Passing Through: Visiting Troy Davis’s hometown with Martina Correia

It is a gem of a city, nestled like a pearl in an oyster of lush, sun soaked velvety green, moss kissed oak trees. When you enter the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia, and get caught up in its magical loveliness, you know why General Sherman could not bring himself to destroy it.

One drives four hours from Atlanta in a straight flat drive and then the scenery changes so completely, that you find yourself transported to a different world. It was the end of March, and I had decided I was going to visit Savannah to cover a concert and also to spend some time with Martina Correia, Troy Davis’s amazing sister whose 8 battle-scarred years with breast cancer, and 20 years fighting relentlessly to save her brother’s life, have still not diminished her sense of humor, her wit, and positive energy.

Martina had just landed back home from Boston, as I arrived in to town, and she took me on not just a tour of the city but the places associated with Troy. “At times it is hard to make Troy understand that things have changed in many ways, because he was barely 20 when the murder occurred and he was put on death row,” says Martina. “I have to remind myself, that my brother’s mind is frozen in time. It hasn’t progressed beyond the age of 20. I think he will still be able to find his way eventually in many places because so much is still the same, but then there has also been change. The flyovers, the new malls, the new roads. That would take time getting used to.”

In March when we met, the 11th circuit court comprising of Judges Joel Dubina, Stanley Marcus and Rosemary Barkett had still not returned a verdict after the 9 December 2009 hearing about whether to give Troy a new trial. The court had stayed his execution in October 2008 after the US Supreme Court had washed its hands off the matter, giving the same lame excuse every court of law in the state had given previously, citing procedural technicalities coming in the way.

And yet in spite of the odds, we were still hopeful that maybe these judges will show some courage, some integrity, a second time around and set a new precedent by acknowledging the fact that many cases where there had been just one witness recant, had been given a new trial by more conscientious judges. And therefore they need to do the same for Troy because there had been 7 recantations.

So here we were, also celebrating Martina being finally declared cancer free, after a long battle. Driving through the beautiful roads in Savannah, in a maze of moss covered oak trees forming a canopy over us,our first stop was The Georgia Infirmary, the first black hospital in the United States. In 1904, the Infirmary became one of the earliest training schools for African-American nurses.

When Martina’s youngest brother Lester was born in 1975 in a regular hospital that was a huge deal. Until then if you were a person of color or non white, you delivered your kids in specified hospitals.

We got acquainted with Bay Street which boasts of the longest palm tree drive in the US. A palm tree was planted for each soldier who died in the revolutionary war, and the drive goes all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, said Martina the tour guide! We passed a building where the notorious Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s mail bomb ended the life of a black attorney, according to Martina. Kaczynski was responsible for one of the most expensive FBI investigations and was only caught when his brother David recognized his style of writing and tipped off the FBI. Martina and David Kaczynski have formed a friendship based on mutual respect.

“David Kaczynski is a friend and the President of the group “New Yorkers against the death penalty”. He fights against the death penalty because he firmly believes that if his brother had been poor and of color, he would have been on death row. When he turned his brother in, many big lawyers went to his defense and he got life instead and so David feels that our system is flawed and therefore he is against the death penalty.” Driving past a set of Chatham county apartments, we also saw Candler hospital where Martina’s mother worked since she was 17, until the time she moved to the other side of town with her family.

We drove past some of the historic squares that attract tourists. ‘I don’t know why they call them squares because they are circles,” Martina laughs, “ I guess it’s a southern thing but all these squares were put in place, to protect women, children and treasures. They were put in the center and soldiers were around them when the British came to attack. But General Sherman was so enchanted with the beauty of the city, he spared Savannah and Charleston.”

We drove past the famous Savannah College of Art and design, homes that were supposedly haunted, St John’s Cathedral, the largest Catholic Church in the city and the South East. It was undergoing more renovations. A devastating fire on February 6, 1898, destroyed the entire Cathedral except for the outside walls and the two spires. The rebuilding began immediately, and the first mass in the newly restructured Cathedral was held on December 24, 1899. A couple of years ago according to Martina, some one set fire to the altar and millions had to be spent to fix the damage.

We drove past the old police department , the Forsyth Park, a replica of the liberty bell, the Board of education building built years ago-“They still operate like they are in a time bubble,” says Martina humorously. We went past the birthplace of Juliette Gordon Low who started the Girl scouts of America. We see a lot of new hotels under construction. Martina shakes her head and wonders in today’s economy what tourists would be filling those new rooms, when they have so many old hotels going semi vacant.

