My Generation (32 page)

As the hearing began to draw to a close between noon and one o'clock, and with Reid's moment of execution only hours away, I became uneasily aware that all through the proceedings one member of the board had been in the habit of gazing abstractedly for long periods out the window. But there was no diminution of attention among the audience when the final witness appeared: Reid's mother, badly crippled with an arm adrift from her side like a helpless wing, who said, almost inaudibly, “I ask you, would you grant him life, please”; and Reid himself, who stood stiffly in his khaki uniform in a strained, awkward half-bow and, his voice almost a whisper, made a brief plea for mercy.

The next-to-the-last presentation was made by Louis Pollak, professor of law at Yale, who capped even this morning's mountainous evidence of injustice with a brilliant analysis of the possibility of constitutional infirmities in Reid's case. He pointed out that although it was true that the United States Supreme Court had declined to hear Reid's appeal, there had been, in the long history of the case as it proceeded from court to higher court, enough dissent and doubt (as to whether Reid's rights had been violated) on the part of a few distinguished jurists to make it incumbent upon the board to consider this grave aspect of the case before consigning Reid to oblivion. It was a masterly plea, and it seemed difficult to surmount in terms of force and effect, but it was at least equaled by the presence of the final person to speak. This was a tall, athletically built, trimly tailored man, very grim, who approached the board and formally identified himself as Judge Douglass Wright. He had been the prosecutor in the original Reid trial and has since become a judge. The hearing room was utterly still, for this was a spectacle almost unique in American jurisprudence: a prosecutor interceding in behalf of the prisoner only hours before his doom. Wright was brief and to the point: there was no doubt of Reid's guilt; the trial had been conducted with strict fairness. But such factors as Reid's youth at the time of his crime, his slum background, his marginal mentality, had caused Wright, in the years since the sentence of death, to feel that execution would be an injustice. He joined therefore with the others in making a plea for clemency.

After this, the case for the state seemed almost anticlimactic. The state's attorney, John D. LaBelle, an owlish, methodical man who kept shuffling
through his notes, was quick to indicate in the strongest terms that Reid had been guilty, that in this “classic case of first-deg ree murder,” justice, insofar as the state was concerned, had been done. But, like Judge Wright, he conceded that the board, constituted to dispense mercy, might grant such mercy in this case, and he added, “Whatever you do, it isn't going to upset our office one bit.” The proceedings were ended. The board would announce its decision at three o'clock that afternoon.

Downstairs in the prison reception lobby a large group of God's underground, the Quakers, had assembled. They numbered a score or so. Some of them had attended the hearing, and all of them were now prepared to participate that night in a vigil at the prison should the appeal for clemency fail. I spoke to one Quaker, a Hartford businessman. “We will pray for Reid,” he said, “which is all we can do.” He began to speak with a kind of fury for a Quaker. “It is a fearful thing, isn't it? What right has the state to coop up a man—a boy—in a tiny cell for five years, and then exterminate him like a dog?”

Outside, the day was still blooming with summer and sunlight, and along the streets of Wethersfield, one of the supremely lovely New England towns, the children were still pedaling their bicycles. I met Louis Pollak; he was chatting with the Reverend William Coffin, Jr., the chaplain of Yale University, who had taken a personal interest in the Reid case. We were joined by Mrs. Jones, and the four of us decided to have lunch in a coffee shop on one of Wethersfield's elm-lined streets.

At lunch, Mrs. Jones, seeming only a little nervous about the outcome of the appeal, said, “Oh, I knew Ben real well. He was a sort of lonely little boy. And a bit lazy, I guess. But there was nothing mean about him. He was really so proud of himself whenever he accomplished anything good. You know, he was a trombone player and assistant leader of the band. He was a good trombone player, too. I'll never forget how proud he was, dressed up in that band uniform.”

“How long did you know him, Mrs. Jones?” Coffin inquired.

“Oh, the whole time he was there. It must have been eight years. Imagine, eight years in the County Home! I guess he was sixteen when they let him go. But, you know, he wasn't
ready
to go back—back to that terrible slum. It's society's fault, really. I mean, all of us. People should know more about this situation, where these poor abandoned children are taken in for a
while, and then sent back just at the wrong age to that awful environment. It's just a shame, really, and people should know about it.”

