The Buddhist on Death Row

Back in the prison, Jarvis wanted to hear every detail about the visit. As Melody talked, he pictured his mother. He remembered her beauty and gentleness but also her absence and volatility. He recalled sitting with her watching TV, and then she would get up and disappear. After a while he’d go look for her and find her passed out on the toilet in a heroin stupor. He would try to wake her up and get her to bed. Every time, he was afraid she might be dead.

He also remembered the men who came and went. He ran into a stranger in the living room, and Cynthia would say, “Give Jarvis some money, Daddy.” Then to Jarvis, “Run down and get some candy.”

Though he’d been only five, Jarvis vividly recalled the day police came to the house and found him and his sisters living in squalor. Social workers took the children to Child Protective Services, where they were separated. Jarvis was taken to a small room with two gentle-seeming women. One lifted him onto a table and removed his shirt. They looked in horror at the bruises and scars that covered his body.

Jarvis shook that memory aside and instead looked ahead to his mother’s visit. He thought of the things he wanted to tell her most: he missed her, and he loved her.

Jarvis put his mother’s name on his visitors list, and he eagerly awaited her arrival. But she never showed up. One morning, through the bars of his cell door, he saw the prison chaplain approaching. Inmates knew that the chaplain didn’t come around just to chat. His visit meant bad news.

The chaplain told Jarvis that one of his sisters had called with a message. Their mother had a heart attack. She didn’t make it.

The chaplain said, “I’m sorry, Masters,” and left the tier.

Jarvis began trembling, and then his shock morphed into fury. He pounded his fists into the cell wall until his knuckles bled.

For weeks, he remained distraught over his mother’s death and fuming because he wasn’t allowed to attend her funeral. He paced his cell, refused yard time, and cursed out a guard who, in response, slammed him into a wall.

Meanwhile, Melody continued to interview people for her report, and she was delighted when she could bring news that might pick up Jarvis’s spirits. She’d been in touch with his younger sister, Carlette, who planned to come up from Los Angeles to see him.

Jarvis added another name to his list of approved visitors, and this time it was not in vain. On the morning of the visit, he was escorted to the visiting hall where his sister waited on the other side of a Plexiglas window.

Carlette began crying when she saw him. Finally she collected herself enough to speak his name: “Jarvis.” She stared at her big brother and said it again: “Jarvis.”

Jarvis responded without emotion. He gave a slight nod before asking, “What’s up, baby sister?”

She asked, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said flatly.

“What’s it been like in there? Are you okay?”

He shrugged. “What do you think?”

She repeated, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “No big deal. Motherfuckers fighting, stabbing.”

She looked alarmed.

“Don’t worry about me, little sister,” he said. “No one will fuck with me.”

Carlette noticed faded tattoos on her brother’s temple and wrist, the number 255, and asked about them.

When they were children, they lived on 255th Street in Harbor City.

“What made you get that?” she asked.

“It was something I’d seen on a homeboy lying in a coffin.”

Carlette was aghast.

When a guard came by with a five-minute warning, Jarvis asked Carlette if she could put money in his trust account so he could buy cigarettes.

She said okay, and she left.

It was an expensive ordeal for Carlette to travel by car from LA, but she returned a month later, this time with her young son, who sat on her lap. Once again, Jarvis regaled her with prison stories. It saddened her that he acted as though prison were a joke, and she was disgusted when he boasted that he was feared and envied as a “warrior” in some revolution.

The third time Carlette came, Jarvis started up again, talking about the race war in San Quentin—in which black inmates were defending themselves against attacks by Mexican and white gangs—about crooked guards selling drugs and guns, and about a stabbing, as if these horrifying events were amusing.

Carlette burst into tears.

Jarvis stared. “What are you crying about?”

She blurted out, “What about us?”

He didn’t understand.

“You’re always telling me about your life like you’re a hard gangster, some revolutionary, all that bullshit. You never ask about us. Why should I even come see you? What about me? What about your nephew? You know what he said after last time we saw you? ‘Mama, I wanna be just like Uncle Jay.’ What am I supposed to tell him?”

