56 pages • 1 hour read
Susan KuklinNo Choirboy: Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Look at Me”
Kuklin prefaces her interview with Nanon Williams by noting that Nanon was still on death row at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) four months after the Supreme Court’s Roper v. Simmons ruling, which should have immediately released him.
Nanon was only 17 when he was charged with capital murder in commission of a drug deal in 1992. Three older acquaintances of his were also investigated but made a deal with investigators to pin the murder on their younger accomplice. Police recovered a .22 pistol belonging to Vaal, one of the older men, but the state’s ballistics expert did not even test-fire it to match it against the bullet found in the victim’s head; instead, he testified that the bullet had most likely come from Nanon’s .25 derringer, which was never recovered. As a result of this expert’s testimony and Vaal’s, Nanon was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death.
Most of Nanon’s words in this chapter come from his published books and from letters to Kuklin, who was granted only one, two-hour interview with him. Kuklin’s interview with Nanon is the only one she conducted with a prisoner still on death row. (Napoleon was executed before Kuklin began her research.) She describes the strict security measures used to separate the two of them during the interview: the bulletproof Plexiglas, the cage of steel mesh for the prisoner, the phones they must use to communicate.
Nanon begins by indicating his extensive tattoos are a “shield” he uses to protect himself. He suggests that this is not his true self, just one aspect of the intimidating front he must keep up in a predatory environment. He has seen over 250 men executed, as well as other horrors: rapes, murders, and suicides. He talks of the systematic dehumanization of prisoners, robbing them of identity and breaking their will: uniforms, identical haircuts and shaves, and numbers—which include, for death row inmates, a “death number.”
Nanon says that his attorney urged him to plead guilty to avoid the death sentence, but he refused. He maintains that he is innocent of murder but that his attorney did not believe him until years later, when the flaws in the ballistics testimony emerged.
According to Nanon, most of his immediate family is educated, hardworking, and successful: His mother is a registered nurse with several college degrees, his sister is an accountant, and his younger brother recently earned a degree in journalism from Notre Dame. Nanon, by contrast, never graduated from high school. He grew up in an impoverished part of Los Angeles, where he admired street-smart people like his father and even came to respect the neighborhood “pimps,” sex workers, and hustlers, who managed to put food on the table for their families despite society’s disdain for them. Throughout his teens, Nanon’s family moved around, which led to an unstable education. Whenever he was in a school that he liked, such as the Catholic school he attended through third grade or his middle school in Texas, he excelled in both academics and sports. He showed promise in football, regularly making the national news and even being scouted by colleges. Then his family’s precarious finances would break his momentum by shifting him to another place, sometimes a crime-ridden school, and he would lose direction.
In his midteens, Nanon began dealing drugs. At the time, it made him feel good to contribute to his family’s well-being. He did not dwell too much on the harm his drugs did to people or to the community. After an arrest and a short stint in a juvenile facility, he dropped out of high school and went to live with his grandparents in Texas. He began dealing drugs again, and three months later came his arrest for murder.
Nanon was transferred to the J-21 wing of Texas’s Ellis One Unit—the most dangerous part of death row—shortly after his arrival. He was terrified: Despite his heavily muscled, 230-pound physique, he knew that “this was no place for a boy” (107). More troubling than his dirty, roach-ridden cell was his anxiety about finding a group to join for protection. A light-skinned African American teen of mixed race, he did not look like many of the other prisoners. Eventually, he did find some friends on death row: Jazz, Big Tex, Stumpa, Rogers-El, Da’Oud, and Slim. He notes that they are all dead now.
Nanon spent most of his time at Ellis in solitary confinement. This prolonged time alone allowed him to reflect on his life and to read. He says he has read over 1,500 books, many of them about figures such as Frederick Douglass, George Jackson, and George Washington Carver—famous Black pioneers he never learned about in school. Eventually, Nanon began to write, scribbling poetry on a roll of toilet paper. He published his first book, Still Surviving, with help from his mother; it is about his life on death row. Nanon reflects on the importance of leaving a record of one’s life, insights, and personal wisdom so that valuable knowledge will not be lost forever when one dies. In view of this, he began a prison newsletter, The Williams Report, to profile the lives and thoughts of fellow death-row inmates.
After several long years waiting for his death number to come up, Nanon finally had some good news: His new court-appointed attorney had called for an independent test of Vaal’s pistol, which turned out to be an exact match for the bullet that killed Nanon’s alleged victim. Nevertheless, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied Nanon’s request for a new trial. Morris Moon, one of Nanon’s attorneys, was furious. Vaal, who had confessed to the shooting shortly before making his deal to testify against Nanon, served only four years in prison.
At the time of Kuklin’s interview, Nanon was still struggling to remain upbeat in a wing of death row referred to as F-Pod: a “dungeon” smelling of urine and feces and reverberating with endless noise. Despite everything, he says he would not change anything about his life. He feels himself to be a far better, deeper person than he might have been as a free man. If he had stayed out of trouble and become a professional athlete, he thinks, he might have become rich, but he would likely believe in “nothing.”
