In our names rewriting the us death penalty

Explain to the class where you believe the following are found in the essay, if applicable: claim, support, warrant, backing, rebuttal, and qualifier. Give citations to back up your points, and create a final works cited citation in MLA format for this essay.

Gunter, Kimberly K. “‘In Our Names’: Rewriting the U.S. Death Penalty.” Writing on the Edge, vol. 21, no. 2, Spring 2011, pp. 32–38. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip&db=ehh&AN=60305236&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Kimberly K. Gunter

The stench of death is strong. Like the reek that hangs after a day of hog-killing, the dense, sickly sweet smell thickens the air. It’s almost as if I could reach out and grab a handful of that odor and slide it into my pocket. Before either my students or I can ask, the prison guard cum tour guide, Lt. Bowden, offers, “We’ve tried to do something about the smell. We’ve cleaned. We’ve painted. But nothing works.”

Jorge has slipped away from Lt. Bowden, who is now talking about last meals. He has instead ventured inside Cell C, the cell that houses North Carolina’s condemned for the final 72 hours of their lives. Tattoos of skulls and flames running between his elbows and wrists, Jorge has outstretched his arms so that his fingertips touch the opposite walls of the tiny room. He’s seen documentary footage of inmate Antonio James performing this same ritual in his own death row cell in Louisiana’s Angola prison. Bowden catches up to us and, nodding at the flimsy, stained mattress upon which Jorge now sits, offers, “That’s the bed where all of North Carolina’s executed prisoners have slept. People like, say…” Bowden searches his memory and hits upon, “Velma Barfield.” Samantha nods. All semester she has studied the dialectic created by gender and the U.S. death penalty, and she recognizes Barfield’s name, the so-called “Death Row Granny” and the first woman executed after the United States’ 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment.

My students are a curious bunch, and Bowden’s having some trouble corralling them all. Erica has spun away and stands peering into another cell here in the death house. “You’re using this one for storage?” she asks, incredulous. Staring at the brooms and mops and buckets and paint cans that tumble on top of one another in a second death house cell, Erica raises her eyebrows in cynical dismay. “That’s one expensive janitor’s closet,” I whisper to her.

Bowden hastens us onward and into the death chamber itself. Until 1998, North Carolina still used lethal gas to kill its condemned inmates; however, any number of logistical concerns, not the least among them leakage of the cyanide gas from the chamber and into the lungs of the innocent observers, convinced the state to swap for lethal injection. The guards on the prison’s execution team no longer, then, tousle the inmate’s hair while he remains, dead, strapped into a chair

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below which minutes earlier dropped a pellet of cyanide into sulfuric acid; the purpose of what might have looked to onlookers like some gruesome fatherly gesture was in fact to dispel trapped cyanide gas. Instead, the old gas chamber has been reconfigured to serve as North Carolina’s current death chamber. Ventilation ducts and gas barometers remain. Now, however, a hospital gurney dominates the former gas chamber, and my students and I can squeeze in, only three or four at a time. Jorge, starting at the gurney, whispers to me, “Dr. Gunter: touch it,” as if it’s some wild animal or ancient relic. “I don’t wanna touch it,” I hiss back. But I do run my fingers over the crisp hospital sheets. I stare at a patch of gauze taped to one of the gurney’s steel rods. And I try to imagine how it must feel, to lie here, strapped down.

