Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States

My Trip to the Chair

33 My Trip to the Chair Willie Francis (As told to Samuel Montgomery)1 They tell me that this is the first time anyone ever had a chance to tell the story of how it feels to go to the electric chair and know that you might have to go back there. This is the first time I ever told the whole story and I hope that by at last telling it people will understand what it means to go through what I went through. I hope it will help people to do the right thing and live right. I know how it felt to have them read a death warrant to me, I know how it feels to sit in a cell waiting for the day they will lead me to the chair again. I sure know how it feels to sit in that chair and have them strap me in and put a mask on my eyes. I know how it feels to have the shock go through me and think I am dead but find out I am not. I do not like to talk about it at all, but if it will help other people to understand each other, I want to tell everything. A lot of people write to me and ask me to tell them something about what I did when I was young. I am only eighteen now, so I guess they mean when I was very young. I was born in St. Martinville, Louisiana. It’s just a little town where everybody knows everybody else. We have two sections, one for the white people and the other for the colored, and everybody gets along fine. The white tend to their own business and the colored tend to theirs. It isn’t often something exciting happens there and when something does happen like when Mr. Thomas gets killed, everybody gets real excited and wants to know who did it. I don’t want to talk about the killing of Mr. Thomas. When they asked me to write this story I said I would only if I didn’t have to say anything about that part. I was tried and convicted of the killing, and as far as I think, that’s all over. But I will tell you about the electrocution. I guess from the first minute I was born I gave people something to worry about. Maybe you will think I am superstitious. I guess I am, because I have a lot of reasons to be. I was the thirteenth child of my father, Frederick Francis, and my mother, Louise Francis. And I was convicted of the murder on the thirteenth of September, 1945. Then the United States Supreme Court turned me down on January thirteenth of this year. We lived in the colored section at 800 Washington Street. It is a little 34 willie francis house dull gray in color and faces north. It had thirteen of us kids running through it all the time. I was baptized Willie Francis.That’s what theyalways called me, anyway. I guess I grew up just like myothercolored friends. I belong to the Catholic Church in St. Martinville and my pastor was Father Maurice Roussere. He was there at my electrocution. He comes to see me now and then and tells me how my family is. Every day or whenever he can he goes to see them. I used to like to play jokes and my friends used to tell me I could make almost anyone laugh when I said or did something.We had a bunch of kids who went around together a lot. We would go swimming in the bayou all day long without telling anyonewherewewent and when we got back home we got spanked for it. It’s something to laugh at now but we didn’t like the whipping at the time. Sometimes we went fishing or maybe we would grab some watermelons and go down by the bayou to eat them. It was a lot of fun and we always laughed a lot. More than anything else we like to eat figs. We would snitch them and go sit on the bank and see who could throw them the farthest out into the water. I liked to play marbles, too. I didn’t win all the time but when I won it was more often than when I lost. I think I was pretty good at the game. I...