Shakespeare Saved My Life Page 7

  At that time in his life, when Newton was living on the streets, robbing liquor stores, getting in and out of juvenile institutions, he did get a chance to make something of his life: he received an opportunity to join the Job Corps in Wisconsin. Instead, he ended up in prison for life. Thinking about how he finally had something positive to look forward to, I asked him, “Why did you mess up again?”

  “Well, because I was a really weak guy. That’s the reason I felt like I had to sneak away.”

  “The Job Corps was going to be your attempt to escape, to sneak away, from your other life, your criminal life on the streets.”

  “Right, exactly. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I knew it wouldn’t take anything but a word from any of them people and I wouldn’t have left. The problem is when we look back, we don’t consider certain things. And that is that these two parts of the brain aren’t really connected—the part with the ‘I’m gonna get away’ and the other part ‘I’m in this life and gonna live this life.’ They’re not feuding, they’re not at war, nothing. They’re just two different fantasies, or ideas, so when you’re in one you’re not considering the other. When I’m on the street, I’m not thinking about two weeks from now. I’m only thinking right now. I think for the great deal of troubled youth, it’s a common thing.”

  “And you told me the other day that your girlfriend was pregnant. At sixteen, were you excited about becoming a father?”

  “Oh yeah, she was my girlfriend or whatever you are at that age. Yeah, that was a big deal. Yeah, man! Thing is, I knew, we knew it was between me and this other guy—he’s dead now, he’s the one taught me how to steal a car. I always wanted to be a father because I hated mine so much and I thought I would be a good father.”

  “You said ‘would be.’ Does that mean—”

  “Right, I never got a chance. It was black, so obviously it was the other guy’s.”

  “And what ever happened to your stepdad?”

  “He died right after I got locked up that December. You know, they let me go to his funeral. There’s, like, six officers, and we’re in this church: there’s probably freakin’ two hundred black people and two white people and six cops all in the back.”

  “Your stepdad was black?”

  “Right. And I don’t know what this means psychologically, but I’m sitting there and I’m not moved by it, the funeral. It’s like the whole novel experience. I’m sitting there in full trip gear—you know what that means, right? You got your hands crossed like this, chains around your wrists and your ankles, and another chain from your belly to your ankles, so you can’t turn from side to side. And I’ve always had a problem with handcuffs. I put more pressure on them than you need to. I end up with bruises on my wrists and ankles. So I’m sitting there in full trip gear, I’m wearing prison clothes, my family around me. They’re still looking at me, the officers are looking at me, and I don’t know how to take it. It feels awkward, it feels weird, it feels way out of place. I’m not even thinking about him being dead.”

  “That’s probably normal.”

  “Then for whatever reason, they suddenly say I have to go. They speed it up so I can go view the body. They’re still talking and everything, but the officers say, ‘Well, we gotta take him out of here, so he’s gotta go view the body.’ And I go up to the casket, it ain’t no big deal, but for whatever reason just at that moment I broke down, started crying and everything. I don’t know why. I think I did love the guy. I’m getting soft now thinking about it.”

  For a moment, he looked like he was about to break into tears, then he shook it off and continued the story.

  “But the coolest thing was, as soon as I did that, everybody stood up—whoosh!—and they all lined up, giving me hugs, and I’m thinking how uncomfortable the cops were: this whole church full of black people standing up all of a sudden. Like, ‘Whoa! What’s going on?!’ And for a second I didn’t even care that I was crying, but it was only for a second. I remember everybody hugging me, my little brother hugging me, ’cause he was still small then, so he was like hugging me around my waist. It was a cool experience, man. Yeah.”

  He stayed quiet for a long while.

  “You’re reliving it?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, man. Yeah. I was just thinking. It’s kinda strange, now I look at him, the circumstances of his life, that’s the way he viewed the world, his people probably beat him and that taught him that’s how you deal with disappointment, and in turn that taught me that’s how you deal when you get angry, you lash out. It’s just that earlier in my life, I hated him so much.”

  “I’m surprised you wanted to go to the funeral.”

  “I hated him, but I didn’t want him to die, I don’t think. But I think you go through stages with your hatreds, man. Now I look at him and I think none of the things I used to think. And nothing’s changed, except the way I see the world.” Silence again. “Yeah. What are we doing? Where we at? Come on, let’s go somewhere before I choke up.”

  “The Job Corps.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And you know what? I still got them tickets. No joke! I pull ’em out every now and then, and just look at ’em.”

  “Tickets?” I asked.

  And he opened up his Shakespeare folder and pulled out a couple of airplane tickets to Madison, Wisconsin. He showed them to me, then he looked at the date and quickly did the math, calculating the time between the murder and his scheduled departure date.

  “Two weeks,” he said. “I was two weeks away.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “To Know My Deed”

  Whence is that knocking?

