The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (30 page)

In November 2010, not long before Stroman received his date, Rais—wearing a purple shirt and black trousers—spoke those words in a ceremony that made him an American. From filling out his N-400 through uttering that oath, he felt the process remolding
him. Now thirty-seven, he was offering himself up to his adopted country. “It’s not only a status change,” he said. “It’s also made me more responsible, and I took it in this way. It’s not just a certificate they gave me today. It’s something that I have to treat myself in a different way. From now onward, I’m more responsible, and I have more duties.” Had he been a native-born American with a special occasion to celebrate, he might “just go and party around and throw some Champagne bottle,” as he put it. (He had clearly been watching American sports.) But for Rais it was less a celebration than a coming into his own. From the moment of his arrival, he had known that it was a country of boundless anythings, but he had also come to know its ailments. Citizenship brought the opportunity to talk of such things without fear, to try to improve the home he had chosen: the people he wanted to address were now, legally speaking, his people, and they couldn’t just kick him out if they didn’t appreciate his message. “Now I think that I have a voice,” he said.

RAIS’S FOCUS THAT
day was, as it should have been, on himself. He was part of something larger, of course: part of the vast infusion of new blood that kept the country young and churning, and that defined its essential being. This was America’s strange, stirring commitment: to keep itself vital by allowing itself, again and again, to become somebody else’s. Immigration had made, and continued to make, America; immigration ever seemed poised to tear America apart. The people were asked to celebrate this recurring passage into new hands. But in hard times those who had only the glory of their pasts could choose to cling to them—even if it meant sending the country to hell. Yet if you survived their wrath and remained, you would become as much a part of the scenery as they. You would become old blood, too. And, as sure as dawn, you would calcify into what needed further refreshment. Thus the country, having become yours, would become somebody else’s.

It was becoming Rais’s country now. Dallas had been good to him,
mostly. To the outside eye, especially the northern eye, it could be dismissed as a gussied-up, diverse, but ultimately narrow backwater. If you had failed somehow to be white, you could feel the eyes on you when you walked into a nicer restaurant. You knew that you were welcome, legally and otherwise, but you also had the feeling of being done a favor, the sense that you moved about the city at other people’s pleasure.

To see Dallas in this way, however, was to bring to it a view that many of its own immigrants, including Rais, didn’t share. Enormous numbers of them genuinely loved it, and they continued to arrive by the planeload. They loved, for starters, the sky and the roads and the low taxes that had brought Rais to the city long ago. But it was more than that. A newcomer like Rais could find in Dallas a kind of acceptance that New York or Washington or Los Angeles didn’t give.

There was an ad running these days in Rais’s former home that captured the difference: “NYC: Tolerant of your beliefs, judgmental of your shoes.” Dallas was, you could say, judgmental of your beliefs, tolerant of your shoes. This contrary equation wasn’t without its advantages. For the immigrant who was not coming for a cultural transplant or new belief system, who just wanted a chance to rise without meddling or to arbitrage the price of her labor, it was perfect. A city tolerant of your shoes was a city easy to understand, master, and ascend. It was a city without elusive codes. You didn’t have to wonder how to dress in public, for almost any semirespectable way of dressing would put you above average; or what knife to use with which course, because that wasn’t really how they ate down here; or what subway carried you where, since most people had their own bubble of a car. What many immigrants found in Dallas was a dimension of America’s tolerance that was the tolerance of casualness and convenience more than of open-mindedness: an ease of living that became its own kind of welcome.

Dallas, like its immigrants, was don’t-look-back new. Its landscape
seemed to have no legacy that needed reconciling with modernity. It looked like the sum of millions of private pursuits of happiness: as though everyone had conjured a dream, grabbed as much of it as possible, and not conferred with anyone else. In its absence of nostalgia, in its solipsism, the city could resonate with a certain kind of immigrant. The folk memory that Texans often called up to explain their culture was of pre-political solitude—being alone out on the land all those years ago, days from anyone who could save you, far from the law, under brutal heat, on angry soil that required taming or would fold you into its layers as it had assimilated many others before. It was a strange memory to apply to modern life, as the rest of the country was regularly reminded during national arguments. But it was a narrative that overlapped with how some newcomers, from settings far afield, saw their lives.

For the immigrant, even listening to the radio in Dallas was to hear, on station after country station, cowboy-accented reminders of the values that you had sworn not to desert when you left the old country: to stay simple no matter how fortune blessed you; never to forget your God; to distrust the temptations of the corrupting metropolis; to live for family; to grow better than you used to be.

M
ANY YEARS BEFORE
Stroman received his death warrant, a university professor and anti-death-penalty activist named Rick Halperin received a letter from Polunsky. Halperin was a gregarious teddy bear of a Texan who taught peace studies at Southern Methodist University. He was well known for his work against capital punishment and had a reputation among Death Row inmates as a guy on the outside who would help them. When he saw the envelope, he recognized the sender’s name at once: Mark Stroman. He had followed Stroman’s trial. Now Stroman was writing to ask for Halperin’s help in researching end-of-life arrangements, should it
come to that—basically, calling around to some undertakers in Dallas to compare prices. Stroman also made sure in the letter to voice sincere remorse for his crimes. Halperin gladly followed up, sending back a letter with options. As was not uncommon, he didn’t hear from the inmate again.

