This is the latest installment in the Chronicles from Parchman series, a monthly column by writer, L. Patri, who has been fighting his wrongful conviction on Parchman’s death row for over thirty years. This week, Mr. Patri and I were able to record him reading his essay. Click “Listen to Post” if you want the audio experience. Important to note for this essay—though he writes under the pseudonym “L. Patri,” our author’s first name is Joesph.
They tell me the dead don’t sleep, eat, nor rest, that they come to those they love in their hour of need. I suppose that is why I sit here now, waiting and watching P.Nut and thinking about how long I’ve known him. He’s up in age now, fifty-five, so that makes me seventy-five, even though I have not aged in human years for quite some time, as I was fifty when I left the world of the living. As I’m unsure about how this whole “coming back” thing actually works, I will suppose, again, that I must look close to how he remembers me in life, though P.Nut has changed over these many years that I’ve been away. But I still think it’s best that I left, though I doubt he’ll agree. So I am hesitant, as I don’t know what his reaction will be after seeing me again.
On the day I met P.Nut, I was walking through the path in the woods that ran close by my sister’s home, fallen leaves swishing around my feet, when I noticed this kid playing with the hogs. Throwing old rinds from different sorts of fruit and corn seeds into the mud to watch them root it out and eat. I took him to be about six, and because I lived nearby, I asked him what he was doing, whose child he was, and why he was out there all alone. The kid just looked at me like he was dumbfounded and mumbled something I didn’t quite catch. So I took a step closer, and he bolted. I tell you. I’d never seen a child that fast, and he didn’t miss a beat as he hopped over the fence and began yelling.
“S**t,” I said. “I didn’t mean ta frighten ya, boy.”
I happened to catch a name he was screaming like some wild banshee: “Uncle Mann! Uncle Mann!” I knew then that I’d get on round to the house because Uncle Mann, who also went by Bear, didn’t hold quarters to someone messing with his kin. I did find it funny, albeit a little scary, that I didn’t recognize the boy, because he was still relatively new in 1975-74, you understand. But that ain’t no excuse, as my sister was his grandmomma, and her oldest daughter his momma. I should’ve known.
Anyway, as I was saying. P.Nut has grown old, gray hairs in his face showing signs of the stress he must’ve been living with these many years inside a cage. I know I should’ve come back long before now, but I tell you. The boy just plumb pushed me away after the death of his aunt Betty Jo in 1984. Never did see a kid so close to his aunt that way; he even left home to live with her when she grew up and got her own place. But I think I can understand a little of that now-a-days, because Betty Jo was a real killa disco lady, ya hear, and all her friends were just like her. She never had a day that wasn’t a party and you have to know. In 1980-79, disco was live and jumping. Plus, Betty let the boy do what he wanted, you understand.
So I can’t blame him, like I said. But before her death, me and the kid got to know each other. Turns out we had the same name—Joe or Joseph—though P.Nut preferred his nickname. Once I scooted on round to the house so Bear didn’t come out shooting that rifle of his, that’s how I got to know P.Nut. His momma, my niece, was close by, and he hid behind her legs, pointing at me like I was out to kidnap him and all. I tell you.
We finally sat down in his Granny Nellie’s house, out on the car porch, as she had built a wall around the thing and turned it into a sitting room that had two long, tinted windows, maybe four feet long. You could watch what was going on outside in the yard and the street, but can’t nobody see you in the room. I never did see such a thing like that before, and so I went up to it and made sure they wasn’t jiving me, understand, and sho-nuff, I knocked on the window and kids were looking this way and that-a-way but didn't see who’s doing it. Ha!
My baby sister Nellie was sitting in her chair by a side door that led out to the side of the house, as this room had three doors. Four, if you count the door to the washroom that was on her right side. One door led out to the front of the house, and the other door led you into the house, and she was just sitting there sipping on those Milwaukee beers, smoking her prince albert pipe tobacco, and just a grinning. Nellie and me are part Natchez Indian from a tribe that used to claim these lands way back when, and you can see more Indian in her than you can our momma Hattie, who was sitting on the couch next to the wall that led you into the house.
Momma Hattie was also smoking her pipe tobacco and cussing like some crazy lady. She was a big woman compared to Nellie, in size, height, and weight, and mean as a snake if you pissed her off. I tell you. I’ve seen the woman pick up a snake and throw it clear across that road out yonder and whack a kid that sassed her! So, I try to be as nice as can be in her presence. But my sister Nellie didn’t have such a temperament. She would just shush you quiet.
