First Parish Bedford UU

“Killer-Poet Norman A. Porter, Jr. – Prisoner W35127 –
Why He Matters to Me and to Us”
A Sermon by the Rev. John Gibbons
delivered at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts, Unitarian Universalist
on October 4, 2009


Opening Words

Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you,

The divine ship sails the divine sea for you.

Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid,

You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,

For none more than you are the present and the past,

For none more than you is immortality.

Each man to himself and each woman to herself, is the word of the
past and present, and the true word of immortality; ?

No one can acquire for another—not one,

Not one can grow for another—not one.

The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,

The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,

The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,

The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,

The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,

The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail,

The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress not to the audience,

And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own,
or the indication of his own.

—Walt Whitman, from A Song of the Rolling Earth


Sermon


Over the years, many of you have heard me tell stories about me growing up at the Third Unitarian Church on the west side of Chicago. That church was (and still is) a thoughtful, stimulating, caring, inquisitive, engaged, altogether humanist and utterly eccentric place. The sanctuary was an auditorium, the sermons were addresses, and the hymns were songs – and often people studied the words before deciding whether or not to stand and sing. Its members included scientists, artists, political agitators, hobos and holocaust survivors.

I got to know people of different races and backgrounds; and – as a teenager – I recall listening to guest speakers like the battle-ax atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair and a medical researcher who fervently entreated us, if given a choice between taking up cigarettes or dropping LSD, we should definitely choose the acid. Nonetheless, I still smoked my first cigarette at that church.

In Sunday School, studying the world’s first monotheist heretic pharaoh Akhenaton, we made clay tablets with hieroglyphics. Studying radical heroes, we memorized Tom Paine’s, “THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” 

Behind the pulpit (named for Citizen Paine), were great murals of Jesus, Buddha, Confucius and Moses (joined one April Fools Day by Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman) and throughout the auditorium were mosaic depictions of great humanists from Jane Addams to Harriet Tubman, Gandhi, Camus, King, and just outside the door because he refused to take off his hat, Walt Whitman. Chicago bluesmen Johnny Shines and Big Walter Horton played for our youth group dances.

And, most importantly, you’ve heard me recall standing – as a young teenager – with my minister in a city park, holding placards and protesting the discriminatory practices of realtors who refused to sell homes to people of color. Imagine that!  A church that aspired not just to inspire or even teach but indeed to change the world. Of that experience grew my conviction that the church must leave the building.

Third Unitarian was where I learned how to do church and perhaps that explains a few things as to why things are as they are in Bedford.

In 2005, a man named Norman Porter was arrested in the church office at Third Unitarian. Actually, Norman was then known as J.J. Jameson and he was a church member, the church historian, a handyman, a former chairman of the church board of trustees, a recognized poet, a man who started a daycare center at the church, a field-worker for mayor Harold Washington, a man well read in all things Unitarian as well as literature and politics, a man who – while eccentric – was nonetheless beloved by senior citizens and by little children. That day Norman was at the church office because he’d found some used car tires that he was giving to the church janitor. Then he was going to say hello to the children in the church daycare center he started, children who would hug his legs and squeal “J.J.!  J.J.!”

Yes, sometimes J.J. put money in the church offering basket but sometimes he took money out: it was a good Marxist church, each gave according to their ability and took according to their need. He wasn’t the only eccentric at Third Unitarian.

J.J. helped former prostitutes into other employment. His girlfriend – well, one of his girlfriends – was the daughter of famed UU theologian James Luther Adams. He was known as caring and gregarious and friendly and a real character.

What J.J. was not known as was as Norman Porter, for you see at the age of 20 in 1960 Norman Porter – who grew up in Woburn and whose parents operated a farm in Lexington - was convicted for his participation in a robbery and a subsequent jailbreak, crimes that also resulted in the murder of a clothing store clerk named Jackie Pigott and a jailer named David Robinson. It is likeliest that in neither case was he the shooter. He had no prior criminal record as an adult.

“I did not pull the trigger,” Norman later said “but if I had acted differently, two people might not have died.”

Norman went to prison for 24 years; he escaped in 1985; and when he was arrested in 2005 he’d been on the run for 20 years. Well, as you see, he was not really “on-the-run”: he was well-known in some circles in Chicago; once a literary society declared him Poet of the Month!  He knew Senators Obama and Moseley-Braun.

He was hardly in any trouble: he drove the wrong way down a one-way street once, and then there was a check that bounced but later was paid. When it first bounced, however, the recipient complained to the police and police fingerprinted him. Norman knew it might happen when he inked his thumb but it took 12 years for the fingerprint of J.J. Jameson to match that of Norman Porter.