Late in 2010, when Stroman’s expected execution date popped up on his calendar, which was the kind of thing that popped up on Rick Halperin’s calendar, the professor had an idea. The execution was to be in July of the following year. Coming as it would so close to the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the execution was a suitable moment to raise larger questions about America’s decade-long struggle with terror. Like many activist academics, Halperin was the kind of guy who spared no opportunity to organize a modestly attended panel discussion. Plans for one, on the execution day itself, began to take shape.

Despite his personal geniality and good cheer, Halperin’s office overflowed with just about the most depressing books in the world, about prisons and justice and death, death, death. Books served as the furniture, the artwork, and, when stacked knee-high on the floor, the slalom poles one had to navigate to get around to the professor’s desk. Post-it notes obstructed the view of other Post-it notes. No decent liberal cause lacked for space on the walls, which featured exhortations against torture, a Code Pink sticker, a “Caution: Children at War” poster, signs in support of gay rights and the war on poverty and maternal health care, and signs in opposition to the “racist” mascot of the Cleveland Indians baseball team, the killing in Darfur, and hatred in general.

Halperin was among those Americans who felt his country had gone off the rails after 9/11: “We had to hurt somebody after 9/11, and by God we’re still doing it.” In fairness to his country, he had always found it a little off the rails, but he genuinely believed that America had strayed from its nature and forgotten things essential to its being in fighting this vague new enemy called “terror.” He thought that Mark Stroman somehow captured the country’s turning.

“He encapsulated everything about 9/11,” Halperin said. “He acted because of 9/11. He lashed out with violence to kill others in the name of his dead half-sister. Watching the Twin Towers collapse brought out a visceral reaction in Mark Stroman—who had no history of killing anybody, of shooting anybody before that—to kill Arabs at the point of a gun. It was the visceral, typical Texas/American response. And what was America’s response? To go invade. To go against the evidence. We ignored the evidence that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We ignored the truth and went hell-bent into Iraq to cause upheaval and violence. Well, Stroman had no evidence that the people he attacked were Middle Eastern. He looked at them and thought they were the guilty ones. But he was wrong, and America was wrong.”

Not long after Halperin began thinking up his Stroman panel, an activist friend of his asked if he would meet a nice young man who wanted to see him. The young man soon e-mailed and then paid Halperin a visit in his office suite. The visitor was short and slender, with a prominent nose and thinning hair. Half of his face was covered with bumps, and his right eye was gently adrift. It was a strange coincidence. His name was Rais Bhuiyan, and he was the man Mark Stroman had shot. He, too, wanted the professor’s help.

A
FTER THE HAJJ,
Rais had dropped his mother back in Bangladesh and returned to Dallas. The new stirrings within him, to do something for others, grew stronger still, but he couldn’t figure out what the something was: “My heart is telling me that, Rais, now you are in a better shape, because all this time you’ve been struggling to survive, to come to better shape. So now you’re in a better shape—physically, mentally, financially. And now you came from Hajj, and you had a promise to God that you want to do something. So why I’m waiting more? Why don’t I start right now? Who knows
when I’m going to die? Because we don’t know that when our time will be over.”

He felt his vision growing wider than ever before. He was filling up with questions: How can I make the most difference? How can I use my talents? Whom will I need to know? Whom can I serve? Where do I begin? He considered himself “just a normal human being, a very, very poor and normal human being, a simple ordinary person.” If he was going to achieve anything for others, he would have to do his homework and choose carefully.

Thus Rais spent a good part of his free time in 2010 online. Many ideas came to him. He thought about starting a charity focused on the developing world’s poor. He thought about doing something to aid other victims of hate crimes, to speak and lobby on their behalf. He researched the case in which he had become entangled, studied victims-rights policies in Texas, examined case law, perused the sites of peace groups and other civic organizations doing all manner of social work around Dallas, poked around the pages of Muslim groups.

Rais worried that his knowledge of how to get things done in America was very limited. “It’s not like I was born here, I know the culture, I know the people,” he said. “So I had to go through a learning process to understand how things work here. Am I doing the right thing? Or am I going to make people pissed off or upset by doing this kind of thing? Because I had no idea.”

He needed guidance and direction of a kind the Internet couldn’t furnish. Rais needed, he realized, to network. So all that year he did. Community meetings. Peace conferences. Political fund-raisers. Human-rights dos. If Dallas hosted it in a ballroom with stackable chairs, Rais attended it. Here, too, he sensed his skills lacking, but he tried to learn: going up to people he figured were important, telling them his story, asking advice if they seemed open to him. He carefully followed what he perceived to be the American rules—for example, giving people only a hint of what you do the first time you meet, then hopefully running into them again at another event
and making a fuller-court press. “You don’t really give them a lot of information the first time,” Rais said. “You don’t want to make them panic. It’s also creepy—that, ‘Why this guy is talking everything at the first point?’ That was a learning curve for me. Because in this culture, this is how it is practiced. Even if you like someone, a girl, you don’t just tell everything about you the first moment, right?”