  How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?

  What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.

  Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

  Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

  Making the green one red…

  To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself.

  —Macbeth, act 2, scene 2

  When we got to the climactic scene in which Macbeth kills the king, I finally learned what Newton was in for. Of course, it was not a surprise. But it was a shock nevertheless. In his homework assignment that week, he wrote:

  The authenticity of a murderer: WOW! That is insight! The fear and confusion, the anxiety! Even if the author has not killed, he must have been exposed to that possibility. Like attempted or was at the point of trying but could not overcome those fears and great anxiety! As Mac killed Duncan, he was just in la la land! Even forgetting to leave the weapon! Man, that is just so authentic! The detail in fears, confusion, and gut-wrenching anxiety is uncanny! I regret to say that I have experience.

  There. I had the answer to my Shakespearean research question regarding verisimilitude. I could leave prison and write the articles that I needed to publish in order to apply for tenure. I could stop spending my Friday nights in solitary confinement and get back to the stack of freshman papers waiting to be graded. I could say good-bye to the prisoners, thank them for their insights, encourage them to keep reading Shakespeare on their own. Maybe donate some books. I could walk through those prison gates for the last time and be free.

  But then I thought about all of these people we had locked away from the world, whom I had started to get to know: the Newtons, the Bentleys, the Greens, and even the Guidos. They had no one. They seemed to need me—or, at least, seemed to need Shakespeare. I realized that I couldn’t leave—not now, maybe not ever. In a way, I started to feel like I was serving a life sentence myself.

  CHAPTER 20

  CSI: Muncie, Indiana

  As I learned more about Newton’s life experiences, I got even more deeply involved. I sure couldn’t walk away now. In fact, I had to go further. I had to go back to Muncie one more time.

  On our third visit, my husband and I spent the entire day researching Newton in the archives of the Muncie Star and in courtroom transcripts. On September 26, 1994,
the headlines read:

  BSU student murdered

  Man shot to death near campus

  Community shocked

  Victim identified, but many questions remain

  Two days later, more headlines:

  3 held in “senseless” killing

  Suspects have long history of troubles with the law

  Life of misery ended in another’s death

  Going through these records, I started to feel like a crime scene investigator. As a professor of literature, I was accustomed to wading through stacks of papers filled with academic jargon, but these documents took me to a whole new world. I felt uncomfortable and more than a little fearful of what I might find. The descriptions of the murder scene were especially unnerving.

  Newton had entered a guilty plea at his mother’s urging because he was being threatened with the death penalty. But I wasn’t convinced that he was the one who actually committed the murder. The newspaper accounts, as well as what I’d learned of Newton himself, suggested that, on this day, at this particular desperate time in his life (his stepfather was dying, his mother had kicked him out, and his girlfriend left him, taking the baby that Newton had hoped was his), he would have been too incapacitated by drugs and alcohol to stand, much less accurately aim a gun he’d never used before.

  Not that it matters in legal terms: in the state of Indiana, the accomplice in a murder conviction receives the same sentence, so Newton’s partner was serving life as well. I just wanted to know. I needed to know. I left the office of the Muncie Star with two briefcases jammed full of photocopied articles to pore over.

  Next, we drove through all of the worst neighborhoods in Muncie, piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of Newton’s childhood: his homes, his schools, his juvenile detention centers. The stores he shoplifted from, the highway underpass where he slept, the Dumpsters he ate out of. The part of town where he grew up, known as Whitely, is a poor, predominantly black area, where liquor stores and abandoned buildings are common sights. Both my husband and I have lived in areas like this, so we felt comfortable walking those neighborhoods.

  “Before we head back home,” I told my husband, “there’s one last place I need to see.” Of course, he knew what it was: a particular alley where I could retrace Newton’s—and the victim’s—last steps. The articles described the victim, Christopher J. Coyle, as a nineteen-year-old white male, a good-intentioned college student who was walking a female home after a party at 3 a.m.

  “You sure you want to go there?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I replied, exaggerating greatly. I didn’t feel comfortable about it at all.

  “It’s just an alley,” he said.

  “No,” I replied, “it’s…it’s…”

  “It’s what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s important.”

  We drove across town to the “good” side of Muncie. The houses were bigger; the front yards were filled with flowers instead of trash. There were attractive parks along the river; a poster announced an upcoming arts festival. Paraphrasing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I said to my husband, “I don’t think we’re in Whitely anymore.”

  The campus influence permeated the neighborhood: frat houses, dormitories, and the large sprawling campus itself. It was not hard to imagine how all of this must’ve looked to the dropouts from the ghetto—and how they must have appeared to the college population.

  I tried to piece out our journey using references from a number of articles—there were hundreds of articles—and a map of Muncie that we picked up at the visitor information center. Somehow, I didn’t think this was the kind of tourist site they had in mind.

