10
LOVING THE MONSTER
What shall we make of our darkness?
IT’S A FOUR-HOUR DRIVE FROM ATLANTA TO THE TELFAIR STATE Prison down a lonesome stretch of I-75, which slices through central Georgia like a straight-razor cut. I put the tuner on scan and, just as I pass the Pinetucky Church of God, catch a burst of pure southern gothic, some ballad about a dying preacher who “a-laid his bloodstained Bible right in that hooker’s hand.” In the staticky desert of rural bandwidth, where the choice is either Black Sabbath oldies or the Good Book’s greatest hits, I’ll take a good sermon, where the story of Mary and Joseph at the inn becomes “the Bethlehem Motel Six refused to take their credit card!” I play a mental game, slugging in my own translations for the more overwrought scripture thumping. When the preacher shouts, “Friends, I wouldn’t live a day without Jesus,” I think, without compassion, for what else was he, and amen to that. “Repent!” becomes take a frank and fearless inventory, and I try: The truth is, I’m more than a little nervous: I’m on my way to meet a stone cold killer.
The murder had shocked the down-at-heel Atlanta neighborhood of Vine City. Residents there were no strangers to crime, but the victim had been an angel. Forty-three-year-old Patricia Nuckles had come up from those very streets, gone away to college, and then returned to her roots, working as a librarian, tutoring kids, doing charity work in her spare time. Trish, as everyone knew her, had had an unusual upbringing: an African-American woman raised by a white couple, Hector and Susie Black, who’d moved down in the 1960s to do grassroots civil rights organizing. There in the Deep South, the Blacks, their three other daughters, and Trish had formed an unlikely, fiercely devoted family.
Trish’s cousin Michelle was the first to hear. Watching a news bulletin about a homeless crack addict who had burglarized a home and murdered the owner—a drearily familiar tableau of flashing police cruisers and yellow crime-scene tape—she realized with a ripple of horror that she was looking at Trish’s house. Not long after, police caught thirty-two-year-old Ivan Simpson hiding at his mother’s place. “What type of animal could have done that, killed her the way he did?” Michelle asks me. “Trish would literally give you the clothes off her back. She helped the homeless too; she would have helped him if he’d asked.”
The case was a prosecutorial slam-dunk. When Simpson pleaded guilty, the district attorney shifted his focus to getting the death penalty. As the crime’s terrible chronicle was read into the court record, Hector Black, who had driven down from his Tennessee farm, felt thankful that his partial deafness made some of the account inaudible. He could hardly bear to glance at the powerfully built black man, head down and shoulders drooping, sitting in the courtroom.
The defense attorney recounted how Ivan Simpson had been born in a mental hospital to a severely disturbed mother. His life had been a nightmare of violence and deprivation. When it came Hector’s turn to read his prepared victim impact statement, his feelings were in turmoil. Standing with his sport jacket thrown over his bib overalls, he told the court of his joy when Trish had come into his family.
“Although she was not our child by any claims of birth,” Hector told the judge, “she was our child by every claim of love.” He had watched her bloom from the thin, neglected child of a neighborhood alcoholic into a woman intent on making the world a better place. He opened his briefcase and took out his favorite picture of Trish as a beaming eight-year-old, telling the court of the mortal dark that had swallowed their lives, of his feelings of abandonment by a God, whose eye, he’d once believed, was always on the sparrow.
Such statements are usually a platform for crime victims to hammer home the enormity of their loss and demand the maximum penalty, but Hector had a starkly different purpose. “I know that love does not seek revenge,” he told the court. “We do not want a life for a life.” Facing the startled judge, he read the words he had written to the murderer: “I don’t hate you, though I hate with all my soul what you did.” Then summoning a reserve of will, Hector turned around to speak the last lines directly to the prisoner: “My wish from my heart is that God would grant all of us peace who have been so terribly wounded by this murder—including you, Ivan Simpson.”
Hector remembers the moment: “It was almost like I was grabbed to turn around and look at him. He lifted his head, and our eyes met. Tears were just streaming down his face, such a look of...oh, God, like a soul in hell. It was one of those rare moments when the raw wounds strip away all pretense or falseness.”
As he was being led away, Simpson asked to speak. Turning to face the family, he said, “I am so sorry for the pain I have caused. I am so sorry.” Even the court’s victim representative, accustomed to stony silence, false contrition, or even cruel mockery from the accused, told Hector she felt a sense of awe. “This is something we rarely see, genuine remorse.” Simpson was sentenced to life without parole.
