Tonight I was at the local tavern for Trivia Night. While the TV sets around the bar showed NYY vs. TB, Troy Davis was preparing to die. While my trivia partner and I fought (with marginal success) to stay out of last place, Troy Davis was asking God to have mercy on the souls of those who were about to witness his death. I got home early tonight: around 10:30. I turned to the Comedy Central Network and watched a South Park rerun: Coon vs. Coon and Friends. South Park was followed by The Daily Show, which was followed by The Colbert Report, which I turned off after 20 minutes. I sat down at my computer and poked around a bit until a friend’s facebook update reminded me to Google Troy Davis, to see what had become of the massive international effort to stay his execution. As of the writing of this very sentence, he has been dead for 55 minutes.

If you want to read a good Christian response to Davis’s plight, take a look at the article Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove wrote for Red Letter Christians. If you’d rather read something totally unrelated to Troy Davis, take a look at my previous blog post, which I rushed to upload before heading out to Trivia Night. Please excuse my language, but it’s a fucking fairy tale. Literally. My previous blog post is a literal fucking fairy tale. You’re welcome.

I had never heard of Troy Davis until, let’s say, three days ago. Maybe less. I don’t know him personally, I don’t know if he was guilty or innocent, I don’t know anything except what I’ve heard: that seven of the nine nonpolice eyewitnesses who testified against him 20 years ago recanted their testimony, claiming that they had been pressured by the police, and that one of the two who did not recant may actually, in fact, be guilty of the crime.

I also know that the last public lynching of a black man in this country (i.e., an extrajudicial hanging for which no one was prosecuted) occurred in the year of my birth, 1967. In trying to find a citation for this, I came across the following quote from Martin Luther King Jr. “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.”

I had a few other racial-injustice nuggets of knowledge that the internet was unable to corroborate for me, so I deleted them, and will instead merely suggest that MLK may have been wrong: The law can legitimate lynching.

I have always, as a matter of personal opinion, opposed the death penalty. All it took to convince me of the rightness of this position were the words of a fictitious wizard responding to a make-believe orphan’s statement that a wizened creature whose diet included human infants deserved to die:

Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, page 59).

I sincerely hope that Troy Davis’s execution will be the final catalyst for the movement to abolish the death penalty. It is but a small step on the path to justice for the least of these (by which I mean those with whom Christ most identified himself), but it is not a Trivial step. I believe that Troy Davis is at this very moment dining with Jesus in heaven (though I have no first-hand knowledge of what that might look like), and that his happily-ever-after is not a Fairy Tale.

My own fairy tale seemed trivial while I was writing it, but then the ending came over me like a revelation, like an affirmation that writing fairy tales is one of the things God put me on earth to do. I don’t know whether any reader ever will agree with me on that point, but it doesn’t matter. By my inaction in the face of Troy Davis’s death, I stand condemned. My own beliefs about Jesus (and his call to pick up my cross and follow him) condemn me. Many people can proudly (and sadly) proclaim, “I am Troy Davis,” but I, to my shame and chagrin, cannot.

Troy Davis was strapped to a table shaped like a cross. His final words were, “For those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls.” And then, at 11:08 pm, Wednesday, September 21, 2011, he was poisoned to death.

My fairy tale, coincidentally, portrays a little girl poisoning almost 50 frogs in her quest to find one who might be a prince.

May God have mercy on us all.