The sun was shining on a clear day as we drove to the area where 20 years ago her brother’s life was changed forever. The murder spot. I stand with her on the parking lot near what was the Burger King where Mark Macphail was working that night and where Larry Young was being beaten up and ran to the Burger King asking for help. The Burger King no longer exists. There is a new restaurant there. From across the parking lot, Martina points to the motel, from where a witness, Dorothy Farrell (who has since then recanted her testimony) claimed to have seen Troy in the dark at 1 a.m. shooting the police officer and then laughing with a smirk on his face. The motel is so far away from the parking lot that if I was to stand in the motel and look across I would not be able to make out the facial features of the person standing in the parking lot in broad daylight, leave alone at 1 a.m. at night in poor light. There were two large trees that obstructed the view even further of anyone looking at the parking lot from the motel. They were cut down later. The pool hall from where Troy came with his friend to intervene in the altercation between Sylvester Coles and Larry Young is even further away. “ So there were Coles and Larry King, and Antone Williams was working in the Burger King drive through. There were some Air force officers in their vehicles in the drive through as well,” says Martina, “ Dorothy Farrell is supposed to be in her room and says she heard the shots and came out running on the stairs and then saw Troy stand there with a smirky smile on his face. Well firstly, you are in your room, and then you come running down the stairs and someone will wait patiently for you to take all that time and show up and then give that smirky smile? How plausible is that?” Martina adds, “ The manager of the hotel was in the front office and said he couldn’t see what was going on from there and his office was a lot closer. Dorothy did of course change her testimony later. The police also took a picture of a police officer standing on this very spot in the parking lot and he was a white guy. You couldn’t see his face and you are supposed to see the face of a black guy, in the dark and also the smirky smile and be an authentic witness? The witnesses also said the killer had facial hair and Troy was clean shaven.

When one of the Parole Board members Nicks came down and took a picture, what he wanted to show was that Dorothy Farrell was a liar and even asked her-“How could you see from that distance?’ I thought hopefully that this is a good thing because he knows now that she had been lying then, but he turned it against us by saying if she was lying then, she could be lying now. No one bothered to go by the facts.

Troy had been threatened with a gun by Coles and asked to leave the place and he did. Everything happened after that.”

We left the spot and drove over to a run down small strip mall which had the pool hall and the liquor store. The liquor store is still there. Behind the store is the Yamacraw project, which housed army wives and later became a hell hole for the lowly. We go to what is now Sylvester Coles’s abandoned apartment where another witness, Tanya Johnson saw him run in, holding the guns, looking agitated and sweating and then running out. He returned again in about 30 minutes and took the guns out of the apartment. She saw him running away-the guns were never found again. Coles has moved out a long time ago and lives on the west side of town. He works at a printing company and is in a drunken stupor most of the time after he gets back. He has bragged about being the real killer many times and his nephew has come forward to corroborate that his uncle killed officer Macphail but no one wants to investigate that either.

The majority of the people who lived at the Yamacraw projects were juvenile delinquents says Martina. “Before the police decided to formally accuse Troy, they came here and picked up everyone who had a criminal record. One of the guys who came before the Parole board said Troy didn’t do it; and when I saw him and calculated his age, I realized he must have been about 15 years old when he was picked up and made to testify.” Martina’s aunt and her daughter used to live in the project. “ That’s how the Coles knew my family as we would visit them in the summer but I would not mingle with anyone there. Now this place is a lot better and people know that today you can’t live here and create a problem. Apartments have been redone and made better. This is where James Oglethorpe landed and befriended the Yamacraw tribe but there isn’t a single Native American here.”

I look at the apartment, now barren and desolate looking and slowly walk away. The whole place gives me the creeps in broad day light, and I’m happy to get in the car and drive away from there.

We then drove to the visitors’ center to pick up a pass that gave us unlimited parking access to the city for 48 hours and are accosted by a very determined PR Manager of a well known restaurant called 1790, which boasts of signature crab cakes and a haunted room you could saunter into while you are waiting to eat. He confesses he hasn’t seen any ghosts in room 204, and wouldn’t want to, as he has a weak heart. Martina shoots down a trip to 1790, after she engages in a conversation on the size of the crab cakes he is promoting and she finds they are not big enough!