THE TELFAIR PRISON GUARD TOWERS RISE MIRAGELIKE IN the swampy sunlight like giant mushroom caps on gray concrete stalks. Behind them low, boxy buildings warehouse some thirteen hundred violent prisoners, a third of whom are doing life without parole. The assistant warden, a whippet-thin bleached blond woman in her fifties, agrees to take me on a quick tour of purgatory.
We walk the path outside the yard, passing knots of marble-eyed men with time and blood on their hands who pause in their furtive talk as we approach. A young man with a shaved head saunters by, an enormous blue swastika tattooed on his skull. There are hundreds upon hundreds of terrible crimes contained within these walls, she tells me, and she pretty much knows them all. My curiosity morbidly piqued, I ask her to describe a few. She glances at me sharply, quizzically. “Isn’t Ivan’s crime monstrous enough?”
She leads me to a fluorescent-lit room, its walls decorated with fake flower wreaths and a pastoral painting of hunters and hounds chasing down a fox. Four brass ceiling fans whisk the soupy air. I’m seated at a conference table with twelve chairs, like a jury room. “He’s probably going to cry,” the warden says dourly. She puts a roll of toilet paper on the table.
Ivan Simpson is led into the room, wearing a prison-issue white jumpsuit. I expected a glowering, manipulative sociopath or some feral con man behind whose mask I’d spot the hard gleam of cunning. I am unprepared for this man with an abject air of guilelessness, speaking in soft, country cadences.
When I ask him about his childhood, he tells me of the morning his mother, a schizophrenic who had been in and out of mental hospitals since he was born, had awakened him, his four-year-old sister LaToya, his brother Chuck, and two other siblings for an early outing to the local park. He felt excited and happy. They were at the edge of the swimming pool when his mother, raving that they were all “a threat to God,” scooped them up and plunged into the water. His sister LaToya drowned before his eyes. Ivan managed to thrash free and pull his brother Chuck to safety while the others struggled from her grasp.
Ivan was adopted by his great-aunt. He recites his ghetto coming-of-age story in an emotionless monotone. Hotwiring cars at fifteen. Moved up to “B an’ E"—breaking and entering—earning a two-year prison stint. Then the revelation of crack cocaine— “just a few minutes of everything’s-at-ease.” He supported his habit through “property crimes, lying, and manipulating,” sometimes stealing his aunt’s rent money, watching as she lost her house, her car, and her job. The crack, he says, “seemed to take away all my caring for other people.”
Had he ever really cared? I ask him. “Oh, I grew up in a loving atmosphere,” he says in his slow, heartful drawl. “My adoptive mom, Marie, she raised me good. She loved us, just loved us.” A tear meanders down his cheek. “I never had thoughts about hurting nobody.”
Despairing over his addiction, he tried to kill himself several times before being admitted to a treatment center. Clean for a few years, he’d been given a car and a furnished three-bedroom house by a woman at a local church, where he, his common-law wife, and son lived in exchange for simple upkeep. It was a stroke of inconceivable luck, but soon he was addicted again. After picking his gift-house clean of anything he could fence, he wound up back on the street. Finally, he moved back to Marie’s and got off his habit again. But one night, walking to the convenience store to buy cigarettes, he ran into his old dealer, who offered him a rock of crack. Soon high and craving more, he impulsively decided to do a burglary. Chance led him to Trish Nuckles’s darkened house.
When Trish unexpectedly walked in on him, he knocked her down and tied her up. After that he remembers having a strangely cordial conversation. Trish, trying to calm him down, had asked him about himself. He said he was hungry. She urged him to take some cooked chicken and ham and sodas from the fridge. She even told him, as he was leaving with her computer and stereo under his arm, that he should try to get some help. He promised he would, adding he would just use her car to drop off the stolen goods and leave it parked where she could find it, next to the Chinese restaurant up the street.
He remembers thinking she was a nice person, even remembers telling her to be sure to install some outside floodlights and put her lamps on timers to deter future burglaries. “And then I just left.” I can hear the relief in his voice. “Just left.” For a moment he is back at that crossroads, as if he could turn around and walk the other way, as if the story could end right there. His cellmate hears him in his sleep sometimes, saying, “I’m leaving, Trish, I’m leaving.”
Instead, Ivan scored some more crack. As he sat in Trish’s car, smoking it, he was startled to hear a voice, ghastly cold and glacially clear: Go back and kill her. He looked over at the passenger seat; the voice had issued from thin air. He re-creates his hallucinatory dialogue.
“I said, ‘I ain’t gonna kill that lady. She didn’t see my face. Her glasses fell off. She can’t ID me.’”
