What follows was first published as the Afterword to the facsimile reissue of Conversations with the Dead (Phaidon, 2015). (Available here.) Reprinted in Danny Lyon: American Blood: Selected Writings 1961-2020, (Karma Books, New York).
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It has been forty-three years since I finished Conversations with the Dead.
Boxes of material, untouched since 1969, lie before me. Memories, ghosts, and documents tumble forth. When I moved to Midway, Texas, in 1967, in order to be near the prisons, I was twenty-five years old. I was almost twenty-seven when I left. By the time the book was published I had settled down to raise a family and built a house in in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, where Billy McCune came to visit me fourteen years after we first met in prison.
In the final months of working in Texas, McCune had emerged as the most important inmate in my book. I filled the closing pages with his drawings, letters, and writings. Then I put one of his drawings on the cover and added his name and prison number in the subtitle. Meeting me in 1968 had unleashed in Billy a torrent of writing and drawing. By 1973, my old editor, Alan Rinzler, had started Straight Arrow Press, a subsidiary of Rolling Stone Magazine, and there he published my editing of Billy’s writing as The Autobiography of Billy McCune.
In 1974, perhaps due to the influence of the book, McCune was released. I had helped to arrange for him to move in with a cousin in Kansas City, but I wasn’t there to see him walk out of the gates of the prison and had never seen him in the free world. In 1982, Nancy and I went to Santa Fe to see a performance of Tosca, leaving my ten-year-old daughter Gabrielle to babysit Raphael and Noah. When I called to check on things, she was upset. Someone kept calling our home from the bus stop in Bernalillo. It was Billy McCune.
Later that night I walked into the Circle K, where Trailways stopped, hoping to get a look at the person whose work had taken over my book. Soon a thin man with a mustache standing in an aisle looked up and said, “Danny?”
The next morning the three children woke to see a man at the table wearing my clothes (Nancy was washing his). Billy consumed multiple aspirins and later explained to me that he wasn’t used to being around children. After interviewing him on 16mm for my film Born to Film, I put Billy back on a bus and didn’t see or hear from him again for another twenty years.
In the text of the book, I featured the lives of three inmates other than McCune: Aaron Evert Jones, Jimmy Renton, and someone I called John S., whose story I included in a chapter called “Record of a Convicted Murderer.” His real name was Charlie Lowe.
Aaron Evert Jones was probably my closest friend inside the system. He lived inside the prison known as the Walls. He was doing life, a sentence he had received as a habitual criminal. One day I flew to Austin, Texas, and hired a lawyer for $500 to file an appeal for Aaron. My mother said paying a lawyer for him was like “throwing money down a hole.”
Renton, whom I call Smiley in the book, and about whom I would eventually write Like a Thief’s Dream, was also housed inside the Walls. Renton considered McCune, who was serving his time in the Wynne Unit, “a nutcase.” Of Jones, whom he knew well and liked, Renton said, “The only thing wrong with Evert is you can fit his brain inside a walnut shell.”
Jones discharged his life sentence in the mid-1970s. In 1979 he stopped by the house in New Mexico and spent a night. He was with his wife, Fay, and a young hooker, all of them heading to Las Vegas, Nevada. I asked him to sign a copy of the book, and, under his mug shot, which was made when, at the age of seventeen, he began his first two-year sentence for burglary, he wrote in heavy marker, “Thanks Friend, Evert.”
The next winter, when Nancy and I were in New York City, Fay called to say that Evert was dead. He had been shot and killed in Dallas, during a dope deal—marijuana, I’m sure—gone bad. It’s too bad he is dead because he would have gotten a big kick out of all of this.
