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

knowing that I can effect change through my own will, even behind these bars; and the other meaning is more experiential—seeing beauty for a moment in the midst of the mundane. For a split second, I realize completely and absolutely that the season of winter is sentient, that there is an intelligence behind it. There’s a tremendous amount of emotional pain that comes with the magick of winter, but I still mourn when the season ends, like I’m losing my best friend.
    The first true memories I have of my life are of being with my grandmother Francis, whom I called Nanny. Her husband, Slim Gosa, had died about a year before. I recall him vaguely: he drove a Jeep, and I remember him being very nice to me. He died the day after my birthday. Nanny wasn’t my biological grandmother; Slim had had an affair with a Native American woman, who gave birth to my mother. My grandmother, unable to have her own children, raised my mother as her own. My parents, sister, and I had been living in different places in the Delta region—the corner where Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi meet. After my sister was born, my mother felt she couldn’t take care of two children. So Nanny and I lived in a small mobile home trailer in Senatobia, Mississippi. I remember the purple and white trailer sitting on top of a hill covered with pine trees. We had two large black dogs named Smokey and Bear, which we had raised from puppies. One of my earliest memories was of hearing the dogs barking and lunging against their chains like madmen as Nanny stood in the backyard with a pistol, shooting at a poisonous snake. She didn’t stop shooting, even as the snake slithered its way under the huge propane tank in the backyard. Only in hindsight, years later, did I realize she would have blown us all straight to hell if she had hit the tank. At the time I was so young that I viewed the entire scene with nothing but extreme curiosity. It was the first time I had ever seen a snake, and it was combined with the additional spectacle of my grandmother charging out the back door, blazing away like a gunslinger.
    My grandmother worked as a cashier at a truck stop, so during the day she left me at a day care center. I can remember it only because it was horrific. I remember being dropped off so early in the morning that it was still dark, and being led to a room in which other children were sleeping on cots. I was given a cot and told that I should take a nap until
Captain Kangaroo
(my favorite television show) came on. The problem was that I could not, under any circumstances, go to sleep without my pillow and security blanket. I began to scream and cry at the top of my lungs, tears running down my face. It awakened and frightened every other child in the dark room, so that within a few seconds everyone was crying and screaming while frantic day care workers ran from cot to cot in an attempt to find out what was wrong. By the time they got everyone quiet and dried all the tears it was time for
Captain Kangaroo
and I was quickly absorbed into the epic saga of Mr. Green Jeans and a puppet moose that lived life in perpetual fear of being pelted with a storm of Ping-Pong balls. After that day, my grandmother never forgot to send my pillow with me.
    She would recite the same rhyme every night as she tucked me into bed. She’d say, “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.” I had no idea what a bedbug was, but it seemed pretty obvious from the rhyme that they were capable of inflicting pain. As she closed the door and left me in total darkness, all I could think about were those nocturnal monster insects. I never formed a definite mental image of what they looked like, and somehow that vagueness only made the fear worse. The closest I could come to picturing them was something like stinkbugs with shifty eyes and an evil grin. No matter how tired I was when she tucked me in, the mention of those bugs would wake me up like a dose of smelling salts.
    There was something else Nanny used to say that made my hair stand on end. Late at night we would be watching television with all of the lights in the house turned off. The only illumination was the flickering blue glow of the TV screen. She would turn to me and say, “What sound does a scarecrow make?” My eyes would bulge like Halloween caricatures as she looked at me grimly and said, “Hoo! Hoo!” I had no idea what it meant, or why a scarecrow would make the sound of an owl, but for the rest