Two months after the interview with Kuklin, Nanon was finally removed from death row and transferred to Coffield Unit, a maximum-security prison. Kuklin reproduces an email from Walter Long, another of Nanon’s lawyers, who says that it will be at least 40 years before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles can even begin to consider Nanon’s parole.
Chapter 3 Analysis
With Nanon, Kuklin provides another real-life portrait of a young person who has not succumbed to despair despite being warehoused indefinitely in one of the harshest places in the penal system. As a free man, Nanon might have been many things—an athlete, an author, a journalist—but, as with Roy and Mark, teenage impulsiveness destroyed all this potential in a reckless moment of violence. Also like Roy and Mark, Nanon’s naivete regarding the modus operandi of law enforcement worked against him in the aftermath of a crime: Questioned by police, Nanon refused to talk, whereas 21-year-old Vaal, one of his three accomplices, quickly hired a lawyer and cut a deal to testify against him. Not wanting to foul this deal, the state (e.g., the ballistics expert) did not pursue the investigation’s obvious loose ends.
Like many teenage offenders, especially underprivileged ones who do not have access to good legal representation, Nanon was in effect his own worst enemy. He did not trust his lawyer since she was paid by the state, so he rarely spoke to her—something he now regrets. Like the other juvenile offenders in this book, he received no leniency for his lack of a violent criminal background or for his athletic promise in high school.
Nanon, over 230 pounds when he entered prison and heavily muscled from his years of football, boxing, and weight-training, was probably the most intimidating-looking of Kuklin’s subjects. Underneath, however, he was a frightened child. Texas, Nanon says, has the most brutal death rows in the nation, undoubtedly quite different from the one in Alabama that Roy looks back on as a “buffer.” Inherent injustice aside, Kuklin suggests that part of the problem with Trying Juveniles as Adults is that the resulting punishments are in practice harsher than those that adults receive because adolescents are simply not equipped to deal with adult prison environments. Nanon knew he was completely out of his depth, though he tried hard not to show it. As he explains to Kuklin, he still puts up a “shield,” partly by covering himself with tattoos and wearing a menacing frown. Kuklin notes that the prison itself presents a deceptive façade of its own: flowers, perfectly cut grass, and polite, jovial guards. As Nanon observes, the “visitation area looks nice […] like a college campus” (89), but that is only to conceal the brutality and horrors that go on inside. As with Roy and Mark, Nanon’s greatest challenge is his day-to-day struggle to maintain his humanity—to keep intact a “part” of who he was before he came to prison.
That teenage self, Nanon says, was “stupid” but not a bad person. Like Mark’s childhood, Nanon’s was marked by instability that adversely affected his development: He once lived on a California ranch where his stepfather had a drug lab and where he was called racial slurs by other children, leading him to temporarily quit school. His story thus exemplifies Race, Injustice, and Capital Punishment. Nanon remembers that many of the schools he attended did not teach texts by or about African Americans, implying that this contributed to the sense of aimlessness and low self-esteem that led him to participate in small-time drug deals. In this, he was emulating the Black hustlers he had admired as a child, who were doing what they could for their families in a hostile landscape devoid of other opportunities. This led him into scrapes with the law, and, “by sixteen,” he says, “I quit caring” (101).
Ironically, in the depths of prison, he soon came to care a great deal. Like Roy and Mark, he found mentors who nurtured him, teaching him to calm his violent impulses and adolescent belligerence. Perhaps unusually, solitary confinement also “helped” Nanon a great deal, giving him time to read and eventually write. His work mostly concerns prison life and his fellow inmates, especially those about to be executed; he hopes not only to penetrate the careful facades they put up for protection, but also, presumably, to strip away the cultivated façade of the prison itself, revealing its inner workings and horrors to the world.
For prisoners like Nanon, the more public workings of the courts hardly seem better. When a new lawyer finally mounted a successful challenge to the junk ballistics science that had helped convict him, the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected his appeal without explanation. In another example of institutional indifference, Kuklin was still on death row when he met Kuklin, even though the Supreme Court ruling meant he should have been transferred out four months earlier.
Nanon’s words do not suggest he poses any great danger to society, and Kuklin implies that his (perhaps lifelong) incarceration for a single act committed as a juvenile is an immense waste. Nevertheless, No Choirboy indicates that his efforts to document prison life from the inside may yet lead to much-needed reforms. In this, it echoes Nanon, who values the person he has grown into because of his unjust experiences. He credits the introspection he learned in prison with his development of a mind and a soul, as well as his ability to “look past [his] own suffering” (128). This suggests that the brutality and privations of prison make one aware of the value of human dignity, potential, and justice, as well as of the preciousness of each human life—all subjects Nanon has documented in his writings and newsletter.
