Haunted by His Time on Death Row, Inmate Escapes Through His Poetry

Johnnie L. Johnson knows what it’s like to be on Death Row, alone with his thoughts in the middle of the night.

A thin man with pale skin and long sideburns, he spent 12 1/2 years--one-third of his life--on “the row” for his role in the 1973 slaying of a Savannah, Ga., woman, a killing that he claims stemmed from a busted drug deal.

“On Death Row it’s the waiting that really gets to you,” Johnson said during an interview at the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville. “You feel so helpless. All you can do is sit there in your cell while some judge somewhere looks at your appeal and decides if you live or die.

“I used to stare at the wall of my cell for hours. I’d look at it for so long that pictures would start to appear on the wall and then--and I know this sounds crazy--but the pictures would start to move.”

Imaginary images are not only a torment, however. Johnson’s imagination has helped him escape--through the prize-winning poetry he writes.

Still, prison officials say he is known best not as a writer but as a Death Row inmate who escaped--literally--in 1980.

Wearing makeshift guard uniforms fashioned from pajamas, Johnson and three other inmates broke out with outside help.

“The dye for the uniforms arrived in some stereo headphones, and the hacksaw blades were in the handle of a portable radio,” he said.

“We sawed through the screen on an air vent and climbed through the vent to the roof. Then, we walked across the roof of the prison, in plain sight of the guard tower.”

He said they drove off in a car that had been left for them nearby.

“I was never so scared in my life,” Johnson recalled. “We were pretending to be inspecting the roof; I was sure the sniper in that tower would start shooting at any minute.”

They were recaptured three days later in Charlotte, N.C.

During the long, bleak hours following his recapture Johnson began writing poetry. He says it was an effort to keep from going “stir crazy.”

“Poetry was my safety valve on Death Row. You might be surprised to know that quite a few of the inmates here write poetry.”

The subjects are the same as those taken up by poets who aren’t behind bars, Johnson says. “Unrequited love, how you feel about things, how people feel about you.”

Once a “hell-raising kid” from Beaufort, S.C., Johnson has had plenty of time to think about such things.

“I come from a good family but I got into drugs in the 7th grade and went downhill,” Johnson says. “I quit school in the 10th grade and was on Death Row before I was 21.”

“At my trial my lawyer told me to plead guilty and I’d get a life sentence,” he recalls. “But an election was coming up and the judge sentenced me to die.”

In a poem called “Maturity,” Johnson writes:

Were we so wise

as we lived by

the needle and the gun?

Is it really living

when one comes

so near self-destruction?

In 1986 an appellate court ruled that Johnson had not had adequate legal counsel at his trial. His death sentence was overturned and he is now serving a life sentence.

In his poem, “Cellmate,” he likens his situation to that of the tiny spider he discovers living in a remote corner of his Death Row cubicle. The poem won the top award in a national prison publications contest sponsored by the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale School of Journalism in 1987.

The spider, he says in the poem:

sits behind his sticky desk

like a fat pompous official

a tyrant who dictates to those below

and so someday

when his antics no longer please

and I have grown tired of his presence

his whole world will be swept away

with one swish of the broom

and this cell which some call a room

will be more empty without him

... I wonder would he be consoled

if he knew that I too await my fate

and wonder what broom

will sweep me away and how soon

Alice Stewart, the Marietta, Ga., attorney whose work got Johnson’s sentence overturned, said: “He has managed to deal with his anxiety pretty well, for the most part.”

Johnson, who spends his days making license plates, said the hope that he will get out of prison someday keeps him going. He has taken college courses while in prison and hopes to get a degree.

“Meanwhile,” he says, “I’ve got a life of sorts here, now that I’m off Death Row. I work, I interact with people.

“And then, too, there’s always writing, or reading. I can get so involved writing, or reading a good book, that the walls disappear; I’m not even here.”