A very particular humanity

I admit that I rolled my eyes when I saw the subtitle of Suzanne Craig Robertson’s memoir about her family’s friendship with an incarcerated Tennessee man, Cecil C. Johnson Jr., in the decades before his execution in 2009. “A true story of finding humanity on death row” seemed to imply that Robertson went to death row unaware that there was any humanity there. How predictable, I grumbled to myself, that a White Baptist who works for the Tennessee Bar Association would have to learn through experience that someone living on death row is actually human.

In some sense, Robertson plays up the narrative of a naive and sheltered southerner being pulled into an unexpected relationship that sparks a conversion to a more expansive, more gracious worldview. This makes the book ideal for discussion by groups whose members embody various backgrounds, cultural contexts, and political convictions. There is enough doubt about Johnson’s guilt that even readers in favor of capital punishment will be sympathetic to Robertson’s belief that Johnson’s execution was unjust.

But something else is happening in He Called Me Sister, although I didn’t see it until I got to the part where Robertson quotes Johnson’s own writing. In his memoir (a 50-page, single-spaced text written on a typewriter with a fading ribbon, annotated with a blue pen, and mailed to Robertson in a manila envelope), Johnson recalls a childhood memory: