jesse

Jesse's Corrido

When Ammon Hennacy first came to Salt Lake, it was to do a number of things - to set up the Joe Hill House, to picket the Federal Building concerning war taxes, to talk, picket and leaflet about Hiroshima, and to protest against capital punishment.
When Ammon came to Salt Lake there was a boy named Jesse Garcia on death row. He had originally been put in the penitentiary on a murder rap when he was 16 years old. Jesse had been as close to being an orphan as you can get, battered around from family to family. He got into a lot of trouble and had a pretty ugly life.
There was a big sex and dope scandal at the state penitentiary. Evidently one of the convicts had a very loose lip, so the king con, Billy Randall, suggested that Jake Varner ought to be killed. Varner was found up in the attic of the penitentiary with slash marks on his throat.
Jesse Garcia was just a kid - he was used by the other cons. He was used sexually, he was used to do their dirty work. He was a patsy - he didn't know what was going on. During the murder, Billy Randall locked himself in his cell so that he was clear. He turned in state's evidence. He finally had to be transferred to another penitentiary because he couldn't have stayed alive there any longer.
It was a long, ugly trial when all this came out about the drugs and the sex. In the end, three boys - Rivenberg, Bowen and Garcia - were found guilty and sentenced to death. Now it's not that we thought that these folks should be turned loose on the street. We wanted the death sentence commuted to life. We just didn't think they ought to be killed.
Ethel C. Hale, a fine radical, started the Life for Garcia Committee. Ammon Hennacy was very much involved, and I was writing songs we would sing up on the steps of the state capitol during rallies. But all appeals to the Board of Pardons failed to get the death sentence commuted.
It came time for the execution. Ammon decided there should be an all?night vigil on the road by Point of the Mountain, where the penitentiary is. We would be there with our picket signs when the sun came up, and would hear the sound of the guns. I'd been involved for so long that I didn't want to do that. I just couldn't see any sense in it. So I stayed home, and along about midnight I wrote the song for Jesse Garcia.
Sometime during the night Rivenberg committed suicide. The Board of Pardons met in emergency session and decided that they had their pound of flesh. So, just before sunrise, Jesse's sentence was commuted.
A court psychiatrist during the trial had said that Jesse was a dumb kid, that he couldn't be educated, that he would have to be institutionalized all his life. A very fine Swiss professor teaching at the University of Utah, named Dr. Wieler, spent hours and hours with Jesse from the time his sentence was commuted, taking him through grade school and high school, and Jesse learned a hell of a lot. He can learn, he's bright, he knows what he's doing. It's my understanding that, in spite of this, Jesse Garcia has been in solitary confinement since 1961.

Our fathers, they say, were just like us;
Our children will all be the same -
Hair like black leather and skin brown as wood,
Speaking a low Spanish name.

Remember our mothers who gave us our lives,
Like grass in the spring of their years?
They left us behind with hearts light as wine,
Their breasts undissolved in our tears.

The things that I do are all very bad things;
I do them and then don't know why.
You hold up your sons with their blue or brown eyes
And tell me they're better than I.

My friends, they too all despise me;
I do all the wrong they had planned;
And all that I have for the years of my life
Is a cross that I've carved on my hand.

They put me in jail behind iron bars,
You'll find me with blood on my hands;
And tomorrow I'll stand up in front of the guns
And I'll give you the life you demand.

But tonight, as you sit at your table,
With your wife and your child close by,
Remember this corrido my young blood has made.
And now, mi amigos, goodbye.

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