At around two o'clock, as Coffin and I drove back to the prison, we saw Reid's mother. Quite alone, she was hobbling laboriously down the deserted, elm-shaded sidewalk in front of the prison toward a small sheltered enclosure that serves as a bus stop. There she sat down and began to fan herself. Coffin went up and greeted her. It was rather difficult to make conversation but I couldn't help asking where she was going.

“Well, I expect I'll just go on home,” she said. “The Lord done answered my prayers, so I expect I'll just go right on home.”

“Then you think the hearing went well?” I said.

“Well, I figures if they was going to do anything they would say so at the end of it. But they ain't said nothing, so I figures they going let Benjamin off, praise God. I knew Ben has repented, so the mercy's coming to him. The Lord sure done answered my prayers.”

Of course, she hadn't gotten this quite straight, and no one seemed to have advised her of the board's operations, but neither Coffin nor I, exchanging glances, could figure out a way to correct her. In the end it didn't seem to matter, for as she left us with these words and the bus came lumbering up, I had the feeling for the first time that day that all was going to be well.

The decision, which came to the gathering in the reception room of the prison at 4:05, was that Reid's sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, with the possibility of parole. There would be no necessity for the Quakers to keep their vigil. And a rent had appeared in the veil of immutable law.

It is of course important that Reid's life was saved. It is more important that he will not be left to rot. Whether the five years spent in the shadow of the electric chair have worked irreparable damage upon his spirit is something no one can say for sure, but judging from his letters alone, there is a sense of something struggling and questing, and therefore salvageable. At some time in the future he will be eligible for parole, and in the meantime the Trinity group has pledged itself to help him in his search for an identity. It may be said perhaps that in prison a man's identity cannot be much, but we who are on the outside looking in—we who are so prone to forget that all men must be given at least the possibility of redemption—are in no position
to judge. Not only capital punishment, but all punishment in general, is one of our most crucial dilemmas; the death penalty is the wretched symbol of our inability to grapple with that dark part of our humanity which is crime. Equally as important as Reid's own salvation is the fact that his case and the struggle to save his life, which attracted so much attention, will have caused people to rearrange entirely their ideas about some of our penal and criminal processes. Certainly the law in Connecticut in regard to capital offenders is archaic and monstrous; and already, largely asa result of the Reid case, there is talk in some circles about pressing in the legislature for a “triple verdict” law, now in effect in California and Pennsylvania (1, to determine guilt; 2, to determine sanity; 3, to determine sentence), which will permit evidence to be introduced at trial that was generally denied to Reid, this denial contributing greatly to the fact that he was initially sentenced to death. If just this act is accomplished, Reid's anguish will not have been in vain, and the simple victory won that afternoon in Wethersfield—the victory of life over death—will have been transformed into something even larger in our unending search for justice.

[
Esquire
, November 1962.]

T
his may be a good place to examine briefly certain aspects of the power of the written word. I have never wanted to claim credit for having saved a man's life, but as I was reminded years later by George F. Will (the “young Trinity College student,” mentioned in “Aftermath,” who has become a celebrated national columnist), the original essay did have the effect of causing the Trinity people and others to spring into action. So I suppose it may be inferred that had I not written the original essay, Ben Reid would most likely have gone to his doom. On a somewhat less dramatic note, I was pleased to learn that the second piece I wrote on Reid had the effect of changing the Connecticut law regarding capital punishment along the lines I detailed in the concluding passage. Robert Satter, now a judge, whose wonderful speech about
Moby-Dick
still lingers in my memory among the bright moments of that day, later became a state legislator. It was he who, taking a cue from my article, introduced legislation that eventually brought about a more equitable procedure regarding capital offenders. So I felt that my initial ventures into journalism had hardly been wasted time.