You go back now and kill that lady, said the voice. You go back and kill her.
Ivan knew then he was remonstrating with a demon, a demon, he says, “name of Legion.” He smoked more crack, then returned to the house. “Legion want me to kill you,” he told the still-bound and now terrified Trish. He remembers her asking why after he’d been “so nice up to now,” her begging him to just take her car. He told her he wanted to have sex. She said he’d have to kill her first.
“The only thing I remember,” Ivan claims, “is watching myself...strangle her. That’s...that’s all I remember. Standing above. Watching.” A slow cortege of teardrops rolls down his cheeks. He swears he’d never been violent before in all his years of crime. “I don’t know why she had to die,” he mutters, “or I should say—why I took her life.”
For Jesus had commanded the evil spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places.
Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
“Legion,” he replied, because many demons had gone into him.
The ranks of the possessed—by personal demons of defeat and dysfunction —are legion in the world. Ivan Simpson had had what psychiatrists call a “command hallucination"; crack, which addicts call Kryptonite, is notorious for them. I am revulsed by Ivan’s crime, by his vile massacre of an innocent. Yet I think of a prayer by the Dalai Lama: “Those who, maddened by the demons of delusion, commit violent negative actions that destroy both themselves and others, should be the object of our compassion.”
Navajo tribal healers who treat modern mental illnesses, like the violent flashbacks of soldiers returned from war, call it all nayee (monster). “What is the essence of the cycle of violence,” writes a Navajo lawyer, “in which children who are abused or neglected become offenders themselves? Nayee. Antisocial personality disorder? Nayee.” Just as his mother had been “told” to kill his little sister, Ivan, in some awful restaging (a psychologist would call it repetition-compulsion), had been ordered by a phantom to snuff out a blameless young woman’s life.
HOW COULD I HATE THIS MAN WHO HAD SUFFERED SO MUCH as a child?” Hector wrote in his diary after the day in court. “Someone so tormented by what he had done?” Hector had been unable to sleep that night. For the first time since the ordeal began, the coils that had wrapped themselves around his heart had loosened a little. He knew he’d done the right thing to oppose the death penalty. But there was something else, something he hadn’t expected. “I knew then that I’d forgiven him,” he says, the echo of surprise still in his voice. “And though I found it an awful stretch to think I could be concerned about the man who’d destroyed Trish, I also knew I had to write to him, encourage him that his life wasn’t over.”
Hector stayed up until dawn trying to find a way to put his new feelings on paper. He wrote to Ivan Simpson:
The thought of being in prison for the rest of your life must be very hard. But it doesn’t have to be the end. You can still find ways to help people who need help. You can be a force for peace and for light in dark surroundings. Patricia tried to make the world a better place. We should also try. If you will let me, I would like to keep writing to you. It would mean a lot to me to hear from you, especially knowing how hard it is for you to do this. Please try.
He signed it, “A Brokenhearted Father.”
Ivan tells me that after his arrest he had only one purpose at his trial: to die. “I felt like for what I did, I deserved to go. I done took someone’s life. Even though my dying wouldn’t make up for it, why should I still be here?” He had told his lawyers, over their objections, to plead guilty. He’d wanted justice to take its course, straight to the electric chair. When they told him about Hector’s opposition to the death penalty, he was baffled.
“Come on! How can someone not want me to die, and I just took his daughter’s life? And Hector, how can he get up in court and say he hated what I did but he doesn’t hate me?” He looks at me wonderingly. “Eyes can tell you a lot about a person. I saw his eyes, and he was for real. And, at first, I really didn’t want that forgiveness. Fact, right now, up until this point, I ain’t really forgave myself for what I did.”
His voice catches only slightly. His head sinks in shame. He is stern as he weeps. He will not permit himself the indulgence of a sob. I strive to withhold my empathy, as if allowing myself to feel anything would be collusion, would betray the life he took. It’s not easy to do, sitting with a man forever condemned to dry his own tears.
Hector continued writing to Ivan sometimes as often as weekly, the correspondence growing into a thick sheaf. He sent Ivan a letter with a leaf of scented geranium, but the censors confiscated it as contraband. He regaled him with the quotidian doings on his farm—the struggle to keep the grass in the orchard under control after heavy rains, chasing a neighbor’s escaped cows.
Hector told Ivan about his skateboarding grandson and the teenage kids from the halfway house he invites out to climb around his property’s waterfalls and savor a few unfettered hours. And Ivan wrote back in a scrawled pastiche of block letters and cursive about “the thorn in my side,” about how the hardened inmates “think I’m crazy because I cry some nights about what I did.” He described persuading a despondent man who had killed his own children not to hang himself, and breaking up fights and arguments between people “who literally want to see blood.” He was trying every day, he said, to do good.