  “Turn left—no, right,” I said, testing the patience of even my supportive husband, my “partner in crime.”

  “We’ve been down this road before,” he said. “We’re just going around in circles.”

  “Uh, let me see,” I replied while checking the map.

  “You know, if you can’t find it…” he started to state the obvious: we should just give up and head home. But before he could finish his sentence…

  “Stop!” I shouted. “There!”

  The alley: uncanny, unmistakable—unfortunately.

  “Oh…my…god.”

  In my mind, I was envisioning the murder scene: the young man stepping out of the car, the others coming up behind him, the gunshots. I’d spent so many years working with convicted criminals, but this was the closest I’d ever come to a victim. I wasn’t ready for that; it was deeply disturbing.

  We were still stopped at the entry to the alley. I was still lost in thought.

  “You all right?” my husband finally asked.

  “That’s what the articles said that Newton’s partner said to him,” I replied. “Ten years ago. Right here.”

  “Said what?” he asked.

  “‘You all right?’”

  The alley.

  CHAPTER 21

  Death Penalty

  September 1995. One year had passed since his arrest. Newton sat in the Delaware County jail as the trial continued. Now the headlines read:

  Teen could face death

  Newton fails to stop death penalty bid

  Killer’s fate weighed by judge

  Superior Court Judge Robert Barnet Jr. was up for reelection, and his platform was “get tough on crime.” “I don’t care if he is a juvenile!” seemed to be his feeling. According to newspaper accounts, when the prosecution filed the death penalty, the judge turned to the teenager with these words: “Frankly, Mr. Newton, I don’t believe you have a conscience.” Pressured by his mother, Newton agreed to plea-bargain into a sentence of life without the possibility of parole; furthermore, he agreed to waive his right ever to appeal the sentence in a court of law. At the age of seventeen, he wasn’t even old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes, but he could legally sign away his life.

  ***

  “What did you think when the death penalty was filed against you?” I asked Newton. I expected a big, dramatic revelation, but he surprised me with an understated reply.

  “I really don’t know,” he said. “I say that I didn’t care, but I must have cared.”

  I was dumbfounded. How could a seventeen-year-old kid have no reaction to being told that he was going to be executed? What could that tell us about the condition of his mental faculties at that time?

  “And you know what?” he continued. “It made such an impression in the jail! That’s like street cred. I might have been basking in it a little bit. Like, ‘Yeah, man, death penalty!’”

  “But when you’re alone, lying awake at night…?”

  “I think you just avoid it. I don’t remember ever sitting down and facing it.”

  “Was it a surprise?”

  “I knew it was coming, but it was a surprise to know that it was coming; does that make sense? When they announced it, I already knew they were going to announce it. It was brought up from the time I was arrested. They threatened my mom with that: ‘They’re gonna kill him!’ Which is illegal.”

  “So it was part of your consciousness all along, but do you think you held on to some kind of subconscious hope?”

  “Oh, I can say that! I can say that even years later in prison, it never sunk in. I think that little kid in me must’ve thought that things were just gonna work out okay. It wasn’t till years later, I was in seg already, a few years into seg, maybe five years into my bit, that I realized, man, things aren’t going to work out. I remember that moment, the feeling of it, like, ‘Man, this is a life sentence. It’s not gonna heal itself.’ Because I must’ve felt through the whole process that things will work out, things just do.” He laughed. “But, yeah, you’re right. I must’ve had that hope somehow.”

  “How long did you live with the death penalty?”

  “Probably a year. Yeah, it was a long time. When you get a capital sentence, you automatically go through the review process. You’re pretty much on hold until it’s through the court of appea
ls, Supreme Court. So they sent me as safekeeping to prison already. I remember when I was there, I had this crazy nightmare. I had read a Dean Koontz book called Mr. Murder.”

  “You’re in prison for murder, and you’re reading a book called Mr. Murder?”

  “Right. This guy is like some weird android-type thing. He’s just this killer, man, he’s hired to kill people. Then he wanders off and tries to take over the life of this other guy. I’m having this dream that he’s chasing me, trying to kill me, and I’m trying to get away from him. And I wake up, I really wake up, in my cell, but my body won’t move! My body was paralyzed; my mind was awake. And this will make you think it was a dream within a dream: he was still talking to me, he was still threatening me. And I still couldn’t move, that’s why it was so scary ’cause he’s back here, which was probably just in my head—well, obviously, it was just in my head—but he’s back here, so you can’t see or defend yourself. It was one of the coolest dreams I ever had. I like nightmares. I like ones that you’re the most active in. I like waking up and having to look around the cell, even though I know there’s nothing there. I love those dreams, man!”

  “Eventually the death sentence was commuted to life without parole—still an unusually severe sentence for a juvenile. Why did you give up your right to even try to appeal?” I asked.