Osler's Razor

Next week, on Sunday, I will write about a book that Prof. Joanne Braxton gave me, Ernest J. Gaines's "A Lesson Before Dying."  It is about a man in prison, condemned to die.  It is set in a time when  black Americans saw Joe Louis, the boxer from Detroit, as the kind of hero we find hard to imagine anymore.

In one of the more painful passages of the book, Gaines describes a young man about to be executed:

And my mind went back to that cell uptown, then to another cell, somewhere in Florida.  After reading about the execution there, I had dreamed about it over and over and over.  As vividly as if I were there, I had seen that cell, heard that boy crying while being dragged to that chair, "Please, Joe Louis, help me.  Please help me.  Help me."  And after he had been strapped in the chair, the man who wrote the story could still hear him cry "Mr. Joe Louis help me, Mr. Joe Louis help me."

I'm no Joe Louis, but we have one thing in common.

I was gone this summer, and my mail piled up.  I have spent part of this week sorting through it all, and there is one large pile of similar letters.  I get them often.  They are in white rectangular envelopes, with neat pencil addresses on the front:

"Dr. Mark Osler, Professor of Law"
"Prof. Mark Osler, Lawyer"
"Professor Mark Osler, Esq."

Inside, carefully handwritten, is a story.  It is always a tragic story.  They are from men, and sometimes women, who are in prison for life or a very long term.  They have exhausted their appeals.  They have no more hope through a habeas petition.  So they write to me.  They think I will know a way to get them out of prison, after 20 or 27 or 35 years there for a narcotics case no one but them remembers.

Sometimes, the letter is not from a prisoner.  It is from a wife who has been alone those 20 years, or a despairing sister, or a pastor who has seen too many families dissolve.

They often begin their letter by explaining why they chose me to write to.  Sometimes, often, they have read something I have written, something like the things I wrote in the past week.  Other times, they know someone our clinic has helped.  More often than I am comfortable with, they say "I know you are a Christian man...."

I can't help them, usually, not in the way they want.  The answer is nearly always "no."

It is a compliment, I suppose, that they write to me, but the appearance of these letters fill me with dread.  It is exhausting, emotionally, to read the stories, even to see the painstaking handwriting or the row of stamps purchased with prison wages of 45 cents an hour.  I feel guilty just to hold them in my hand.

I am about as much good to nearly all of them as Joe Louis was to the young man being strapped to that chair.

Or, maybe not.

Maybe, if we keep fighting there will be a change, a movement towards mercy, towards the good, a reform of what clemency means.  Perhaps we can win at wholesale what I cannot give them at retail.  Maybe.  There is some bit of hope.  Maybe.

Still, every stamp hurts my soul.  I need grace to open my mail.  I need forgiveness to get through the day.  It is never enough.  My words are never enough, and I always know that the next day, the nest week, there will be another letter addressed to me in neat pencil letters because the river of tragedy will flow and flow and flow.