I don't know how long the picture is going to stay up.
But maybe if we just have it at the beginning since--
and you have to remember it, OK.
You have to remember it as I read this piece
that I have never read before, which is a little scary.
Thank you.
This is called "Black Boy with Cow--
Black Boy with Cow: A Still Life--
A Still Life."
"A still life"-- this is the epigraph.
"A still life can be a celebration
of material pleasures such as food and wine
or often a warning of ephemerality of these pleasures
and the brevity of human life."
I was staring at a--
was in the museum before I came here several months ago,
and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to say about him.
And I settled--
I flew to this idea of a still life
when I saw still life in the museum.
"Black Boy with Cow: A Still Life."
"We gather before him.
The bowl of his eyes in the frame on the screen.
No fruit in the picture.
Only the bowl itself, empty for now.
The bowl of his desires wanting to be filled,
he looks sideways at us.
Can you see him?
We could fill his bowl with thousands
of drawings of airplanes and automobiles, at the very least.
At the very least, we could fill it
with his cow and the document I've been searching for.
South Carolina Penitentiary record
of George J. Stinney Jr., age--
14, height-- 5 feet, weight--
95 pounds, hair--
Negro, eyes-- dark maroon.
Repeat, eye-- dark maroon.
Alcolu-- rural, South Carolina-- town, 1944.
There are Black churches and white churches,
Black schools and white schools, white girls, Black boys.
There are railroad tracks.
There are always railroad tracks when
there are white girls and Black boys living
within 200 feet of each other.
It is the Jim Crow South.
If you are Black and riding in a car,
then you must first look and make sure the car
you are passing-- passing does not contain white people.
This is what they call the law of the land.
Passing white people in a car is illegal if you are Black.
You may look quickly to see if they are there,
but don't look too long.
If you're walking, you must not walk near
or brush against a white person who is also walking.
Touching a white person is illegal if you are Black.
If you are lost and need to ask a white person how to get home,
you best stay lost and not ask because you
might be arrested for asking a white person for directions.
No matter what you do if you are a Black person,
white people are never to be looked at in the eye.
This is the story of a Black boy with a cow
and a handful of pencils drawing out his still life.
This is the bowl of George J. Stinney
Jr. Friday, March 23, two girls are last seen on one bike.
They were out looking for maypops.
Saturday, March 24, 1944, the bodies of the two girls,
who are white, Betty June Binnicker, 11, Mary Emma
Thames, seven, are found side-by-side on their backs
in 3 inches of water.
The bike they were seen riding the day
before has now been laid across their bodies
like a paperweight.
Someone reports George Junius Stinney Jr., 14,
to be the last person to see the girls.
Does he mean last to look at the two girls who
were out looking for maypops, and stopped and asked him
for directions?
I don't know how the someone knows this.
But the census of the Jim Crow South
shows there were thousands of mystics alive at the time.
People who saw things that never were.
The girls stopped to ask George and his sister, Amie,
if they had seen any maypops.
And if so, where?
In the Jim Crow South, Black children
know one word answers are best and make for less trouble.
Black children are taught this.
This is inside information that I do not
have to research in order to write this poem that I have
been asked to write and bring to you along with the bowl
of his eyes.
Amie answers for them both, no.
A maypop is the fruit of the passion flower.
When it turns from bright green to yellow orange,
it is succulent and ready to eat.
When you step on a maypop before it is ready,
it makes a popping sound.
The bodies of the two girls were found
on the Black side of town, beaten to death with a railroad
tie or a hammer.
Both skulls smashed, both hymens intact.
The 11-year-old had a bruise, and they think
there is semen on her thigh.
Think?
The language of rape has now entered the community
switchboard.
All operators are busy not standing by.
The bowl, which previously only had a cow and the boys drawing
pencils, now has a crack.
It is a crack that stretches back
hundreds of years to the great camp meeting
that was held where skin of different colors
was peeled and measured and weighed on a scale.
And different size craniums were lined up with
and cataloged by protractor, sundial, caliper and measuring
tape.
The word-of-mouth, over the fence,
long playing record that the operators are spinning
is the very reason there are railroad tracks
in southern towns and different people living
on different sides of them playing this one song all night
long.
