“Would you like to know my earliest memory? You’re interested in my perspective and my memories can give you insight. I was at that house, the one on N— street in the Bottoms where there used to be a convenience store. I was at that house, in the front yard and it must have been the fall because I remember leaves of every color, even colors that don’t exist on leaves, and I was rolling around in them, laughing. This was before time, before we have an understanding that everything is marching towards death. It was before I really knew my father, when he was the man who would lift me up towards the sky so that I could fly, not the sadistic man that everyone can tell stories about. My first memory, playing in the leaves in autumn, is picaresque, almost unbelievable. But I know it to be real because all of my senses were engaged, I can remember the feel of the dry leaves and the sounds they made as I crushed them. And the colors. I know that it was real. And from that starting point it’s easy to imagine only good things happening, but we know how roads meander, we know how time unfolds.”
Tamarvan Edward Barnes had not lost his mind in prison, he may have even been sharper if those who continued to visit him that knew him before his incarceration are to be believed.
“My mother was always a light to me. When we’re young, adults are giants, but my mother was something else. It was like I could see her as her God had made her, no doubt a woman sculpted from rays of pure light to bring hope to the darkness that existed in the Bottoms. She was always there for me to make things better, she was always a source of my happiness and in that first memory, she is with me, rolling around in the leaves and laughing. I remember the way they smell, do you know it? The smell of the fall, dying leaves and dirt? It sounds repulsive, but that is goodness to me, that is home.”
In a prison visitation room, it is difficult to grasp the notion of goodness. Everything is bland and simple, even the few snacks available, and the amount of time I had waited to see Mr. Barnes had zapped a lot of my enthusiasm. I was running on fumes; my girlfriend had an exam early that morning and in her rush to make it to the test, she forgot some things she needed, which forced me to bring them to her and to corral my son along with me. He was a handful in the morning and it was hell getting him ready to drop off at school. I had a long argument with my boss at the law firm who complained that I was taking days off to travel to a prison during our busiest time of the year; it was late November and people were drinking and driving more than usual. I hadn’t had an easy trip to the prison where Mr. Barnes had been since he killed people with a bomb that he meant to end his own life as well; the prison was in the mountains of Virginia and even though I went to college in the mountains of North Carolina, I didn’t have a lot of experience driving up the sides of mountains. I cursed a lot on the drive and kept telling myself that it would be worth it, until I finally made it to the prison where I was almost denied access because of problems with paperwork and visitation rules. The idea of goodness was very much a foreign concept to me as I sat with Mr. Barnes who had a full head of greying hair that was balding in the middle and facial hair that I would guess was manicured if not for the rough patches of hair on his cheeks; the vandyke around his mouth was very pronounced as though he had cut it that way but he told me that the hair grew there naturally. His father has identical facial hair in old pictures.
“I have been to a lot of places, I am grateful for that. But that first memory, that first feeling of being carefree, is my home. It’s what I strive for, you know? Even here. I still think that I can find it.”
“Really, despite the death sentence?” I asked Barnes seriously. “You think you’ll ever get out of here?”
“Even if I don’t, I can still find that feeling anywhere I am. People don’t understand that these feelings and memories we have are just chemical responses. I can duplicate them, it just requires mindfulness, self-awareness.”
“Tell me about your father, was he a bad man?” I thought Mr. Barnes was crazy, despite how sage he could sound, and it was important to me to make my trips to see him worth it. I wanted to know him, to understand him and I wanted to prod into as much of his personal life as he was willing to share. Making this happen really did cost me a lot of money.
“He was the man, right? They will all tell you that. He wasn’t the boss man, someone else always made more money than he did, but he was important because he was the muscle. The boss can’t exist without the muscle and my father was highly regarded as the best because he couldn’t be killed.”
“Everybody dies, Mr. Barnes.” I said evenly.
“Not that man. You should go talk to him, he definitely has more interesting stories to tell than I do. I only have the one.”
“That’s the only one I’m interested in.” I said. “Did they ever try to kill him? It must have been dangerous around your house.”
“When I was very young, my brother and I weren’t fully aware of my father’s activities. We continue to benefit from them, we always have, but as kids, we thought our lives were like everyone else’s where daddy went to work and mama made meals. But my father was a junk yard dog. My mother, as beautiful as she was, was the only one strong enough to leash him, and she had a dark streak of her own. I hated that when everything happened that landed me here, people were talking about how this was bound to happen because of the lives my parents had led. Honestly, it had nothing at all to do with them and the nature of my crime is so removed from theirs. There is no straight line from my parents to me, they did not raise a criminal. They raised a man with dignity and principles.”
“Your father raised you with principles?”
“Of course. Men like my father are the most principled. The most hardened street thugs are usually the most philosophical, or poetic, or romantic, or principled, it’s how they justify their actions.”
“Was he born in Ladoga?”
“He was. He’s lived his whole life there. I won’t make excuses for him because that is a waste of both our time, but the life he led was the life that was given to him, and now he is old and he can finally be happy or peaceful. He deserves it. Yes, he allegedly killed people and did other amoral things, but he did it for us.”
“So your crime isn’t evidence that you are your father’s son because your crime was different. How so? You said he killed people.”
“Allegedly killed people,” he made a point to say that and he smiled at me slyly. “What I did was a demonstration, almost like an art piece that sadly resulted in the death of innocents. My father was different. He had a different set of choices available to him. You could argue that he made the wrong choices, but that doesn’t change the fact that he only had so many to choose from. His actions were more vital, more justified than mine. I only wanted to make a point.”
