We buried Robert Sutten on one of those August mornings that stick to you like a guilty conscience.  The docs said his liver gave out.  I suppose that little organ quit in protest after all those years of filtering the toxins of decades of sin.

                But Robert’s spirit . . . well, that was another story entirely.  If a choir of angels had descended on the funeral at Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church to offer up a song of the redeemed they could scarcely have trilled a sweeter note than Robert’s life sang.  Or the last 15 or so of his 60 years, anyway.

                I met Robert about 10 years before he died.  My first recollection of him comes from a meeting at the Carol Vance Unit, which houses Prison Fellowship’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative program.  I was sitting in on a session of Sycamore Tree, a ministry that guides inmates in taking responsibility for their wrong deeds and squaring things, as far as possible, with those they have hurt.

                Linda Barnes, a white lady of about 60 whose daughter had been murdered, is running the meeting, which will eventually break up into smaller groups.  Robert will lead one of those.  Sycamore Tree – its inspiration is Zacchaeus of Luke 19, like Robert a little man who had done great wrong -- was the component of the IFI program he had liked best when he was last inside; now he comes in as a volunteer facilitator.

Sixty felons wearing state-issue white sit on folding chairs arranged in neat rows on the chipped vinyl tile of Day Room B.  The pre-meeting hum has a keener pitch than usual.  Linda, reading the room from the lectern, can see that if she wants to capture the prisoners in her charge she must acknowledge the dark cherub seated on the center aisle, front row.  She puts on her exasperated look.

“Robert, come on up here,” she says.

He is wearing dark slacks and a pullover shirt.  And he wears his smile, the smile that says everthin’s awright and everthin’s gonna be awright.

“You don’t want me up there,” Robert says.

“Ro-bert,” Linda replies, playing along.

“You don’t want me up there.  I get up there an’ start talkin’ I might not stop.”  He speaks in a soft drawl.

Linda, hands on hips now, staring at him.  “Robert, where you been?”

The hum rising, 60 men in white fastened on the scene playing out before them.

Robert gets to his feet and takes the few steps to the lectern, turns around to face the crowd.  Smiling even bigger now, he says, “Where I been?  Where I been?  You wanna know where I been?”

Sixty men grinning ear-splitting grins, a couple punching their neighbors on the arm.  They all know where he been.

He been to the White House, seen the president.

“Where I been?” Robert says, milking it hard.  “I tell you where I been.  I been in Third Ward, Tex-us.”

Whoops and cheers, back slaps, chairs scraping, peals of laughter.  “Where he been?  Where he been?  He say he been in Third Ward, Tex-us.”

It’s a frat party without the keg, the $200 loafers and the pricey lawyers on Daddy’s speed dial.  Some of them aren’t even criminals in any useful sense of the word.  They have driven drunk and hurt someone or kited some checks to impress a girl.  They know as much about the predations of a man like Robert as they do about Sophocles.  But he been to the White House, seen the president.

Robert is smiling.  Linda is wearing her deadpan how-will-I-ever-get-control look.  The metal door swings open and a guard walks through, a big black man in the gray uniform carrying a clipboard.  He surveys the scene and puts on his what-kind-of-damn-prison-is-this scowl.

“Count time!” he growls, and the room begins to subside.  Men begin singing out, “4-17 . . . 3 West top . . .” The guard ticks off billets on his sheet.  Robert returns to his seat.  Linda gets her meeting back.

                Robert had indeed just visited the White House and seen the president, George W. Bush.  He was in a frolicsome mood not because that visit inflated his importance but because he enjoyed his brief time with a man he considered a friend.  Smack in the Roosevelt Room, in fact, he had planted a kiss on the presidential cheek, right in front of two cabinet secretaries and other dignitaries, and received a warm hug and a smile in return.

                They had met in 1997.  Chuck Colson, the man who came to saving faith while in a federal prison for his role in the misdeeds of Richard Nixon’s White House and launched Prison Fellowship upon his release, went to Brazil and saw a Christian-run prison he had heard about.  Convinced that this was the way to change men’s lives, he scoured the states in an effort to implement a similar program in the U. S.  One after another turned him down -- until he decided to try Texas, which had a governor who wore his religion on his sleeve.  George W. Bush had been listening to Marvin Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor who had written extensively on the community spirit, and actions, of a more Christian America of a bygone day.  Bush wanted to see faith spring into action and he gave Colson an enthusiastic welcome and a green light.  IFI began at the unit near Sugar Land, on the edge of Houston, in 1997.

                When Bush came to the official opening to see what Colson had wrought with his help, the inmates assembled in the yard in his honor and began belting out “Amazing Grace.”  The governor chimed right in and, moved either by the Holy Spirit or a photo op, he threw an arm around the shoulders of a nearby prisoner who was half-a-head shorter than he.  The man responded in kind and there they were, frozen in brotherhood, in the picture that ran on page one of the Houston Chronicle the next day.  The story explained that Bush was singing along with a convicted murder.

                On his White House visit, Robert asked the president if he would have picked him had he known what crime he was in for.  The president smiled and said, well, maybe not.  Robert had simply been handy.  A smooth play by a smooth politician?  Perhaps.  But as Bush’s career advanced, IFI officials received occasional notes, first from Austin and then from Washington, asking how Robert was doing.  No publicity, no requests for anything but information.  Robert O.K.?  Then just before Christmas 2001 Robert, by now out on parole, received a letter on White House stationery at his home in the inner city area known as Third Ward:

Dear Robert:

I heard from a friend that you are doing well.  I hope this note will serve as encouragement to maintain your walk with God.

I am proud of the changes and good choices you have made.

Sincerely,

George W. Bush

                Yes, Robert called the president a friend.  He would call at the White House two more times during Bush’s tenure. There was a great deal more, however, that his friend did not know about him.  Robert was serving his fourth stretch in Texas prisons.  The prosecutor had first gone for a habitual criminal enhancement, which would have put him away for life, but in the end traded it away for a no-contest plea.  Robert had shot his common-law wife Francine – “good-lookin’ high-yellow gal from Looziana,” recalled another inmate from Third Ward – in the head.  Robert told the police he didn’t know how the .357 went off, but he did.  Such details as motive lacked relevance, anyway.  The judge gave him 35 years for shooting Francine in the head.  His rap sheet argued more eloquently than any prosecutor ever could.  Years later, Robert admitted he did know how the pistol fired.  He was “jes’ playin.’”

                It’s what he did.  Robert’s life was about having fun, and fun only happened when sex, drugs, weapons, or some combination of those was involved.  When Robert had fun, someone often died.  And there was no point in asking how many.  I did pose the question once.  We were riding around Third Ward in his pickup and he was pointing out the sites of his old exploits like a tour guide droning, “Now coming into view on your left, the house where Mr. Lincoln’s law partner lived . . .”  What Robert actually said was, “We used to have a little habit of goin’ ‘round shootin’ at people.  Jes’ like they do drive-bys now.  We were doin’ somethin’ like that way back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  As far as knowin’ who or how many, I don’t know.  We went to football games and had fights and cut folks up with machete knives.”

                Back in the day when Robert ran the streets, the white cops rarely answered a call from Third Ward and the black cops would just shake everybody down.  “They’d take your money and your drugs,” Robert said.  On any given street corner, the law was what the baddest dude said it was.  And Robert franchised his operation.  I never did get him to open up about how he maintained his malevolent presence when so many other bad guys coveted the same turf.  Maybe he didn’t understand it himself.  If it’s a guess you must have, I think the chaos out there on those corners has a logic all its own that no mortal can penetrate.  One thing I’m fairly sure of is that distilled evil, the kind that never considers pity or remorse, radiates a menace that would curl the toes of many a murderer.  If you’ve ever seen a movie titled “No Country for Old Men” you might have an idea what I mean.  Some fake it.  But not Robert.

                I did ask around.  In a Texas prison, you don’t need a bloodhound to track down somebody from Third Ward, which squats in the shadows of the skyscrapers, wedged in between downtown and the University of Houston.  And on a different planet.  Upstanding citizens, if they think of it at all, associate the place with Barbara Jordan and Lightnin’ Hopkins, the blues legend who lived on Dowling Street and played the joints that lined it.  The section of Third Ward Robert called home was known as the Bottom – nobody today seems to know why – and Hopkins recorded a song titled “Down in The Bottom” about his own life of lovin’ and leavin’ and cryin’ and dyin’ and doin’ time.  And Robert’s:

Well now meet me in the bottom,

Bring me my running shoes.

Yeah now, meet me in the bottom,

Bring me my running shoes.

When I come out the window,

I’m gonna have time to lose.

When you see me streakin’ by,

Please don’t believe.

When you see me streakin’ by,

Please don’t believe.

When you see me coming baby

You know my life is at stake.

Yeah now I hope you’ll see me

When I come streakin’ by.

Well I hope you’ll see me,

When I come streakin’ by.

She got a bad old man, you know

And I’m too young to die.

                One inmate told me, “I don’t know where that name came from, I just know my great-grandmother called it the same thing, the Bottom.  And that’s where everythin’ really went on, down off in that Bottom.”