There will never be any legal evidence
to support the song that is playing.
This song that is playing is one of the Republic's greatest
hits.
It's an LP, a long playing record.
It has now been placed in the bowl
with the Black boy and the cow.
This is his still life.
The man who found the girls reports
there was not much blood at or around the ditch itself.
Adding, it looks as if they were killed elsewhere and moved.
But no one looks for where the girls might
have been killed because the long playing record is hitting
its high notes and getting smoother and smoother
and easier to hear.
Before George Jr. was instructed to take off his Saturday
t-shirt and his blue jeans, the clothes he had just
walked the cow in, and put on blue prison stripes and now
turn forward and, yes, to the side
to show off his maroon eyes.
George was in the seventh grade.
A good student who routinely told
his mother, who was a cook in the Jim Crow South,
that he wanted to be an artist when he grew up.
For practice, George drew airplanes and automobiles
on every piece of paper he could find.
Airplanes and automobiles, as you know,
fly and move very fast.
Do you think he knew these are machines
that might help him one day escape the Jim Crow South?
I do.
This bowl holding these kinds of desires of boys with Negro hair
that supposedly have no future to care about or speak of
has been seen before.
It will be seen again in the life of the son he will never
have and in the life of your other Black sons.
Four large men, not with Negro hair,
arrive at the house that is owned by the lumber company
where the father and mother work.
Amie, George's youngest sister, sees the men coming
and runs to hide in the chicken coop.
She is surrounded by warm eggs and cackling hens
as she watches George's drawing hands handcuffed.
She watches the men who live on the other side of the track
walk her George outside and put him
in the back of one of two long black cars.
She sees they have guns and Billy clubs.
She sees that she has broken some
of the eggs the family needs to live by.
Amie is eight years old.
She idolizes George.
George calls her his shadow.
70 years after being in the chicken coop,
she will remember yelling out for her brother.
Oh, George, are you leaving me?
Oh, George, where are you going?
George Junius Stinney Jr., at 5 feet tall and 95 pounds,
is taken away.
There is no physical evidence.
There are no witnesses to the murders of the girls.
The only physical evidence ever written down in this story
is what George looks like.
This is the refrain of the song that plays on the long playing
record--
Negro hair, maroon eyes.
This is what spins around the record player in Alcolu
and surrounding counties in South Carolina all night.
George Junius Stinney Jr., 14, dreamer
of airplanes and automobiles.
And anything else with a wing had a life in motion
and now he has a still life.
His life is interrupted, interrogated for many hours
with no attorney present, no family present.
After spending half the night in a small room with large men
with silk hair holding Billy clubs
and dangling pistols from their hips,
from the other side of the tracks,
he confesses to the crime.
Well, they say he confesses to the crime.
A written confession, a signed confession
will never be seen by the world because there will never
be one in the world.
There will only be the word of four men
against one 14-year-old boy who would give anything
to see his mother and walk his cow again.
The boy with Negro hair and maroon eyes
is charged with capital murder.
The confession changes several times to fit the prosecution.
The confession changes several times
to fit the elements involved.
The murder weapon has changed at will.
First it is a hammer, then it is a railroad tie.
Anything at all is changed in whatever
manner is beneficial to the law enforcement and the ball that
rests in the middle of the velvet canvas that
shows the ephemerality of life.
Materials being looked for-- oranges, apples, maypops,
muscadines.
All we have now is a cow and some pencils.
It's 1944, the Jim Crow South.
One word answers are best, two at most.
George later tells his cellmate, while waiting for his trial,
that he was so afraid while in the room with the men
from the other side of the track,
that he would have said anything because he wanted to go home.
I wasn't there in 1944, but I do not
have to do any research on this particular reasoning
that Black children of the South are taught, then and now.
Just after the afterbirth has dried behind our ears,
we are taught the two words that just might keep us alive.
Yes, sir.
But not even, yes, sir is foil proof.
There was never a transcript of the trial.
There was no written confession.
There was only the one long playing vinyl song
of the Black boy who looked at two white girls looking
for maypops.
