Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Read Online Free PDF Page B

or Masons, but I can’t remember. I do remember my mother hugging them all and thanking them over and over while my sister and I ran around their legs like hungry cats, anxious to see what treats were in those sacks. My mother was crying uncontrollably and kept hugging the men. They didn’t say much, just told her she was welcome and left as quickly as they came. This was our Christmas dinner. We received gifts from such groups more than once. Most often it was the Salvation Army.
    My father was deeply ashamed for having to accept a handout. That’s something that gets drilled into the heads of white males in the South from the moment they can speak—never accept anything that you haven’t earned for yourself. Having to accept the handout deeply wounded my father in some way that pushed him close to the edge of an emotional cliff. I wasn’t old enough to really understand it; I just knew that my dad was acting strange, and that he was chewing his nails so viciously that sometimes it looked like he was going to put his whole hand in his mouth. Now I know it’s because a man who accepted a handout wasn’t really seen as being much of a man—especially by the man himself. Any man with two working arms and legs who signed up on welfare wasn’t seen very differently from a thief, a liar, or a rapist.
    In the end I think that’s part of what caused my parents’ marriage to begin falling apart. The stress of poverty. I usually think of these things around Christmastime. Probably because there was a bag of hard candy in the sacks of food the men brought us, and my grandmother always called it “Christmas candy.”
    As I grew older I learned to be ashamed of being poor, too. It became humiliating, something I’d do everything I could to hide from the rest of the world. I developed an overwhelming sense of being excluded from everything. Everywhere you look you see people with things that you do not have, and it has a profound mental effect. That’s mostly during the teenage years.
    Later still, I developed a fierce sense of pride at having come from such situations and circumstances. I look at the people who have done horrible things to me, who have lied about me, abused me, and tried to take my life, and I know they would never have been able to rise above the things that I have. They would have died inside.
    I’ve talked to some of the other guys on Death Row about our lives as children, and they laugh at my poor childhood. I laugh along with them. One guy will say he was poor because he grew up in the projects, and I become outraged. “Poor? You had water! You had heat! You were wearing shoes that cost a hundred dollars! That’s not poor! Let me tell you what we had. . . .” Everyone snickers when they hear that certain areas of the trailer park were considered to be where the “rich people” lived. Now that I can look back on it all, it’s funny to me, too. I didn’t always see the humor in it, though. It’s no laughing matter when you have to fight with the roaches to see who gets the cornflakes.
    Now I believe my parents just weren’t meant to be together. Perhaps they weren’t meant to be with anyone, as my father has now been married and divorced several times, and my mother follows closely behind in her number of failed relationships. The trouble between them began when I was in second grade.
    Nanny had gotten remarried to a respectable man named Ivan Haynes. He’s the one I always remember as being my grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. He could be a real asshole sometimes. I could always expect to hear his amused chuckle anytime he witnessed my pain and misfortune. Upon hearing tales of my childhood, some people have speculated that perhaps he didn’t like me so much. I don’t believe that. There was much love between him and me; he was just doing what comes naturally to members of my family. Laughing and teasing others helps take your mind off your own troubles.
    I remember one