If you go down there today, you’ll see people in bathroom slippers shuffling along wearing the look of horror-movie trances, collecting on vacant lots carrying bottles in brown paper bags and conducting various transactions.  They disappear into empty houses that seem as far past any hope of rehab as the people.  Every now and then, the city sends a crew over to knock one down and the human amoeba oozes over a block or so and forms itself anew, trailing its flotsam of bags and bottles and syringes and grocery carts.  Folks say that in Robert’s youth the Bottom was a much worse place.  People were meaner then.

It’s hard to say which there are more of, crack houses or churches.  Some purely unbiblical stuff goes on in both, but no one is beyond redemption.  Robert proved that.  Well, God did.

One inmate from Third Ward, Roy White, was a few years younger than Robert.  A tall, lean man with large hands, Roy worked at a junkyard some relatives owned and never got in trouble with the law until he was 27.  One day his girlfriend and another girl came by and asked if he wanted to smoke some weed.  Roy had been smoking weed since junior high.  He started to roll a joint but they giggled and his girlfriend said, “No, you ain’t got to use yours.  Smoke this here.”  It was laced with cocaine.  From that day forward, Roy was in lots of trouble with the law.

Roy dwelt in an urbanscape populated by characters called Track Down, Flood, Coffee Pot, Old School Dude, Dickie Pooh.  He was just Roy.  He had a theory about how Robert maintained his overlordship on the streets.  (Roy knew Robert back then as George Mason, for a reason that will be explained.)  He didn’t raise his voice, Roy said.  He had the languid manner of a much larger man.  He even seemed polite, but when he approached, people hangin’ on the corner scrambled.  Having stashed their dope in case the cops came by – in a clump of weeds over there or under a brick down the alley – they hustled to retrieve it and flee the area before he could roll them up.  He wasn’t the only tough guy in Third Ward but an air of unleavened malice put him at the top of the cast.  People still remember – “You know how a neighborhood be buzzin’?” – the time he beat up his sister Shirley and took her money.  His own sister.  In a tangled sea of contradictions, he was an all-star.

“If you didn’t know him” said Roy,” he’s just a regular nice guy.  You know what I’m sayin’?”  “But he didn’t have no heart.  He didn’t have no heart at all.  Was nobody would hang with this dude.  If you see somebody with George, George needed that person to do somethin.’  He was usin’ him.  ‘Cause, George, ain’t nobody goin’ to help him.  You know, really.  But if you seen somebody with him, he was usin’ that person.  That person was buyin’ all the dope or somethin.’  So when you seen George Mason, if he wasn’t with Francine, George Mason was by himself.  I had never seen him with somebody else.

“You know you’ve got tough guys that’s not scared of him.  They don’t want the trouble, though.  You know what I’m sayin’?  There’s a lot of tough guys in Third Ward.  But you know one thing I’ve noticed about tough guys?  They have a mutual respect for one another.  You know, when I know you’ll kill me and you know I’ll kill you and neither one of us really want to die?  And that’s how it was.  That’s how it was. “

Roy had a homeboy named Fred.  He split with his girlfriend and Robert (George) took up with her.  He didn’t do anything wrong, Roy said, but Fred was not the sort to let things slide.  “You could see the animosity they devised.  I used to always get me and Fred away from where he was because I knew they was goin’ to kill each other, or one of them was goin’ to die.  Some way or other, I always got my friend away because he was still hurt.  This is his daughter’s mother, O.K.?  And he was hurtin’ by the breakup.  Wasn’t George’s fault, he just happened to come in the picture.  But my friend was still hurtin.’

“I know my homeboy.  If it was anybody else was messin’ with his ex besides George Mason, I know it wouldn’t have took that long (snap) for him to do somethin’ to him.  But this was George Mason.”

Robert, meanwhile, was averaging $2,000 to $3,000 a day from dealing and robbing.  Some days he brought in considerably more but it was never enough.  He had expensive tastes, including Francine.  Their relationship was complicated.  One of their former neighbors said, “She knew what not to do.”  She undoubtedly did, but that frames it too neatly.  They fought on street corners.  They got high together.  They made babies.  Robert had his commercial and recreational activities outside the home. Francine stayed to herself when he wasn’t around, mostly.  People saw her as independent, like him.  There were other men, but she knew when and where -- and why.  “If it came down to George needin’ money,” said Roy, “Francine was goin’ to go get some money for him – by any means.  Do you hear what I’m sayin’?  By any means.

