BOOKS: ​“Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row”

Unheard voic­es from death row come to life in the new book, Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row. The book, a col­lab­o­ra­tive project between the arts col­lec­tive Hidden Voices and more than 100 men on death rows across the United States, the­mat­i­cal­ly weaves togeth­er their per­son­al nar­ra­tives to cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of who is on death row, how they got there, what they expe­ri­ence, and why their lives matter. 

The men’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with Hidden Voices began in 2013. In an intro­duc­tion by the book’s edi­tor, Lynden Harris, the pris­on­ers state their col­lec­tive goal — one that crit­ics say they have met: ​“We intend for our sto­ries to break the stereo­type of who lives on death row. We want the pub­lic to know we are not monsters.”

In his Washington Post book review, colum­nist Steven Petrow calls Right Here, Right Now ​“a col­lec­tion of pow­er­ful and often wrench­ing first-per­son sto­ries.” ​“It’s an emo­tion­al­ly dif­fi­cult read,” he writes, ​“but it’s more than worth the invest­ment of time and heart.”

The 99 sto­ries are anony­mous and orga­nized into eight life stages that, col­lec­tive­ly, present a detailed mosa­ic of the men’s lives. There sto­ries range from ear­ly child­hood through age five (“The Part That Was Innocent”), age four­teen to arrest (“From Bad to Worse”), enter­ing death row and soli­tary con­fine­ment (“Worst of the Worst”), life on death row (“You Are Not Here to be Rehabilitated”), and fac­ing exe­cu­tion (“Every Day’s Worth Celebrating”). Each sto­ry takes the read­er on a dif­fer­ent jour­ney. One starts: ​“I was four when my father start­ed try­ing to kill me.”

In his fore­word to the book, death-penal­ty lawyer and advo­cate Henderson Hill says, ​“Right Here, Right Now allows us to read the sto­ries and hear the voic­es of men soci­ety has deter­mined to be dis­pos­able, per­sons whose human­i­ty is offi­cial­ly denied, pris­on­ers who await the capri­cious call of the lot­tery-like sum­mons to the exe­cu­tion cham­ber.” He writes, ​“The sto­ries com­piled, and the voic­es ampli­fied, in effect restore the 2,500 men and women on death row to the human family.”

The book, Hill says, is itself a com­pelling argu­ment against the death penal­ty. ​“Right Here, Right Now,” he writes, ​“while address­ing none of the pol­i­cy argu­ments that col­or the cur­rent debate — exon­er­a­tions, seri­ous men­tal ill­ness, race dis­par­i­ties, costs — attacks the very premise of the death penal­ty: that cer­tain per­sons are dis­pos­able, that they have no human­i­ty the law is oblig­at­ed to respect.” 

The men’s sto­ries are riv­et­ing and often heart-wrench­ing. One shares that his first mem­o­ry ever was a gun. Another recalls being kicked out of the house in the freez­ing cold by his abu­sive father. He and his moth­er stood out­side with a new­born baby, strug­gling the entire night to keep the baby warm. But the baby got sick and died from pneu­mo­nia. ​“I used to go to his grave site and put flow­ers by the lit­tle head­stone,” he writes in the fifth chap­ter of the book. ​“Soon as I was old enough, I got his ini­tials tat­tooed on my left arm. So I always car­ry him with me in memory.” 

In the fif­teenth chap­ter, a man writes that he got his first C ever on his report card because his fam­i­ly couldn’t afford a tri­fold board required by a sci­ence project. ​“I felt cheat­ed. And hurt. And deeply ashamed. That was the moment I real­ized hard work didn’t mat­ter. Poverty would win out in the end. … That C was my U‑turn.” In ​“Every Day’s Worth Celebrating,” a man near­ing exe­cu­tion writes of eat­ing cere­al and watch­ing TV as a child with his baby broth­er in their tiny clos­et. It was, he says, ​“the first game I remem­ber play­ing.” They called it ​“Playing Solitary.”

“These voic­es bear wit­ness that crim­i­nal jus­tice in America has become a nation’s crime unto itself,” civ­il rights leader Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said. ​“We must mea­sure our nation­al stature and moral stand­ing not by stock mar­kets or church steeples but by the grace and human­i­ty of the insti­tu­tions that rebuild broken lives.” 

Harris, in her intro­duc­tion to the book, calls upon the read­er ​“to trou­ble the waters of our com­pla­cen­cy: a com­pla­cen­cy that claims those of us gift­ed with child­hoods free from wit­ness­ing mur­ders, from the need to sell drugs for rent, from incar­cer­at­ed par­ents.” She asks, ​“Do the sto­ries in this book human­ize the men? Certainly. But my hope is that by read­ing these sto­ries, we humanize ourselves.”