After his arrest in Chicago, Norman was brought back to Massachusetts and his story appeared on the front page of the Boston Globe. That he was the former chairman of the Third Unitarian Church Board and that he was a devout if eccentric churchman was duly noted. And when I read the Globe and read about the church that had been so important to me growing up, and even though I did not know J.J./Norman/whomever he was, well, I figured I’ve got a lot in common with this guy and, why not, I might as well be his chaplain.

So, from time to time I now visit him at the supermax Souza-Baranowski prison in Shirley and, sure enough, he knew my mother and dozens of people I know. And he is learned, astute, perceptive, very funny, and – for a guy convicted of gun crimes, a guy who now has come to hate everything associated with guns – he is utterly disarming. He’s a con, for sure – a convict; and for sure he was a con-man too. What is he now? Who is to say?

Norman’s story raises a number of questions, none of which I’ll really answer here but…What about the worth and dignity of every person, that “first principle” of Unitarian Universalism?  Jackie Pigott’s worthy and dignity was grossly and obviously violated and that too of David Robinson. What of Norman Porter’s?  What interest is served by continuing to imprison Norman Porter?  What are prisons for – rehabilitation, retribution?  How do we think about people who are at or whom we have placed at the very margins of society?  Why do so few people speak for those who cannot speak for themselves – the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, the imprisoned, the victims of crimes and, alike, the perpetrators?  Here in our midst, would we welcome a J.J. Jameson? A Norman Porter? 

There are a lot of angles to stories like Norman’s and, though I am now his friend, I’m not here to uncritically defend him. I don’t know all the million details of his story, but let me tell a bit more.

When Norman was 12 he had a job picking up construction debris in Woburn, driving his boss’s 1932 Ford truck. He got it stuck in a sand-pit and unable to get it out, walked home. When the truck wasn’t back on time, his boss - not wanting to admit to using child labor - reported the truck stolen.

Norman was arrested, but his parents never came for him; they thought he needed to be taught a lesson. For five months then, Norman went to the Lyman Reformatory School for boys where he said, “They beat the shit out of me.” 

“How’d you feel?” he is asked. “Disowned. Something snapped in me after that.” 

“Were you angry?” “No, anger’s not the word for what I felt. I didn’t have enough sense to be angry. But I don’t think my father, mother and sister knew what to do with me.”

At 13, Norman hotwired another car. He was interested in history and the Civil War so he drove it to Gettysburg and then south to Virginia and Manassas and Jefferson’s home at Monticello. He got caught and, again he went to reform school.

Lyman and the other reform schools were eventually closed by a crusading reform youth commissioner named Jerome Miller. Ironically, while Norman was in prison, Jerome Miller became a friend of Norman’s.

On the night of September 29, 1960, Norman and a beer-drinking buddy decided to rob the Robert Hall clothing store in Lynn. It was uncharacteristic: what petty crimes he’d committed he’d always committed alone.

The robbery, as they say, went wrong; and in the chaos and confusion, Jackie Pigott was shot and killed.

Some months later, in jail awaiting trial, Norman got hold of a smuggled pistol and they planned an escape but when his accomplice instructed him to shoot the chief jailer and Norman couldn’t bring himself to do it, his partner took the gun and killed David Robinson.

Soon they were caught and Norman was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.

American attitudes toward crime and imprisonment have alternated between rehabilitation and retribution. Beginning in the late 60’s and throughout the 70’s you may recall a progressive period of experimentation with furloughs and counseling and education and vocational training. Citizen observers were even brought into the prisons to observe both guards and prisoners. When I was in my early 20’s, I was such an observer at Walpole prison – I met Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler there – in a program sponsored by the UU Service Committee. Maybe Willie Horton was there too; I don’t know.

When Norman went to prison he was an 8th grade dropout, nearly illiterate, and he never expected to be released but still, from his cell he took 16 correspondence courses and earned his GED.

For 13 of his 25 years in prison, Norman was at minimum-security status. In 1976, when he was moved from a medium to a minimum-security facility, he began seeking work assignments through which he could make life better for patients in state institutions. He served as Director of Volunteer Services for Medfield State Hospital; assistant director of volunteer services at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center; and trainer of volunteers at the Fernald State School and the Metropolitan State Hospital, and the Bridgewater State Prison. He studied and began to write poetry. He edited prison newspapers. He got counseling and he thought a lot about his crimes and their consequences.

He also sat on prison councils and often acted as a mediator. In 1971 after the Attica prison riot in New York sparked riots in prisons across America, correctional officials brought Norman to the Norfolk prison where he calmed the tensions.

With a minimum-security classification, Norman was eligible for furloughs—thanks to legislation that he had helped to write. For periods of up to two days, prisoners could be away from prison without direct supervision from correctional staff. These “visits to the free world” offered prisoners opportunities to demonstrate responsibility and self-control and to begin their readjustment to life outside prison. Norman was granted over 60 furloughs, all of which he completed successfully. He used his time to visit his parents and friends, attend literary events, and speak to various groups about prison issues.