An appeal is made to the governor
of South Carolina for clemency because of George's tender age.
The governor responds in writing.
Finally, something has been written down.
Quote, "It may be interesting for you
to know that Stinney killed the smaller girl to rape the larger
one," the governor writes.
"Then he killed the larger girl and raped her dead body.
20 minutes later, he returned and attempted
to rape her again, but her body was too cold.
All of this, he admitted," the governor said.
Admitted, how does he know any of this?
He was not there.
There was no confession.
There was nothing written down.
Mystics do talk to each other though.
Furthermore, are there those who get
to just say what they want to say
when there are no facts to abide by?
None of these assertions are supported
by any evidence on the medical examiner's report.
George had an alibi that could have
been used if he did not have Negro hair and maroon eyes.
His sister, who also has Negro hair and maroon eyes,
was with him that day, but she didn't count.
She was not in this particular bowl.
There would be another bowl reserved for her still life.
He was with his sister when the two girls were killed.
They were both watching the family cow eat grass and chew
its cud, but nobody from the other side
wants to follow this fact out.
Remember those mystics and those Jim Crow rules?
Apply them now.
George's court-appointed lawyer was
busy running for a seat at the State house.
He needed every vote in the county,
so he called no witnesses, and waved
at the men who were his neighbors who arrested George
as he pulls into his driveway.
They live across the street from each other.
He questions no police officers at the trial.
And he sits there for all of 10 minutes
until the all-white male jury comes back with their verdict.
The 14-year-old known for getting his friends
to sing along to the radio in the yard near the chicken coop
after he has walked and watered the family cow, the 95
pounder who wants to go and finish the seven grade so
that he can one day be known as a painter of cars and airplanes
is ordered to the electric chair.
No appeal is ever filed by the attorney running for the State
house.
In jail, waiting to die, George is
put into a cell with an older man, Johnny.
Johnny is George's only sounding board for 83 days
while his 14-year-old mind contemplates what does
it mean to be electrocuted.
George asks Johnny, why would they charge me
with something I didn't do?
George asks Johnny, why would someone
want to kill me for something I don't know anything about?
Johnny is twice George's age and has no bowl,
and is of the generation of still life men before George.
There will be many generations of men
after him, still lives waiting in a bowl of iron.
In 1944, a reporter for the state newspaper
in South Carolina writes that George J. Stinney
Jr. was walked to the death chamber with a Bible
beneath his arm.
He was orderly, polite, obeying the men as he was told to do.
I wonder did he walk like he was back in school
and headed to the library to return a book.
The reporter writes that George J. Stinney
Jr. was made to sit on the Bible he
was made to carry into the death chamber
because the chair had been made for men
and he was just a boy with a mother, a father, two
sisters, one brother and one cow waiting for him to come back
home.
Not even the mystics of Jim Crow had thought ahead
to this moment.
What George would need to die, what they
would give him to make up the difference in his body's age.
The reporter wrote that the guards had difficulty strapping
the 14-year-old into the chair because he was
so small and slight of build.
The electrodes were too big for his legs.
And when the switch was flipped the first time,
the 2,400 volts of electricity caused convulsions,
and the convulsions knocked the large steel mask off his head,
exposing his tearful face and maroon
eyes to the witnessing crowd.
Two more jolts of 2,400 volts of electricity
took four more minutes to run, screaming through his body
before the boy who loved to draw airplanes
and those long 1940s cars with wings was pronounced dead.
It took 83 days for George Junius Stinney
Jr. whose middle name, Junius, sounds
more and more like a newly found planet to me
where boys with Negro hair and maroon eyes
might be teleported to safety, was walked out of his mother's
house in the jewelry of the State
and walked to the oversized seat of the electric chair.
But not before stopping to grab a Bible for him
to sit on in order that his tiny wanting to live body and maroon
eyes be denied.
Nothing further would ever be added to his bowl.
His life is smoldering and still.
Part two.
It takes 70 years before anyone will
give the last living members of the Stinney family
what they want.
We do not want an apology, they tell the newspapers.
We want coram nobis.
It's the best we can get.
Coram nobis will tell the State and the world
that mistakes were made.
