I was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on October 10, 1984, and was raised fifteen miles north of Tupelo in Guntown, by Roy Lee Baswell, my father, and Sandra Marie Montgomery-Baswell, my mother. They were members of a Pentecostal/apostolic church that we attended faithfully every Sunday and Wednesday. I attended Saltillo Elementary School and lived a perfectly normal small-town American life until my family was torn apart when I was eleven, by divorce. My father remarried almost instantly and moved into a neighborhood about ten miles south of my childhood home with his new wife and stepchildren, whom he later adopted.
My mother, unable to handle being so close to her recently divorced husband and his new wife, packed up my nine-year-old sister and me and moved us seven hours south to Jayess, MS, where a man she had met and gotten engaged to lived. He has since passed from this life. I do not miss him or feel any sympathy that his death was slow and torturous. When I was eleven and twelve, this sadistic, pitiful excuse for a man brainwashed me and made me believe the way a stepfather loved his stepson was by putting his penis in my rectum. . . night after night until I was thirteen. Because I was a preteen missing his father, and sheltered from the “birds and bees” by my strict religious upbringing that allowed no outside communication from our religious sect—television was a sin, any music other than Southern gospel damned you to hell—I had no reason to believe otherwise, nor any information from my thirteen years on this earth to combat what he was saying and doing. My parents and their congregation thought that alienation and ignorance of wrongdoing would quell it. How fucking wrong was that train of thought? I started finding reasons not to be alone with him or to be in the house, period. When my mother noticed a difference in my activities and character, she asked me what was wrong. At first, I put it off on missing my family and friends, too embarrassed to tell anyone the truth.
One night, not too long after my mother had questioned my behavior, he cornered me in his room after my mother had taken her sleeping pill and couldn’t be awakened. He proceeded to undress me and kiss my lips and neck. I pretended to have to go to the rest room and got up from the bed, starting toward the master bathroom. In between the dresser and the chest of drawers stood an old New-England-firearms single-barrel 16-gauge shotgun, that was loaded. I grabbed the shotgun, spun around and raised it to my shoulder while backing the hammer and pointing it at his head. I knew he kept it loaded for home defense reasons. He reacted angrily until I squeezed the trigger. The hammer slammed into the firing pin with the loudest click I have ever heard, but the round in the chamber didn’t go off. Nevertheless, he pissed and shat himself right then and there. The gun had been loaded with an old paper hull, low brass birdshot that had apparently absorbed too much moisture to fire. Either way, he never touched me again, and he got to live a long, agonizing life plagued with brain cancer and bone cancer in the skull. Much more satisfying to me than instant death from a 16-gauge shotgun round to the face at pointblank range.
We moved back home in the middle of the night two months later. During these couple of months, we watched him shoot a man in the face with a .38 caliber revolver, and were made to help dispose of the body, weapon, and bloody clothes. We had to create alibis and scrub the blood from the porch with bleach and toilet brushes. Hence the move back home in the middle of the night. We were threatened with death to insure we never spoke of the ungodly events ever again.
My mother divorced that man and swiftly remarried someone from the previously-mentioned religious cult. We were, once again, swept away from everything we knew. We moved to Randolph, MS, in southern Pontotoc County, about an hour and a half from my childhood home. My father eventually obtained joint custody of my sister and me so we spent the next three or four years living six months with my mother and six months with my father. This went on until my sophomore year in high school, when I finally moved in with my father full-time. I started drinking heavily and using marijuana. It didn’t affect my grades much, or didn’t bring my scores down to the average students’ grades, anyway. I graduated with honors, #14 out of 250. I had $96,000 in scholarships, not counting football scholarships. I did not go to college, though. The Monday after I graduated, I started at the furniture factory where my father was a supervisor, making $16 an hour. I started a healthy pain pill habit at the same time.
I moved out of my father’s house into my first rental property that year. In 2005, I made a down payment on what was then a two-year-old 2003 Ford f-150 extended cab, metallic blue in color with a five-speed manual transmission and chrome alloy wheels. It was the newest thing my family and friends had ever owned, and I was proud. I changed jobs for a promotion and a chance at competitive pay. The faster I produced furniture, the more money I made, so I started using meth. My weekly pay nearly doubled and consequently so did my drug habits—three, by now. The increase in pay was rendered useless and I now had another habit. Thus began my days of peddling drugs. In poured the newfound “friends” and women that this lifestyle brings.
This carried on until 2007, when I met what would be my first wife and mother of my future children. I quit doing and selling meth, but picked up Xanax, acid, and ecstasy. On June 7, 2008, I married Amanda Rose Fowler. I adopted her daughter, who was then six months old, and after I had changed jobs a few times we found out we were having a baby girl. My first biological child. The day she came home from the hospital, we moved into our new four-bedroom, three-bath home with paved circle drive and basketball court. It had a two-car shop, a lake, and a deck. At the time I was working for Williams Transfer United Van Lines moving company over the road. I was now selling larger quantities of a wider variety of drugs. I would be gone for two to three weeks at a time, sometimes even a month, moving people around the country. At the time, my younger cousin, Bradley, who had lived with me on and off since he was eleven and was now seventeen, was living with us. My wife was nineteen, and apparently it wasn’t the right time to be working out of state for such long periods, because my wife and little cousin began having an affair that would end my marriage. It was the end of 2010 when I found out about the affair and caught the first drug charges. I paid a lawyer and, after a year in court, I pled out for a year of house arrest and nineteen years suspended to hang over my head.
. . .
[There follow continued details of subsequent arrests and incarceration for non-violent crime.]
[Editor’s note: Upon his release from Parchman, Roy will complete his plans to open a re-entry house in the Tupelo area, modeled on Susan Burton’s world-renowned A New Way of Life Re-entry Project—a nonprofit organization that supports women in their transition from prison back to society. He credits our class for giving him confidence in his writing skills, which he has employed in filling out various forms and grant applications.]
