The
following is an excerpt from Will the Circle Be Unbroken/Reflections
on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith by Studs Terkel, New York
Press, New York: 2001. Copyright 2001, Studs Terkel. Reprinted by permission.
All Rights Reserved.
He
had served two years
on Death Row in the state of Florida. He had been convicted by an all-white
jury of rape and murder. The sentence was overturned by the Florida
Supreme Court for lack of evidence.
I am a man of African and other roots: Indian, and no doubt European,
as my research would indicate. A father, a citizen of the United States
of America, and a man on the planet earth. I was born in Mississippi,
on a sharecroppers plantation, around sixty years ago. I grew up there
until I was about twelve years old, at which time, we migrated to Chicago,
my mother and I. My mother had twelve children, like the twelve tribes.
I was the last. Her baby, she called me. I went to Chicago public schools,
from about the fifth grade through high school, and later I went to
college for a bit. I went to the Chicago Theological Seminary from 1970
to 1972.
My mother was a black Baptist fundamentalist. I am spiritually orientated.
I didn’t go to the seminary actually to be a preacher, I went to
the seminary because I had fiddled around in school. I considered myself
uneducated at the time. When I came up from Mississippi at twelve years
old, I was practically illiterate. Black children were not expected
to be educated. In fact it was dangerous to be educated in Mississippi
if you were black in the fifties. If you came from a black family, let’s
say middle-class, they would send you away to school. There you would
be in danger just because of the fact that you were pursuing knowledge.
That has always been something that has nettled me, the fact that my
underpinnings were not good. That I might be an educated man impelled
me to become a bookworm. I met a teacher in the fifth grade here and
she started me to reading and I never stopped. It also was an escape
for me from the horrors of urban life. Reading became an escape from
the squalor, from the gangs, when I was growing up here in Chicago.
I started out reading anything and then as time went on, I began to
read quote significant or meaningful works by whomever. I promised my
mama that I was going to get an education.
One
of the things that really got me going was that I failed English. I
could do English basically from my reading, but I had no sense of the
mechanics of grammar. I wrote a good paper, I read well, so the teachers
would leave me alone. They didn’t know that I didn’t know
any grammar. The same way with math, I just somehow got by. But when
I went to night school, I flunked English, and that messed with my head.
In the meantime, I’m working a day job in the salt mines down at the
old Lakeside Press, making telephone directories, Sears Roebuck and
Sports Illustrated, Time, Life, and Look. It was one of the most racist
places that ever existed on this earth. I also got a chance to read
there all day. It kept me from probably leaping on one of those East
Europeans and strangling him. I sometimes tell my son, "Hey man,
I don’t know what your mama tell you about but I made a few sacrifices
for you, because I wouldn’t have stayed at that damn job for seven
years, and hated every single day of it" –– I mean, with
a passion that you can hardly believe. They were sued recently. Class
action suit for all of the years we were kept out of the unions. I can
remember a timekeeper. I don’t know if they knew I was going to
school. It wasn’t something you’d necessarily want them to
know. I remember him asking me to work overtime one day. And I refused.
What he didn’t know was I left there and went to school. If I had
been a white boy, I could have told him that and he’d have said,
"Don’t worry about it, go ahead." But I just told him
no, and then he said, "Well, maybe eight hours is too much for
you." Of course I had a fit, I called him all kind of expletives.
Of course, to myself (laughs). I decided F-- them, I ain’t ever
going back there.
But
it taught me a lot. It taught me, if you have some heart, a little faith,
God will take care of you. You might not always like the way he takes
care of you, but he’ll take care of you. So I quit my job. After
a little hassle, I drew some unemployment, and then I went to school
full time. This was Delbert Superman. Because at that time, we thought
education was the Balm in Gilead, education would fix everything, I
mean, no more “yassir, boss.” It wasn’t quite like that.
As a youngster, I wanted to be an adventurer, to live life to the fullest,
go places that I’d never been. I used to tell people my ambition
was to roam the world and make love to the various women of the world,
drink the wines of Spain, the saki of Japan and so forth.
I leave Lakeside with nothing and no place to go. I’m twenty-three
years-old and I have a son who's four or five, and a wife that I’m
separated from. The unemployment runs out before I can get my associate
degree, and the rent man is banging on the door; so I have to go and
find myself a job. And I did. I never read the Defender* before in my
life. I never would look in the Defender for a job because black ain’t
got no jobs that are going to pay me any money to take care of my family.