Using prison records, I had devoted a double-page section of the book to James Ray Renton, whom I then knew as Smiley. Renton was also the first person named by me in my “note of thanks,” the paragraph that opens the book. Incredibly, at least incredibly to me today, I had tried back in 1968 to publish the entire book inside the prison. Somewhere deep inside James Agee’s text in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee wrote that he wanted his book issued “as a government report.” I took this seriously and in 1968 got it into my head that I could print the entire book inside the Texas prison system. Smiley had been trained in lithography in the federal reformatory at El Reno, Oklahoma, and would, after his first detention, use those skills to make a counterfeit $100,000 Canadian Bond. I still have a thirty-by-forty-inch Kodak Lithography film box containing all the film that was shot inside the Walls by the prisoners, a crew led by Smiley, who worked in the printshop. On these large sheets of film are pages and pages of my book. There was more. I had, along with permission to wander around making photographs, gotten access to the records department, which sat right across the street from the Walls in the administration building. Whenever I got involved with an inmate I would request his records and then make Xerox copies of the reports. I was very taken with this police writing, as there were many accounts of crimes and murders, typed out as the convict gave his rendition of events to a policeman or prison clerk upon entering the system. There were also photographs, mug shots, negatives of mug shots, FBI telegrams, and many things that I could not copy, at least not copy with the fidelity I needed for my book.
I simply did not believe I could convey the reality of the prisons through writing and pictures. I wanted to drag the reader in with me. I wanted to put the reader through what I was going through emotionally. I wanted it to be real, and I became convinced that the best way to do that was to use these documents and count on the basic humanity of my readers. I also wanted the text to look good. So, I made it from mug shots, reports, telegrams, and handwritten letters. If the file of an inmate had multiple copies of mug shots, I would just take the extras. But there were negatives and unique copies I dared not remove, so I would drop them into a briefcase, walk across the street to the Walls, arrive at the printshop, give them to Renton to make lithographic copies of a quality high enough for reproduction, and, when he was done, I would return the originals.
Mr. Morrow, a civilian, ran the print department, and when I told him I wanted the convicts to print the entire book, he said it was fine with him but that I had to show it to the director, Dr. Beto, first. I knew there were at least two pictures he would never approve—the two of inmates who had collapsed in the fields from heat exhaustion. Rather than submit to any kind of approval, I gave up my plan. Instead, Smiley and his buddies used the material to print a small portfolio called Born to Lose, which they ran off in a single night and which I removed, along with all the negatives they made for me, from the prison.
I saw Renton in Houston in 1973, after he discharged his sentence, and I made a portrait of him and his girlfriend, Kathy, a hooker. He never visited my house in Bernalillo. Instead, in 1978, an FBI man came looking for him. Renton was wanted for the murder of an Arkansas policeman and had made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. After his capture in Denver, I testified during the penalty phase of his trial. He was sentenced to life. Nancy and I visited him in Arkansas. Then, in 1988, after becoming the first person to escape from Tucker Max in Arkansas, he was put on the FBI’s then-expanded Fifteen Most Wanted list. After a long manhunt, he was recaptured. I asked him to write an account of his escape, which was published in Like a Thief’s Dream. Jimmy Renton died in the New Mexico prison in Santa Fe in 1995.
After his visit to New Mexico, I had never really expected to hear from McCune again. Then one day in 2000 I received a letter from a Sister Cibola, a Catholic Worker at Holy Family House in Kansas City, Missouri. By then, I was living with my family on a farm in the Hudson Valley. I was stunned to open the letter. It had all happened so long ago. Billy’s story was by far the most distressing. His work was the most powerful and had been the most difficult for me to deal with. The letter from Kansas City said that Billy was a regular visitor at Holy Family House, that he was now old and frail and that he wanted to see me once more before he died.
A few months later I flew to Kansas City with Matt Ozog, a sound recordist. Billy had been living in government housing for years. He was waiting for me in the lobby of his building, sitting there, old and frail, his first words to me delivered with the same brilliant irony that was embedded in his writing: “How do I know you’re Danny Lyon?” Brother John, a Catholic Worker who had created Holy Family House, said Billy was the most interesting person ever to come through their doors. After leaving his cousin, he had found a home in Kansas City. He had also done some traveling, including a bus trip through the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue in New York. In his backpack he carried copies of Sartre and Nietzsche. Apparently, for a couple weeks, Billy had been among the homeless who hung out around the bus terminal. Perhaps I passed him on my many trips in and out of the city. I think Billy had been looking for me. Because Matt was recording us for a radio show, he asked for a written release. Billy’s hand was shaking so badly I had to hold it in order to help him sign his name. I felt ashamed of myself, as if I was signing his name. Then Billy looked at me and said, “Danny, everything you ever did for me was good.” He died in Kansas City on October 1, 2007. The following week, NPR broadcast Billy singing “My Last Mile,” the song he wrote on death row, which I had recorded in 1968. Fourteen million people heard it.