Before he was brought back from Chicago, Norman served 25 years in Massachusetts prisons. He was more than a model prisoner. “I didn’t kill anyone. But I did wrong,” Norman says. “I was a criminal…but I transformed myself.”

When Norman became eligible for the commutation of his first conviction, he had unprecedented support. The Middlesex DA who had prosecuted his case spoke in his favor of his release; as did the assistant commissioner of corrections and even the commissioner. In 1975, Governor Dukakis commuted one sentence but – though this was intended to make possible his release – it was two more years before another hearing was scheduled.

Meanwhile, the pendulum began to swing to retribution. One of conservative governor Ed King’s first acts in 1978 was to cancel all scheduled commutation hearings.

Not until 1984 was there was another hearing.  Porter supporters filled the room, but Jackie Pigott’s fiancée took their engagement ring from her purse and put it next to Jackie’s photo. The room went silent. Norman testified that he was truly sorry and that he’d changed. But when he went on to say that he had not pulled the trigger, the board took his denial as evidence that he was not rehabilitated. Norman went back to prison and fell into a deep depression.

He had come so close to release. He had become a very different person that he had been. And yet, his prospects were bleak. “Lock the door and throw away the key” was the new ethos. It looked like Norman would die in prison.

And so, a year later, outside the prison on a minimum-security work detail, Norman got on a bus and he ended up in Chicago. He went to Chicago because it was the hometown of his favorite writer, Nelson Algren, a left-wing chronicler of “drunks, pimps, prostitutes, freaks, drug addicts, prize fighters, corrupt politicians, and hoodlums.” Norman’s kind of writer; Norman’s kind of people. It wasn’t long before Norman found more such intriguing people at Third Church.

One of Norman’s supporters now is a writer named Elizabeth Nash who got to know Norman in one of the classes that she taught in prison many years ago. She writes, “The truth is that Norman Porter is not a monster, a number in a prison uniform, a “case,” or a character in a sensationalized story. He is a man who made terrible mistakes and paid for them. He is a man who has struggled to rehabilitate himself and to earn release from prison. He is a man to whom the correctional system made promises that it has not honored. That is the truth of Norman Porter’s life.”

Looking back to when she first met him in prison, Elizabeth writes, “Then, as now, Norman was keenly intelligent and curious, enormously energetic, kind, funny, sensitive, stubborn, highly social yet at times quite withdrawn, determined, irritating, charming--in short, a normal, complex man doing his best to live a decent life. Not an angel, but not a monster; not a saint, but neither a cartoon convict with striped suit, black heart, scant vocabulary, and limited prospects. I’ve always seen Norman not as an irredeemably bad man but as an essentially good man who made some terrible mistakes when he was very young and who has struggled hard to earn forgiveness for those mistakes.”

She goes on to say, “I do not believe that living under an assumed name in Chicago makes Norman’s life there a lie, his heart corrupt, or his poetry without meaning. To say so makes no more sense than to say that living under one’s birth name necessarily make one’s life true, one’s heart pure, or one’s artistic expression meaningful.”

v   v   v  


I have but three postscript observations and attendant questions:

(1)    Unitarian Universalists affirm the unities and the universals, the interdependent web, our common humanity, the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. Doesn’t that mean that our lives are somehow connected to Norman’s, perhaps one and the same, united?  And Jackie Pigott’s and David Robinson’s?  How can that be?

(2)    Norman is not the only prisoner that I sometimes visit; and I know that there have been and are prisoners among your families and friends and, well, maybe you’ve done some time too. I know another man who also serves a life sentence for murder, one who grew up here in this Sunday School, a fellow parishioner, really. His is a completely different story than Norman’s, not nearly so colorful or publicized. These days that man doesn’t want out of prison. It’s been too long, he says. He has no idea how to live on the outside. He doesn’t think he wants to. And so I ask, Is this what we want our prisons to teach?  And do we care?

(3)    Norman Porter comes up for parole on Tuesday. Parole is unlikely. Nonetheless, I’ll be at the hearing. I ask, What will they do?  What will they do in our name?  I’ll let you know.  



The Poetry of Norman Porter


The Bridgewater State Prison Experience
in the Bridgewater State Hospital

When I first came here
Two hundred years ago
They took off the ball & chain
And set me into a barbed-wire brick courtyard.
I asked:
“What do I have to do to get out of here”
They said:
“Just go through the Green door.”
My eighth-grade eyes
Counted to twenty-one Green doors
Before education wearied me.
I paused to rest . . .
They went . . .
and painted the Green door Brown.