“The hardness I have against myself,” he wrote Hector, “is a sort of strength to help others that I draw from. I used to pray for myself, but I realize it’s not about me. From the moment I came to realize the hurt, pain, and grief I caused, I can pray for others now. It’s hard going, giving up anger, jealousy, lies, and pride. But I am trying.”
“Sometimes,” Hector tells me, “I doubt myself. Are you crazy, writing to the man who killed your daughter? What kind of strange bird am I? I do have to wrestle with my feelings.” But somehow, improbably, he’d grown to care for a man struggling in the grip of damnation.
What had happened to create such an overturning? Hector’s plea for clemency had been on moral and intellectual grounds. But even with his Quaker philosophy and his big heart, he had hated Ivan’s guts. “When I found out Trish was raped, especially,” he says quietly, “I tried to demonize him. I felt like he had power over me, like someone was shoving my face in the mud. I had these horrible pictures in my head of the murder; I just couldn’t shake it.”
But when Hector saw Ivan sitting at the defense table, facing a sentence of death, in a courtroom “filled with our family, folks from our church, and he all alone, nobody there for him,” he had felt something shift. Saint Paul said that higher morality is “written on the heart,” not in the canon. Studies have shown that belligerents in war will feel sympathy when shown a picture of an enemy soldier in pain. When photos of a frightened, bedraggled Saddam Hussein being dragged from his spider-hole were beamed around the world, many people expressed oddly ambivalent sentiments for the Beast of Baghdad. “I felt pity to see this man destroyed,” a Vatican cardinal was quoted. “Seeing him like this, a man in his tragedy, despite all the heavy blame he bears, I had a sense of compassion for him.”
Perhaps it is easier to be magnanimous when we have the upper hand, gazing down on a human being prostrate in defeat. (One biologist told me: “I suspect brain structures for nurturant behavior fall in a rough range of candidacy: helpless, defenseless, weak, the underdog.”) But religious doctrines often enjoin their followers to imagine even a superior enemy as weak and fallen, trumping the mind’s logic with that of the heart. Martin Luther King used to portray his racist adversaries as broken people, living in spiritual exile, in need of forgiveness only the oppressed could grant them. He inspired among his followers a paradoxical sense of empowerment: It was only they, the victims, who could heal the damaged souls of their enemies by moving them to mercy and leading them out of hatred’s wilderness.
There is an intellectual component to understanding the fruitless cycle of revenge and a moral component to understanding the willed extension of humanity to a hateful other. But compassion goes beyond moral decision-making. It is an irresistible force, breaking down the thickest fortress walls that separate us from each other. Psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a member of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, had taken it upon herself to interview the jailed former security chief of the apartheid regime, Eugene de Kock. Chief planner and sometime triggerman in the government’s brutal shadow war, de Kock was the mastermind of the infamous Vlakplaas “death farm,” where the worst killings and tortures had taken place. He had by his own hand murdered and maimed. For the horrors he had visited on so many, he became known to the public by the sobriquet “Prime Evil.” Gobodo-Madikizela’s prison interviews began as a detached study of a specimen of inhuman detritus through a psychological microscope.
Convicted as a common criminal on murder charges, de Kock surprised everyone by asking to meet the widows of three black policemen who had been killed by a bomb he himself had planted. Gobodo-Madikizela was further astonished when one of the women told her after the meeting, “I couldn’t control my tears. I could hear him, but I was overwhelmed by emotion, and I was just nodding, as a way of saying, yes, I forgive you. I hope that when he sees our tears, he knows that they are not only tears for our husbands, but tears for him as well.” The widow’s response went beyond empathy; she had offered de Kock a priceless gift, a reentry into the human community: “I would like to hold him by the hand,” she said, “and show him that there is a future, and that he can still change.”
Gobodo-Madikizela’s own friends criticized her for the equivalent of sitting down on a first-name basis with Adolf Hitler. She herself was shocked as a rapport grew uninvited. She had been “dumbfounded,” she says, to discover that she and de Kock shared the same birthday: “I had to steady myself just to consider what it meant to share something so personal with a man whom many would consider a mass murderer.” But meeting with de Kock, so close she could sometimes feel her skin crawl, she saw in spite of herself a man whose remorse was so deep he was wearing “an intolerable shirt of flame.” She found over time her revulsion was challenged by the suffering of the human being sitting before her, leaving her deeply conflicted—consumed, she writes, by a “fear of stepping into the shoes of a murderer through empathy.” She was taken by surprise by her own conclusions.