“But I never seen Francine hang on a lot of people.  I think the reason why she was by herself most of the time was because of George and people not wantin’ . . . you know, ‘Man, I don’t want this fool to see me with her.’  You know what I’m sayin’?  They was a couple that couldn’t be separated.  Everybody in the neighborhood knew.  They would fall out on the corners or whatever, but they couldn’t be separated.  They loved each other.  Even if another man came into the picture, Francine wasn’t goin’ for it.  You know what I’m sayin’?  Same thing with George.  There wasn’t no woman who could take Francine’s place.”

The night Francine died, the neighborhood jury reached its verdict before she reached the morgue.  A few dissenters, people Robert had messed with, tried to make the case that he acted with malice, but everybody else believed, like Roy, he had loved her too much to shoot her intentionally.  He was probably jes’ playin.’  They also believed that when the prosecutor went after him for murder one Robert was getting what he had coming.  But in Third Ward people tend not to dwell on what should be.  You got enough trouble with what is.  Besides, it’s not like he had a lot of friends.

Robert shot Francine Michelle Jackson on the night of Aug. 31, 1985, in the apartment they shared at 2606½ Napoleon No. 1 with a blue steel .357 caliber pistol with a mahogany grip he had purchased illegally the day before.  “I have been having problems out where I live,” he would tell police, “because I jack up dope dealers from time to time to make some money.”  He paid “damn near $170 to buy the pistol and some bullets and all.”  He told the man who sold it to him that he could report it as stolen so that any crimes committed with it did not come back on him.  The seller did report the gun stolen, but not until the early hours of the next day, 2 1/2 hours after the shooting.  Such details never became an issue in court because nothing was more obvious than that Robert had shot Francine.  He did not flee, nor did he deny his act.  People in the crowd that gathered outside flagged a patrol car.  Officers found Francine on the bed with a bullet wound in her forehead.  Robert told them she had been sitting on a chair in the bedroom when he shot her.  His pistol was lying on a night stand with one spent shell in it.  Five live rounds were under the bed.  Used syringes littered the floor.  Two neighbors told police they entered the apartment and found Robert holding Francine, saying, “Don’t go, I didn’t mean it.”  The two women also said they had heard the couple arguing on other occasions and had seen Francine with a black eye.

One of them, Ina Washington, lived directly above Robert and Francine.  She said that just prior to the shooting, while in the shower, she had heard a loud argument from below and had clearly heard Francine say, “Stop, George, stop!”  After she left the shower she heard Francine scream, “George, stop!  Don’t do that!”

An anonymous informant phoned police and said that Robert and Francine had been shooting dope and arguing when Robert began playing Russian roulette, or rather a variation of it in which he pointed the gun at her head instead of his.  Years later, Robert confirmed this version.  He had been jes’ playin.’  But the facts of the case were in any event incidental to the facts of his life.  The district attorney had a small-time dealer with a long sheet which included arrests for assault and weapons dead to rights.  The charge was murder one.  The DA threatened the enhancement that would send him away for life but then dangled dropping it in exchange for the nolo plea.  When his court-appointed lawyer presented the prosecutor’s offer to Robert he reported as well that his 13-year-old daughter Tammy, the oldest of his children with Francine, was in court and prepared to testify against him.  On the night of the shooting, she had walked into the room and seen him holding her mother, blood flowing down her face.  Robert had told her to go back to her room.

Before sending Robert back to the penitentiary, the judge ordered the customary pre-sentence investigation.  One of its components is family background, including criminal history of siblings.  If anything in America’s black ghettos is unremarkable, it is family ties among felons.  Still, the probation officer who conducted the investigation found that, “Criminal history associated with siblings of the defendant is remarkable.”  One half-brother had already served three prison sentences and another was serving his third at the time.  Both were in their early 20s.  Another was in a state psychiatric hospital and had a drug dealing charge pending.  Nothing in the report indicated that Robert, who had turned 35 in the county jail while awaiting trial, might ever be anything other than an addict, dealer, and killer.  The probation officer’s evaluation:

“The Court has for its consideration a thirty-five-year-old male found guilty of Murder following a plea of no contest.  This individual has no formal education, no employable skills, and an extensive drug abuse history.  Continued anti-social behavior has resulted in an extensive criminal history including three terms in the Texas Department of Corrections.”

In Third Ward, of course, most of the males are on their way to prison, in prison or on their way back to prison.  A 35-year sentence for a 35-year-old man is the price of doing business or having fun.  If Robert knew anything, it was how to do time.  He had always been a proper prisoner.  He claimed not to know why, but the life he had found so alluring on the outside did not appeal to him in the penitentiary.  Perhaps it was because mayhem is a hard go for a loner caught between gangs and razor wire.  Whatever the reason, Robert steered clear of violence and even avoided drugs when he was locked up.  This time would be no different in that regard, but something fundamental had changed.  “Before, I knew I was doing wrong but I wasn’t ashamed,” he said.  Killing Francine had made jes’ playin’ a personal matter.  “I told her I was sorry.  I didn’t mean to shoot her.  I was torn to pieces.  I cried my heart out.”  There was no more fun in fun.   “Now my shame had come before me.”