But what about Benjamin Reid? Rereading the two pieces I wrote on his case, I became aware of how important to my argument against the death penalty was the Christian doctrine of redemption. This interests me now, because I thought that by the time I was past thirty-five—at the very
least agnostic and surely swept by the bleak winds of existentialism—I had abandoned the Presbyterian precepts of my childhood. But I can see that the Gospels were as much a mediating force in my attempt to save Reid's life as were Camus and Heidegger. And how sweet it was to see this candidate for redemption come alive from his benighted dungeon in a way that would quicken the heart of any Christian salvationist. How beautiful it was to witness this outcast victim flower and grow, once rescued and given that chance for which those honest Quakers had prayed on their knees. For the simple fact is that Ben Reid—now that he was snatched from the electric chair and released into the general prison population—demonstrated qualities of character, of will, and above all, of intelligence that defied everyone's imagination. All of the people connected with Reid's case had been deluded about his mental capacity, which was as much a victim of having been underestimated as Reid himself was a victim of foster homes and deprivation. Far from being the borderline defective he had been described as by many observers (including myself), Reid, it turned out, was quite bright, in certain ways even brilliant, and the metamorphosis he underwent in prison was something to marvel at. He became a star baseball player, a leader among the inmates; he secured his high school equivalency diploma, began to take college work. A model prisoner he was—in every sense of that worn and risky description. A triumph of faith over adversity. Maybe someday a winner.

Reid spent eight more years in prison before his time came up for parole. In the middle of March 1970 I received a telephone call from some of the people at Trinity College who had taken an interest in Reid and had followed his career through prison. It was highly probable that Reid would be paroled in April, they said. What they proposed to do was enroll Reid as a special student at Trinity, where he would begin courses at summer school. Would I be willing, they wondered, to let Reid stay in my house in Roxbury for a few weeks while they put things in order at Trinity and began to ready a permanent place for him there? My willingness would be a not inconsiderable factor in obtaining the parole. I immediately replied that I would indeed take Ben in. Although I had never visited Reid in prison, we had corresponded quite a few times over the years since his commutation. His letters were well-reasoned, grammatically correct, persuasive—so impressive, really, and showing such signs of growth and blossoming that I could not stop reproaching myself for having helped cast
him as mentally deficient. A week or so before he was to be released into my custody, I visited him in the new state prison at Somers, near the Massachusetts border. I was impressed by his poise, his verbal agility, his warmth, his intelligence. The idea of my studio in Roxbury becoming Ben Reid's halfway house filled me with pleasure, and I understood the blessings of redemption.

Early in April, only a few days before the magical date, Reid walked off into the woods from a work detail just outside the gates of the prison. An alarm was sounded, and Reid was pursued by state police with dogs, but his trail was lost. After a night in the woods, during which time Reid had strayed into Massachusetts, he lingered through the early daylight hours outside a house in Longmeadow, a well-to-do, semirural suburb of Springfield. Reid found an automobile antenna and sharpened it into a weapon. He then entered the house where a thirty-seven-year-old woman was preparing breakfast for her two young children and the child of a friend. Forcing the woman and the children into her car, he made her cruise up and down the Connecticut River Valley for a large part of the day. At one point during the abduction, Reid told the woman to drive into the parking area of a deserted state park. There, he raped her. (In subsequent testimony some conflict developed as to whether there was an element of consent on the part of the woman, but this would seem to be an almost frivolous point.) Later on in the day, after the woman had driven him to Holyoke, he boarded a bus for New York but was spotted by a prison official and was quickly arrested. Tried that summer in Springfield for an assortment of crimes—including rape, kidnapping, forcible entry, and assault with a deadly weapon—Reid was sentenced to ten to fifteen years in state prison. These horrible, bizarre, and seemingly improbable events took place twelve years ago. At this writing—in the spring of 1982—Reid is approaching the end of his sentence at the Bridgewater facility in southeastern Massachusetts. This is a medium-security prison where, as before, he has been a model inmate. At the age of forty-four, he has spent all the years since the age of nineteen behind bars. Could it be—as I suspect—that Reid's frantic flight from freedom was a way to ensure staying incarcerated?

In the summer of 1981, when Jack Henry Abbott—Norman Mailer's protégé—knifed to death a young aspiring playwright on a Lower Manhattan sidewalk, a tempest of public rage roared around Mailer's head. Had it not been for Mailer's misguided zeal—it was said—had it not been for the
sentimental ardor which impelled him to espouse the freedom of a murderous convict simply because he displayed a literary gift, this terrible crime would not have taken place. Well, yes and no. There was no doubt that the tragedy happened, that it would not have happened had Abbott remained in prison, and that Mailer was a critical factor in Abbott's release. But as I replayed over and over again those ugly events, I could find no possible way—with the memory of Ben Reid's own near-release into my custody so immovably fixed in my mind—to condemn Mailer for his role in the awful story. There were significant differences, of course. For one thing, Reid had escaped before his parole took effect, although this is an academic point. Unlike Abbott, Reid had displayed no artistic talent worth nurturing; he had seemed to be merely an attractive and salvageable human being who had behaved well in prison (unlike Abbott, who, whatever the motivation, had killed a fellow inmate). Then, too, their last crimes on the outside had been of different magnitudes—manslaughter even in this day being an atrocity greater than rape.

