Apr 99

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

"How do you live through that?"

Renee Wormack Keels is pastor of United Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, MA and serves as a consultant to criminal justice services and programs. This article is prepared from an interview with Susannah Sheffir.

I am the daughter of a man who was executed. It was several years before I learned this truth and many more years before I was able to speak out about it.

My father's parents raised me, and I spent weekends and holidays with my mother and stepfather. I knew that my father had died when I was a baby, and my grandmother told me that he died of an illness. I wasn't very inquisitive about my father because I trusted that what my grandmother told me was the truth. She had a picture of my father and mother on their wedding day, and she always made a point of telling me that I was wanted and loved. Although we didn't talk about my father, each year we made a trip to the graveyard and put flowers on his grave.

One day when I was about 11, I was coming home from rollerskating with friends. The mother who was driving us, after asking me some routine questions about myself, asked, "Wasn't your father executed?" There I was in the company of my girlfriends, hearing something shocking that I had never heard before. I was devastated, and when I got home I immediately said to my grandmother, "I can't believe you lied to me!" My grandmother had never lied to me, so it had never occurred to me that she might be telling me something that was not the full truth.

But she said, "Yes, your father was executed. I knew that one of these days I was going to have to tell you, but this was not the day that I expected to have to do it." She didn't go into a lot of detail. All she said was that he had gotten into some trouble and that they were a very poor family and couldn't get good legal counsel.

That day was a turning point in my emotional life. Now I too bore this secret shame in my family. As I got older, my grandmother and I talked about it periodically, but still not in any great depth. One thing I remember is that she said none of her sisters and brothers had come to be with her when my father was executed. She felt very much alone during the whole process.

Throughout the next several years, as I grew up and moved away, I dealt with the knowledge on and off, but never in a really up-front way. Then in 1988, when I was in my forties, I started doing work in the criminal justice system. My oldest son had just gotten into some trouble and got sent to prison. He was almost 21, and he got a 3-15 year sentence on a breaking-and-entering charge. So I was dealing with that. Meanwhile, I was working for the Ohio governor as a policy analyst on women's issues. Someone asked me if I would be a keynote speaker at the women's prison. I said, "Me? I don't have anything to say to those women." But gradually I was convinced, and I went and spoke to them. It was very rewarding, and eventually I went back to do a workshop.

Some time later, I, along with other staff people for the governor, began to coordinate a task force to study the needs of incarcerated women in Ohio. We ended up becoming such experts on the needs of women in prison that I was recruited to come to Boston as the Executive Director of a group called Social Justice for Women. So I came to Boston and worked with women in prison, and about a year later I received a request to go into a men's prison.

When I went to men's prisons, I was often the only African American among the visitors. Having grown up in the church, I began to ask, "Where is the church?" Here were people who were suffering, people who needed spiritual direction, and just people who needed people.

So I started going in as an infrequent speaker. One time I went down for a Kwanzaa program at Norfolk and I met Mark, who was in prison on a 40-year sentence. We became good friends, and I shared some of my story with him. He asked, "Have you ever read your father's trial transcript?" I said, "I haven't-I'm almost afraid to." He told me it would help to read it because it would give me a way of seeing some of the facts for myself. Well, one day he announced, "I'm having something sent to you as a birthday present, but when it comes, I want you to promise that you won't open it by yourself."

The package came and I went to the post office to pick it up. I went into the parking lot, opened it up by myself, and started to read. The first page was the arrest. My father had been arrested the day before I was born. Reading the trial transcript, I discovered that my mother, my grandmother, and my grandfather were the only three witnesses for the defense. I read troubling things: my mother said that my father had pulled a gun on her at some point. My grandparents spoke about the fact that my father had had an accident as a child and they thought maybe there had been some head trauma. These were things that I had never had any inkling of.

The last page of all of this material was the death warrant that had been signed by the superintendent of the prison, with the date of April 16, 1947. He was executed less than a year after he was arrested. The death warrant is what sent me into a tailspin emotionally, because even though I'd been to my father's grave, it was horrible to be confronted with his death warrant, particularly because of what I now knew about execution from working in the criminal justice world.

That evening I called my mother and told her I had just read the trial transcript. She said, "I suppose you want to talk." I sure did! Within the next couple of days, I was in my car, driving 880 miles to sit with her and ask her some questions. My mother had never talked to me about my father, and I needed to know if she loved him. Since she never talked about her love for him, I wasn't sure if she loved me. I needed to let things go but I also needed to take things in.

I returned to Boston after that visit, and after a while I realized that I was being called to work for the abolition of the death penalty. In 1997, four years after I had read my father's trial transcript, I was speaking against the death penalty at a rally on the Massachusetts State House steps. I was the first speaker, and, as if I had stepped out of myself, I heard myself say, "I'm standing here as the daughter of a man who was executed."

Pat Clark of AFSC was there that day, and afterwards she asked me if I would come speak at an upcoming religious organizing conference on the death penalty. "Speak about what?" I asked her cautiously. Of course, I knew exactly what she wanted me to speak about, but I was thinking about the fact that if I was going to speak about my father publicly, it would have to be all right with my family. I called my mother and asked her how she felt about my speaking at this conference. She said, "I knew when you drove here years ago that you were being driven to do something about this. I want you to know that you can do what you have to do. I'm OK."

So I have continued to speak out. As a result of speaking at the religious organizing conference, I was asked to be on the board of Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation. I think it's important to realize that when the state kills, the people they kill have family members. Any time there's a homicide, an entire family is affected, and that's just as true when the state is the one who kills.

My mother told me that the night my father was executed, she and my grandmother had to go down to the Ohio State Penitentiary and wait to receive the body. Still, today, I have a hard time imagining that. How do you sit in a room somewhere and wait to receive the body of your son that somebody is deliberately putting to death? How do you live through that?

My grandmother was 46 when her first-born son was arrested; I was 46 when my first-born son was arrested. But my grandmother didn't have a voice. She couldn't say the kinds of things that I can say, and although I can try to imagine it, I can't know all the things she felt. I hope that by sharing this story, I can help another mother who is dealing with such a loss be able to find her voice.