She also points to the cover of the magazine he is touting because it advertises the restaurant. She has been featured in the same magazine and has a bigger spread! The man is impressed, it lightens the mood and we decide to head to the famous marketplace which has many restaurants, shopping spots and is just a nice place to walk around.

We go past the famous Paula Dean restaurant which has a waiting line snaking all the way round the block. ‘I don’t know why people are so obsessed with this place,” quips Martina. “It’s expensive, and the funny thing is during summer they have their guests sprayed with water while they are waiting in the sweltering summer heat to get in. And when they do, they are blasted by the air conditioning inside and freeze! The apartments in that area are very expensive, many high end stores however have started closing down as the economy has taken a huge hit every where. No one can afford 10 dollars for a scoop of ice cream these days.”

But what everyone can afford and Martina goes into a gluttonous mode over, are the famous praelines in some of the candy kitchens. I prefer to buy some fudge instead as she happily tucks into several different kinds sighing happily with each bite. There is so much pleasure in the simple joys of life, I think, walking out into the sunshine. I think of Troy, who saw green grass for the first time in 20 years when he was taken outside to meet Rev Al Sharpton last year.

We walk over to the square depicting the contribution of Haitians during the revolutionary war. The squares are often frequented by war veterans and other retirees who hang around, chat,p lay chess or other games. After 228 years, Haitian soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War’s bloody siege of Savannah, finally had a monument dedicated in their honor in 2007. They had been largely ignored until 2 years ago and their contribution not acknowledged. The monument features statues of two Haitian troops with rifles raised on either side of a fellow soldier who has fallen with a bullet wound to his chest. The fourth statue, is of a drummer boy, young Henri Christophe, who went on to become Haiti’s first president and

ultimately king!

We walk over to look at the first African Baptist Church, and then the night club where the Lady Chablis, made famous in the Clint Eastwood directed thriller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, performed. “ I haven’t seen her,” says Martina, “or the voodoo lady in that movie, but Lady Chablis is now famous. As a man she perhaps mingled with the crowd, but it was her performance as a woman that seemed to have wowed many.”

We drove through streets surrounded on both sides by huge oak trees whose roots are probably growing under the roads. ‘If you hit any of these trees, you better have a lot of money for compensation. They are protected.”

But soon enough, I find myself running my hands over the biggest of them all. The famous Candler oak which stands majestically by itself . Its 50 feet high, close to 300 years old and has a trunk that is 16 feet wide.The tree evidently was in decline but in 1984, it was taken over and nurtured back to health by the Savannah tree foundation. It is said the Oak and pine trees are powerhouses of energy and I felt that when I leaned against its huge trunk standing there for many minutes basking in its regal majesty, feeling rejuvenated when I walked away.

Near the historic riverfront, we see some parking garages. Martina says she is angry because these parking garages should have been protected as a historic site. It was in these dark spaces that hundreds of slaves were huddled in, food thrown at them from a hole cut near the top and a slave master would come and pick the ones he wanted and they would be dragged out. “There were almost 500-600 people crushed in here together,” Martina adds. “There are days I stand here by myself , and if you close your eyes, you can almost hear their sorrow, feel their struggle, hear their sighs, in the wind, and every once in a while, you can feel their presence. We have had two African American Mayors and even they didn’t think these spaces were an important part of our history. Almost everyone has the attitude that if you don’t talk about it-it doesn’t exist.” She laughs and says the city manager has a better parking spot than the Mayor. She remembers also his reluctance to allow a peace march dedicated to human rights. “He saw my name there and actually had the audacity to call me and say – you expect me to give you a permit to have a parade for a cop killer? It was when the ACLU lawyers called that we got the permit.”

We look at a monument that Martina says cost close to a million dollars of tax payers’ money to build. It was to mark the spot where slaves were sold, but they got a Chinese artisan and Chinese limestone to create the monument. “ I cant believe the cost – we are still paying for it – especially when we have great artists in town and also enough limestone in Georgia.

This extravagance is appalling.”

We spend the next day at the Laurel Grove cemetery which is divided into North and South. The North houses white people and the south affluent black people, or those slaves whose masters loved them and bought a plot there for them to be buried. The maintenance in both the places is a startling contrast. The white section is beautifully maintained, the black side is much more run down. We see a tree which has tombstones rising out of it, as if the tree is cradling those graves.

There are areas marked “Stranger burials”, because a black cemetery was dug up, and bodies dumped together in a mass grave and no one took the trouble of keeping the tombstone with each body that was dug out. Martina says her mom thinks its ghoulish that she comes to these cemeteries, but she finds it oddly peaceful to sit among the dead. “My daddy always said it wasn’t the people who are dead but those who are alive that you have to worry about.”