But I do. And there’s an ad for claims adjusters for the Checker
Taxi Company. Hell, I don’t know what a claims adjuster is, but
I’m six feet three, I have all of my teeth, and my mind is sharp
as a Toledo Sword (laughs). So I apply for the job. And this Texan hires
me. I look like I can take care of myself. At the time, the brothers
are raising so much sand until it’s dangerous for white adjusters
to go into the black community. So for the first time in my life, I
got a white collar job, right. I wear a suit and a tie every day. So
I do this for two years, three years, and am very good at it. Damn...
I speak very well, and my boss said, "Mr. Tibbs, you know why you’re
so successful? Because people believe you." I said, "Well,
generally speaking, I don’t lie to them. I tell them what the deal
is. I say, 'Hey, I can give you three grand now, or you get five grand
later and a lawyer gets a third of that and a doctor gets the other
part.'" That’s my prejudice against insurance companies. So
I would settle claims like that. And nobody ever came back and said,
"Hey, I got cheated."
But
the job was boring as hell. All kinds of other stuff was happening around
human rights issues and so forth. I’m making good money, but that’s
only for me, it ain’t doing nothing for my people. I’m not
furthering my own growth, and so I spent a great deal of time afterwards
boozing and carousing. After a couple of years, I met this beautiful
young lady who was not at all typical of the young ladies I had met.
She was a bourgeois black woman from Hyde Park. Her daddy was upper
middle-class. She had run away when she was sixteen to march with Martin
Luther King and became a member of SNCC. I quit my job and she and I
got a place in Old Town, and as the youngsters say now, we chilled out
for the next year or so.
At
the time, the black clergymen in Chicago had gone to the white seminaries
and said, "Hey, you people graduate two or three hundred seminarians
a year, one or two of them are black." I found out about this three-year
program where one could get an MAT, Masters in Arts and Theology. So
they opened it up to selected black folks, whether or not you had an
undergraduate degree. I was saying cynically, yeah, they’re looking
for somebody to stem the shit that’s jumping off now. And yeah,
I’ll do that because I do believe that peace is better than war,
that friendship and that kind of stuff is better than enmity. I ain’t
going to be somebody’s Uncle Tom, but I will do what I can. And
so also I will have fulfilled my promise to my mama: I will have myself
a master’s degree. It was really beautiful because I could read
all day and didn’t feel guilty for reading because it was course
stuff.
And
then crazy stuff starts happening. I had about five friends pass away,
and these are young guys, in the matter of a year or two. And it scared
the piss out of me, if you will pardon the expression. Not to mention
the stuff that’s happening in the street. The cops going and shooting
[Black Panthers] Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. I dropped out of the seminary.
And
then I had an experience. I was at a friend’s house, someone I
was in school with, and I was drinking orange juice, and I think this
guy put LSD in it. The story really gets crazy. I left his house and
I was taking one of our friends home. I looked at the girl and her face
had changed. I had this very violent verbal reaction and I’m not
a violent guy. I think I scared her. I dropped her off at home and my
body started shaking uncontrollably, which acid will do to you. Something
was happening with my body and I didn’t know what it was. I drove
my car all night because I knew I couldn’t sleep.
I dropped out of the seminary and now I don’t know what to do with
myself. There was an agitation within my spirit, so I said, well, I’ll
take off. I’ve never been any place except Mississippi, Michigan,
Illinois and Indiana. I thought, you might not live that long anyway,
so I took off and I took off walking. I wanted to go to California.
This
was in 1972. I sold my car to my brother. When you’re six-three
and you’re black, there are a lot of places you don’t get
no rides. So it was mostly walking, and then later on I rode freight
trains. I'd get a job working by the day for two or three days, make
twenty bucks a day. That would last me a couple of weeks. I smoke bulk
tobacco, roll my own, and I sleep under bridges and in cars. I went
all over the USA. I’ve been in all the states, except maybe three.
So I was all over Florida. And when this crazy stuff jumps off, the
murder and the rape thing - People say, "You were in the wrong
place at the wrong time." Philosophically, I can’t accept
that. I was supposed to go through the experiences that I was supposed
to go through for whatever reasons. I think God wanted me to disabuse
myself of my fear of death, I really do. I think that’s why I went
to Death Row. I think God was saying to me, "Okay, I’m going
to show you there’s nothing to fear out here but me. I’m going
to the House of Death," cause that’s what they call it, they
call it the Death House, "and I’m going to bring you out again."
