Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Aileen Wuornos. A witch, a pirate, a slave who poisoned her master. A serial killer, a Quaker, a case of mistaken identity. The earliest to be electrocuted, gassed, and lethally injected; the last to be publicly hanged. In her first book, Habeas Corpus, acclaimed poet Jill McDonough gives us fifty sonnets, each about a legal execution in American history. From four hundred years of documentation she conjures – and honors – a chorus of the dead. The sonnets, headed meticulously by name, date, and place, are poignant with the factual, with words and actions reported by eyewitnesses and spoken by the condemned – so limpidly framed that at moments one forgets the skill that tautens and crystallizes all this into authentic poetry:
The warehouse was dingy, cluttered with lumber:
thirteen steps, noose, black mask. No hymn, no psalm.
He spat out his gum in the chaplain’s outstretched palm.
Habeas Corpus: you have the body. With a rare control of indignation by sorrow, of subjectivity by the subject’s own truth, McDonough’s unsparing sonnets reveal the enormity that is the death penalty in America: “a ladder, a hanging tree” for Mary Dyer, “an odor he'd/described in print as peach blossoms, sickening-sweet” for Caryl Chessman, “a hood, their/target, then bang, bang, bang, three noises, quick” for Gary Gilmore, “Two needles in his arm,/blood splatters on the sheet” for Charles Brooks. Taking the words of fifty out of the nearly 20,000 men and women executed since 1608, she reflects them back to us in works of self-effacing artistry. Resurrected from their obscurity these individuals speak our secret history.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Early 1608: George Kendall
October 22, 1659: Mary Dyer
June 1, 1660: Mary Dyer
July 19, 1692: Susanna Martin
June 4, 1715: Margaret Gaulacher
July 12, 1726: William Fly
February 25, 1755: Tom, a Negro
September 18, 1755: Mark and Phillis
October 21, 1773: Levi Ames
April 11, 1778: Aaaran
October 8, 1789: Rachel Wall
July 8, 1797: Abraham Johnstone
July 9, 1819: Rose Butler
April 25, 1822: Samuel Green
April 22, 1831: Charles Gibbs
November 11, 1831: Nat Turner
January 31, 1850: Reuben Dunbar
August 30, 1850: Professor John W. Webster
December 2, 1859: John Brown
December 26, 1862: Chaska
June 19, 1863: Private William Grover
April 22, 1864: Corporal William B. Jones
July 7, 1865: Mary Eugenia Surratt
November 10, 1865: Major Henry Wirz
December 12, 1884: George Cooke
August 6, 1890: William Kemmler
June 28, 1895: Michael McDonough
October 29, 1901: Leon Czolgosz
June 9, 1916: Juan Sanchez
February 8, 1924: Gee Jon
August 23, 1927: Nicola Sacco
August 23, 1927: Bartolomeo Vanzetti
August 14, 1936: Rainey Bethea
January 31, 1945: Private Eddie D. Slovik
May 3, 1946: Willie Francis
May 9, 1947: Willie Francis
June 19, 1953: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
May 2, 1960: Caryl Chessman
April 14, 1965: Perry Smith
January 17, 1977: Gary Gilmore
December 7, 1982: Charles Brooks
April 16, 1986: Daniel Morris Thomas
May 21, 1997: Bruce Edwin Callins
June 22, 2000: Gary Graham, later known as Shaka Sankofa
August 9, 2000: Brian Roberson
August 9, 2000: Oliver Cruz
June 11, 2001: Timothy McVeigh
October 9, 2002: Aileen Wuornos
September 3, 2003: Paul Hill
May 13, 2005: Michael Ross
Notes