She looks above and says “This graveyard holds a lot of memories for Troy and me. When we were little, I don’t know how Troy found it, but we would go from our subdivision, around a cess pond full of alligators, cut through the cemetery, after climbing a barbed wire fence to a public pool across. We would run as hell as if ghosts were after us, the canopy of these mossed oaks was a lot thicker and it was dark as the sun couldn’t come through and we were 9 or 10 then. I’m sure everything looked eerie and larger than life to us. But it was so much fun!”

We walk away from the cemetery and drive past many houses that Martina says are haunted. A couple of them are even up of sale and one has a black cat seated across, adding to the eerie ambience. We finally arrive at the most famous of them all- the Sorrel Weed haunted house, the subject of many TV shows. It boasts of ghost tours that start at night which we skip but we are taken on a day tour in which we relive the opulence of those times, discover that the inhabitants of the home have a lurid past that includes suicide, murder, an extramarital affair between a master and his chief woman slave.. and are told that ghosts frequent these portals on a daily basis. People claim to have heard screams, cries, entered a special room and felt very sick. I don’t experience any such memorable event, and the house seems strangely cheery and welcoming even while the tour guide rattles off the lurid details to us.

We head to an Indian restaurant, A Taste of India, which has great food, and then to the concert which is the icing on the cake. As I drive away from Savannah, I feel a sense of emptiness. I don’t want to leave, this beautiful city, in spite of its dark underbelly that carries with it a history of bloodshed, racism, injustice and politics, atrocities against blacks and its reputation of being the most haunted city in Georgia.

I return only to find two weeks later that by a 2-1 vote the 11 circuit federal court has denied Troy’s appeal for a new trial. I’m angry and devastated by turns. Troy calls the very next day after the verdict is handed down-to check on me. He wants to make sure I’m doing okay because I have become so involved in this case. It has always been this way. Troy and Martina thoughtfully calling people who care for them and want Troy to be given a fair chance, to make sure they are doing okay each time, another door is shut in Troy’s face, for all the wrong reasons.

I speak with Martina at length. She says she is most disappointed with new Chatham County DA, Larry Chisolm.

“The DA can investigate the case again any time and call the witnesses and talk to them and find out if there is any validation to what they are saying because the courts have not addressed that. I can’t believe that Coles’s nephew Benjamin Gordon has said Coles is guilty of killing the police officer and they don’t think that witness needs to be interviewed?

Larry Chisolm had fought and won on a campaign cloning President Obama’s motto of change, accountability and openness to public and the community. He talked about how cases of blacks and whites were handled differently in Chatham county and under him that would stop, that there would be fairness. He grew up in the same neighborhood as us. He went to the same High School as Troy and I did. He said in a recent interview that he knew the Mcphail family. My question was- what about the Davis family? What about us? And does he realize that its not about knowing the victim’s family or the defendant’s family – its about justice. Today he does not even return my lawyer’s calls to have a conversation. But he doesn’t know that if he goes against the community and the people who helped him win, they won’t support him for too long. He cant stand and hide behind his current position.”

Then the anti terrorism bill is another problem and in reality it is not attacking terrorists, it is attacking poor people who can’t fight the government, can’t hire expensive lawyers, to fight for you. We are being told in this country that tells other countries how to treat their constituents that its not unconstitutional to execute somebody who is innocent. How ironic is that?”

Various individuals and organizations have swung into action, petitions are being signed across the board by people of all denominations, and May 19th Is being designated as The Global Day of Action for Troy Davis. I talk to Troy as often as he can call.

I think of the police officer whose family grieves and waits for justice and wonder if they ever ask themselves why every one is rooting for Troy Davis. And do they ever ask themselves-is his incarceration and possible execution really true justice? Do we have the right man?

As we wait, for that one last chance, hanging on to a dim ray of hope, in my mind’s eye, I once again see a fearless, adventurous little boy and his big sister running across a vast expanse of lost and resting souls in a graveyard, to their destination- a canopy of mighty oaks with moss protecting them from the heat of the sun, and wonder if for once, some gutsy judges with a conscience on the benches of the US Supreme court, or a new DA, in Savannah will finally acknowledge, a poor black man’s plea, a big sister’s relentless work, the support of millions and their prayers, and give him a second chance – at life.