Nonetheless, the similarities of background were wickedly familiar: broken homes, poverty, neglect, abuse, foster parents, and the loathsome taste of incarceration at an early age. And years and years of the inhumanity of prison life. It is hardly possible to feel anything but revulsion for both Reid's and Abbott's ultimate crimes, but it is plain that each crime in its way was the result of perceptions wrenched and warped by the monstrous abnormality of long imprisonment. An almost unbearable fact here signals for attention: both Reid and Abbott were in prison as
children
. Much was made during the Abbott case about the alleged romanticism of writers in their conjunction with prisoners; some of us have been called, with a certain appropriateness, “jail groupies,” and certainly there are writers who have had to answer for their silly love affairs with criminals. But I am quite sure that romance alone does not explain the fascination or the constant devotion that many writers pay to those that live half-lives behind bars. Remembering one's own Elysian childhood in juxtaposition with that of Reid and of Abbott, I think it is fair to say that a concern for either of those wretched felons has to do less with romanticism than with a sense of justice, and the need for seeking restitution for other men's lost childhoods.

It could be argued that the power of the written word, effective in helping to save Ben Reid from death, had the unanticipated and certainly pernicious result of causing a suburban housewife terror and suffering. So
there we are. Do we abandon our efforts to salvage prisoners because of the savage acts of Reid and Abbott? Almost as important is the question:

Do we indeed now abandon Reid and Abbott themselves? As for the first question, neither Mailer nor I would have acted as big brothers—or as surrogate fathers, or role models, or simple sponsors—to these men had we known what they might perpetrate on two innocent people. But daily throughout this country prisoners whose records are every bit as flawed with violence as Abbott's and Reid's are released into freedom, and maintain clean records thereafter. Such a statistical consideration was not in my mind when I vouched for Reid (nor do I imagine it was in Mailer's), but our mistakes were committed within limits already well established by precedent. Therefore—speaking for myself alone—I can feel (and at times have felt) aching regret, but no guilt. We are neither the first nor the last to be shattered by this dilemma. And others will make fearful errors in helping their disadvantaged brothers seek redemption.

But, finally, do we abandon Jack Abbott and Ben Reid? Since Abbott was sentenced to fifteen years to life for his New York crime, he would now seem to be placed beyond any such consideration, at least for the time being. Reid's case is considerably more simple, since in only a few more years he will have paid his debt and will go free. When I asked Robert Satter—who had invested almost as much time as anyone in working selflessly in Reid's behalf—what he felt when he first heard of the escape and the rape, he replied that he experienced a sense of utter betrayal. So, I must confess, did I, and I have often wondered what might have been the consequences for me and my family had Reid—suffering the emotional upheaval that caused him to erupt so violently—actually taken up residence with me as planned. In my grimmest imaginings I could not help thinking that he might have raped my daughter instead of the Longmeadow housewife. Yet—and I can only try to dream of the stoicism it required—Satter immediately went to Reid's aid again during the Springfield trial, offering legal and moral support to a man whom most people might have written off for good.

My own sense of betrayal has been strong, but not so complete that I have been able to turn my back on Reid's destiny. His conduct in the Massachusetts prison system has been once more, as I say, exemplary, and even if he has to serve a year or two more in Connecticut for his escape (he is hoping to be pardoned from this), it will not be long before he is free, after
more than twenty-five years. It will doubtless become a difficult matter for Reid to adjust to freedom, and his return to society will have to be monitored with delicacy and care. But hope persists. I have talked to Ben Reid several times; he speaks of his remorse and his repentance, and of his conviction that he will make good on the outside, and I cannot explain why I believe him.

[Written by Styron for
This Quiet Dust
and published first in the 1982 edition of that collection.]