Therefore, we petitioned the state of South Carolina
to hear our plea.
January 21, 2014, Sumter, South Carolina-- the court hearing
begins at 11:00.
But I'm in the parking lot now.
I made the hour's drive from Columbia,
where I live, to Sumter where after 83 days,
George Junius Stinney found guilty of capital murder
was electrocuted.
Here, in Sumter, is where George and I both were raised.
In 1944, he was 14.
My father was 13.
News of the hearing has been in the air for over a month.
Daddy is 83 now.
George J. Stinney should be 84, but he's not.
I am waiting my turn at the metal detector.
My hard-bound journal book is deep in my bag.
There are three purple pens in my purse.
I tested them for strength early this morning.
Most of the people waiting with me are Black.
We say good morning with a clear and deliberate sadness.
My journal book is pulled out and turned over a few times,
opened up even the pages thumb.
No cell phones in the courtroom.
I can pick it up when I leave.
I tell this Sheriff I need my pens.
She tells me I cannot write in the courtroom during
the hearing unless I am a reporter.
She tells me I can keep my pens because pens aren't what
they are looking for.
She adds, pens aren't dangerous.
I half smile.
I walk in the courtroom.
I look around and the four members of the Stinney family
are directly across from me.
I get up from my seat, I walk across,
I say good morning to them.
I am diagonally across from the portrait of Sumter County
Judge, Ernest A. Finney Jr., who presided
in this courtroom for many years in this Sumter town
where I was raised after George J. Stinney Jr. was electrocuted
for having Negro hair and maroon eyes.
I have not seen daddy's portrait since it
was hung 25 years before.
I remember coming home from college
to watch and help with the unveiling of a Black man
wearing the monumental black robe in a town that
still honored the Confederacy.
Daddy's eyes hold me in place.
The courtroom has filled up quickly.
We are all of different generations,
but our stories involve fear and the scent of impending trouble
always rising and sometimes falling.
The perception of being a person made of trouble,
aimed for trouble because of something we come in the door
with, something like Negro hair and maroon eyes.
There is more trouble for some, less trouble for others.
I look across the aisle.
The two men on the Stinney family pew
have their arms folded.
The Stinney women are quiet.
This is not church, but the wooden seats in the courthouse
have a certain resemblance-- the institution of law,
the institution of religion.
It is not Sunday, but it is 11 o'clock,
that most segregated of hours.
Two attorneys-- young, white with kind faces and silk hair,
hired by the Stinney family--
have agreed to work pro bono to seek this writ of coram nobis.
They have taken their place at the defense table
directly in front of daddy's portrait.
The judge is young, white and female.
All month long in the South Carolina newspapers,
she has been called courageous, even a maverick.
She does not have to hear this case.
After all, it's been 70 years.
She does not have to allow for this hearing.
After all, this is still South Carolina, still the deep South.
Jim Crow has a little gray hair, but he's not dead.
The Confederate flag is still flying over this Statehouse
for now and still stuck on pickup trucks and motorcycles
and t-shirts.
She addresses the court as soon as she sits.
Not much was done for this child, she says,
and I am not here to rule on his guilt or his innocence.
As far as I'm concerned, he could have committed the crime.
I am here only to rule whether he received a fair trial.
The whole row seems to cringe.
She is the matriarch of the old guard
that still remains in our community, Mrs. Julia Bowen.
She was on the front lines of the movement back in the day.
She pulls out her handkerchief to touch
the corners of her eye.
When the judge adds, we now have safeguards against this ever
happening again, the hands of all the Black people
on my row with Negro hair and maroon eyes
lift and levitate and hold on to each other.
The bailiff turns to look at our noisy row,
he gives us the evil eye.
Defense counsel, this is your motion, so make your plea.
Your Honor, George J. Stinney was 14 years old,
and he was the youngest person ever electrocuted
in this country.
We believe wrongfully convicted and wrongfully executed,
a writ of coram nobis is requested, Your Honor.
This is procedure when someone falls through the cracks
of the law as we assert he did.
In addition, Your Honor, in file, 70, 50, 30 years old,
we found hundreds of letters of support
for George Stinney asking for him to receive due process.