Besides Bear, myself, and P.Nut, P.Nut’s momma, Lee, was there, as I said, and the boy was still hiding behind her leg. That woman was just as huge as Momma Hattie. Everybody called her Erma Lee and she was every bit as tall as six feet four inches and weighed around 260-50 pounds. She could hold her own, as she’d been running in the streets since age thirteen, working in bars and clubs and such, to get money and help her momma with her six siblings, who were still in school trying to get some learning. Erma Lee had five kids of her own by that time, and in 1975-74, when she was twenty-four or twenty-three years of age, she was shacking up with the youngest boy’s daddy, a truck driver. She drove, too, here and there, on the road with him, but not much. He was married, they say.
Bear, well, I guess the name says it all there. He was Erma Lee’s brother and well over six feet six inches. He drove logger trucks for Harvey B. + Sons, hauling pulpwood all across Mississippi and Louisiana. Eventually, their brother Samuel, and Lee’s husband Charles, who she married in 1976, both worked for the logging company, too. They were close knitted as any family could be.
I get ahead of myself talking family. P.Nut finally let go of his mother’s leg and ventured out to see who I was. Although I didn’t introduce myself by name, he had heard his folks call me Joe, you see. I am his mother’s uncle, and she’s just about as close me as P.Nut is close to his Aunt Betty Jo. But listen, because I guess things is getting just a tad bit confusing to you. Let me go back to where I started, before I got all sentimental about the family.
Later on, after that first meeting with P.Nut, when he was around six years old, his mother lived close by to his Granny Nellie in a place called La Grange. A rural area in Natchez, Mississippi, where Country folks migrated to when they left the Deep Country down on Lower Woodville Road and out in Kingston Way. Years earlier, the Klan had burned out his Great Granny Hattie and the family one winter night. But P.Nut, who was only four or three, doesn't actually recall much of that. Only what he’s heard his sister tell, as she was around eight or seven years old and remembers walking in the cold night. So this one particular night, P.Nut decided he wanted to go home, and because their house wasn’t so far away from his Granny Nellie’s home, if he took to the woods and used the short cuts of the bypass, it was maybe three or two minutes, you see. It was getting on dark around this time, but the family didn’t worry much about their children in the ‘70s and ‘60s because, as I told you, everybody just about knew everybody in that community, and most were related kin one way or another. So P.Nut was free to roam the woods, as all the children did.
Coming out of the wooded by-pass behind the house next door to his home, sat down in a cul-de-sac, he climbed the small hill and walked up to the house. Peeping through the window he saw his momma fighting with his baby brother’s daddy. Then he heard gunshots. Frozen in place, he watched his momma kill George. That was the night I—Uncle Joe—came into being for P.Nut. The boy kind of latched onto me in the few days his momma spent in jail.
The child wasn’t afraid about what he had just seen because he saw that his momma was okay. But he didn’t run to her or let her know what he had seen, and it wouldn’t be until his adult years that he ever told anyone except Baby George when they were teenagers living in Louisiana around 1982. That conversation came about when George first met his daddy's people and a boy named Walter Jones made it look like his daddy was a good man, but he wasn’ because he always fought P.Nut’s momma, you see, as he was abusive that way. As George Sr. and George Jr. are no longer of this world, I guess I’ll let them be and sleep on.
As the years passed and P.Nut was growing up, his momma was huge on the church thing. She’d go about three times a week, revivals and all. Thinking back, I guess she had her own demons she was wrestling with, but that didn’t matter, because when she went, so did he, and he actually liked the church. Can’t say that he ever tried to preach, but the kid did sing every chance he got.
During these times—I guess he was around the age of twelve or eleven—his real daddy took deathly ill and died. His momma always made him go see his daddy before he died. He lived in Roxie, Mississippi, just off the highway, and his daddy’s parents, his grannies Greybeard and Martha Hunt, lived there, too. There wasn’t much of a relationship between him and his daddy, or the dozen or so siblings his daddy had sired. They were much older, you see, but again, we will let the dead rest in peace. Needless to say, P.Nut didn't feel much of anything about that side of the family except when it came to his siblings Marilyn and Louis and Julius. They’re all gone now, and he doesn’t actually know where any of them are laid to rest, but he remembers that a plot or two of land in the old country may hold some of their remains.
Looking at him now, he’s sitting on an iron bed inside a barren, cold steel cage, still trying to retain some hope, some dignity about the life he was raised into. Yet I can tell it’s all but faded and that he must begin forming and building other relationships if he’s to survive the cold winter months ahead.