She cried harder, but Jarvis just rolled his eyes.

She continued, “You think when your homeboys get out they’re going to send you money? You think they’re going to write you, send pictures of their children? Do you even think about us? Who are you trying to impress? What is wrong with you?”

Still sobbing, she picked up her son and left.

Jarvis sat fuming. What was wrong with him? What the fuck was wrong with her? She had no idea who he was. She had no idea where he was. His sister was a fool, and he didn’t care if she never came back.

In his cell that night, Jarvis tried to put the visit out of his mind, but he kept thinking about something Carlette had said. Many of the men he knew in prison were in for life, but some would get out eventually. Would he hear from them? Would they write? Would they send money or pictures of their children? Would they visit?

Not a chance.

What had he been trying to prove? Who was he trying to impress?

Even harder to ignore was her other question: “What is wrong with you?”

He tried to blow it off, but he couldn’t. He huddled in a corner of his cell. He felt … he didn’t know what. Something he didn’t want to feel.

Jarvis had often contemplated death, having seen it from a very young age. He’d imagined being shot like many of the boys he knew in his neighborhood. Other times, he saw himself going out in a blaze of gunfire like in a movie. Sometimes he even looked forward to death. It would be a relief.

Throughout that long night, he confronted a thought he’d never let himself think before: He wanted to get out of prison, to reconnect with his family, to be his sister’s big brother and his nephew’s uncle. He wanted to live.

Using the only writing implement he was allowed—the insert of a ballpoint pen (a pen could be a weapon)—he placed a sheet of paper on his bunk, using it as a desk, and wrote to Carlette. He thanked her for her help, her letters, her visits. He wrote that he was proud of the woman she’d become and her beautiful son, and he apologized for never asking about her life; he wanted to know everything about it.

He feared that he’d never see her again. And he still couldn’t get her question out of his head: What is wrong with me?

Jarvis was nineteen when he arrived at San Quentin. When he went out to the yard for the first time, he saw men playing basketball on courts with sagging, netless rims. Other cons lifted weights, sat across from one another on benches and played checkers or cards, or clustered in groups talking. Races did not mingle.

When a stranger approached, Jarvis was wary until the man dropped the name of Halifu, an inmate he’d met at Los Angeles County Jail. Halifu was physically imposing but spoke like a professor. He was some kind of revolutionary. He bent Jarvis’s ear, talking about the historical oppression of African Americans, quoting W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X and educating Jarvis about the Black Panthers and an “organization” called the Black Guerrilla Family. Halifu said the BGF, cofounded by W. L. Nolen and George Jackson, had been created in response to a spate of killings of African American inmates in US prisons. He said that Jarvis needed to join the revolution and began calling him Askari, the Swahili word for “soldier.”

Later, when Halifu learned that Jarvis was heading to San Quentin, he sent word to “comrades” there, including the man who approached him on the yard. The prisoner, whose Swahili name was Fuma, had been in the San Quentin contingent of the Black Panther Party when Jackson was killed in the prison in 1971. Fuma introduced Jarvis to other “revolutionaries,” including teachers responsible for educating “kezi,” the men who aspired to join the BGF. A blackboard was set up on the yard and classes of sixty or so kezi gathered for instructions. Those who’d never gone to school were taught to read and write, and all of them learned about black nationalism and the class struggle.

That political education justified and focused Jarvis’s rage. Angry and alienated, he was primed for radicalization—and to connect to something bigger than himself. In the name Black Guerrilla Family, “family” was the operative word for young men like Jarvis, as its members embraced them like fathers and brothers.

Jarvis and the other kezi knew that only a handful of them would be accepted into the BGF. They were told, “Many are called but few are chosen.” Jarvis was determined to be one of the chosen few. He trained with diligence and commitment, and, as a former BGF member recounted, Jarvis was among a handful of dedicated soldiers who made the cut. They were initiated in a solemn ceremony at which they were given pins with the five-pointed red Communist star to wear on their lapels. Then they were awarded “fraternal membership” in the gang. A commander said, “There are new dragons among us. They have risen into the ranks of jamaa (family).”

