Oblate Reflection - Hospitality
By SMM Oblate Ric Smith
Ric Smith, SMM Oblate
In November of 1967, my family moved back to Birmingham after living in Winfield, Alabama for a year and a half. Gary Brown was my first new friend. We rode to school together, we were often in the same classes, we went to church together, we even smoked our first joint together, in ninth grade, behind the First Baptist Church activity center. In junior high and high school we were in band together, Gary in the percussion, I in the trumpets. We even played in a garage band called Earthquake; Gary once quipped that we were more like a little tremor.
By our junior year, Gary's life was becoming more and more consumed by drugs as mine became more consumed by girls and education and ambition. He drifted away from all the things we had shared and we lost touch.
In 1986, Gary was involved in the murder of a man in Pinson, Alabama. By that time, I had finished college, married Cynthia, we had gone off to Miami to complete graduate degrees and returned to Montgomery, Alabama. It wasn't until Gary was tried and sentenced to death in 1990 that I read about his trial in the Montgomery Advertiser. I obtained Gary's prison address from former church friends and wrote him. He responded immediately and we quickly recovered our friendship with regular letters and visits at Holman Prison. Gary had recovered the faith of his childhood while awaiting trial in the Jefferson County jail and later became something of a jailhouse pastor on death row.
After a year or so, Cynthia went along to meet Gary and share in the visit. Since Gary's limited list of visitors was full of family and a few close friends, and Gary being a lifelong finagler and gifted manipulator of systems, he was able to arrange for Cynthia to be put on the list of Robert Coral. Robert occupied the cell next to Gary's and had no visitors at all. So it became a chance for Robert to have an occasional visit and for Cynthia and our daughters to share the two and a half hour trip to Atmore for visits every couple of months.
Emma and Hannah loved prison visit days. They got to eat breakfast at Hardee's or McDonald's in Evergreen; fast food of any kind was a rare treat and a playground with brightly colored swings and slides was a thrill. We took rolls of quarters for the prison visititation yard vending machines. That was a rare treat for Gary and Robert, a treasured break from the food from the prison kitchen. Each girl was allowed a sweet snack, a salty snack and a drink over the course of the four hour visit. It really was fun, a little like a church picnic...if the food at a church picnic all came from vending machines. The girls took crayons and coloring books and we all talked and laughed while the girls colored. Sometimes one or both of the girls would climb up in a lap; Robert's and Gary's laps stayed just as busy as Cynthia's and mine. We were all family. If the inmates on the yard hadn't worn white, no one could have distinguished who had killed someone and who hadn't.
Our little girls paid no attention to the razor wire at the tops of the fences as we walked into and out of the prison, or the loud buzzes and clanks of the numerous gates. They didn't even mind being patted down or having their shoes searched, just like the adults. The grandmotherly guard who performed those tasks were very kind.
Robert built things. He'd collect model boat kits and other materials from the rolling store on the death row cell block and use the collected supplies to build projects of his own design. He specialized in doll houses, which he sometimes was able to sell in the prison store—it offered crafts produced by inmates and made them available for sale to visitors to the prison.
Hannah was six years old and Emma was two and a half in the Fall of 1990, as Gary and Robert began to hatch a plan for Robert to build a doll house for the girls. The house was a replica of the house Robert had grown up in in Kansas, though I suspect that the version Robert made for Emma and Hannah was more like the house Robert wished he had grown up in than any house he'd ever actually lived in. It came completely painted, furnished with furniture made from popsicle sticks and carpet, bed coverings and towels made from whatever fabrics he could scrounge. There was even paper on the tiny toilet paper holder in the bathroom. Robert constructed it in three sections so that he could get it out through his cell door.
It was actually Emma's third birthday, April 19, 1991. It was a brilliantly sunny day. We didn't tell them about the doll house until we picked it up at the end of the visit. They were very excited as we put it in the trunk of our old Buick. I wished Robert and Gary could have enjoyed that moment with us.
Both girls set to playing with the doll house as soon as we arrived home. They quickly found little dolls that fit and cars to go in the garage. From time to time after that day we'd find tiny dishes and other furnishings that made the house still more livable. Once our girls grew up and no longer played with it, Cynthia and I secured and sealed it in a refrigerator box where it sat in the basement, waiting for the third birthday of Emma's little girl, CeCe. CeCe has been just as delighted as her Mom and Auntie Han were, and has played with the house just as happily and frequently for the last two years. Emma and CeCe have replaced some of the old popsicle stick furniture and Grammy has contributed new dishes. The doll family that lives there is bigger now, but some of the original dolls remain.
Gary was executed by lethal injection in 2003 and Robert died of heart disease, still in prison, sometime in the 20-teens.
Now, who offered the hospitality in this story? Well, like most examples of hospitality in all our lives, it was and is a mutual gift, given and accepted by all those involved. We traveled hours to visit because of our need to see two men we loved as brothers and to the girls, uncles. Gary and Robert opened their home and their hearts to us for much the same reasons, plus the relief of boredom...and the snacks. We all gave and we all received. Gary didn't have to arrange to have Cynthia and the girls put on Robert's visitation list. Robert didn't have to spend dozens of hours building a dollhouse for Emma's birthday. We didn't have to take our daughters into a very strange and potentially disturbing situation—hospitality always carries risk—or even go ourselves, or for that matter, even initiate contact. But we all loved each other, and hospitality is borne of love. It's not some abstract set of ready made, off-the-rack behaviors. It's a very particular relational hunger that human beings share. It's improvisational and must be adapted to the requirements of the moment and the people involved and their unique situations. We reach out to each other because we need whatever it is that only loving hospitality can satisfy.
A brief epilogue: As we gathered ourselves to visit again on another Friday, in June of 1991, we told the girls that we were going to visit Robert and Gary again. Emma's eyes lit up and she asked, “Oh, is it my birthday?”
Ric Smith, Oblate
October 22, 2022