In her book A Human Being Died That Night, Gobodo-Madikizela’s writes, “Empathy reaches out to the other and says: ’I can feel the pain you feel for having caused me pain.’... There is something in the other that is felt to be part of the self, and something in the self that is felt to belong to the other.”
You in me, me in you. “I know it’s a cliché,” Hector had told me, “but deep down I’m not that different from Ivan Simpson. I really believe we each have a capacity for evil as well as good. What kind of person would I have been if I’d been born into his circumstances?”
Somehow Hector’s open heart is having an inexorable effect. More than penitence, Ivan is absorbing into his charred soul Hector’s unpretentious lovingkindness. When Hector sent him a small money order, Ivan was amazed: “How can he, I’m wondering? Where was his hate at? ’Cause I have to tell the truth, if the shoe was on the other foot, if someone took a loved one from me, I couldn’t send them nothing. But he goes, ‘Here’s ten dollars.’ He asks me to use it to buy something I need, some stamps or a candy bar. It just felt funny, it really did, for this man—I’m gonna have to say it—for him to love me. And I really believe he loves me. Even when I couldn’t love myself. When I look around and wonder, Is there really some love left, or care, or kindness? here he is.”
Theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “God’s forgiveness is independent of anything we do, even of self-accusation and self-humiliation.” But Ivan Simpson is the lowest of the low. I was sitting across a table from a man who had killed a sweet young woman out of sheer depravity and then—there is no delicate way to put this—returned to ghoulishly rape her body. Yet I could not help but see in him what Hector saw: a person possessed not by demons but by an unmistakable spirit of human worth he struggles daily to reclaim. That Hector’s love is a force working on the very substance of Ivan’s heart, I cannot doubt.
DOWN A FEW TWISTY BACKROADS AND DEEP IN A TENNESSEE holler, there’s a sign that reads, “Entering Spring Creek Sanctuary: Animals and Plants Protected.” Hector’s house is a little farther on, a modest affair concealed in a green jumble of vegetative exuberance. When I walk up the path, his big dog doesn’t let out a hint of a bark at the stranger but trots up to amiably nuzzle my hand.
Hector’s farm grows everything from chestnuts to cherries, but it’s the blueberries that are running riot this season, the fields spread with an azure impasto as far as the eye can see. A big carton of fresh blueberries sits in the living room. There’s blueberry wine, blueberry preserves, blueberry muffins, and thick blueberry juice dark as indigo, at once sweet and tart, steamed right from the fruit. Homemade, all of it, as are the exotic plant jellies set on the dinner table by Hector’s wife, Susie, who trundles around the kitchen with cheery efficiency despite being wheelchair-bound from rheumatoid arthritis. They have a stand at the farmers’ market every week with the Quakerish motto, “Plain But Delightful.”
Hector on first impression is just a tall, snowy-haired farmer in Liberty-brand overalls with tarnished brass buttons, a folksy sort who calls his combination fax-printer a “watchamajiggit,” uses “okey-dokey” as his preferred assent, and reserves “humdinger” as an accolade for a stellar occasion. He’s an atypical local—his degree, from Harvard no less, is in social anthropology—but he’d gone to agricultural school just before World War II and is clearly at home with anything that issues from the dirt.
“If it bears fruits or nuts,” he says cheerfully, “I’m interested in it.” He raises exotic plants as a member of the intrepidly named North American Fruit Explorers. As we walk through his nursery, he offers me a calamondin, a tiny fruit with a sweet skin and a sour inside. His current passion is autumn olive from the Himalayas. “Just loaded with antioxidants —and it’s nitrogen-fixing.” A gaggle of Russian plant biologists came through recently, conveying in thick Slavic accents their admiration along with a certain covetousness.
All they needed to do was ask. Hector’s an open hand. He’ll likely just give away most of his blueberry crop this year. He sold 80 acres to a community land trust at a no-interest steal.
Hector is a grade-A giver. He grew up in a family of them. His aunt Mollie inherited a pot of money, gave it all away to charity, and went back to her day job. His mother was so generous with her table during the Depression that the hoboes used to mark the house with chalk. He is another with that quality sociologist Pitirim Sorokin called “generativity"—something in him that likes fostering and the provision of sustenance. “You just like taking care of things,” I tell him mock-accusingly. “People, plants, the dirt under your toes...”
He considers this, then nods. “I never looked at it that way, but maybe that’s about right.”