Two years later, in 1985, a BGF member broke from the organization’s leadership and planned a series of attacks on guards. Court records show that the first target was to be a veteran sergeant, thirty-eight-year-old Howell Dean Burchfield, who was rumored to be supplying weapons to the Aryan Brotherhood, a rival prison gang. According to multiple BGF members, Jarvis wasn’t told about the plot because of a rift he’d had with the planner of the attack. As a result, he didn’t know what was coming the night of June 8 of that year: Sergeant Burchfield was taking the nightly prisoner count, a mundane chore that he’d repeated hundreds of times. An inmate called to him and asked for a light for his cigarette. When Burchfield approached the man’s cell, the prisoner stabbed him with a makeshift spear, severing his pulmonary artery. By the time help arrived, the guard was dead.

That night and the following day, those suspected of involvement in the killing were moved from South Block’s C-section, where they’d been confined, to the Adjustment Center. Jarvis apparently wasn’t a suspect, because he was left alone. Prior to the murder he’d had unusual freedom of movement as a “tier tender,” and that privilege continued. When other prisoners in the block were locked in their cells, Jarvis swept and mopped tiers, delivered dinner trays, and scrubbed supply room walls.

Six months later, Jarvis and other inmates were watching a football game when another prisoner yelled out for Jarvis to switch to a news channel. When he did, he saw his face alongside those of two other BGF members. A newscaster reported that the killers of the San Quentin correctional officer had been identified.

The next morning, Jarvis was moved to the AC, and a guard delivered a notice informing him that he was being charged with participating in the Burchfield murder. He suspected that he’d been framed by the same renegade gang member who planned the murder, because Jarvis was known to be a loyal soldier who wouldn’t break the BGF code, which forbade speaking about any of the organization’s members or activities. The price he paid for his loyalty was a charge for a crime with “special circumstances”—the killing of a police officer—that could result in his execution.

The murder trial began in 1989. On the mornings court was in session, Jarvis changed from prison denim into an orange jumpsuit. He was shackled with leg irons, handcuffs, and a chain around his waist and moved from his cell to a California Department of Corrections van, which took him to the blue-domed, Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Marin County Civic Center. He sat alongside his lawyers in a wood-paneled courtroom.

In preliminary hearings, Jarvis’s attorneys filed a series of motions, but Marin County Superior Court justice Beverly Savitt ruled mostly against him. Then came jury selection, which was also inauspicious. Jarvis’s attorneys quickly used up all their peremptory challenges. In the end, all but one juror was white, and all of them supported the death penalty.

Jarvis hunched in his chair while lawyers and witnesses talked about him as if he weren’t there. Sometimes he looked up at the judge and saw kindness, almost motherly concern, but other times she looked right through him. He told Melody that the trial felt like “one nail in my coffin after another.”

2

Breathing, Sitting

After months of work on the mitigation report, Melody brought Jarvis a draft, which he read that night. When he finished, he was livid.

He wrote Melody a venomous diatribe: “You smile to my face and write about me like a dog. The police basically would have written the same things you wrote.” He told her he never wanted to see her again.

Jarvis couldn’t believe he’d trusted Melody. How many times did he have to learn he couldn’t trust anyone?

Still boiling with rage, he picked up the report and read it again the next day. The further he read the worse he felt—hotter and angrier and sicker. Then, midway through, he had a horrifying epiphany: Melody hadn’t turned against him. She’d done her job. She’d pieced together an accurate account of his life and reported the truth. The truth was what enraged him.

Melody described his mother as a prostitute who’d had men come to the house; her neglect; his father’s violence, and then his father leaving. She reported his stepfather Otis’s frequent beatings and the unremitting physical abuse Jarivs had endured in foster homes and state institutions.

Where was he in those stories? He’d been passive, hiding, afraid.