The death chamber itself is pierced by two Plexiglas windows set high into its cinderblock walls. The gurney is jacked up so that the inmate’s prone body lies flush with the window sills. The larger of the two windows, maybe three feet high by four feet long, allows the inmate to glance to his right and into the witness room. Or, more precisely, the window allows the witnesses to stare in at the inmate. Up to sixteen people can pack into the witness’ antechamber. Therein, the victim’s family sit shoulder to shoulder with the inmate’s family. Journalists, prison staff, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and “four respectable citizens…[who] serve as official witnesses” (“Selection of Execution Witnesses”) fill the rest of the seats. Directly in front of the condemned hangs the death chamber’s second window. Much smaller than the other and intentionally angled so as to remain hidden from the witnesses, this window is a peephole into the next-door nook that houses the executioner. Two IV lines snake through a hole bored in a shared wall, lines through which flow the three-drug cocktail that will kill this woman or, more often, this man, now pronounced a monster. Bowden teases Kimberly, probably because, cherubic, she looks the youngest of my students: “Jump up here and we’ll show you what it feels like to be strapped in,” he offers, laughing and patting the gurney’s mattress. “Wouldn’t that be special?” he asks, uttering a phrase that will pepper his talk all afternoon.

Our sojourn in Central Prison’s, and North Carolina’s only, death house and execution chamber comes early in our tour of this maximum- security penitentiary. My composition students and I spend another three hours walking the prison grounds. We stand in the paved, razor wire-encrusted prison yard and peer skyward at the watchtowers. In- mates play basketball around us as Bowden points up to the guards and explains that they are trained to fire no warning shots. Filing through the gymnasium, on all sides the clanks of inmates lifting weights, I

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notice that lift records are carefully recorded on the walls in letters cut from construction paper. We slip into the auditorium to listen to a visit- ing Christian evangelist. The auditorium is full, the prisoners, racially segregated, listening to calls to Jesus, the preacher singing promises of a spiritual life that supersedes prison walls, backed by a tinny cassette of piped-in karaoke music. We walk through the non-air-conditioned infirmary, and I hear a nurse respond to one of my students, “There ain’t nobody innocent here.” We sit in the holding cells where groups of prisoners remain on first arrival at Central Prison. Bowden, chuckling, notes how uncomfortable it would be to linger in one of these crowded holding tanks for the five or six hours necessary, especially if one of the inmates defecated in the public toilet in the cell’s corner. “Schew!” he exclaims, waving his hand underneath his nose. We meet the impos- ing prison guard who oversees the “prison within the prison” where the worst offenders end up, those who couldn’t get along in general population or those who are on suicide watches. We stand not simply peering into cellblocks of death row inmates but walking within arms reach of them, no bars or steel doors between us. They are color-coded in their red jumpsuits, or in green shorts and t-shirts for those who are allowed outside to do landscaping, Ashley, my five foot dynamo of a student, whose e-mail handle is “callmetatertot,” murmurs in my ear, “If these guys are the worst of the worst and so dangerous that we must execute them, then why are we allowed to stand right beside them with nothing between us for protection?” We walk through the no-contact visitation center and through the prison chapel. We learn that there are no on-site educational programs and that the prison employs only a Christian chaplain but no religious advisors of other faiths. We listen to the mental health unit supervisor explain that prison guards are empowered by physicians and the state to forcibly medicate inmates against their will, all the while a lone inmate moaning and screaming in the background. A line of slack-jawed and wall-eyed men slugs past us, and one of my students reports later that the mental health guards had mocked, “Time to feed the bugs.”

Late in the day’s tour, I fall back so that I can talk with Bailey, the guard who assists Bowden, bringing up the rear. A guard at Central Prison for only three months, it is a good job for Bailey, one with health- care benefits and a state retirement plan, but she’s come to the prison because she thinks she can do some good, too. “Any one of us could have ended up here,” she says quietly.

Back on the bus, I’m counting heads, and the students are fired up. We pass Germ-X hand sanitizer back and forth, and exclamations about the day echo off the bus’s riveted walls: “Dr. Gunter, did you

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hear it when the dispatcher came over the Lieutenant’s radio and an- nounced there’d been a stabbing?” Grey asks, wide-eyed. “I couldn’t believe they didn’t even make us walk through the metal detector,” Samantha marvels. I respond that I don’t think the metal detector has been installed yet, that the prison hadn’t even had a metal detector on my first two tours. “Were your tours with other students the same as this one?” Tiffany asks. No. I tell them how tour guides make all the difference—how Bowden’s authority to take us anywhere in the prison was diluted by what seemed to be a transparently standard PR script. “For instance, he out and out said that rape isn’t much of a problem in that prison, but last year, another guard, a big barrel-chested sergeant who kept saying, ‘I like to fight,’ told me that, while guards ruled the prison during the day, the prisoners ruled the prison at night, and that prisoner rape was widespread and unchecked while the cell blocks were on nightly lockdown.” “Well,” Erica chimes up, aping Bowden, “isn’t that special?” We laugh in what is as much nervous relief as anything else.