He talks about Trish, remembering “this little kid with impetigo sores on her legs from lack of sanitation and nutrition who was like a starved plant. She absorbed all the love you could give her, then just bloomed.” Trish had passed that same love along, he says, taking in a young girl from the neighborhood and seeing her through college and marriage.
“When she died, I was in darkness,” Hector says. His voice is ruminative, far off. “Susie reminds me that the first night, I was wild, crying, saying, ‘I’d like to kill that bastard!’ I don’t have any answer why forgiveness happened. It was like a hand pulled me out.”
His eyes mist. “I wanted to find something good in all the horror. I’m one of these people who don’t believe in accidents. Though I do have a hard time figuring out what the hell happened and why this guy Ivan’s in my life now.” Then he laughs, and the laugh shocks me with its uproariousness, a burst of cosmic humor to shoo off any lurking grief-buzzards.
IT IS SURPASSING STRANGE. THE PURPOSE OF THE JUSTICE SYStem in capital cases, after all, is vengeance. Either the killer is himself killed, terminating his tenure on the same Earth his victims’ loved ones must walk, or else he is buried alive where they will never have to know he still exists. Either way, victims are offered the grail-cup of final closure.
I once attended a meeting of a group called Parents of Murdered Children. Around the circle where a dozen mothers and fathers of varying ages, races, and backgrounds come together to cope with the ultimate tragedy, the current of outrage ran deep— at the “slimebucket killers,” at the “donut-eating detectives” who couldn’t catch them, at the “injustice system” that couldn’t convict them or hold them or execute them.
The stories they told were heartrending. So were their lives. The past haunted them, the wound still as fresh as yesterday. One woman proffered the thin consolation that “you do get numb after a while, but you’re never the same again because a part of you has been torn away.” Legal retribution held out the only hope of peace from torment.
But for many that peace seemed more elusive the longer they sought it. I was struck by a woman who had brought along a white plastic bag filled with memorabilia about her daughter and her case. She carried it everywhere. “They call me ‘the Bag Lady,’” she said acridly, her mouth a tight slash. Her daughter had been killed—”at the age of twenty-seven years, five months, eight days, twelve hours, and four minutes old”—in a hit-and-run on Christmas Eve while making a charity delivery of food. The Bag Lady thinks she knows who did it. She has collected Ziploc baggies of paint chips from the cars of potential suspects and collated boxes full of evidence, from the coroner’s report to mortician’s notes. She may yet have the triumph of justice long denied, but meanwhile it’s eating her alive.
“I’m more full of rage than a 7-foot, 350-pound man,” she said as she tugged from her bag of sorrows a framed picture of a beautiful long-haired young woman and passed it around the circle. “I was one of the best Christians you’d ever meet, but now I’m like a pit bull on steroids. This has made me a bitter, angry person. I know some people who are my targets shouldn’t be, but...” She trailed off.
An elegant British woman of about seventy with swept-back gray hair, a blue shawl over her floral dress, smiled at her. “Well, I may not be a pit bull,” she said, her diction gentle and precise, “but I am a British bulldog.” Her son had been kicked to death by three men outside a bar, and the wheels of justice were grinding exceeding slowly. She’d been complacent about the legal system, she said. “Now I tell them, ‘I’m sorry I’m not easy to deal with, but that is of no consequence.’” She looked over at the Bag Lady. “I might want some of those rage drugs you talk about next time I go in there.” I got the impression of a crew of diligent carpenters constructing something that, with each turn of the screw, became too deeply joined to ever dismantle.
No one can judge how another deals with the most tragic of losses and certainly not whether they ever choose to forgive. Notes one clergyman, “We sometimes speak of forgiveness as though it were some sort of coin you can reach into your pocket and hand someone. There is no ‘cheap and easy grace.’”
And Hector’s decision has not led to any cut-rate closure. Ivan Simpson has become, from within his entombment, a vital presence in Hector’s life. Rather than consigning him to state-sponsored nonexistence, Hector has chosen to receive his letters, think about him, care about him. To forgive someone who has eclipsed the very sun of joy—to gaze into his soul and find some indwelling virtue, no matter how besmirched—seems a form of spiritual heroism few could muster. Hector claims that he is the one being healed. “I just can’t imagine that I would be the person I am if I had not forgiven,” he says, “if I hadn’t continued to write to him. In recognizing his humanity, I found my own again.”
And granted it to another. It has been said it is not the wrongdoer’s repentance that creates forgiveness but the victim’s forgiveness that creates repentance. This is where forgiveness enters a realm of paradox and panacea, becomes a mysterious gift offered to one who does not merit it, becomes the essence of compassion itself.