Wearing white for the fourth time, he landed at the Eastham Unit near Lovelady in the Piney Woods of deep East Texas.  A man named Jimmy pestered Robert to join him at a revival.  Whatever curiosity stirred inside him was muted by the prospect of the yelling and weeping he knew to be part of these events.  Finally, he agreed to go, provided that Jimmy did not “act crazy.”  During the preaching, Jimmy did indeed begin to cry.  Robert got up to leave.  Jimmy pulled him back into his seat.  “You don’t understand,” he said.  “God has done a whole lot for me.”

Still, religion seemed to offer more confusion than comfort.  Blindness did not knock him over in an instant on the Damascus Road.  It crept upon him.  Despite his lack of education – he had paroled out before completing the GED class on a previous stretch – he had learned to read during those earlier confinements.  He picked up the Bible when no one was looking and began perusing literature of other religions. “Trying to make the Bible out to be a lie.”  Years passed.  He made no attempt to contact his three children with Francine or two others with another woman, nor they him. But one day he received a letter from one of his daughters: “Daddy, you’ve been in there a long time.  You need to know Jesus.”  He went to see the chaplain.  “And that is where I met Jesus.  Next thing, I found myself reading the Bible for hours.  And I was praying.  Every time I prayed, I found myself at peace.”

In 1997, 12 years into his sentence, the chaplain called him out one day to tell him he could apply for a new program at a unit on the outskirts of Houston.  Robert arrived at IFI as a member of Group 1.  He was within 20 miles of the Bottom and he was in an alien land.  At age 46, he had spent 20 years of his adult life in prison but he had never seen anything like this.  Inmates in the program jokingly called the place the God Pod.  They hugged each other.  They hugged newcomers right off the chain, laughed, and welcomed them to the “Hug-a-Thug” pre-release program.  No one carried a shank.  No one lay awake because he feared to fall asleep.  When the new wore off, Robert found he fit right in.

As the program grew it consumed more and more of the prison, finally taking it over in 2004.  In those early days, however, it used only 10 percent of the 330 beds on the unit.  Inmates in general population filled most of them.  Roy White was one of them.  He had spent most of his life since the day his girlfriend passed him a cocaine-laced joint behind the wire.  He wasn’t surprised to find Robert on the unit, but he was shocked when he came face-to-face with him.  “When I seen him and heard all this ‘God,’ and ‘God bless you,’ it was like, man, that dude be trippin.’  That dude be crazy.”

Robert’s zeal for God was such that less committed men in the program stuck a label on him.  “Look, here come the Pharisee,” they would say.  A man who had spat on the law all his life now wore the long tassels of a legalist, at least in the eyes of some.  Robert became fast friends with Bernard Veal, a small black man from Chicago who had gone to college in Dallas, and James Peterson, a hulking, pale fellow from South Texas who had played tuba in the high school band.  Peterson would assume mythic status when he did the unthinkable.  When he was approved for parole, he asked to remain in prison rather than leave before completing the program.  He had never finished anything in his life, Peterson explained, and he wanted to see this through.  These three vowed to one another that they would remain faithful to God and to each other after release, that they would return to the unit to serve as free men.  They did, and others have as well.  These three visited the White House together.  They formed a traveling squad of IFI graduates that Prison Fellowship flew in to speak at fund-raisers.  They returned to the unit for dinners honoring volunteers.  Immediately upon release, James took a job at the program’s new aftercare office in Third Ward.  When he became eligible, Robert began to volunteer regularly as a group facilitator for Sycamore Tree.  He had already taken a job at his church, Greater Zion Missionary Baptist, as janitor and van driver.

On one of our visits, Robert would tell me that he had indeed let his newbie convert passion sweep him into the land of the Pharisees in those days.  And Tommie Dorsett, a former parole officer who signed on with IFI and became its director in short order, would recall getting trapped frequently in a role reversal.  “He’d march into my office – I’m the one in charge, right?” – Tommie said with a chuckle, “and he’d say, ‘Now, listen here, brother . . .’  I knew I was in trouble then.”