The Lilac Fugitive

Once when I was young
I wanted to escape
the constraints of my parents
so I ran and hid
under my Cousin Shaw’s
lilac bush.
I was so young
I didn’t understand
the bottom branches
were so far off the ground
they did little to camouflage me
my father found me within the hour.
The constraints the next day
became yet even tighter
I vowed the next time
I would hide yet deeper
into the inequities of my neighborhood
I would stuff myself
into my Uncle Ned’s doghouse.
I grew older
the weeks turned into adolescence
Uncle Ned’s dog died
he set the doghouse afire
he burned my potential sanctuary
it is a strange behavior Uncle Ned
and where in the blue blazes
was I now to go?
Hiding out from the world is an art
surely someone else
has a doghouse
or maybe just maybe
Cousin Shaw’s lilac bush
has grown full enough to conceal me.
The months have grown into middle age
and the adult world
imposes more inequable constraints
than my parents could ever have thought of
so I go now to my childhood
to find Uncle Ned’s doghouse
or more hopefully to locate Uncle Shaw’s lilac bush
where my father can find me within the hour.


A Weed
after Ralph Waldo Emerson

Alone amidst a crack in concrete
grows a weed.
A weed, just what is a weed,
perhaps an ugly plant
looking and acting
like some London harlot
shuttlecocking the street
in pale makeup,
short skirt, spiked heels,
driving cracks in the concrete
from whence grows a weed
an ugly useless thing
what now needs plucking.
But, alas, my friends,
and particularly my foes,
a weed is simply a plant
we haven’t found a use for.


I Wanna Be Carpenter of Words

Yea, though I walk
through the valley of books,
I shall lift mine eyes up unto my dictionary
from whence cometh my meaning.
Thy adjectives and thy adverbs,
they comfort me.
The word is my shepherd.
I shall not mispronounce.
Words that lead me to lie
down in great definition.
Words restoreth my faith.
Two score and nine years
testing whether this poet
or any poet may long write.
I wanna be a carpenter of words.
I wanna take my sawzall
to omphaloskepsis
lop off my navel
and just simply meditate.
I wanna be a carpenter of words.
I want to take my plane
shave oxymoron
from a cruel kindness
to a smooth devotion of generosity.
I wanna be a carpenter of words.
I want to take my axe
to billionaire
a bil to those on lower Wacker
the air to those
who can’t breathe on their own.
I wanna be a carpenter of words.
I wanna take my jig saw
to nastiness
rearrange the letters to stainness
and dye everything to politeness.
I wanna be a carpenter of words.
I want to take some glue
give the limerick its due
on the pretext
it’s just like sex
surely which I can do.
I wanna be a carpenter of words.
I want to take my table saw
cut six inches off
antidisestablishmentarianism
and join a monastery.
I wanna be a carpenter of words.
I want to take my orbital sander
to hate and sand off people
as a possible object of that verb
hate only to be used for inanimate things.
I want to be a carpenter of words.
I want to take my chisel
to politicians, carve those self servers
out of the fifth floor of city hall,
and return that floor and every floor
to We The People.
I wish be a carpenter of words.
Take my hammer and nail
bent over, closed, and ended
for surely meaning and definition
shall follow me all the says of my life
and I shall dwell in my dictionary,
forever and ever. Amen, Amen, Amen


To Poets of Chicago

If someone could write a book
as someone did once
“Making Love to a Minor Poet of Chicago”
why could I not write a poem
“Making rhymes with a fugitive poet from Massachusetts.”
On March 22nd, a day of spring,
I went to the church office
to see the pastor about spiritual affairs
We Unitarians abjure spiritual affairs
preferring instead the regular, ordinary affairs.
I met instead two underneath Illinois State troopers
who also could care little
of other-worldly spiritual affairs.
They arrested me
on a pure, earthy out-of-state escape warrant.
At that moment, at that hour,
J. J. Jameson seemed to have gone
to some other-worldly ether chamber
a self-created personality
who lived an abbreviated twenty-year citizen life.
Born full-blown on cobbled Chicago alleys
no time for childhood, no basis for stickball
no time for adolescence nor Peggy Westmoreland’s tongue
no time for maturity or experimental learning
no time for friend making or loyalties to be counted.
Straight into semi-civilized manhood
no identity, no frills, no family, no history
an eighth-grade dropout
with jailed bookend learning
atop twenty-five prison years cultured immersed.
From the scrap heap of my previous life
I patch together a semblance of someone
from here a name—from there a birthday
from my life before, nine truths, one lie,
the promise of my life before.
And so I lived and so I wrote and so I write
rejoicing and reveling in knowing
I have known the poets of Chicago
the poets of Chicago have known me
we both owe a debt to Nelson Algren.