He’d spent his whole life proving that he wasn’t a victim, but Melody’s report showed that that was exactly what he was.

Jarvis sat on the bunk, reeling and nauseous. Then he thought about the vicious letter he’d sent Melody.

He wrote her again. “I have a tendency to react,” he said. “Historically these kinds of reactions have been the worst mistakes I’ve made…. I’m fucking up. I apologize.”

“I have a lot of trust in your better nature, Jarvis,” Melody responded. “Your true self will always arise and open your heart. I know you’ll be mad at me again—there are hard times coming—it’s a hard and scary case. But if you stay committed, I will. I will never let you down.”

Melody’s letter calmed him. He was also relieved when he heard from Carlette. She, too, accepted his apology and said she’d visit soon.

Jarvis’s relief was fleeting. The trial dragged on, and not only did he worry about the eventual judgment but also, every day, his survival. On the tier, he was vulnerable to the whims of guards, who weren’t waiting for a verdict to punish him; they considered the charge enough proof that he’d been involved in the plot to kill their colleague. Guards ransacked his cell, ostensibly conducting random searches, and confiscated his few possessions. Once, an officer escorting Jarvis to the showers pushed him down a flight of stairs, professing that it was an accident.

Melody visited the day after the guard’s assault, and she saw the anguish in Jarvis’s eyes. She said to herself, “There has to be something I can do.”

Back when Melody tore her Achilles tendon, a doctor recommended she try meditating to ease the pain. She attended a class and found that it did help. And something unexpected happened: memories of her troubled childhood flooded her mind. She recalled her mother grabbing her and shaking her violently. She relived losing her child and thought of her beloved baby sister, who had inherited the worst of their mother’s depression. In spite of her own trauma, Melody had pulled it together, but her sister never did. One day while she was drunk, she fell, hit her head, and died. Melody never recovered from the loss.

Melody confided all that to a teacher at a Berkeley meditation center who taught her a technique he said could help her face her childhood trauma, accept her sister’s death, and move on. He told her to meditate on the experiences from a safe distance and imagine them unfolding before her eyes. He told her to repeat the meditation often. “Over time, the memories lose their power,” he promised.

Each morning when Melody meditated, she used the technique, and a lifetime of repressed grief erupted. She felt her sister’s death and other losses. She watched her mother’s violence. Over time, the memories did lose their power. Meditating helped her face and release the anger, guilt, and resentment she’d carried since childhood.

Recalling her experience, Melody suggested that Jarvis try meditating with her. “It’s helping me,” she said. “Maybe it’ll help you.”

Jarvis looked at her in disbelief. “That’s what you got for me? In this place? They’re trying to kill me, and you want me to meditate?”

They let the subject drop, but on another visit, Jarvis looked fatigued and miserable. He stared down at his hands, balled into fists. They sat in silence for a while until Jarvis spoke so softly that Melody could barely hear him. He looked at her and asked if she really thought “that meditation shit” could help.

“It might,” she said. “I think it can. As I said, it’s helping me. Can we just try?” She instructed him: “All you do is sit quietly with a straight spine, close your eyes, breathe, and pay attention to your breath as it flows in and out. That’s all. Just feel your chest rise when you breathe in, and feel it fall when you breathe out. When your mind wanders, return your attention to your breath.”

Jarvis looked up at her with fire in his eyes. “Sit? Close my eyes? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

She didn’t understand.

“If you want to survive in here, you don’t close your eyes,” he said. “You want to see everything. Your life depends on it. And you do not sit. On the yard, you are always ready to defend yourself. When you’re sitting, you have no legs.”

“I get it,” Melody said, “but no one will know. You’ll be hidden in your cell.”

He countered, “You don’t understand. This isn’t just about where I am but who I am. I do not sit. I do not close my eyes.”

She let him calm down for a moment, and she said, “Maybe you can try. Just try. We’ll sit here for five minutes. That’s all. Just breathe deep and slow, slowly in, and slowly out.”