Roy White had figured the “God bless you” routine was a play for favor with the parole board, which is not obligated to grant parole when an inmate completes a pre-release program.  Many IFI members, in fact, do finish only to be turned down for parole and languish in prison.  By the time Robert came back in as a volunteer, however, Roy had experienced a spiritual awakening of his own and moved from general population into IFI.  “I thought before, ‘that dude must be crazy,’ ‘cause I wasn’t feelin’ it.  I wasn’t in the Spirit, I was still in the flesh.  Then I hadn’t seen him no more ‘til I seen him come through the gates free.  He come back to the chapel and you could see it.  He didn’t even have to open his mouth.  You could see it and you could feel it.  It was just vibes runnin’ through me.  And it’s like, man, you’re so happy for him and you know it’s the work of God.  It absolutely brought tears to my eyes.  This time, when I see him . . . it’s hard to explain but it brought tears to think about who this man is, where this man come from.  And then teachin’ Sycamore . . . man, that’s the dude that I knew of in the street, dude who used to carry a shotgun.  You know, livin’ the dangerous life in the ghetto, man, and look at him now.  This time, with me bein’ in the Spirit, it’s like the dude shines.  And it’s tears of joy, you know, it’s like, man, I’m so glad for him.  Because I myself now understand the power of the Lord and it’s like, man, it can happen.”

Driving the Bottom in his pickup, pointing out the sights, Robert weaves together a biography that can’t be constructed from court documents.  Implausibly, he had no juvenile record, probably because back in the day the cops, apart from the occasional shakedown, took little interest in black-on-black crime, also known as “nigger business.”  Police reporters, when they did hear of a call on a killing in the black ghetto, would shrug it off as a “misdemeanor homicide,” unworthy of a run to the crime scene.  Only the most blatant outrages attracted official scrutiny.  “That’s the way it was,” Roy White said.  “That’s jes’ the way it was.”

Robert got around to more than his share of major outrages, of course.  But there’s always a back story.  Until he was 13, he never knew he had a name other than George Mason.  It was what his mother called him.  Virgie Mae Mason gave birth to nine children by four men that Robert knew of, and the men weren’t entirely sequential.  Things got mixed up.  A birth certificate materialized as Robert entered his teen-age years.  His father, who left for California shortly after the birth, had put his name – Sutten -- on it.  Robert continued to use the name by which his mother called him.  His biological father came around a couple of times during his childhood, never for long.  The name meant nothing.  When his father died in prison in 1970, he felt no loss.  Only much later, after his experience of salvation, did Robert take his father’s name.  A new man in Christ should have a new name, he decided, and so he discarded the one under which he had wrought so much mayhem and picked up one that promised a fresh start.  By then he had come to terms with how little identity is in a name, and how much.

He had dropped out of first grade after one week because he “didn’t fit in,” and had begun using drugs and stealing to get them long before he became an adult.  His addiction occasioned many crimes but he would have committed most of them even absent the monkey on his back.  Before he reached junior-high age he began visiting campuses and stadiums because they were the best places to start fights.  From the time he was able to throw a rock he was fighting.  Until he came of age for drugs and sex, it was the only recreation that gave him any pleasure.  It was fun, and fun was what Robert was all about.

“The only reason I went to school was to fight with teachers and the ROTC,” he said.  “The ROTC was like the school police.  They’d be at the doors with bats.  Yeah, they had bats.  But we had knives and guns.”

Weapons were fun-enhancers.  A .357 could make a half-pint king, put him in control in a world that didn’t know his name.  Even Dirty Harry’s piece has its limitations, however, so Robert packed a sawed-off single-barrel shotgun much of the time.  He could rig it under his coat so it didn’t show.  In hot weather, he wore combat boots a couple of sizes too big, broke the shotgun down into two pieces, and stuffed one into each boot under his bell bottoms.  That shotgun became his trademark.  It was particularly useful when he roamed off his turf and into areas where he was less known, such as Fifth Ward.  In a gambling house, he would join a dice game and, when the action was hot, pull the pieces and assemble the shotgun in a blink.  Pistol don’t argue with no shotgun.  He would clean out the room and back out the door before the dice quit clattering.

You could say having fun came naturally to Robert.  “My mother was what you call a loose woman,” he said.  “She was a young lady that just liked freedom with nothing attached.  It’s hard when you know your mother likes being with different men, but this was her.  She wasn’t restricted to anything.  I’m not saying . . . she’s my mother and I’m not saying anything wrong or bad about her, but it’s true.  If she saw somebody she liked, she would go with him.”

They lived in his grandmother’s house at 2501 Canfield.  A tiny woman – she stood less than five feet – his grandmother was in Robert’s eyes a powerhouse.

“She didn’t believe in nothing but doing what you’re supposed to do.  She was heart and soul, my grandmother.  And that’s mainly how it is, too – the grandmother keeps the order.  Man, I mean, my mother was grown, my grandmother would still whup her.”

