Executing Mama

A True Story

Her

She was told she’d have a visitor, a man, one of few in the past twenty years, none of the others were men. She scanned her 7X12 foot cell trying to decide where she and her visitor would sit. He’d sit on the chair she decided. It wasn’t seemly for a strange man to be on her bed.

Everything was painted green.

Thank god she recently cleaned her cell and washed the worn pale-yellow sheer curtains she was allowed to decorate her barred and screened window issuing the only daylight she saw, not counting the overhead light she didn’t control. Daylight, whether daring, dingy, or deluded, it was daylight.

The cell furnishings were a mattress-covered cement slab bed, a stainless-steel counter bolted to one cement wall as a desk, a green plastic chair with a cracked backrest, a long steel bookshelf bolted above the desk, and a combination stainless-steel toilet and wash basin. The bed sheets were neatly tucked and covered with a pink and purple spread adorned with little white cotton puff balls which she inherited from another prisoner who had been executed.

She ran a finger across the bookshelf’s edge for dust and adjusted three photos of children, a boy and two girls. The bookshelf held a Bible (King James Version), a photograph album, several Readers’ Digest Condensed books, The Religions of Man by Huston Smith, books by Nora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ellison, Baldwin, Franz Fanon, Lawrence Hill, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and the Meditations…