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ROYCE MURPHY
by BUD TANT
Wednesday Afternoon
July 12, 1989
Royce Murphy,
#61756, arrived at the Cummins Unit back in 1961. He was sentenced to five
years for burglary. He was a slight young man who had a speech impediment
and chose silence to ridicule. He didn't make friends easily and didn't
fit into any of the prison cliques.
Royce Murphy was alone as he
bent over his hoe under the watchful eyes of the longline rider. He
suffered in silence.
Royce was small and a mere nineteen years
old. He didn't shave, and when he dared to talk his voice was as meek and
small as he was.
One night a big gang banger came to his bunk with
a shank and took Royce's manhood. He also took Royce's left eye during the
fight that proceeded the violent sex. Royce suffered in silence. He didn't
even go to the Infirmary to have his eye checked. Royce had no money and
knew that without something to pay The Man, the chances of them doing
anything for his eye were slim.
I doubt if Royce slept that night.
I imagine the misery of his punctured eye mixed with the bitter tears
running down his cheeks as he laid there, again, suffering in silence. But
quiet men have loud thoughts, and Royce was screaming inside his head.
The next day Royce found a shank of his own and also placed a
patch where his left eye should have been. He stood in the auditorium
waiting for gangster to leave the chow hall. When Royce saw him walking
out the door and saw that he wasn't paying attention to anything except
the line of bullshit he was throwing on one of his companions, Royce made
his move. Now, there's a great deal of controversy surrounding exactly how
many times Royce stabbed that gang banger, but suffice to say he mutilated
the man in front of dozens of witnesses.
Royce was charged with
first degree murder. He was a quiet man and had difficulty expressing his
thoughts, even when he wanted to. But, still it was the early 60s in
Arkansas, and he was white. He was spared by the jury, although he lost
all of his good time and had to serve another couple of years.
Most folks left Royce to his thoughts after the exhibition he put
on in front of so many witnesses, but Time has a way of erasing memories,
and in prison violent memories mean respect. Royce's eye turned white and
he was jeered at by the other prisoners. He became quite sensitive about
his white eye.
The Captain's pet was a huge, white trusty and he
was tough. He was one of the inmates in charge of handing out the daily
whippings with the big leather paddle. He was "untouchable". To hit him
would be tantamount to striking the Yard Captain.
One day the Yard
Captain's pet snitch called him a one-eyed punk. Royce told him never to
call him that again. The Captain's pet just laughed at him.
Royce
went to his barracks and retrieved the long shank he had so carefully
concealed behind some loose bricks in the wall, and returned to the Yard
Desk. Royce slashed and stabbed the trusty untold times until the desk was
covered by blood and the trusty had quit trying to fend off the knife's
blows.
Royce Murphy, of slight stature and impeded speech had
killed for the second time in a year. He had killed a white trusty inmate
in full view of the guards. Royce was in trouble.
Royce was again
charged with first degree murder and taken to trial. The prosecutor
painted a vicious picture for the jury. Royce became a cold killer in the
eyes of the jurors, and the prosecutor prayed that those jurors and the
Good Lord would pass sentence preventing Royce from ever endangering the
public again.
Royce sat silently, shielding his white, sightless
eye from the jury's view. His slight build had by this time diminished to
115 pounds while he was held in the hole awaiting trial. In those days the
inmates were fed a "grue" loaf once a day. That's a bland mixture of
vegetables and corn meal baked in an oven and then placed in a
refrigerator so that it's cold and tasteless.
The jury returned a
verdict of "guilty" and recommended that Royce receive a life sentence.
The judge concurred and Royce was returned to his concrete world to suffer
in silence.
Some time in 1980 Mr. Lockhart must have suffered a
feeling of guilt, because he ordered the Cummins Warden to release Royce
from the hole and put him in a single cell in 2 barracks. He told the
Warden to leave Royce alone, he had suffered enough. He told him not to
assign Royce a job or fool with him in any way.
Royce couldn't
believe his good luck as he walked out of the hole and onto the green
prison exercise yard for the first time in more than 10 years. At first it
was all he could do to walk. The old timers say he looked like a ghost as
he stumbled around the big yard, squinting with his one good eye from the
bright Arkansas sun. He weighed 110 pounds and was 6 feet tall when the
doctor filled out the form releasing him from isolation.
The days
passed and Royce spent every second he could on the yard. His walking had
turned into a slow jog, and he moved around the big yard as incessantly as
the Earth revolves around the sun. He ran and he ran. He ran for hours and
he would have run for days had they not made everyone leave the yard at
the end of each day. He somehow never lost his pallor, and the old timers
say Royce's spirit left that shell of a body years ago and that now the
body is weightless. He ran as if he weighed no more than a sheet.
In 1985 Royce's mother died. She was a poor widow from the hills
of Northern Arkansas and she had only been to visit Royce once in the more
than 10 years he had spent in isolation.
I was living in the room
next to Royce when his message from the Chaplain's office arrived. Royce
didn't go outside for several days. He just sat on his steel bunk staring
at the wall with water running from his one good eye.
An aunt of
Royce's came to see him shortly after his mother's funeral. She had
promised Royce's mother that she would deliver a message to the maddened
person she always thought Royce was, and as he turned out to be. She took
Royce a present to remember his mother by. She took Royce a big black
Bible that his mother had used to record landmark dates and events in the
life of her family.
Royce didn't stay in the visiting room long.
He came back to his room clutching the Bible his mother had clutched in
her moments of crisis. He held the Bible his mother had held during her
hours of pain. He held that Bible until it was wet with the tears of his
one good eye, and then he began reading the soggy pages.
Royce
only went to the yard once more after he read that soggy book. When he
came in from the yard that last day, he ran. God was waiting for him in
his cell. God spoke to Royce and told him to stay in his cell until He
called him out. He told Royce that his speech would be sweet as music and
his thoughts would flow with the ease and purity of a mountain stream. He
told Royce that it was up to him to spread His word to anyone who might
visit Royce's room. Royce has only left his room to eat since God talked
to him.
I talk to Royce all the time. He speaks with a quiet
conviction and his thoughts and words fall as softly as autumn leaves on
my ears each time I speak with him.
Royce's mother left him a
little more than two hundred dollars, too. He knew it was the last money
he would receive in the mail, so he prayed on what to do with it so that
it would grow and not disappear. God came to him a couple of days after he
received the money and had begun praying and again spoke with my one-eyed
friend. He told Royce that He wanted Royce to work on radios so that
people would come to his cell and be ministered to.
Royce knew
absolutely nothing about radio repair, but he ordered a $15.00 meter, some
solder and a soldering gun, then just sat back and waited.
I don't
know of a problem a radio can have that Royce can't fix. I don't
understand it, either because Royce is quiet and is not predisposed to
lying or even rationalizing anything. Royce told me in his quiet, simple
way that God taught him to work on radios.
Royce Murphy is in his
cell, even as I type this. He's waiting for whoever walks through his
door, and he's hoping that God will return to tell him it's ok to go
outside again. I know how he longs for that Word because I see him staring
out his window at the blue sky, green grass and yellow sun.
I
don't know God, or I'd insist that he give Royce permission to go outside.
If anything should happen to me in this place and if it turns out there IS
a God; if I have an audience with him, one of the first things I'm going
to ask him is if he'll let Royce go outside and play.
...Just
reporting history...
Blood Cows
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