IN A FAMOUS SCENE FROM VICTOR HUGO’S LES MISÉRABLES, Jean Valjean, a desperate man just released from nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, is taken in by a kindly bishop. The cynical ex-con repays his hospitality by stealing the church silverware in the dead of night. But when Valjean is caught by the gendarmes, with the cutlery in his sack, the bishop lies that he had given it to him as a gift, pressing upon him two more silver candlesticks. Valjean’s humanity is reawakened by this single gesture, and he begins a new life of virtuous service to others.
But what could Ivan Simpson possibly give back?
“Oh, I have a chance to give a lot,” he tells me. “I’m in a place where a lot of people are going through pressure, having flare-ups. I try to point out stuff to them, keep ’em out of trouble, maybe just that day. I believe if each man just sat down and not dwell on his past but look over his life to see what he started, the envy and strife and how his attitude is making him now, it would humble him. I learned this: A soft answer to anybody’ll turn away wrath. Sometimes you can hear two people yelling at each other; tensions are building. If one of them answers in not a harsh way, the other’s going to stop. ’Cause you gotta have wood to make a fire burn.”
Suddenly, I burst out laughing. I can’t help myself: Ivan Simpson has become a peacemaker. Silent Simpson, the men in the yard call him; Quiet Ivan. Ivan, the crackhead killer, is making this harsh world of murderers and madmen, within its razor-wire circumference, a better place to live. The assistant warden and a guard sit on the couch, leaning forward, listening in, expressionless. I don’t want them to think I’m being conned, chatting and laughing with the man as if I’ve forgotten who he is, what he’s done, the lives he’s blighted. But I can no longer hold, any more than can Hector, to a strict taxonomy of inhumanity.
Every day, Ivan says, he reads Psalm 88, a song of abandonment and of impossible faith.
O Lord, God of my salvation, when, at night, I cry out in your presence,
let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry.
I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those
who have no help...
You have caused my companions to shun me; you have made me a
thing of horror to them. I am shut in so that I cannot escape...
Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your saving help in the
land of forgetfulness?
“It’s when David thought the Lord had forsook him,” Ivan explains, “but he was just trying to show him that he’s always there.” It strikes me as unutterably sad, but Ivan insists, “That’s a good song, a song of hope.”
I ask him what hopes he could have. “There’s another passage says be of good courage and wait on the Lord,” he says in his deliberate way. “I didn’t know whether it meant to wait on him, like, he’ll show up so don’t rush, or wait on him like a waiter or waitress. So I try to do both. I wait for him, and I try to serve him by helping.” But how could he help, in lifelong lockdown, with his faith at once puerile and profound? “I pray,” he says simply, “for inmates, for officers, for everybody. I try not to pray for myself. That goes back to the life I’ve taken. I know Miss Patricia did touch a lot of lives. I believe if I ask for someone else, he’ll help them. And if I can get to see that, see it manifest a little, that’s good.”
I ask Ivan if he thinks about the future. He’s quiet for a minute. “I’m going to live out my natural life in prison, so I have to treat this as my home and do what I can to make my home a peaceful place. My future is to speak right or just walk right, try to be an example if I can. If I can. Encourage someone no matter where they at. That’s just how I look at it.”
He stands up and juts out his hand. It’s cool and dry, the grip light, tentative, not making contact. He expects no warmth from the clasp, no friendship. I rein in any urge to offer solace, even to hug him, but I know he senses it. I almost regret my glimpse of this man’s private suffering because I have been unexpectedly pierced. Weeks and months after I return home, I see his indelibly stricken eyes. Though Ivan Simpson is by any conventional measure a monster, a ghoul, he is also a figure of deep pathos and improbable hope.
AS HECTOR AND I HIKE UP A HILL—I’M PANTING, HE’S BARELY winded—he recites a running inventory of the critters he’s spotted on his property: river otter, deer, muskrats, mink, scarlet tanager, indigo bunting, mourning doves, whippoorwills, great blue heron, vultures—even the bald eagle’s coming back, he says. We come to a stand of dawn redwood trees that marks Trish’s gravesite. The grave is a homespun affair, bordered with hand-laid rocks and blanketed with pink and red impatiens, aka Busy Lizzy, which bloom all summer long. The simple headstone reads: “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
It would be glib to say that light is growing. But though Hector may be “a strange bird,” as he puts it, he’s part of a flock of others who have managed to fill the mortal void of loss with living compassion. I’d expected them to be a gaggle of church ladies in deep denial, bringing hot soup and hand-knit socks to hardened cons who laughed up their sleeves at them the minute they left. Instead I’ve found people who have become, without setting out to be, agents of social healing.
