He Called Me Sister: A True Story of Finding Humanity on Death Row

by Suzanne Craig Robertson, Helen Prejean (Foreword by), Bill Moyers (Preface by)

Overview

Deeply poignant and astonishingly personal, this “moving story of a death in Tennessee” (Bill Moyers) shows hope can endure, grace can redeem, and humanity can exist—even in the darkest of places

It was a clash of race, privilege, and circumstance when Alan Robertson first signed up through a church program to visit Cecil Johnson on Death Row, to offer friendship and compassion. Alan's wife Suzanne had no intention of being involved, but slowly, through phone calls and letters, she began to empathize and understand him. That Cecil and Suzanne eventually became such close friends—a white middle-class woman and a Black man who grew up devoid of advantage—is a testament to perseverance, forgiveness, and love, but also to the notion that differences don’t have to be barriers.

This book recounts a fifteen-year friendship and how trust and compassion were forged despite the difficult circumstances, and how Cecil ended up ministering more to Suzanne’s family than they did to him. The story details how Cecil maintained inexplicable joy and hope despite the tragic events of his life and how Suzanne, Alan, and their two daughters opened their hearts to a man convicted of murder. Cecil Johnson was executed Dec. 2, 2009.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640655959
Publisher:	Church Publishing, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/21/2023
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,024,998
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Suzanne Craig Robertson is a former statewide legal magazine editor and bar association communicator. She holds a Master of Arts in writing and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ is a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph and author of the bestselling book Dead Man Walking.

Bill Moyers is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and author. Former managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, his previous shows on PBS included NOW with Bill Moyers and Bill Moyers Journal. Over the past three and a half decades he has become an icon of American journalism and is the author of many books, including Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Moyers on Democracy, and Healing and the Mind. He was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, a special assistant for Lyndon B. Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News, and a producer of many groundbreaking series on public television. He is the winner of more than 30 Emmys, nine Peabodys, three George Polk awards.

Read an Excerpt

PREFACE

For the first time in the fifteen years that Suzanne Craig Robertson has been coming to Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, she is here alone. She and her husband Alan have always visited together, but he is away on urgent business, and she has come on because time is short and Cecil Johnson has but a few days to live. She pauses at the entrance, then walks through a series of slow-opening gates, surrounded by loops of fourteen-foot fences topped by sharp concertina wire. Her eye catches the razor wires that slice behind the landscaping, then registers the huge, red-and-white-striped tent and the remote satellite dishes extending skyward from boxy news vans “like claws searching for prey.” She moves more slowly, taking in the “beautiful, cold and clear day,” wondering “if Cecil will get to see such a sight again … ,” knowing it isn’t likely. After she turns into the next building, a guard takes her elbow and guides her a different and unfamiliar way, not the usual route to death row. They go through a visiting room, past vending machines where she and her family had bought candy, drinks, and potato chips for Cecil over the years. She stops as she feels the first of many waves of nausea. There, she sees a door she has never noticed before. And she realizes: the death chamber is behind the snacks.

With this summation I have brought you to the lip of Suzanne Robertson’s moving story of a death in Tennessee. As she lived it, so did others, and she has searched their records, accounts, and testimonies to painstakingly produce this compelling, sad, puzzling, and inspiring book. Inspiring because while the story is both disquieting and troubling, it is gracefully intimate, respectful of all parties, tender and moving. As I read, I kept thinking of the prime-time documentary I reported for CBS News in 1977 of the execution by a five-man firing squad of the convicted killer Gary Gilmore—the first execution since the Supreme Court had declared a moratorium on state killing ten years earlier. I still sense emotions I had experienced then, emotions I tried to set aside out of concern for “objectivity.” But there was nothing “objective” about the way I felt interviewing Gilmore’s brother as we waited for the sound of rifle fire. Occasionally I still dream from that week.

So, readers, Suzanne Craig Robertson does us a great service. She subtly honors the emotions inevitable in a story of innocence and guilt; of our collectively taking a life; of race and politics, right and wrong, and of wrestling with questions haunted by biblical memories that we confront every day, in this and every year of our Lord:

Are we not brothers?

Are you not my sister?

Are we not a family?