This fieldtrip has come in April. These composition students entered this class in January, and most of them were adamantly in favor of the U.S. death penalty, too. Now, near the end of our fifteen-week study of America’s system of capital punishment, fully 90% of these students oppose the practice. But how did we get here? To the prison? Sure, on a 60-seat luxury bus normally used by the university’s athletic teams. But how did we get to abolition?

First, via a course structure intent on empowering students to become rhetorical power-players. In American first-year composition programs, we largely teach a single genre: academic writing. Moreover, if academic writing is our destination, process pedagogies are often the vehicle for getting there. Too often, though, “academic writing” remains arbitrary, oppressive, exclusionary, or, perhaps worse, undefined, and processes remain prescriptive. Bucking, for instance, a regulatory textbook industry and restrictive estimations of students, the best way to teach students to write as academics is to regard them as academics, all the while rending apart exactly what “academic writing” means. Single-themed composition courses, especially when they also employ writing groups, provide one viable means for doing so. Students write more complex, intricate essays and take up more complex, critically in- formed arguments because they have had the time to conduct expanded research, to assimilate what they’ve learned, to position themselves in the discourse, to hear dissensus in the classroom, to be challenged by knowledgeable readers during workshops, and to write multiple drafts and also various essays on the same subject matter.

Second, the notion of the student as author was fundamental to this course, and not simply as authors of essays but as (collaborative)

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authors of selves and of this class. If we remind ourselves that literacy isn’t just a storehouse of knowledge but a kind of action and that dis- course isn’t printed text alone but also a way of being in the world, the ideological nature of all discourse is apparent; moreover, if we look at literacy (here, academic literacy specifically) as what we do, not only is literacy a social action, but it is a social call to action. Thus, discourse’s creative power (that is, discourse as our means of being in the world, the enactment of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves), less it become hegemonic, must really be shared with students. Therefore, in this class, students compiled our course textbook by researching and selecting class readings. Students led all discussions and moderated all classroom debates. Student groups wrote their own essay assignments in group conferences with me. Students chose the subtopics on which they wrote all semester. Students co-wrote portions of the syllabus. This course demanded, then, not just a student-centered classroom but a student-propelled classroom. And if students’ early choices (sometimes) emerged from a performative impulse (for example, if they designed essay assignments that seemed to represent the types of papers that students “ought” to write), they were at worst learning to use academic language, eventually learning to insert themselves into and change it, exploiting the language but not being subsumed by it.

Third, my students and I dismantled the walls of the insular class- room. We abandoned the insinuation of academia as an ivory tower, unsullied by material conditions. Instead, we took to the streets and invited the streets into our classroom, and doing so was vital to our scrutiny of America’s death penalty. Yes, we left the campus to inspect North Carolina’s Central Prison, but into our classroom came attorneys on both sides of the capital punishment debate: the words of Bruce Cunningham, an abolitionist attorney who cautioned my students, “If you’re gonna kill somebody in this country, don’t be poor,” were contested by Assistant District Attorney Joe Osman who described for my students the atrocities committed by the men whose deaths he seeks as a routine part of his job. Asked to coordinate a lecture series, I invited to campus and into our classroom Scott Langley, Amnesty International’s Death Penalty Abolition Coordinator for the state of North Carolina and a photojournalist who has amassed an enormous collection of photographs documenting America’s capital system. My students, in search of real-world sources for their essays and for the themed magazines they were producing, spread across the campus and into local communities. For instance, one group surveyed over 250 of their fellow college students in an opinion poll that sought to trace students’ opinions on the death penalty and correlations between those opinions and students’ race and religion. Students interviewed parole