(laughs.) And that’s what happened.
During
the time I was in Florida, this guy was killed, and allegedly this young
white woman was raped. I really don’t know what happened, because
I wasn’t there. But I do know I am not the perpetrator of it. I
think what happened was this girl was like sixteen, and as pretty as
you’ll ever want to see, right. From Rhode Island. And she had
been living with this photographer who was in his forties down in St.
Pete.
A young white brother from downstate Illinois, who just got out of the
Navy, comes through. She says she had been smoking grass for several
days, and I really believe this young ex-naval guy was maybe transporting.
People did a lot of that back then, and Florida was one of the places
that you could pick up really good weed. So this young guy, the guy
who was killed, comes and stays in the trailer court where the girl
was living in St. Petersburg, with her older photographer. And when
the young guy takes off, she takes off with him. She runs away from
her old man. At one point during the trial, my lawyer, from Chicago,
he said to her, "Isn’t it true that you ran away from this
guy? The photographer, he pursued you and caught you on the highway
and then killed this young man and threatened to kill you if you didn’t
come back with him?" She broke down and went to crying. And the
judge, great pale defender of white southern womanhood that he is, called
for a recess. And my old scary black lawyer didn’t bring it up
when he came back because he didn’t want to make these white folks
mad at him. And I understand it, I’m a southern boy. My rationale
to them for being in the state was just that I wanted to roam across
the country, which is typical of writers and artists and so forth, but
it’s not typical of black people. It’s all right for Jack
Kerouc, but not for Delbert Tibbs. There's another assumption: this
is my country, I can go any place I like. This happened around the 4th
of February, 1974. On the 6th of February, the Florida State police
stops me. They asked me to let them see my I. D. I let them see my I.
D. I told them I’d been down in Southern Florida doing farm work.
They questioned me, I guess, because Ocala, Florida I believe is maybe
two hundred miles from Fort Meyers, which is near where the crime occurred.
The cops questioned me and let me go, but before they do that, they
ask if I mind if they take photographs of me. I say, "No, I don’t
mind." So they take four Polaroid snapshots. One of the cops said,
"Mr. Tibbs, I don’t think you had anything to do with it,
so I’m going to do you a favor." In the meantime, they don’t
know what to do with this nigger. I’ve got I. D. in my pocket from
the University of Chicago, and photo I. D. and that kind of stuff, and
yet here I am in Florida with these work clothes on. He says, "There’s
been a serious crime and you’re going to be stopped a number of
other times because all the enforcement folks are going to stop people
they see that are strangers." He wrote me out a letter saying this
person, Delbert Tibbs, was questioned by me on the 6th of February,
1974, and I’m satisfied he’s not the person wanted in connection
with the crimes, crimes, he never specified, which occurred around Fort
Meyers on such and such a date. And he let me go.
I think I got stopped once more after that. I go into Mississippi where
I have an aunt. I tell her what I’m probably going to do is walk
to Memphis, which is a hundred miles away, and stay at my uncle’s
house there. Then I’m going to call, Roy, that’s my brother
who at that time was a lieutenant in the sheriff’s department,
and tell him to send me a hundred dollars. They think I’m crazy,
cause I’ve left this job and I’m just roaming around the country.
That’s not typical for black young men to do. But I’m me and
I don’t always choose to follow the path that everybody else follows,
which is what got me into trouble. I wasn’t behaving quote, the
way a nigger ought to behave, end quote. After a couple of weeks at
my aunt’s house, I get back on the highway. A bout ten miles from
my aunt’s house I see a Mississippi highway patrolman driving in
the opposite direction. He goes past, turns around, and we go through
the thing, "Let me see your I. D." I show him my I. D. He
says, "You’re Delbert Tibbs? You’re wanted for rape and
murder." He said, "There’s a warrant for your arrest."
I said, "Here’s a letter I have." He said, "I don’t
know nothing about no letters, I don’t know nothing about nothing.
All I know is there’s a warrant for your arrest." He puts
the cuffs on me and takes me to the nearest jail, which is a little
place called Clarksdale.
I didn’t know at the time, but the photographs had been sent to Fort
Meyers. Initially, the girl had given a description of the rapist and
murderer as a black man about five-six or seven, with a great big Afro.