There’s Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, whose pregnant sister was murdered in 1990 by a teenage thrill-killer from a wealthy family. Now serving three life sentences, the murderer has never explained or apologized let alone asked for forgiveness. “I’m not doing it for him; I’m doing it for me,” says Jennifer. “I’ve heard it said, ’Hating is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.’ It’s not going to kill them; it’s going to kill you.” Her sister’s last act, she tells me, was to write “I love you” on the floor with a finger dipped in her own blood. “I’m not going to second-guess the power and sacredness of that message,” says Jennifer. “We need to be about the business of loving, of trying to solve our problems and making society a less violent place.”
Jennifer has been a leader of Murder Victims Families for Human Rights, a group that has grown from a small number of victims’ families bearing witness against the death penalty to an activist organization of more than five thousand members. Hector is one of them. So was Mamie Till, the mother of Emmet Till, the teenager whose lynching in 1955 in Mississippi awakened the nation to the horrors of racism. Another member is the son of James Byrd, whose gruesome 1998 death by dragging in East Texas was a reminder of hate’s virulence unquenched. Members have been accused of being, as one puts it, “either not good enough or too good to be true.” They’ve been told to their faces by supporters of capital punishment that they are betraying their dead loved ones. (One member recalls being invited to talk to an audience of bereaved who, alerted to her viewpoint, held aloft miniature nooses all through her talk.)
But the group is part of a larger movement, a society-wide, even worldwide, search for a justice that heals. The quest to balance justice and compassion is one of historic provenance: On one side stand those who counsel restoration, restitution, and absolution; on the other, those who favor some variation of the eye-for-an-eye tradition of what is known as the Talionic Code (from the same root as retaliation). In the Jewish Sefirot, the Tree of Life, the branch of justice (din) is balanced on the opposite side by compassion (rahamim). Hassidic tradition says that God himself struggles to tip the balance to overcome his trait of judgment (midat ha’din). Indeed, in many traditional cultures the justice system is weighted heavily toward compassion. Leading Navajo jurist Robert Yazzie points out that his people’s word for justice, usually translated as “reparation,” is actually a verb meaning “to enter into a respectful discussion of the hurt” or “to be made whole.” Navajo law focuses less on punishment and more on healing and reintegration with the group, working to restore relationships between offender, victim, families, neighbors, and community.
Programs of reconciliation that bring together victims and offenders—usually matching those in different states not linked to the same crime—are becoming common. For some offenders it is the first time they have understood the impact of their deed on the lives of real people. “I knew I had hurt my family and friends who trusted me, yet I never considered the wider effects,” writes one prisoner who took part in the program. “I was so caught up in the actual event that brought me to prison that I hadn’t even thought of reconciliation. These classes opened my eyes to the world, the way we’re all connected. I will never be the same. Maybe one day, I’ll get to tell my victim’s family, ‘I’m sorry,’ face-to face.”
We live in a world where’s there’s a lot to say “I’m sorry” for. Archbishop Desmond Tutu helped found South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission so that everyone could finally apologize to each other. Some have criticized the commission as an extreme application of the principle of Christian mercy, allowing wrongdoers to escape punishment through public confession, placing the reweaving of the social fabric above rightful justice. Others see it as a continuation of a radical experiment begun two thousand years ago. When Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive, the Rabbi answers: “I tell you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.” Far from being cheap grace, seventy-seven times takes everything and more.
Once Tutu had to sit and listen to a police torturer who had killed a man and used the grisly photos to intimidate his next victims. “He said of the man’s death, ‘It leaves me cold.’ Then he told the person’s name, and I nearly fainted. This was a friend of mine. And I put my head down on the table and wept. What could have eaten at the vitals of this man’s humanity?” Only one perspective had gotten him through it all, Tutu explained: “When you are dehumanized, inexorably, I am dehumanized. If I want to enhance my humanity, then whether I like it or not, I must enhance yours.”
I suspect it will be written into some future history that, after eras of assuming only real saints could ever get the hang of it, it was in our time that the doctrine of forgiveness finally took hold—took hold because it had to—from individuals forgiving individuals to entire peoples reconciling with those who warred against them. (For aren’t all wars waged by parents of murdered children, children of murdered parents, brothers and sisters of murdered sisters and brothers?)
I wonder if we aren’t seeing prefigurations of an age when the binding of wounds takes precedence over the binding of captives, the beginning of a new covenant to heal the damage done by not caring passionately enough what happens to one another. I get the feeling history has written only the first provisional lines of that story. If we can stick around awhile, it’s going to be a page-turner.