BOOKS: ​“He Called Me Sister: A True Story of Finding Humanity on Death Row”

In He Called Me Sister: A True Story of Finding Humanity on Death Row, author Suzanne Craig Robertson details her jour­ney from reluc­tance to true friend­ship dur­ing her chal­leng­ing fif­teen-year rela­tion­ship with Cecil Johnson, a Tennessee death-row pris­on­er, who was exe­cut­ed in December 2009. Using let­ters, poems, and a per­son­al mem­oir writ­ten by Johnson, Robertson tells their mutu­al sto­ry of per­se­ver­ance, recall­ing that ​“dif­fer­ences don’t have to be barriers.”

In the Preface, jour­nal­ist Bill Moyers explains that Robertson ​“sub­tly hon­ors the emo­tions inevitable in a sto­ry of inno­cence and guilt; of our col­lec­tive­ly tak­ing a life; of race and pol­i­tics, right and wrong, and of wrestling with ques­tions haunt­ed by bib­li­cal mem­o­ries that we con­front every day…” In her Foreword, Sr. Helen Prejean (author of Dead Man Walking) sums up the nar­ra­tive, “[T]his fam­i­ly (includ­ing Robertson’s hus­band and daugh­ter) showed up for Cecil Johnson and he showed up for them. With a bond laced with sad­ness and joy, he and his cir­cum­stances changed the direc­tion of their think­ing. And that is something powerful.” 

Robertson is the for­mer Director of Communications at the Tennessee Bar Association, as well as the for­mer edi­tor of the Tennessee Bar Journal. In this posi­tion, she spent more than thir­ty years work­ing on sto­ries relat­ing to law and society.