The lawyer reports another governor went so far
as to say this moment will never die
and this is shame and disgrace for the state of South
Carolina.
The lawyer states for the record the story
of the crime that the bodies of the two young girls
were found on March 23, 1944.
I scribble fast.
How did I miss this?
This my father's 13th birthday.
My eyes lift and fly across the room to daddy's judicious face.
His Negro hair is back lit, his maroon eyes shining.
The court does not care about this factoid, but I do.
My father was a 13-year-old and George Stinney
was a 14-year-old.
In 1944, my father, Ernest Finney, was on his way
to South Carolina in a car with wings from Baltimore, Maryland.
My grandfather, Ernest Adolphus Finney Sr.,
was beginning a career in education
as Dean of students, first, at Voorhees College
and then Claflin University, both small Black historical
colleges in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
George Stinney Jr. was a son of George Stinney
Sr., a man who owned one cow and could not read or write.
This still life that I am drawing out
in this courtroom of my father is clearly
about Negro hair and maroon eyes.
But it is also clearly about poverty
and complete disenfranchisement and the fear that accompanies
that state of being.
The solicitor finally speaks.
Your Honor, the state of South Carolina
maintains George J. Stinney was guilty and deserved the death
penalty.
The bailiff moves and stands in the aisle near me.
I don't look up.
I have not come to make a scene with the state of South
Carolina.
I've come to be George J. Stinney's poet.
The poet that James Baldwin spoke of 50 years ago
when he said, quote, "only the poets can tell us
what it is like to die and what it is like to feel pain
and what it is like to love," end quote.
The solicitor continues.
Your Honor, this is about standing and timeliness.
One of the problems of this case is that it is 70 years old.
It is clear the defendant had a constitutional right to counsel
and that he had counsel.
A writ of habeas corpus is the only other remedy that exists.
Habeas corpus?
I was raised around lawyers, I know what this means--
to bring the body forward.
The defense objects.
Coram nobis, Your Honor.
Your Honor, the State's hands are dirty.
I circle dirty and underscore it in my journal book.
At the very least, he says twice,
the State must say a mistake was made.
I am scribbling so loudly that the bailiff moves over
to my row again.
The solicitor is wrong and the defense is not accurate.
Yes, please, habeas corpus.
Bring his body forward, South Carolina.
Let us see the body that his sister and mother and father
could not recognize in the casket at his funeral.
Bring the body forward, and let us see the 95 pound
boy whose last act as a 14-year-old human being
was to position his 5 feet strategically
on top of the Holy Bible that waited between him
and the wooden chair that finally reached him
up high enough in the air that the electricity could finally
do its job.
The State's hands are not dirty, they are covered in blood.
At the very least--
at the very least, the State walked a boy,
a child to the electric chair--
a boy who walked his cow every day and wanted to be a painter.
My heart is pounding through my chest
when Katherine Stinney, 79, sister of George J. Stinney,
takes the stand.
Do you solemnly swear?
I do.
What do you remember about South Carolina in 1944?
Nothing good, she says.
And may I also say that a maypop is a fruit, not a flower, sort
of like a lemon.
She was 9, idolized her brother.
He liked to draw.
She says, she and her brother should be growing old together.
The long-drawn trauma people with Negro hair and maroon eyes
have to endure that is 500 years old and older than that.
The long-drawn trauma of not being on the voting list
or not on the jury list or not having
to depend on only one cow or not being able to read or own
your own house.
Or the trauma of intimidation by Billy club
and the backseat of black cars.
Or terrified because 1,500 white people of the Jim Crow South
or the urban Midwest or the California metro system
have gathered to not allow you safe
passage as you try to fill your still life with motion.
You are 14 years old and in the seventh grade,
and you haven't seen your mother in 83 days or your father.
And there are no other Black people in the courthouse,
but you and your 14-year-old Black-eyed beautiful self.
And there are 1,000 people with silk hair sitting behind you
in your rearview waiting for you to take your last breath.
And you're only one boy with maroon eyes among many
who have been taught by his people
that there is always less trouble when you
keep your hands in plain sight.