I had a small Afro and I’m six three and relatively light complexioned.
The police are desperate to find someone, because there’s a black
murderer-rapist running loose. The cops take the Polaroid snapshots
of me and by now I’m sure they’ve scared the pee out of her
because she ain’t come up with nobody and here’s the corpse
here, right. And they said, "Is this the guy?" And she said
yes. So that’s when the warrant went out. But now she’s changed
her description of the guy, right. I didn't know that at the time, but
that’s what’s happened.
By then I had gone through a spiritual breakthrough where I almost didn’t
see people as black and white any more. I had spent two years sleeping
under the stars. I called it my "wilderness" experience. Two
years more or less at the mercy of the world. I was someplace one evening,
sitting in the doorway of this freight train, and folks in their cars
and pickups were pulled up waiting for the train to go by so they could
cross the track, and I see this little boy. There was a guy sitting
in a truck, probably with a rifle in the back, and this little white
boy jumps out, eight or ten year-old kid, and runs towards where I’m
sitting in the door of the freight train. I’m thinking, what is
this? He’s running to bring me a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken,
cause his daddy done told him, "Go take this to the guy, the hobo
man, and feed him." You know what I’m saying? What he saw
was a hungry man, not a black man. Incidents like that, there have been
many of them-- I saw individuals, I saw human beings. And that’s
both liberating and dangerous. So I think, why not go back to Florida?
Obviously, it’s a case of mistaken identity. This stuff ain’t
gonna go away if I just sit here. If I were being pragmatic, I’d
have let the state of Mississippi and Florida argue about it, and Florida
would have had to prove that they had a reasonable cause to want me
back. They didn’t have anything except the girl said I did it.
But I went back to Florida. I should have known that something was crazy.
It must have been a fifteen-hour car trip, hand-cuffed, chains on my
legs. As we’re going into the station, there’s somebody out
front with a minicam taking pictures. They take me in, fingerprint me,
give me my blankets. Get up the next morning and they feed you the stuff
they feed you, and I’m watching TV and I see myself coming into
the station on TV. After that, they call me out to go into a lineup.
I said, "Well, shit, everybody in town knows what I look like now."
Sure enough, I go in the lineup with five or six other guys and the
girl say, "Yes, that’s that fucker." That was her word.
Oh boy, game’s afoot now. So they have good cause to keep me. They
bind me over, and I’m in Lee County jail waiting to go to trial
for rape and murder. Irony abounds. My middle name is Lee and I’m
in Lee County Jail. I spend the next nine months there. The first couple
of weeks, I don’t do anything 'cause I figure they’re going
to let me out of here, so I don’t even bother my family. But that
ain’t happening. They say, "Hey, shit, you’re it."
In a sense, I integrated the jail. This place was kind of like time had
passed them by. This is Fort Meyers. They do what they want to do down
there. My presence there focused so much attention on it. This young
woman I’d been involved with for five years, Julie Tyler, started
the Delbert Tibbs Defense Committee and they began raising money for
lawyers. Folks started visiting me. A lot of my friends had been movement
folks, so there was a lot of scrutiny on the town. They began to kind
of get themselves together so they didn’t look bad to the rest
of the world.
I was slightly bewildered, but I still wasn’t worried at all, which
was stupid. I should have been. I had reached a stage in consciousness
either where something deep in me knew that it ultimately was going
to be all right, or where it didn’t matter, kind of like Socrates...
I’ll drink the hemlock, ain’t no big thing.
I was locked up for nine months and then the trial. All white jury. In
Chicago, my lawyer, he was with a prestigious law firm, very successful.
But Chicago ain’t Lee County, Florida. He was intimidated. He was
scared, and I don’t much blame him, because the judge was quite
capable of locking him up too if he displeased him. When he had an objection,
the judge would overrule it; when the prosecution had an objection,
the judge would sustain it. It was obvious to me what was happening.
We had one black person who made it through the preemptory challenges
for selection on the jury and then got disqualified at the last minute.
I think he said he didn’t read or write too good and the judge
maybe thought that was enough. You have this arrogant Negro dash nigger,
from up north someplace, who tended to look white folks in the eye and
who would not let them put words in his mouth. I can’t stop myself.
I said, "Delbert, they see you as an arrogant, crazy nigger."
Actually, I was just being me.