“What about the dog fighting?” I asked. “I can understand that he allegedly did bad things as the muscle for bad men to feed your family, but why do something cruel like dog fighting? That’s cruelty for pleasure, right?”
“Someone’s pleasure, no doubt,” Mr. Barnes said and stared aimlessly past me. “Did he take pleasure in it? I can’t say. He definitely took pleasure in money, in the security that money afforded. But my understanding was that the dog fighting was a product of his youth that spilled over into his adulthood. He had five dogs that I remember growing up and he loved all of them, he was proud of them like they were extra children and he took better care of them than most everyone in my neighborhood cared for their dogs. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about black people and pet ownership, maybe it’s not even a race issue, though, it’s probably more closely related to class. Poor people and dog ownership is something to think about. Why do people who live in poverty have dogs? I think people like animals and they will find a way to make room for one that endears itself to them. My father liked dogs. He liked that they could be cute and cuddly, and he liked that they could rip things apart. I think that dog fighting is like any other pissing contest between men, it’s about demonstrating superiority. My father liked that his dogs could protect his family from someone else’s dogs and he liked to show other people that his dogs were stronger. Is it cruel to fight dogs, for sure, but my father didn’t just do that. His dogs weren’t starved or mistreated to make them more vicious. I remember my brother and I playing in the backyard with them, my father didn’t worry that they would attack us. They were part of our family, and he expected them to earn their keep. We didn’t live in a society where we needed to hunt and capture our own food, so my father found other ways for the dogs to contribute. He made good money dog fighting and between that and the bodyguard stuff, my father provided a good life for my family.”
“Did you ever see a dog fight?” I asked. I had expected Mr. Barnes to deny that his infamous act was somehow related to the life his parents led. The media had dug deep into the lives of the Barneses after the incident and they were largely viewed as a family steeped in crime to everyone introduced to them through the news. I thought the media coverage was unfair to the family, and hoped to really probe Mr. Barnes to understand his exposure to illegal activity at a young age.
“Never,” he said and shook his head sadly. “Even if my father had exposed me to it, I wouldn’t have been able to stomach it, but he has always been a good enough father to know me well enough to shield me from stuff like that. As a kid, I couldn’t comprehend the lives of my parents, they didn’t ask me to. Maybe they didn’t want me to know about their strife, but I think more than everything, they just wanted me to be free of the burden, you know? Like if they never talked about it, then I wouldn’t know that it was even possible for anyone living under our roof and maybe that would give me a leg up on avoiding the harshest things life can throw at a person.”
“What about your mother’s gambling?” I asked. “They said she had a regular poker game in your house, and bad, violent things happened there. Like that woman that was allegedly raped in your kitchen, or the young man that was allegedly mauled to death by one of your father’s dogs in your backyard.”
Mr. Barnes sighed and relaxed down into his chair. Even with the full head of gray with patches of gray in his facial hair, and the shackles at his wrists, he looked like a young man as he stared upwards, contemplating my question. He scratched at the hair on his chin, his arm thinner than my own, though he didn’t seem to be malnourished. He was a tall, lanky man and he carried it well after all he’d been through.
“Do you think you’re cut out for this, Maxwell Roberson?” he said after what felt like a full minute of contemplation. “This little project you’re working at? Poking and prodding at me so that you can go back to Ladoga and finally help them understand why one of their shining sons was such a disappointment. How a strong black man could do something normally reserved for crazy white dudes? Do you think you’re the first person who tried to understand me, Maxwell? You’re not, and every time I get bored enough with the life inside a cell and talk to one of the many people reaching out with offers to help people understand my point of view better if only I will talk and explain myself, I always end up even more bored than I was before. Because people only want the story, they only want me to retell it because it’s scandalous and shocking, no one would have ever expected in a billion years, and all that. You claim to want to understand me, Maxwell, and you seem like a good man, I can take your words at face value. But understand that I see you for what you are, even despite your best intentions. You’re a storyteller, and you’re always trying to one up yourself. This one is a big get, I’m sure. But know that you are only here because you mentioned Viv and none of the others ever even seemed to know she existed. You’re asking questions about my mama, making connections and assumptions, and usually this is where these types of visits end. But you can do something for me, Maxwell, something important that I can’t do for myself. I want you to give Viv a message for me.”
He looked very serious and I felt a little derailed. I had prepared pages of questions to ask him and he allowed me to record our conversations that would last for thirty minutes. I would have two visits with him on that trip before I headed back to Charlotte.
“Did she help you with the bomb?” I asked. I’d expected to come to that question eventually, after I had talked to him about his past. But he said her name and I figured that her name must actually be Viv, that it wasn’t an acronym.
“She tried so hard to talk me out of it. I was the worst friend to her and that’s my biggest regret. I had to vilify her in my head, though, or else she would have been able to talk me out of it. I imagined her as the voice of the town that I wanted revenge against, pleading it’s case so that I wouldn’t do something horrible. But in the end, my rage won out. She didn’t do anything, but some people might say that was bad enough. She could have turned me in sooner, but she believed she could stop me. And my mind was so warped with rage that all I wanted to do was disappoint her. I wanted to hurt her so she would let me go, let me die the way I had planned.”
Mr. Barnes’ head was low and he looked down at the floor.
“So ask all your dumb questions,” he continued. “Just let Viv know that I’m sorry and if I could take it all back, I would. I’d like to see her again, but I know she probably won’t do that. Promise me you’ll tell her that and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But you should know that I’m sensitive about my mother. I know she was a human being, she had faults, but it’s my instinct to be sensitive about my mother.”
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