In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Green Fields: Crime, Punishment, and a Boyhood Between
  • Mark T. Mustian (bio)
Green Fields: Crime, Punishment, and a Boyhood Between. Bob Cowser, Jr.. University of New Orleans Press, 2010. 176 PAGES, PAPER, $15.95.

Death defines us, or at least it does me. One of my best friends died when I was 16, and it still haunts me 30 years later. See what Wilfred Owen, Walt Whitman, Alice Notley, or T. S. Eliot have to say about death. Or read Bob Cowser, Jr.'s excellent Green Fields: Crime, Punishment, and a Boyhood Between. Cowser, author of Dream Season: A Professor Joins America's Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team, looks back at his own childhood and a death that took place then. Not just any death, though—a murder: the brutal rape and stabbing of his eight-year-old former classmate Cary Ann Medlin.

Cary Ann and Cowser were first graders together in Martin, Tennessee. During the summer between third and fourth grade, having ventured out with her stepbrother on a bicycle ride before dinner, Cary Ann never returned. Her body was found two days later, tossed into the high grass along a rarely used road. She'd been last seen entering a brown Gran Torino with an unidentified man. Her stepbrother, only six, was left behind with the bikes.

An arrest came soon after. Twenty-three-year-old Robert Glen Coe sold a brown Gran Torino and tried to catch a bus to Florida. He told his family he'd gotten in some trouble and needed to leave town, then was apprehended at a nearby bus station, having dyed his hair black in an attempt to aid his escape. Several days after his arrest, Coe confessed to the murder (a confession later recanted). He spent almost 20 years on death row before being executed by lethal injection on April 19, 2000.

Part memoir, part dispassionate retelling of an ugly, senseless act, Cowser's book provides a well-woven account of the totality of a small town crime: the strangeness of the late '70s; the drugs and hopelessness that perhaps fueled [End Page 173] the incident; the family pathology that Coe himself lived through as a child; the slow and tortured process of the judicial system; the chilling monotony of death row. A sense of sadness and waste predominates, from Coe's forced watching of his father's sexual depravity to Cary Ann's mother's ultimate insistence on retribution. Ignorance and poverty haunt the whole story. In an interview with one of the defendant's associates, the prosecutor asks the young man, "Can you read?" "No, sir." "Can you write?" "I can sign a check." One of the most telling anecdotes is a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation official's comment when he first sees Cary Ann's house: he knows then that it isn't a kidnapping, that there isn't enough money for that. He knows Cary Ann is dead before they discover her body.

Yet Cowser's insertion of himself into the narrative offers connection, a photo album-like view of a childhood next door. He knew people like Robert Glen Coe, knew the neighborhoods they lived in, knew what they were going through. He knew Cary Ann, though not well. He recalls the low-key way his mother told him that his classmate had been killed. The whole episode took place near where he grew up. He has his own experiences with the death penalty, when as an instructor in Nebraska one of his students attends an execution and blusters about it later. What is it that brings Cowser back, then, to go through this as an adult, once again? Turning to sources as disparate as James Baldwin and the Doobie Brothers for answers, he asks himself the same question, and asks us, as well.

Perhaps it's the lawyer in me, but the trial and lengthy period between arrest and execution made for a good story. Coe is quickly convicted. His lawyers are convinced of his innocence; the evidence is circumstantial. Still, he receives the death penalty. As time passes, he's evaluated for mental stability, brought before numerous judges, taken through different appeals...

pdf

Share