Does Napoleon Beazley Deserve to Die?
He was the hero of his hometown—football star, senior class president, the first black kid ever to be accepted by whites. And then, when he was seventeen, he committed a brutal, senseless murder. Now he's on death row, waiting for the courts to decide . . .
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Her yearning for a better life was born in a drafty frame house "under the hill," the poorest part of the Quarters, where she grew up hungry alongside six brothers and sisters and whatever drifters her grandmother took in. Rena spent her summers working in the fields, hoeing peanuts until her hands were blistered, and she made do with one pair of shoes whose cracked soles let the rain in. Now, at 47, she is always stylishly turned out, her cinnamon hair done beauty-shop perfect, framing a warm but guarded smile. Outward appearances have always been important to her: In high school she had her cheerleading uniform dry-cleaned before every game, even though it meant skipping meals. She was fourteen and Ireland fifteen when they exchanged glances in the balcony of the old movie house. He was a running back, a sturdy farm boy with an easy manner and a strong sense of faith, and they married after graduation. The Beazleys wanted to give their children what they had lacked; Rena took a job at a Crockett department store when the children were little so she could buy them new clothes on discount. She starched and creased Napoleon's jeans—he had one pair for each day of the week—and at Christmastime, she let him pick out shirts from the J. C. Penney catalog.
The middle child of the Beazley children—Maria is the oldest, Jamaal the youngest—Napoleon shares the same name as his great-grandfather, a circuit preacher. Eight years after Napoleon's arrest, he is still remembered around town for his unfailing good manners. "He wasn't one who had a chip on his shoulder," says one white woman. "It was always 'Yes, ma'am' and 'No, ma'am' with Napoleon." At school he had a nearly perfect attendance record; while other students slumped disinterestedly in their chairs, he sat in the front row, making astute observations in a soft, measured voice. And though fistfights were routine among other boys, no one can remember Napoleon so much as raising his voice. "He was the peacemaker," says classmate Casey Vickers, now a crewman for a gas company. "If the guys were calling each other names on the football field, he'd smile and defuse the situation." Off the field, he was a loyal friend, as when he helped Casey win back his high school sweetheart, now his wife, by ghostwriting poetry that Casey slipped into her locker.
Casey was part of the close-knit group of friends Napoleon had come of age with, all of whom were white. As kids, they played tee ball and Little League together; later on, they lifted weights and chased girls and scored touchdowns together, always certain of one another's loyalties. "In our town it was unusual for us to be running around together, but Napoleon was always just one of the guys," says classmate T. C. Howard, now an emergency medical technician in Crockett. "He blended in." Still, their friendships weren't easy. "Once school was over, it was understood that you went your separate ways—you didn't hang out with your white friends at night or on the weekends," says Maria. "Napoleon crossed that line."
"People stuck with their own for the most part," says classmate Jimmy Moffett, now a draftsman for a steel company in Dallas. "Napoleon broke the rules, and he caught a lot of flak for that. Black guys talked down to him. They put a lot of pressure on him to be tougher, to be bold." Moffett sighs heavily, as if the weight of the past eight years were bearing down on him. "I wish Napoleon could've ignored all that. He didn't have to prove anything to us."
You sit at Thanksgiving dinner, the dinner that your wife has prepared that at all other times would be a feast. You sit there with your mother and your wife and your daughter, and no one says a word, not a single word. There is only one thought in all four of your minds and that is that your dad's not there, and he never will be again. You make small talk. You pretend like nothing has happened and that there is nothing else on your mind. You tell your wife that the meal tastes great when you can hardly keep it down, and then you get up and you go do the dishes so that they won't see you crying.
testimony of J. Michael Luttig
WHAT MANY OF NAPOLEON'S WHITE friends did not understand was just how tricky it was to straddle the two worlds divided by Chestnut Street. On the white side of town, his friends' parents embraced him out of genuine affection and, perhaps in small part, to assuage a nagging sense of guilt. They had grown up under Jim Crow and the court-mandated integration of Grapeland High—a time so fractious that one of Napoleon's cousins, Angie Dickson, claimed that she had been denied the title of 1969 valedictorian because of her race. Napoleon represented a more untroubled future, and the parents of his white friends welcomed him, saying he should think of their home as his own. He was, some of these parents later said, like a son to them. But in the Quarters his peers nicknamed him White Boy. "Among the people we grew up with, Napoleon wasn't liked," says Maria. "There was a certain way you were supposed to be, and he wasn't that way. He was light-skinned. He spoke proper English. He stood out. We'd both been taught to carry ourselves differently, and kids took that to mean we were stuck-up. Other kids would say to him, 'You're white' or 'You think you're white.'"