I see the lost look of agony from wondering if some people may live to see a new year. Sadness has tightened its grip at his throat, and he fights to breathe, so he lays on his back and draws up his knees to his chest. All of his life, people have compared him to the biblical character Joseph, and he’s steadfastly rejected that notion. But I see now, as he sees, that there may be some truth in the story, as he’s gone through similar trials. Many years ago, we agreed to part ways so that he could experience the world and the life that he created, though I doubt he’ll agree with that assessment. But I’m sure he’ll admit that his lifestyle played a part in his current situation, because growing up his life mirrored mine in the ways that we fucked up.
He and I bumped heads hard on how to handle what happened to him. While I believe that when you take part, either directly or indirectly, in the lifestyle you choose to live, you are responsible for the consequences—whether or not they are beyond your control. But he saw it differently. P.Nut didn’t do what they said he did; he didn’t think his lifestyle had anything to do with why he got here. The bottom line was that P.Nut had much growing up and maturing to do, and I was standing in his way. He couldn’t become me, nor I him, even though we shared a common end. I had lived my life long before, now I was just pictures on the wall, existing inside some family member’s memories. I was a namesake he imitated and wanted to be one day, so he mirrored my life in prison at a young age, the ways that I lived the street life—with drugs, women, booze, and gambling. His idolization of me, turned my reality into his fantasy.
So I no longer call him P.Nut. Starting today, he’s a Joe who has conquered himself to where he now knows and accepts himself. The same way P.Nut, I mean Joe, had to learn to know and accept himself from our first biblical Joe, who was sold into bondage by his brothers. Life is a box of chocolates, and I think I’ve eaten enough of these sugary treats.
Well, I believe it’s time I stop standing in this corner nook watching and step forward to see if he really has changed. I’ve been away for so long. Decades, now. Because I, too, needed the growth that time and space have provided, even if the circumstances were dire. I’ve got to tell him that time has run short. There aren't many days left on this clock. I came back to find out if he’s at peace with himself, to find out if the good he’s done will balance against the bad he’s done in this life. Can he find rest in knowing that it wasn’t me he needed to live up to, but himself? I have to know if the rage and anger and madness has dissipated, and if his eyes were to close tonight, would he be at peace. Does he forgive the wrongs done to him and by him and, more than anything, does he forgive me, Joe, and the other Joe for being that crux he couldn’t find a way through or over or under? Does he forgive himself, is what I need to know.
Hmm, I guess my timing is good, as the song he’s hearing now is called “Still Here” from the speaker in his radio. It’s a song he’s known all his life growing up in the church. I can hear him humming along, so I smile and step out into the light—
—God-damn f*****g clown next door. S**t! Now yelling and cursing, slamming his hand on the metal panel attached to the door f*****g awakes me. Man. I can kick into your funky ass with this dumb ass noise! F**k! Waking me out my peace. All f*****g daylight hours, this little s**t don’t make a sound, and every goddamn night he act like he’s losing his mind. Straight b******t, I tell you. Motherfucker! If you actually crazy, fool, you don’t have certain times every f*****g night that you lose your mind. Geez! Silly ass clown. Crazy mother f*****s don’t know they’re crazy. I’m getting tired of this dumb s**t. Yeah. True. I can fully understand guys doing s**t to help their cases and possibly save their lives, but this s**t is just stupid. The major and administration have been walking around here every day and this sorry ass idiot plays like he’s asleep. Don’t say s**t! No yelling, no spitting, no cursing. But then he keeps breaking my f*****g rest and sleep in the a.m. hours when s**t is quiet. Ugh! Man! Seriously. If I can catch this motherfucker, I will give his sorry ass something to be crazy about.
Man, nah. What the f**k you want, Joe? Dude, I know you, so I know you been here a minute watching and s**t, and honestly, now isn’t the time to be f*****g with me on that zen s**t. I got too much I’m trying to get done. I see you standing there with that quirky ass smile playing on your face like you're ready to start laughing. I’m jumping back and forth between legal work, helping others with legal work, class assignments, and so much other s**t as it pops in my head, because I only have a good day left on a lot of it. So, if you will excuse me for a second, sit over there and let me be, Brother. Now is not the time. Listen.
