Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

if their feet get cold they die.” This was a stunning revelation. Now I was getting to the bottom of this thing. I was amazed, and wondered why no one had bothered to teach me this fact of life in school. I had one last question. “Will white people die if their feet get cold?” He chuckled, turned his back to me, and went about the business of trying to draw more customers. This conversation stuck with me for many years. I even told a guy on Death Row about it, and it became a running joke. When he was getting ready to go out into the yard on cold winter mornings, I’d yell over and remind him, “Make sure you’ve got your socks on. You know what happens when your feet get cold.” He’d laugh and say, “You and your old racist granddaddy ain’t going to trick me.”
    There was one other incident in my youth that involved my grandfather and socks. For some reason I couldn’t sleep without socks on. It just didn’t feel right. I would put on my pajama bottoms and tuck them into my socks. The socks had to be pulled up almost to my knees so that it looked like a bizarre superhero’s costume. The problem was that I often didn’t change the socks for three or four days at a time. I would howl in outrage if anyone caught me and forcibly pulled them off.
    This changed when my grandfather told me that sleeping with my socks on could cause my feet to burst open, because they weren’t getting any air. In my head I saw my toes exploding like kernels of popcorn. It actually caused me to have bad dreams, all of which contained bursting feet. He was always telling me something crazy, and seeming to believe it himself. I now tell my sister’s children bizarre tales, which they swear by. At least I can say I’m not sending them into a den of fire ants. Ivan was a nice man, in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. There’s not a hell of a lot more to say about him, other than that I grew to love him over time and cried like a baby when he died a few years later.
    After the wedding Nanny moved from her apartment to Ivan’s house, which was in the nicer, middle-class section of West Memphis. They hadn’t been living together long when we moved in with them. By “we,” I mean me, my parents, and my sister. It was supposed to be a short-term arrangement while my father found us another place. We had hopped from place to place, and for roughly two years we lived in six states before finally crashing to a halt with my grandparents.
    My mother and father slept on the bed in the guest room while my sister and I slept on the floor next to them. I remember my father’s strong arms picking me up off the floor on more than one occasion when he had been awakened by the sound of me gasping for breath, having an asthma attack. He’d carry me to the emergency room, which I despised because I knew many needles awaited my arrival. Now I actually look back on those days with a warm feeling in my heart, and I miss them. Times were simpler then.
    I once asked my father how fish get into a previously empty pond, and he told me in all sincerity that they ride the rain. He believed that when water was evaporated from a lake, the fish were evaporated with it. Somehow the fish survived the process, and when it began to rain, the fish came back down with the water. There was no question in his mind about the truthfulness of the statement. Of course he also believed that you would die if you were to toss your hat onto a bed. When I asked him why fish didn’t rain down
everywhere
, he said they sometimes did. He told me that once when he was a kid he saw fish flapping on the highway after a rainstorm. He refused to eat them because it would bring bad luck. He was uneasy just talking about it.
    After we had been there for a few months my mother and father began to fight, though I still to this day do not know what they fought about. Perhaps it was the usual strain of being broke and on hard times. Whatever the reason, my father moved out and into a motel.
    They tried to work through it at first, seeing each other a couple of times a week and maintaining a relationship, sort of like dating. My father would come pick us all up on weekends and take us out to eat, or to a drive-in movie to watch the latest horror release and fill up on hot dogs and popcorn. We always watched horror movies. As a child I remember sitting up into the early hours of the morning watching horror movies with my father. I still watch horror movies and read horror