There is a pathologist report on the two girls.
It is not an autopsy.
An autopsy was not done.
It is not a forensic report.
It is only an external exam.
The family doctor is called.
Who gets to have a family doctor and who doesn't is
what I scribble.
I write with my head down.
No defensive wounds, says the man
reading the pathologist report.
The attack was unexpected, and I believe
he would have to have been a larger person
to do this kind of damage.
Photography-- no photographs were taken at the scene.
There should have been a lot of blood at the scene
because there were so many blood vessels in the scalp.
Unusual that there was not a lot of blood.
Perhaps they were not killed there.
Perhaps they were killed someplace else
and dragged there across the tracks
to the Black side of town.
Daddy's portrait is 500 feet in front of me.
This thing called law is sticky, I whispered to him
during the recess.
He believed in the law so deeply.
He would walk through the house saying, the law works, girl.
Dear daddy, you taught me everything
I know about justice, but the law does not always work.
The law is not a flower.
It's a fruit.
And sometimes when that fruit is stepped on,
it makes a popping sound.
The law is slow.
The law can hide behind so many things like hair texture
and the perception of another's eyes.
It's more like a lemon than anything else.
The law makes people with Negro hair and maroon eyes
and one cow wait 100 years for peace.
Nothing changes.
Negro haired people get jobs that silky haired people used
to have.
They are taught the rules of the same old book because
of fear, status quo.
Somebody has to be on top, somebody
has to be on the bottom.
George J. Stinney Jr. liked to read and whistled and read
comic books and draw airplanes.
He was a good writer.
He wrote letters for his mother whenever
she needed a letter written.
But more than any of this, he was a child,
and children-- all children come with things
that should be recognized more than hair texture
and strange eye colors.
His 14-year-old brain knew he was going to die.
He didn't understand why.
He died with a sea of questions surrounding his body.
The State made his family live the next 70
years without any answers.
His still life was never filled in.
He had 83 days alone as a 14-year-old to imagine what
electrocution would feel like.
He had 83 days to wonder why he was being punished
for something he did not do.
He died with chaos and confusion in his heart.
His family had to live and raise other children
with that same passed on chaos and confusion,
never finding an answer.
All the way to the end of his life,
he kept asking his cellmate, why?
We had an open casket, his sister, the shadow, testified.
He was burned so badly, hardly recognizable.
But we buried him in an unmarked grave.
Why?
So no one would ever hurt him again.
The cow is sold.
The three room house shut, the chicken coop empty.
No one in the Stinney family ever
wants to hear the word maypop again.
What is violently and systematically
done to human beings who do not look like the State
or the Republic wants them to look from the day they are born
does not go away after the State makes them sit on a Bible
before pulling the fire lever.
It does not go away or stay below the ground
because their family is forced to bury them
in an unmarked grave.
What the State has done stays in the air like a fine powder.
It follows the ones involved in the doing
for the rest of their lives.
The State does not only kill the 14-year-old,
but the family too.
The electricity is sent through the mother, the father,
the brother, the shadow, the cow.
There was no evidence.
The people who lied have all died now.
The man who did this to the two girls is dead too.
People with Negro hair and maroon eyes
or mystic hair or foreign eyes have always,
always have to wait for everybody who wrongly hurt
them, who took everything out of their bowl
to die first before there can be a conversation.
A writ of coram nobis is the best we can get.
Mistakes are often made in the hands
of every State in this union.
Cruel and unusual doesn't even come close.
The conviction is overturned.
And the mother with Negro hair has almost
lost her mind with worry.
The Black boy who could have been the artist
is unrecognizable in his casket to his family.
The family sits for their family portrait.
It is a still life just like the son's portrait in prison blue.
The sister says her brother's name has been finally cleared.
She is 80 years old.
She is overjoyed.
There is a strange afterglow to her.
We are supposed to be delighted that day in the courtroom.
No, we are the ones who survived this horror.
We are the ones with the dust of his life all over us.
We are the ones who must live to tell the story of what
it is like to wear Negro hair, to have maroon eyes,
to die and be buried in an unmarked grave, to know pain
and also to know love."
Thank you.