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officers and prison psychologists, theology scholars and small-town preachers. They even began to correspond with death row inmates. In what was perhaps the course’s pinnacle moment, after attending her lecture in Raleigh, students descended on Sister Helen Prejean with such animation and enthusiasm that it felt more like I was backstage at a Jay-Z show in Madison Square Garden instead of in the chapel of St. Francis of Assissi. This course became a borderland where sorority girls and honors students talked to convicted murderers and Catholic nuns—it was sometimes surreal but always exhilarating.

Finally, this class was shaped by a willing surrender, surrender of space, surrender of power, and, in some ways, surrender of course outcomes. The class was not unlike a giant trust fall, with me falling backwards and into the arms of my students, hoping we wouldn’t all end up on our asses. Sometimes frustratingly so, social justice cannot be decreed. It was my unabashed yet unspoken hope that encounters with the facts that surround and indict America’s death penalty would convince students of its catastrophic legal, practical, diplomatic, and ethical failings. However, I didn’t want to mimic a warden, with my students playing prisoners to my epistemology. Instead, I relinquished my stake in students’ final positions on the death penalty. What’s more, I refused to posit myself as the classroom’s font of knowledge. Only the students could truly say what it was they wanted to accomplish in a given piece of writing, so why not ask them to write their own as- signments? Students really did know more about their semester-long topics that I did by semester’s end, and why shouldn’t they? Instead, my students and I (to the extent possible in a culture where course grades are the currency and the GPA is the bottom line) operated as colleagues in a fifteen-week research project. This course embodied the unfolding of individual research agendas; writing to learn; and, ultimately, the composing of academic selves within a vigorous, critical community. Education came to mean, in the words of Victor Villanueva, “a way of attempting to make sense out of the senseless, to become more, rather than to become other” (53). By course’s end, I’m not sure who had learned more—my students or me—but I can’t help but wonder if the respect they were shown, irrespective of, for example, their stance on the death penalty or their institutional position as first-year students in a general education course, didn’t foster the very compassion and thoughtfulness that most of these students would demonstrate toward the worst among us.

On the last day of class, Erica confided the difficulty that she and her group-mates had had in naming their semester magazine. She told us, “I called my mom for suggestions. She’s heard me talk about this

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class so much this semester, I thought she might have an idea. You know what she said?” Erica dismayed, continued: “She said, ‘Call it Fry ‘Em All.’” Through class laughter, Erica moaned and said, “I told her, ‘Mom, we’re against the death penalty.’ So then she says, ‘Okay. Then call it The Bleeding Heart.’” Half laughing, half jeering, my stu- dents and I were familiar with these ready caricatures of death penalty proponents and opponents and also with the easy answers to violent crime so often suggested by our fellow Americans. But these students, through fifteen weeks of research and composing, had learned the impossibility of easy answers. They knew too much for those now, too much about the racism, the classism, the sexism, the homophobia, the capriciousness, the corruption, the politics, the costs, the hyperbolic media coverage, too much about the mistakes. Moreover, they knew they themselves were culpable, that the state was committing execu- tions, in Samantha’s words, “in our names.” My students, though, had recast the state’s actions, had recast the terms of the entire debate, away from the punishment of monsters and to the punishment of monstrous deeds, away from whether killers deserve to die to whether we deserve to kill them, and in so doing, they didn’t just imitate them but instead they became academic writers.

Kimberly K. Gunter teaches at Appalachian State University.

Works Cited “Selection of Execution Witnesses.” Central Prison. North Carolina Depart- ment of Corrections, n.d. http://www.doc.state.nc.us/DOP/deathpen- alty/witness.htm. 14 Apr. 2010.

Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993.

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