Black Light

“You must feel pret’ good, Sam,” said Hank Kelly, of the Arkansas Gazette.

“Not really,” said Sam. “You just want it to be over.”

“Well, I’ll be glad when it’s over too. I mean, he is just a nigger and he killed a girl, but now they got us believing niggers are human too. We had all that trouble with ’em this summer, the goddamned army and everything. Mark my words, it’s just the beginning.”

Sam nodded; Hank was probably right, though old Boss Harry Etheridge was raising hell in the House, aligning himself with the Dixiecrats and swearing to gut the army appropriation in the upcoming budget to make Dwight Eisenhower pay for sending the 101st Airborne to Little Rock and humiliating the great state of Arkansas before the nation. But everyone knew that Boss Harry would never do such a thing; it was all show for the folks who elected him with 94 percent of the vote every two years.

None of that had anything to do with tonight’s drama, however, which was simply the squalid end of some very squalid business, which nobody could really remember except Sam, and in which nobody had much vested interest and emotion. As ceremony, it was banal and flat; the Masons understood ritual much better.

He pulled away from the milling gents and went up to the glass window, where he got a better look at the engine of destruction: a chair, solid but upon closer inspection much worn, somehow institutional and bland for all its presumed meaning. Sam stared at it as he always did: heavy cables ran from behind a screen (where the executioner would do his business in private) to one leg, were bolted to the leg and pinned up the strut of the chair, rising to a sort of Bakelite nexus. Smaller wires extended from it, two down the front, one down each arm and one to lie across the top of the chair, which ended not in a wrist or ankle bracelet but a little cap. It looked very thirties, Sam thought, assigning to it the style of the decade that had spawned it.

A phone buzzed, the assistant warden picked it up and listened.

“Gentlemen, please take your seats. They’re bringing the condemned man up from death row.”

Sam looked at his watch. They were late. It was 12:02

A.M

. He found a seat as the lights dimmed; around him, as in the theater, people squirmed and made ready, then fell silent. The minutes ticked by; the assistant warden lowered the lights until they sat in darkness, and then he too sat.

In the chamber, the door opened. Two guards, followed by the warden, followed by a priest, followed at last by Reggie Fuller, nineteen, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, Negro male, 230 pounds, eyes brown, hair brown, though it had all been shaved off.

Reggie was weeping. The tears ran down his eyes and his face was puffy and moist. A little track of glistening mucus dribbled from a nostril, and Sam watched as his tongue shot out to lick at it. He was manacled, walking in little stutter steps, talking to himself in a desperate stream of chatter. His eyes were out of focus. He was still fat; prison had not slimmed him down or, apparently, toughened him up.

They led poor Reggie to the chair and sat him down in it, though his body appeared stiff and he had trouble understanding what they were saying to him. At last he was seated; then came a horrid instant when one of the guards stepped back quickly, out of reflex: a stain of darkness blossomed at the crotch of Reggie’s prison denims.

The priest whispered something to Reggie but it did him no good at all; his face seized up and his eyes closed; he continued to mutter madly. The guards moved in to secure the boy to the chair: one of them applied a slippery saline solution to his bare ankles, his wrists and the top of his head, where the electrodes were to be tightened—that would get all the electricity into him and prevent his skin from burning, although in Sam’s experience this didn’t always work out. Two others tightened and buckled the straps after the liquid had been sloshed on. Finally, they strapped the little leather beanie atop Reggie’s round, shaven head though they got it slightly skewed, so that it looked like a dunce cap.

Quickly, a little man emerged from behind the screen and checked all the electrodes a last time, the sure professional, making dead certain that all would work. He pointed to one problem area, and a guard bent to make an adjustment. Then the little man stepped back and disappeared.

Sam looked at his watch. It was 12:08

A.M

., eight minutes late. The warden seemed to be choreographing things. He gave a nod, and the guards left the room, leaving him alone with Reggie. He gave another nod and apparently a microphone was switched on because he now spoke in a grave voice and his tones were amplified into the witness chamber.

“Reginald Gerard Fuller, the state of Arkansas, in full accordance with the laws thereof, finds you guilty of murder in the first degree and sentences you to death this sixth, uh, seventh, day of October 1957. Reggie Gerard Fuller, do you have any last words?”

It was silent, though the mike caught Reggie’s ragged breathing. Then he took a deep breath and spoke through sobs: “Sir, I apologize for wetting myself. Please don’t tell nobody I peed my pants. And I am sorry for Mr. George if I got pee on him as he always done treated me nice.”

He broke down, losing his words in a string of choking sobs. But then he breathed deeply, fighting the anguish. A dribble of snot ran out his nose, irritating his lips, but he could not do a thing. He looked out to the men behind the window. He took another deep breath: “And I miss my mama and my daddy and love them very much. I didn’t kill Shirelle. God bless all the people who was nice to me and I hope someday somebody be able to tell why this had to happen.”

“Are you done, Reggie?”

“Yes sir. I am ready for Jesus.”

“Jesus probably ain’t ready for him,” said a man next to Sam in the dark.

The warden leaned over him, unsnapping something in the top of the beanie, and a blank mask unfurled, sealing off Reggie’s features.

The warden left the chamber. Reggie sat still in the chair and for a second there was no change. Sam almost thought that—but no, the first charge hit him.

From his experiences, Sam knew it was a cliche of the movies that the lights dim in prison when an electrocution takes place: the chair and the prison lighting systems draw their power from separate generators. What happens is that witnesses involuntarily flinch, for to watch the cold extermination of a man, no matter how evil, is not an easy thing; and in memory, they recall the diminution of illumination and ascribe it to a power drain. But Sam didn’t flinch or look away and had no illusion of flickering lights; he watched the whole thing, because that was his duty. He represented Shirelle and he hoped that by witnessing he was in some way liberating her soul from the agony of her death.

Reggie stiffened against the restraining straps as two thousand volts hit him. The shot lasted over thirty seconds. A vein on his neck bulged. He fought like a bull. His hands seized up into fists which held so tight Sam thought they’d explode. He seemed to pivot in the chair, just a shade, as if he were daintily trying to sidestep his fate. A small wisp of smoke rose from his skull and another from one of his wrists. His head lolled forward, but then somehow picked itself up again. He coughed and a spasm of vomit, mostly liquid, spurted out from under the mask to cling in globules to his naked chest. Huge crescents of perspiration blossomed moonlike under his arms.

“Another,” said the warden into the phone.

The second surge bucked through Reggie but beat him down. He was limp by second 10, but the executioner held the circuit closed for another twenty, and by the small vibration of Reggie’s now limp fingers could Sam tell that he was riding the bolt still. But then it ceased.

The odor of electrification reached Sam when the warden, two guards and a doctor entered the chamber. It wasn’t the smell of burned meat or hair, but rather connected with Sam’s memories of Christmas, when he’d given various of his boys Lionel train sets and usually set them up and ran them for a bit, until the kids tired of them: but they had an odd, metallic odor to them, heavy and pungent at once.

Sam flashed back from Christmas: in the room the doctor took out a stethoscope and pressed its cup to Reggie’s chest, bare because the buttons had been ripped off his shirt. He stood and shook his head. The four retreated so that the executioner could hit Reggie again. It took five charges before the heart finally stopped beating.

“That boy just didn’t want to die,” said somebody.

The last official document in the file was the certificate of execution, meant to close the file out, mark it as justice delivered. Sam stared at it numbly.

Reggie, boy, why did you do it?

It was one of the great mysteries of the human heart, why one person will up and kill another. Sometimes it’s