He was no less comfortable closing his eyes, but he wanted to please Melody, because he still worried that she’d abandon him. He didn’t say anything, but he did close his eyes. He opened them and looked around warily, then closed them again and took a breath.

Nights were hardest. “Sleep doesn’t come when you live surrounded by wall-to-wall enemies and the threat of poison gas filling your lungs,” he wrote Melody.

When he did fall asleep, Jarvis had nightmares. In one dream, he was in the gas chamber. He’d seen pictures of the room, steel like a diving bell or space module, sea green, with hermetically sealed hatches and thick glass portholes. He was strapped down and awaiting the poison. Petrified, he looked over at the executioner. Jarvis focused on the man’s face. It was his own.

Jarvis tried to meditate in his cell. There wasn’t much space in the four-and-a-half-by-ten-and-a-half-foot rectangle, but between the bed and toilet he found room to place a folded blanket on the floor. He sat straight with his legs crossed, closed his eyes, and breathed. When his mind wandered, he brought it back to his breath. He was unsure if he was doing it right. In spite of the blanket, the floor was hard and cold.

He was distracted by the noise on the tier and the chatter in his head. What were the cons shouting about? What slop would be served for dinner? He fixated on the trial: he envisioned being convicted, sentenced, and executed.

When Jarvis described the experience to Melody, she repeated advice from her teacher that had helped her: “When those thoughts come, gently push them away.” Jarvis tried that technique. He had a literal image of pushing the bad thoughts away. “I don’t need you,” he said as he swept one aside. “I don’t need you,” when another came. He made it through five minutes. Then ten. He tried it the next morning and the next.

He found that meditation calmed him. However, sometimes when he meditated, instead of serenity he felt panic. His heart would pound, and his breathing would quicken. Sometimes he saw and felt things like in a nightmare. Monsters, roaches, and the screams of deranged cons filled his head. He thought of the men in San Quentin—his neighbors. He thought of their crimes. They were men who’d lit their parents on fire, raped, cut up victims. He was almost choking, gasping for breath.

He decided to quit. But he didn’t. He tried again. He breathed in and breathed out. At first he did it for Melody, but he continued for himself. He was scared and enraged—and desperate—and he didn’t know what else he could do to try to cope.

Melody repeated another instruction from her teacher: “When you begin to panic, picture the upsetting events and feel the uncomfortable feelings from a safe distance. Instead of being inside them, you can watch them come. If you watch them come, you can watch them go.” The teacher had said to remember that “fear is a thought, and thoughts can’t hurt you. Thoughts can’t kill you.”

Sometimes Jarvis glimpsed the profundity of that advice, but holding on to it was like trying to hold on to water. Melody assured him that understanding would come, and her prescription was always the same: practice.

He did practice. He’d go to a dark place—his chest would pound—but if he remembered to concentrate on his breath, his heart slowed. When fear flooded him, if he recalled the teacher’s words—“Fear is a thought, and thoughts can’t hurt you”—the fear lessened.

Occasionally Jarvis emerged from meditation feeling energized. It made him feel … what? It made him feel—the thought startled him—better than he’d ever felt before in his life. He was on trial for murder and could be condemned, yet he felt a lightness and optimism that would last throughout the morning.

And so he kept going.

Every morning. Roused himself. Folded the blanket and placed it on the floor. Sat with his legs crossed. Corrected his posture, straightening his spine.

Inhaled.

Slowly.

Concentrated on the air as it filled his lungs, and, when his lungs were full, held in the air, feeling it swirl inside, and then, slowly, slowly, let it flow out.

Sometimes he tried to meditate but couldn’t concentrate on his breath or still his mind. Then anger welled up inside him again: the unfairness, the betrayal, his inability to speak out.

He sometimes felt like a fool to even try. Once he thought dismissively, “I may be sentenced to death, and I’m sitting here breathing?”

But he pondered that notion for a moment more, and it transformed itself in an extraordinary way: I may be sentenced to death, and I’m sitting here breathing! He felt something like hope.