Scouring the beer joints, she would march in and confront her daughter, slap her hard in the face and drag her out.  She couldn’t keep her from going back, however.  “She was a mother,” Robert said.  “She was a mother.  She liked having fun and doing what she wanted to do.  But she was a mother.”

As he grew older, the price of fun increased.  He staked out a street corner a few blocks from his grandmother’s house and sold heroin and cocaine.  In his early teens, he ran with a gang, but he wasn’t really cut out to be a member of anything.  Years later, in his 30s, when he was home between stints in prison, he ran into one of the old gang bangers at a funeral.  The man greeted him cordially and told him he had a job at the bookstore at Texas Southern University.  At that moment Robert sensed how different he was.  Several of the gang, the ones who lived, had eventually gotten on with their lives.  They went to work.  Some even went to school.  Robert had always been a thug, never even considered being anything else.  He and Francine talked now and then about giving up drugs, but that was as far as it went.  Robert always said he could quit any time he wanted, but he never wanted.

His growing reputation was good for his stature but less beneficial for business.  He robbed the drug dealers who sold to him, robbed the customers who bought from him.  For a time, he collected debts for a bigger dealer – another reason he can’t put a number to his murder victims today – but his employer came to fear him so that he quit coming round.  Still, there was robbery, burglary, pimping.  There was shooting pool until all hours and then going to the all-night café.  “Homosexual ran it.  He was a drug dealer later in life, too, made a lot of money.  His biscuits with jelly was outstanding.”  Robert used the heroin and cocaine that he sold but his favorite was an amphetamine prescribed for weight control called Preludin.  On the street, they called the tablets “preludes.”  When Robert wasn’t doing time or dealing or robbing he was doing preludes at the El Orbit Motel.  “Made you feel like a super sex fiend, you know, four or five women at one time.  And then I’d watch them with each other.  The pimps’d get mad ‘cause the women was off the street for a couple of days, there in the motel.  But I didn’t care.”

He told his story matter-of-factly but I had to press for details.  I had no sense that he was bragging but I did register an uneasy feeling that he wasn’t filled with penance.  Then one day when we broke off our tour and stopped for lunch at an eatery known for its oxtails I finally understood.  As he spoke of his Lord and the change He had wrought in him I knew that he was spilling the whole story with all the sordid details because he saw it as his testimony to the amazing grace of which he had sung with his arm slung around the president-to-be.  If this God could save a wretch like Robert, what could He not do and how could anyone doubt Him?  To defang the monster that he had been would be to diss the God who had created a new man in him.

                At Greater Zion MBC, Robert did his janitor’s job and a good deal more.  He would go off to a silky resort in Phoenix or Los Angeles to charm Colson’s top donors with his testimony on a weekend and on Monday he’d be back on the job in work clothes.  He never betrayed to me any envy or desire to get anything for himself out of these appearances.  It was just something he did, like helping out with Sycamore Tree.  He also drove the church van on Sunday mornings, picking up the old folks who needed help getting to the service and delivering them to their doorstep afterward.  By this time he was a deacon as well.  I went to a service and there he was in a black suit, white shirt, plain black tie, and white gloves, like all the other deacons.  It was the same suit he wore to the White House to visit his friend the president.

                Robert liked all his jobs at the church but you couldn’t miss the passion in his voice when he spoke of one of them, one he had assigned himself.  He took care of the homeless people.  He had something for everyone who came to the church looking for a handout, whether it was pantry day or not, but he didn’t stop there.  He would seek them out under the freeway bridges and minister to them, giving whatever he had, even if it was only a kind word.  A man who had spent much of his life detached from his true name couldn’t do enough for the rootless and hopeless.  “People wait til folks die to give ‘em flowers,” he told me. “I like to give ‘em flowers while they can still smell ‘em.”

                I encountered still another Third Ward alumnus, a much younger man who had found his way to IFI by the time Robert returned in clothes.  Melvin Delane’s mother had been a friend of Francine’s, perhaps her best friend.  Melvin had two brothers, one older and one younger.  His father drove a truck.  They lived two blocks from Francine’s apartment and Melvin’s mother, Loretta, often told him and his brothers to meet her there at night.  All the boys played together.  She would be at TJ’s, a club there in the Bottom.  Melvin’s dad, Milton, stopped in on his way home every evening.  His parents went there on weekends, too, until the day a man named Clarence said something he shouldn’t have to Loretta.  Melvin’s dad fought the man in the club.  Clarence left and Melvin’s dad walked out shortly thereafter.  As he walked past a tree, Clarence popped out from behind it and buried a knife in his chest.  Melvin’s dad went down so hard the concrete split his head open.  Melvin and his brothers, playing a block away, heard their mother screaming and ran over.  His dad was the first dead person Melvin ever saw.  Francine was the second.