The
courtroom was packed. My folks had come from Chicago in large groups,
probably every black person in the town had come to the trial because
they knew about the brother from Chicago. The police department have
marksmen on the roof because they think that some of these black militants
might come down and try to bust me out. After a day and a half, they
find me guilty.
At that time there was a moratorium on the death penalty and the judge
said well, if the moratorium continues, then you will serve two life
sentences consecutively. If not, then you are to be executed by the
State of Florida. Before that, there’s a pre-sentence investigation,
wherethey check your background to see if you have a criminal record,
if there are mitigating factors. I’ll never forget, one of the
investigators came to see me after the trial and he asked me, "Delbert,
I know you say you dated white girls. Did you ever have sex with one?"
I’m saying, why would he ask me that? I’m such a fool. I was
inclined to ask him had he ever slept with a black one, but I answered
his question, I said, "Yes, I’ve had sex with white females."
He turned as red as your socks and again something said, you fool, you
were supposed to say no. So I got sentenced, and then they shipped me
off to the Death House.
The
electric chair is up at a place called Starke. Right next door is Florida
State Prison, the regular penitentiary. The max joint is Starke and
it’s right next door to Raiford, the Big House. That’s where
the death house and the electric chair is –– Old Sparky, as
they call the chair. Sometimes they refer to it as the Iron Lady. A
couple of things stuck in my mind. When they got ready to take you from
the county jail to the state jail, they always did it in the middle
of the night. I remember reading about the camps in Germany, how when
they’d come to take people to the gas chambers, they’d come
and get you in the middle of the night. It was almost as scary because
I didn’t know where the hell I was going. For all I knew, they
could have took me and executed me then. My rational mind told me they
weren’t, but it was just scary.
They
put you in a van with no windows in it, and you’re chained up,
I would say maybe ten of us. Some guys are going to one place and some
are going to another. I’m going to Death Row. There’s a bench
on each side and chains, one around your waist and another one around
your feet, so you ain’t going nowhere. I remember the guy saying,
"Well, you got five over here for Raiford." He comes to me
and says, "What’s your name?" I said, "Tibbs."
He said, "You’re to go to the death house." The moratorium
ended. Now the State of Florida's free to execute all the folks they
want to. So they take me there and put in my cell. The food was much
better-- Cons always think about food.
I was there two years. Until the Florida Supreme Court overturned the
conviction. In the meantime, the Delbert Tibbs Defense Committee and
Miss Julie Tyler, they’re working. Pete Seeger did a concert for
me. Angela Davis spoke at Operation Push and raised money. I sometimes
tell people when I do lectures: if you really want to punish a guy,
lock him up on death row for twenty or thirty years. After five years,
he’ll probably beg you to put him in the chair or strap him to
the gurney. I have friends now, like Rolando Cruz, who did eleven years,
I said, "Man, you’ve got to be the strongest man on the planet."
Each day, each day... It was getting harder and harder by the time I
got out. Each day it was like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the mountain.
Tuesday might as well be Wednesday. The only kind of change was on the
weekend when people would come to visit.
I was convinced that they were not going to kill me. I didn’t think
that they were worthy of my death, to put it in those kind of terms.
Somehow, deep down, I knew that that wasn’t my fate. But, the reality
is, in a sense they create your reality. I am behind the bars, I have
to ask to be let out, they feed me, they turn out the lights when they
want to turn out the lights. I don’t run anything there.
I had gotten so when I got up out of the bed about 7:30 in the morning,
I would reach for the TV. You automatically turn it on because it was
something coming in from out there, and there were people on the TV,
right. Then I would eat breakfast and I’d sit up and watch TV,
maybe doze off, go to sleep. At eleven- thirty, they serve lunch. And
I would watch TV through lunch. Then some days I’d work out in
the cell, do push-ups and sit-ups like most of the guys did. Then you
look around and it’s four o’clock and they served dinner.
Everything was focused around mealtime. Because that was the only pleasant
thing in your day, the food. You eat dinner and then you’re up
until lights out at eleven o’clock. Turning on the TV was automatic.
Before I’d go to bed at night a lot of times I would tie a towel
around the knob on the TV, so that when I’d go to hit the knob,
the towel would be there and I’d go, "Oh, I didn’t mean
to turn this image on this morning." It was one way of my taking
control of at least that action.