This leaves Charlie Lowe. Charlie was born on the 4th of July, 1944, and was doing life for beating a guard to death with a baseball bat when he and four other boys escaped from Gatesville, the so-called “Boys’ Home” juvenile detention center. I had had zero contact with or information on Charlie since the old days, when I used to visit him in his cell at Ellis. Gatesville was considered such a brutal and pitiful place even by the standards of Texans that it was closed by order of Judge William Wayne Justice in 1979. When I googled Charles Lowe, ex-convict, I found him. I immediately recognized a color photograph of Charlie, made twenty years after I knew him. In 1988 Charlie was listed as a sex offender, supposedly for assaulting a thirteen-year-old, and was sentenced to one year in jail. He was alive. And he was no longer inside prison. The report also listed his parole officer and address in Texas. Within a week he texted me. A long phone call followed. Life in Texas used to mean twenty years, which, with good time, could be reduced to twelve. In 1973, Charlie came up for parole. He wrote a letter to the board, explained he was not the same person he was when he was seventeen and pointed out that if they were going to release him now was the time. If they waited another ten or fifteen years he would become institutionalized and be unable to reenter society. An excellent argument. They cut him loose. He paroled to California where he had a sister. Charlie Lowe had lived a normal and prosperous life ever since. The sex offender charge was in fact a traffic stop in California, and he had never spent another night in jail for that or anything else.
Don’t forget: Jones, McCune, and Charlie Lowe all discharged or were paroled out of life sentences. Lowe’s was for murder. And McCune’s had been adjudicated to life from death. All were eventually released. Now they don’t let anyone go. Life means you die in prison.
If, back in 1968, I thought I could “bring down the mighty walls of the Texas prison system” by publishing the work of Billy McCune, then those years of work are among the greatest failures of my life. In Texas I photographed a world of 12,500 men (and women). Within a generation that number exploded to more than 200,000. For every convict I saw standing around or working in the fields of the T.D.C., eight would soon be standing around or working. Much has changed in America since I drove from New York City to Texas to stay and make this book. Renton once said to me of his youth that “the only thing I did wrong was smoke marijuana.” Marijuana is now legal in Colorado, just a few hours north of where I write. Marriage between homosexuals is legal in thirty-three states. In 1968 “sodomy” was illegal in Texas, and people did time for it. And they did time for possession of a single joint.
Yet prisons remain. I never studied prisons and never want to, though I have been inside many. Seven and a half percent of all single adult Americans between twenty and thirty-five are felons and have been locked up in prison. It’s like a cancer inside us. Prison seems to be part and parcel of America. There are even prisons run by corporations inside the United States. In other words, you can make money by locking people up. People like Charlie, like Billy, like Jones. Recently I drove from the northeast corner of Utah down to our home in New Mexico. America has changed. The road has changed. There aren’t any gas stations any more. There aren’t any mechanics either. There are just a bunch of ugly mini-marts selling crap to overweight people in a world where the most successful sentiment is greed. And that changes us.
You cannot have prisons without guards. And for every day of life you steal from these people, you steal something from yourself. For every pleasure you deny them, you deny another to yourself. For every severe sentence you steel yourself to hand out you diminish something inside yourself. And when you insist on execution you kill something inside yourself. You kill your humanity. Be neither a slave nor a master. Just be free.
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Danny Lyon’s blog is bleakbeauty.com (where you can buy signed copies of his books) and his instagram is http://instagram.com/dannylyonphotos. His next show of pictures and films, “Danny Lyon — Journey West” will be up for six months at the Albuquerque Museum of Art, on March 11, 2023. A fictionalized version of Lyons’ The Bikeriders is set to be filmed with Jeff Nichols directing Mike Faist as Johnny.