The 10-year-old Melvin and his brothers had orders to meet their mother at Francine’s that night.  As they approached, they saw the bubble-gum lights flashing and the crowd in the street.  An ambulance stood there.  Some black officers were keeping the crowd away from the apartment.  They had already put up the yellow tape and Melvin remembers thinking that was a bad sign.  When his father died, he saw the police putting up yellow tape before the ambulance pulled away, and Melvin was sure he was dead before it left.  Now there were more people milling in the street, more yellow tape, more police, another ambulance.  The entrance to the apartment was on a dark alley and Melvin and his brothers sneaked up into the bushes in front for a closer look.  “You know how kids kind of just be nosy.”  They made it to the bedroom window and saw Francine on the bed, fully dressed, with a hole in her forehead and blood down her front.  Three white detectives wearing gloves were sifting the scene.  Melvin saw a gun and wondered what kind it was.  The police had already taken Robert away.

Melvin, a thick-chested man with a gold tooth, and both of his brothers went to prison.  His younger brother, after he got out, killed himself.  When he was still a teenager, Melvin got in a fight and pulled a pistol from the other man’s waistband and shot him.  Then he shot him four or five more times.  He turned himself in and got shock probation for involuntary manslaughter that time – six months in jail and 10 years on probation.  Later, a beef with a girlfriend landed him in prison.  When Robert came back in as a Sycamore Tree facilitator, he and Melvin renewed acquaintances and Robert began arriving early on Wednesday nights to sit with him and talk.  Melvin’s mother never visited him.  “I don’t expect her to rip and run ever’ time I get incarcerated, you know.  She told me what she was goin’ to do and she’s just been a woman of her word.”  Robert relayed messages between them and sometimes told Melvin that his mother has been bragging on how well he was doing in IFI.  Melvin did not raise the subject of Francine’s death with Robert because he didn’t want to seem a voyeur.  He figured that if Robert ever brought it up he’d ask how he has dealt with it all these years.  Melvin did not know the man he killed very well but he remembers the man’s mother and sisters coming to court, asking for him to get a tougher sentence.  He recalls how he hooded his eyes when he talked about how sorry he was because he couldn’t look at them, even though he was only trying to save his own life.  He appreciated Robert’s visits.  “I need someone to push me because sometimes I get a little careless and I slack off, you know.  My father died and that was a long time ago, when I was little, but even though I’m older now I still need some type of father figure in my life.  I still need some type of stronger opinion in my life.”

Robert had many opinions but on one subject he was silent: how he managed to live as long as he did.  Roy White thought he had that one figured out.  “The Good Lord,” he said.  “Had to be.  You know what I’m sayin’?”

At the funeral, I sat with Robert’s friend Bernard Veal, who had been with him at the end.  Robert had been really sick with hepatitis C for only about three weeks, he said.  When Bernard heard he went by the house around the corner from Greater Zion where Robert lived with his wife, Mae Helen.  She was the mother of the two children he had sired before he got together with Francine.  They married after he got out of prison.  Bernard and Robert prayed together in the front yard.  People driving past honked their horns and pumped their fists by way of encouraging this display of faith.  Bernard laughed.  And cried.

We spoke of Robert’s humility and Bernard said when he learned that Chuck Colson had mentioned them in one of his books he called Robert in an excited state and Robert said, “Praise God.”  And then he discovered that President Bush had mentioned Robert in his book.  He called again and Robert said, “God is good.”  Nothing more.  Then Bernard told a story that put a period to Robert’s life.

Back when he was running the streets, Robert accepted a contract to kill a big-time drug dealer named Johnny Binder who rode around in a Rolls Royce and wore more jewels than many a princess.  Binder owed some important money to some important people and was seriously in arrears.  Robert stalked him for a week and decided to make his move one night.  He called his employer and told him he was about to execute the contract at the Sportsman’s Club at Hwy. 288 and Yellowstone.  The man informed him the hit was off; Binder had just settled up.  Robert said he had developed an intense dislike for Binder in his week of shadowing him and was going to kill him anyway.  The man then offered Robert money not to kill Binder and Robert stood down.  Not long after, Binder went to prison and served 10 years.  He came to faith inside and became a minister when he got out.  Now, Bernard said, Binder pastors a large church in Sunnyside, south of Third Ward, and ministers to the children and grandchildren of the people to whom he once sold drugs.

Once again, what man had meant for evil God had used for good.  Robert could have no more fitting epitaph.

Ed Fowler