When I meet people now, if they try to make a big deal about me having been
on death row, I sometimes gently remind them that we're all on death
row. The difference is that here the state’s gonna do it, and at
some point you’re gonna know the date and the hour, but that’s
the only difference. I mean, if you’re walking around here, shit,
you’re on death row, cause you’re going to have to leave here.
You’re going to lay down and they’re going to throw dust in
your face. They never set a date for me. And I thank God for that.
The Florida Supreme Court finally overturned the conviction. They said that
there was no evidence. The jury convicted me and they shouldn’t
have. The jury convicted me because a white woman said I had raped her.
This is the politics: The state appealed the overturning of the conviction.
But they had to let me out. They got every pound of flesh they could:
They let me out on ninety thousand dollars bond, so I would come back
for the trial. The case was overturned a couple of times. I came to
Chicago. In the meantime, the state was gearing up to retry me. At one
point, there was a circuit court judge who overturned the whole thing
and dismissed it. The state got the case re-instituted.
The case was overturned in 1976, I got out in January of 1977. That should
have been the end of it. But the country was moving further and further
to the right. Initially, when the sentence was overturned, it was a
four to three decision. Four justices said we believe he’s innocent,
three said we believe he’s guilty. All seven are very well-educated
people, why is it that these guys look at the same evidence, the same
data and come to diametrically opposite conclusions? It can’t be
based on intellect or reason, it has to be based on something else.
I suggest to you it’s based on that cultural conditioning. To folks
of this particular mindset, I’m guilty because that white woman
said I’m guilty. And because I’m a big old black buck.
In
1982, the D. A. dropped the case. He said because his witness wouldn’t
be credible before a jury because she had lived a life of alcohol and
drug abuse and so forth. The girl admitted that she’d been smoking
marijuana the day that the crime occurred. It certainly can impair your
identification of somebody. The real reason he dropped the case was
because during the interview the young prosecutor who had sent me to
death row, had said –– this is the crazy part ––
I had made friends in Fort Meyers. One of my white friends was talking
to the D. A.’s wife, and she says, "What your husband did
to Delbert Tibbs..." The wife said, "What did my husband do?"
She said, "They convicted that man on just four Polaroid snapshots."
When he came home from work, he’d gone into private practice, she
asked if that were true. And he said, yeah, but if he had known at the
time, he would not have prosecuted the case. But if we had gone to trial,
he was going to be the first witness for our side.
I believe life is endless. We can’t talk about life without talking
about death, we can’t talk about death without talking about life.
I was listening to the Dalai Lama, I read his autobiography, and he
says that Buddhists often meditate on death. That’s total anathema
to the western mind, right. I think it has something to do with Greek
culture, with it’s bifurcation of existence. This is life and this
is death-- I learned to meditate before I went to death row. That’s
one of the things that helped get me through, but it was very difficult.
Otherwise, I read, mostly. As much as I could. I can go home with a
good book today and I’ll spend the whole day reading it. On Death
Row, I couldn’t focus my mind on anything. I couldn’t lose
consciousness of my environment for more than forty-five minutes. If
I did, I would find myself getting up, pacing, looking out of the bars.
I remember saying to one of my homies who was executed by the State
of Florida, I’d say, "Hey, Shango, I believe there are spooks
in this goddamn place." He’d say, "Well, if there’s
any such thing, Brother Tibbs, this is the place for it."
What
I’ve discovered is: all of the holy books are marvelous, absolutely
so, including the Bible. The Bible has the most beautiful language of
any book I have ever read. Not to mention the fact that there’s
something there. God is there. But I really do believe he’s hidden.
I believe the Jewish mystics who went into the Kabala know that. I sometimes
wish I spoke Hebrew because the words might not be the thing itself
but they can lead to it. The Bahagavadgita is the bible to three hundred
million Indians and others who are not Indians. Thoreau and Emerson
read it. Krishna says there never was a time when you and I did not
exist, and there will never be a time when we cease to be. He said,
"This body wears out, like garments, and when a garment wears out,
you take it off and you lay it down, and you pick up another one and
put it on."
One
of the terrible things about executions is to jump people off into the
universe like that. I think for a soul to be wrenched from the body
is for that soul to be in anger and in pain and in hatred. I believe
it impacts negatively on our world, that probably a lot of the calamities
that happen are a result of that sort of thing. I mourn for the whole
world because it’s such a horrible place so often.