It’s only four days before my fifty-fifth birthday and you’ve been gone too long now. Things have changed. I don’t talk inside of myself a lot anymore. So right now, you just need to wait, okay? For years, that age—fifty-five—played havoc for me because even though I know it’s superstitious s**t, I had two uncles die at fifty-five in back-to-back years. My mom was fifty-two when she went, but I’ll be fifty-five on Saturday. My sister Red is now fifty-eight, and my sister Baby Girl is fifty-three, and even though I have my days of melancholy, I do think we three still have plenty of life to go. That is, if I make it through this ordeal. If I continue to live inside with all this b******t around me, though, I can’t say, because so much is beginning to affect me. There was a time that I didn't allow much of anything to do that.
You see, around the age of twelve to eleven years old, I lived in a world of abuse. Not necessarily abuse to me, personally, even though my parents didn’t spare the rod when it came to ass-whipping. My mom and Charles had married in 1976 and that s**t was always a rocky thing on weekends because Charles—now I’m going to begin calling Charles my dad, so don’t be confused, as I’m not speaking on my biological father A.J. Abrams, okay—would go out on town on weekends, Friday and Saturday, and get drunk on Seagram's gin and come home wanting to fight. Usually it was with my moms for some s**t or the other, or us kids over some trivial s**t like the television or dirty rooms. During the week, my dad was damn cool. He cooked, cleaned, did s**t with us, and all that, but as I said, on weekends. He was just mean.
But abuse ran across the board where we came from, and we’ve witnessed it a-plenty, especially in the country La Grange and places like that. We both know women caught hell. Cause as you know, Uncle Joe, you beat the hell out of Martha. LeRoy, I’m not so sure about, but Blue beat the hell out of Nancy, Fred beat the hell out of Elizabeth, Charlie beat the hell out of Nancy, who is your sister, Julius beat the hell out of Molly, and on and on and on, you understand. So, the ass beating I took from Momma and Dad wasn’t something I dwelled on as it was natural, I guess you could say, when I fucked up. And believe me, I fucked up a lot.
However, I did have issues. Listen, I pissed my bed for years, and that got me a beating, too. I think I stopped around thirteen or twelve years old, I was so afraid at one point that I would refuse to drink anything, believing that if I didn't drink before bed, then I wouldn't piss the bed, and I wouldn’t get beat. That s**t didn’t work! I would try to stay awake all night. That didn't work, either. I’m telling you. I was fucked up around this time. Three or two years prior, I was struck by a car going to my grandparents’ home. I was having seizures and black-outs, killer headaches and s**t, and through it all, I had no clue how to tell anyone or talk to anyone, you know. Sure. I had good days, fun days and things. I was a child. What the hell did I know, but I had serious problems, and I struggled around other children. Most of them knew I pissed the bed, how could they not, when my siblings teased me all the time about it, whether at home alone or around other people. So eventually I went into myself, I guess is the way to describe it.
Now Uncle Joe has always been in my life as far back as I can remember. I shouldn’ta pushed him back in the corner like that, coming to visit me after all this time. He was a great huge man that my momma really loved. Did he put his hand on my shoulder? Why’d I brush that s**t away? The way he looked at me when I was ranting and raving, like I’m six years old again and hiding behind my mom’s skirt. I can still feel him here, he’s got to be. Come, sit there on my bed for a minute.
One of my favorite memories of Joe is the time we took a black and white picture together at the homeplace on Lower Woodville Road, that one the klan burned out in 1972. I was sitting on his knee, both of us smiling. Long time ago, but I still recall. Last time I saw that photo, Grandmomma had it in a shoe box in her closet at the LaGrange home.
I know why he’s here. After years of state prosecutors wasting my life inside of a cage, he’s come to give me strength. He can feel my resolve starting to weaken. Even though he hasn’t been in my life since the age of about seven, here he is, inside this cage with me, rolling a joint on my bed. Leaning back on my pillow, propped up against my wall, just like me.
Reckon you can say that I had an identity crisis growing up. Two Josephs to choose from, and me not knowing who I am or how I fit into this equation. I had the church folks taking my name and selling me into slavery by my Brothers, suffering many years in bondage, and I had the family folks calling me Joe because they really was talking about Uncle Joe, and Uncle Joe was real, you know. He wasn't just an old story from a very old book. Eventually, something had to give, and it did. Now, I’m not gonna dwell long as I think I have reached my time to begin wrapping up other things in my life, and since I live around stupid people, I have to take these quiet moments when I can to rest. So. Listen to this.
