The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Giridharadas Page B
Authors: Anand Giridharadas
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big and ruthless the black prisoners were. Tena remembered her husband’s saying how “loud and obnoxious” he’d found the black inmates. If white guys like them didn’t band together, didn’t strike before they were struck, they stood no chance. This was part of the logic of an affiliation that Stroman claimed in prison—the “Peckerwood Warriors.”
The term “peckerwood” was a long-standing epithet in the rural South for poor whites, in the same genus as “redneck” and “cracker”—sometimes slung derisively at them, sometimes embraced pridefully by them. It had become favored by the white-power movement more recently and had reportedly come into use as a label for aspiring associates of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang and meth-trading crime syndicate that Stroman was sometimes said, inconclusively, to have run with. News reports connected him to the highly secretive group. His daughter Amber said, “From the beginning, he’s been a lieutenant. That’s the highest rank you can get in Aryan Brothers.” Stroman himself denied it, citing his half-Mexican ex-wife as proof: “Now if I was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, me having a Spanish wife—that would kind ofmake me a hypocrite. You have to be—if being proud of who I am, my skin color, makes me a racist, then I’m a racist. But no, I’m not. I don’t hate the blacks, the Spanish. I don’t hate Jewish people. I don’t hate—well, I was gonna say, I still have animosity towards the Arabs. Seeing people being hung from bridges and decapitated, that still infuriates me. But no, I’m not a racist. I believe in being proud of who I am. My mother’s got a lot of Cherokee Indian in her, so I’m a mixture.”
Stroman’s tattoos, photographed in detail after his arrest and offered in the trial as state exhibit No. 125, seemed to tell a different story. A swastika graced his right pectoral, and an indecipherable figure of some import appeared to be hanging off the side of it. Adjacent to it, just under the cross hanging from his neck, was etched “187,” presumably a reference to Section 187 of the California penal code, which begins, “Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought …” It was a common marker for men who claimed to have committed that act, in California or beyond. On his left pec was a rose, with “In Loving Memory” above it and “A Bro” below, which might or might not have referred to the Aryan Brotherhood. Between his pecs, a little way down toward the abdomen, were raging flames. Rather more moderately, the word “Harley” decorated a forearm.
The state’s investigation also unearthed photos of Stroman horsing around in “SS” neo-Nazi T-shirts, calmly clutching a rifle and handgun in one snapshot, throwing his hands exuberantly skyward in another. A different picture showed two young children, apparently his own, standing before a neo-Nazi flag and giving their best little “Heil Hitler” salutes.
Now in prison, Stroman stayed true to this record, mailing a friend on the outside a poem he loved about the Peckerwoods. Different versions of the poem floated around American lock-ups, and prosecutors would use its words against Stroman at the trial. They spoke to ideas of white pride and white power, and to the way theycould become, in the eyes of certain prisoners, the only way to protect yourself inside:
Peckerwood Warriors, down for a cause
Texas convicts and solid outlaws
The rules they live by are written in stone
Awesome—fearless they are bad to the bone
The unit they live on can’t take their pride
They live in a warzone, they are ready to die
There bodies are solid + blasted with ink
To earn their boltsis how they think
The strength they possess as they go into war
Was passed down to them by the great mighty Thor
They go into battle with their head held high
Some will get hurt, others will die
None of this matter’s, the
The term “peckerwood” was a long-standing epithet in the rural South for poor whites, in the same genus as “redneck” and “cracker”—sometimes slung derisively at them, sometimes embraced pridefully by them. It had become favored by the white-power movement more recently and had reportedly come into use as a label for aspiring associates of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang and meth-trading crime syndicate that Stroman was sometimes said, inconclusively, to have run with. News reports connected him to the highly secretive group. His daughter Amber said, “From the beginning, he’s been a lieutenant. That’s the highest rank you can get in Aryan Brothers.” Stroman himself denied it, citing his half-Mexican ex-wife as proof: “Now if I was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, me having a Spanish wife—that would kind ofmake me a hypocrite. You have to be—if being proud of who I am, my skin color, makes me a racist, then I’m a racist. But no, I’m not. I don’t hate the blacks, the Spanish. I don’t hate Jewish people. I don’t hate—well, I was gonna say, I still have animosity towards the Arabs. Seeing people being hung from bridges and decapitated, that still infuriates me. But no, I’m not a racist. I believe in being proud of who I am. My mother’s got a lot of Cherokee Indian in her, so I’m a mixture.”
Stroman’s tattoos, photographed in detail after his arrest and offered in the trial as state exhibit No. 125, seemed to tell a different story. A swastika graced his right pectoral, and an indecipherable figure of some import appeared to be hanging off the side of it. Adjacent to it, just under the cross hanging from his neck, was etched “187,” presumably a reference to Section 187 of the California penal code, which begins, “Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought …” It was a common marker for men who claimed to have committed that act, in California or beyond. On his left pec was a rose, with “In Loving Memory” above it and “A Bro” below, which might or might not have referred to the Aryan Brotherhood. Between his pecs, a little way down toward the abdomen, were raging flames. Rather more moderately, the word “Harley” decorated a forearm.
The state’s investigation also unearthed photos of Stroman horsing around in “SS” neo-Nazi T-shirts, calmly clutching a rifle and handgun in one snapshot, throwing his hands exuberantly skyward in another. A different picture showed two young children, apparently his own, standing before a neo-Nazi flag and giving their best little “Heil Hitler” salutes.
Now in prison, Stroman stayed true to this record, mailing a friend on the outside a poem he loved about the Peckerwoods. Different versions of the poem floated around American lock-ups, and prosecutors would use its words against Stroman at the trial. They spoke to ideas of white pride and white power, and to the way theycould become, in the eyes of certain prisoners, the only way to protect yourself inside:
Peckerwood Warriors, down for a cause
Texas convicts and solid outlaws
The rules they live by are written in stone
Awesome—fearless they are bad to the bone
The unit they live on can’t take their pride
They live in a warzone, they are ready to die
There bodies are solid + blasted with ink
To earn their boltsis how they think
The strength they possess as they go into war
Was passed down to them by the great mighty Thor
They go into battle with their head held high
Some will get hurt, others will die
None of this matter’s, the
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