Johnnie L. Johnson knows what it's like to be on death row, alone with his thoughts in the middle of the night.
A thin man with pale skin and the long sideburns of a hustler, he spent 12 1/2 years - one-third of his lifetime - on "the row" for his role in the 1973 slaying of a Savannah, Ga., woman, a killing he claims stemmed from a busted drug deal."On death row it's the waiting that really gets to you," Johnson said during an interview at the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville. "You feel so helpless. All you can do is sit there in your cell while some judge somewhere looks at your appeal and decides if you live or die.
"I used to stare at the wall of my cell for hours. I'd look at it for so long that pictures would start to appear on the wall and then - and I know this sounds crazy - but the pictures would start to move."
Imaginary images are not only a torment, however. Johnson's imagination has helped him escape - through the prize-winning poetry he writes.
Still, prison officials say he's known best not as a writer but as a death row inmate who escaped in 1980.
Wearing makeshift guard uniforms fashioned from pajamas, Johnson and three other inmates broke out with outside help.
"The dye for the uniforms arrived in some stereo headphones, and the hacksaw blades were in the handle of a portable radio," he said.
"We sawed through the screen on an air vent and climbed through the vent to the roof. Then, we walked across the roof of the prison, in plain sight of the guard tower."
He said they drove off in a car that had been left for them nearby.
"I was never so scared in my life," Johnson recalled. "We were pretending to be inspecting the roof; I was sure the sniper in that tower would start shooting at any minute."
They were recaptured three days later in Charlotte, N.C.
During the long, bleak hours following his recapture Johnson began writing poetry. He says it was an effort to keep from going "stir crazy."
"Poetry was my safety valve on death row. You might be surprised to know that quite a few of the inmates here write poetry."
Once a "hell-raising kid" from Beaufort, S.C., Johnson has had plenty of time to think about such things.
"I come from a good family, but I got into drugs in the 7th grade and went downhill," Johnson says. "I quit school in the 10th grade and was on death row before I was 21. At my trial my lawyer told me to plead guilty and I'd get a life sentence," he recalls. "But an election was coming up and the judge sentenced me to die."
Alice Stewart, the Marietta, Ga., attorney whose work got Johnson's sentence overturned, said, "He has managed to deal with his anxiety pretty well, for the most part."
Johnson, who spends his days making license plates, said the hope that he'll get out of prison someday keeps him going. He has taken college courses while in prison and hopes to get a degree.
"Meanwhile," he says, I've got a life of sorts here, now that I'm off death row. I work, I interact with people.
"And then, too, there's always writing, or reading. I can get so involved writing, or reading a good book, that the walls disappear; I'm not even here."