Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 259

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row," by Jarvis Jay Masters.

We went into a room, and I was lifted up onto a table. Two other ladies began to undress me. I started crying because the lady who had held my hand was about to leave. So she stayed and held my hand again, talking to me gently while the other two women opened up my shirt. They kept saying, “Oh my God, oh my God.” The look in their eyes as they registered the condition of my young body began to scare me. I could tell they were near tears and at the same time angry. I felt a pain inside me, as if something were really wrong, but I didn’t know what. 

I had accepted beatings, loneliness, and near-starvation as normal because those things had helped me to survive. Now when these women undressed me, it felt like they were removing a shield that had become part of me. As they peeled off layer after layer, I began to feel my age and started crying. With my tears, I shed each fiber of responsibility I had had in caring for my sisters and brother. I was finally being cared for as a child, and so the child inside me opened wide.

At school the next day I heard that Tony had been telling everyone that our fight had been a tie. Nothing could have suited me better. Since I didn’t win, no other kid would have to challenge me for my reputation, and since I didn’t lose either, I wouldn’t be seen as easy prey, a kid to pick a fight with just for the opportunity to beat someone up. To come out of that fight tied against a known school bully felt like a win to me.

Because the Prockses loved me without asking me to love them back, they gave me who I was; they gave me myself. And I loved them for who they were too. Soon, nestled in Mamie’s lap, I could close my eyes and be truly carefree. Seated on the floor between Dennis’s legs, I felt safe enough to let my imagination go, to wonder and ask about whatever I wanted. Dennis always gave me understanding and patience. They taught me how to feel like a child, to add and subtract on my own fingers, to say things like “please” and “thank you.” But most of all, they taught me to believe in myself, whatever my mind clung to. 

One night in 1969 the three of us sat around the television and watched Apollo 11 land on the moon. When we saw the astronaut take man’s first steps on the moon, I turned to Dennis and Mamie and said that I too would someday be an astronaut, that someday I wanted to fly to the moon. 

Instead of chuckling, Dennis and Mamie looked at me with the same surprised seriousness that I felt. They took my dreams into their hearts in a way that made me believe in those dreams. Later, Mamie gave me a poster of the moon to put on my bedroom wall, and she found stories about astronauts and the moon to read to me at bedtime. As far as they were concerned, they were there to help me explore all the possibilities of what I could be. No matter how silly my dreams were, Dennis and Mamie made me believe that what someone else had become, I could become as well. Their faith in the power of true loving hearts gave me the best years of my childhood, somehow erasing many of the horrors I had experienced before I walked into their lives.

I'd started robbing Taco Bells again, up and down Pacific Coast Highway. I knew it was madness but pretended to myself that I didn’t care. I’d give the cash register attendants a percentage of the loot in exchange for sending the cops in the wrong direction. Earning minimum wage, and often treated badly by management, the attendants were glad to see me coming.