"I don't think Napoleon saw color," said Casey Vickers. "Other people did." One time, when Napoleon was seven years old, he was turned away from a white classmate's birthday party: "Y'all aren't welcome here," a man had informed his father as Napoleon stood, puzzled, holding the unwanted birthday present. But it was the ridicule of black kids, Napoleon emphasizes, that stung. "I've felt more racism from blacks than I could ever experience from whites," he wrote me in a letter from prison. "Because some of my friends were white, I was ridiculed. Because I dated white girls, I was ridiculed. Not by white people, black people." Pulled between two worlds—he would never completely belong on either side of Chestnut Street—his own identity would become increasingly fractured. "I wanted to be accepted, so I did what I thought was necessary to fit in," he wrote. "I was, quite frankly, a chameleon, an actor. I played roles and changed colors to fit the scene and the script." Most of all, he wrote, "I wanted to be black."
No one, in Napoleon's eyes, was blacker than his cousin Timmy, a Grapeland Sandies football player five years his senior who moved, poor and without prospects, to Houston after graduation. His cousin came home driving a low-slung white Cadillac, his fingers glittering with diamonds and gold. He was a crack-cocaine dealer, and although he would be arrested in 1998 in a Drug Enforcement Administration sting, that was far too late to keep Napoleon out of trouble. Back then, even after Rena had barred her nephew from the house, he managed to slip Napoleon a few rocks of crack and schooled him in the ways of the street. To a thirteen-year-old, the appeal was powerful. "When my cousin came home, he was accepted, admired, respected," Napoleon wrote. "No one questioned his blackness." Napoleon began dealing crack, though he sold it seldom enough that word never got back to his family or friends. As a track star, he had the perfect cover: He jogged at night with $20 rocks in his pockets, slowing down when he spotted a likely buyer. He never made much, he says, because money was not the allure: "My crack dealing was never serious; keeping the image was." Dealing drugs garnered him the approval he hungered for. "When I dealt crack, I was accepted by the blacks everyone considered hip," he wrote. "Sad, but true."
Crack would take him to the deepest part of the Quarters, to the squalor under the hill that Rena had tried so hard to shield him from, a world so different from the one he was raised in, he says, that he often felt like a "voyeur." Under the hill, a fellow crack dealer named Cedrick Coleman would take Napoleon under his wing. Three years older than Napoleon but only one grade ahead, Cedrick was the handsome, smooth-talking star running back of the Sandies, named all-state his junior year and a blue-chip player in Dave Campbell's Texas Football. He was as close to a hero as Napoleon had ever known. As the Sandies' second-string running back, Napoleon learned to emulate his moves—off the field as well as on. "Cedrick had all the answers," he says.
By the summer before his senior year, Napoleon was drifting away from his friends north of Chestnut Street and growing closer to Cedrick, whose hotheaded little brother, Fig, was always underfoot. The Colemans' world was one of capricious violence, in which cousins were gunned down, fistfights were common, and the police were known to come calling. Napoleon also began dealing crack with Cedrick.
Ireland and Rena grew concerned that summer, having learned from a friend that Napoleon was involved with drugs. They had their son tested for drugs twice, but the results were negative. "You're wasting your money," Napoleon told them with a good-natured grin. "You don't need to worry." That fall he seemed too busy to get into mischief: He earned straight A's, played football, worked on his uncle's farm, and lifted weights for two grueling hours a day. Still, his friends noticed that he was changing. "Napoleon was evolving into a different person," says Jimmy Moffett. "He was trying to be something he wasn't." Privately, the sixteen-year-old was overwhelmed: A girl he had dated briefly that summer had told him she was pregnant, making the football scholarship he had pursued since junior high no longer an option. He would have to support the child. "All my hopes, dreams, and aspirations were in the progress of a ball," he wrote to me. "I gave that up . . . I was trying to be a man." He knew a military salary would allow him to provide for the baby, so he joined the Marines, deferring his induction until after graduation. His parents initially made their disapproval known, but he assured them he would attend college on the GI Bill and apply to Stanford Law. When the baby was born, in March 1994, the spring of his senior year, Napoleon learned he was not the father. He had been duped. "I was devastated," he says.
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