Around the age of thirteen or twelve, I began noticing the world around me. I went to church with my momma because, like I told you, that’s what we did. Three days out of the week. But this was just regular Sunday church day, and pretty much all my family attended Mount Zion Baptist Church down on Lower Woodville Road, across the papermill. A small white clapboard, modest church that held maybe ten rows of pews on either side with a red carpet running down the aisle to the preacher’s pulpit sitting directly center. The elders sat on the first two rows, all in white, as well as the ushers. The preacher’s chair sat directly behind the pulpit with four chairs, two on either side of that chair, and a choir pit was behind those, where my momma and I sat, cause Momma could sing, too, you understand. Our reverend was a Mr. White, dressed in white pants, red shirt, black shoes, and his hair slicked back like they wore back then. The women loved him, and I guess the men did, too, because Reverend White knew how to preach. Every four or three words, he would throw in a “huh” and “eh” and he be sweating like it was 100 degrees even though it was rather cool inside the church because they had air conditioning and ceiling fans going.
But, like I said. Reverend White, he be preaching, and on this particular day, he was all Fire + Brimstone, Hell + Heaven, and the sins of the wicked that lust, you see, and he’ll get all loud, and then go quiet, and would even step away from the pulpit to get down to pews, where my family and family friends sat, and be in their faces about the sins of evil, wicked people. Mind you, now. S**t! Just telling this story got me back in time and talk, running so fast in my mind that I hope I don’t miss my words, but listen. Reverend White goes on and on for a good thirty minutes to an hour, and he’s sweating like an overworked mule, and it damn near got me scared to death. So, he ends, and the choir jumps in and we do a song, and I tell Momma I need to use the bathroom. No s**t. I believe he scared me that bad. She lets me go, and they keep singing, as Reverend White takes his break. Exiting from the choir pit to my right, as the men’s and boys’ toilets were on the right, the women’s and girls’ on the left, I head to the bathroom, but now I don’t have to go. Since there is a side door that leads outside, that’s where I go, because I figure I can sneak next door to Uncle Boogie’s house, as he only lived maybe thirty feet away, and to the corner store that’s maybe another forty feet, and get some candy, because my great granny’s home is on that hill on the other side. Yep. The house that the klan burned down.
Anyway, that’s exactly what I do, and it took no time at all as I ran all the way there and back so Momma wouldn't come looking, you know. I head back around the backside of the church to go in, and I see Reverend White sitting on the steps and he’s drinking. Now I am not stupid, and having lived around Uncle Boogie, I know what’s in the mason jar. Moonshine. And it hit me.
That was my wake-up call. That lying s.o.b. Now, I am saying s.o.b. today, but no such thought like that crossed my mind or my lips then. However, my church days took a blow and I guess since then, I’ve never given it that much thought. Eventually, slowly, I pulled away from the church, but I never told Momma why. I just made other excuses or found reasons to be with my dad on weekends, as he didn’t go to church. So. The Bible’s Joseph took a back seat, and around this time, I was learning more and more about Uncle Joe. It fascinated me that he shot someone, and that he was in Parchman all that time I didn't know where he had gone. He liked the streets, and booze, and women, and eventually I headed down that same road. I came to Parchman at eighteen or seventeen years old, even though I had not shot anyone to get there. So. Uncle Joe and I have prison in common, as well as our name. I got to tell you, and then I’ll let y’all be and get my sleep. You know. It’s goddamn funny the tricks life will play on a motherfucker, because all the time I was being Uncle Joe’s Joe, my f*****g life actually turned out like Joe—Joseph—in that old book. Because as Black people, we call one another Brothers and Sisters, and it was goddamn Brothers and Sisters who got me here.
Uncle Joe stands up and I realize how huge of a man he is compared to my smallness. He’s about 240, which is what I would be if I had lived outside a cage for thirty years. It’s as though living inside the cage for so long has shrunken me back to the six-year-old child. When he enfolds me in his embrace, I feel even smaller. As if I’m a child waking from a nightmare and needing to be comforted.
Hmm. Ain't that some s**t. Uncle Joe embracing me to give strength in my time of need. Molded inside his warm embrace, my head turns to the right. I can feel the beat of his heart soothing my soul. My eyes rest upon the rarely used holy book sitting on the table. He shushes me quiet, whispering shhh…shhh…Peace. Be still.
L. Patri is of Black and Natchez Indian descent, and he is the father of one daughter and a grandfather of five grandchildren. He was born on the river in Natchez, Mississippi, and for the past three decades, he has been challenging his wrongful conviction of capital murder. He writes in multiple and hybrid genres, including thought pieces, journalism, short fiction, letters, and memoir.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rooted.substack.com/subscribe