Bill Moyers

August 2022

Table of Contents

Foreword by Sister Helen Prejean
Preface by Bill Moyers
Prologue: A Long Way from Home for All of Us

PART ONE: FAMILY
Chapter One: It Started with a Phone Call . . . and Poetry
Chapter Two: From the Back of the Courtroom
Chapter Three: Daddies and Daughters . . . and a Personal Shopper
Chapter Four: His Own Safety Net
Chapter Five: Life in the Big City Chapter Six: Guilt (Mine)
Chapter Seven: The Definition of Family
Chapter Eight: The Cracks in Our Walls

PART TWO: THE NIGHTMARE
Chapter Nine: Surprise! We Should’ve Been Paying Attention
Chapter Ten: “What a Family Is Suppose to Feel Like”
Chapter Eleven: Connecting with Another Execution
Chapter Twelve: Tick Tock
Chapter Thirteen: Friends in High Places
Chapter Fourteen: Protestors
Chapter Fifteen: We Didn’t Think They Would Really Kill Him
Chapter Sixteen: They Showed Up
Chapter Seventeen: Deciding Which Lives Are Worth Sparing
Chapter Eighteen: It Was Time We Knew
Chapter Nineteen: More Puzzle Pieces
Chapter Twenty: Thou Shall Not Kill—No Asterisk

Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author

Editorial Reviews

"This is Suzanne Craig Robertson’s moving story of a death in Tennessee. While disquieting and troubling, the story is gracefully intimate, respectful of all parties, tender and moving. She subtly honors the emotions inevitable in a story of innocence and guilt; of our collectively taking a life; of race and politics, right and wrong, and of wrestling with questions haunted by biblical memories that we confront every day." —Bill Moyers

"This deeply moving book is a personal challenge to doctrinaire notions of justice verses the Christian conviction that each person is redeemable."—Library Journal

“. . . He Called Me Sister is more than a heartwarming portrait of an unlikely friendship, a model of successful lay ministry, and an illustration of problems with the death penalty that will speak to Christians across the political spectrum. It’s also a testimony, in the sense that it accomplishes what it portrays: a change of heart.”—Christian Century

"Here’s the truth: I choked up on the dedication page of this book and now, weeks later, I am still tearing up at random moments, still thinking about this incredibly moving story. Suzanne Robertson takes us with her and her family on a journey to a place that few of us want to see or understand better—but, for the sake of our humanity and community, desperately need to: Death Row. We are introduced to an inmate, Cecil Johnson, who is also a poet, a cook, a football fan, a once-neglected child, a family member, a friend, and a man for whom the justice system did not work as it should. To my amazement, the author gives us moments to laugh on this journey, moments of wonder and even beauty—as well as plenty of moments to weep. He Called Me Sister is a story of becoming family with someone whose life experiences could not be more different, a tale of tragedy and mishandled evidence and crushed dreams—but also of authentic connection and goodness and hope. He Called Me Sister is a must read for all those who are pro-death penalty, all those who are anti-death penalty and, truly, everyone in between." —Joy Jordan-Lake, bestselling author of A Tangled Mercy and Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous

"In this carefully reported, heartrending story of her family’s personal relationship with a Death Row prisoner, Suzanne Craig Robertson interrogates the justice system’s deep inequities, as well as her own journey from trusting in the system to seeing it for what it is—human-made, biased, and deeply flawed. He Called Me Sister is a captivating story of the power of showing up for one another, of choosing to be in community even in the face of ultimate unknowns." —Erin Keane, author of Runaway: Notes of the Myths that Made Me

"Pregnant with a sense of tragedy and wrestling with what could have been, He Called Me Sister is a touching memoir about how faith and love reached beyond prison bars."—{::}{::}Foreword Review**

From the Publisher

07/21/2023

Arguments surrounding the death penalty often pit statistics and idealistic rhetoric against devastating narratives of the victims of violence and their loved ones. Robertson (former Tennessee Bar Journal editor) tells the story of her family and Cecil Johnson, who was convicted for the 1980 murders of a market owner, his 12-year-old son, and another adult doing a repair at the store at the time. Johnson maintained his innocence but was executed in 2009. What starts for Robertson as a vague sense of biblical duty to visit people who are in prison soon gives way to Cecil's horrific story. Most poignant in the book is the 15-year bond that develops between Johnson and the Robertson family. After Johnson's execution, Robertson passes through her own veil of grief and delves into the question of his guilt. She finds a system where the felt horror of some crimes tragically perverts the course of justice. The book shows that some believe they have the right to extinguish that opportunity. The author's only comfort being that somewhere along the line, Cecil found humanity. VERDICT This deeply moving book is a personal challenge to doctrinaire notions of justice verses the Christian conviction that each person is redeemable.—James Wetherbee

Library Journal