Mark Stroman was a Texan who lived in obscurity until he tried to incite a race war that would presage the Trump era.

And on this day nine years ago, he was waiting to find out if he would be executed -- or if a man he had shot in the face would succeed at saving his life.

A decade before that day, in the fearful days after 9/11, an immigrant from Bangladesh -- Rais Bhuiyan -- was working the counter at a mini-mart in Dallas.

Stroman walked in and barked, "Where are you from?" A question many of us have been asked innocently and not innocently.

Rais put money on the counter.

Mark didn't touch the money.

Instead, he, a self-styled "true American" vigilante, shot Rais in the face.

Rais fell to the ground, feeling himself to have been stung by millions of bees.

He called to his mom. He thought he was dying.

He didn't die.

He would lose his right eye. Lose his fiancée. Lose his home.

He would soon plunge into $60,000 of medical debt, including a fee for dialing for an ambulance.

But he lived. And one day he would ask himself what that gift required of him.

Rais would come to believe that his second chance called for him to give a second chance to a man you might think deserved no more chances.

Mark Stroman lived in the Dallas area all his life, always the life of parties, always in some kind of trouble, and, as time wore on, ever more full of hate.

He was told by his mother as a boy that she was just $50 short of aborting him, and she wished she had had the cash.

At first, he was a general-purpose troublemaker and instigator more than a full-blown Nazi. But a few tours in prison, where you had to get in with your racial group to survive, turned him into a militant white supremacist.

And what you need to know about Mark Stroman now is that he was Trumpism before Donald Trump ran for office.

Keep out the immigrants. White people are the real victims now. Anyone of color is presumed foreign until proven American. Restore our past glory.

For a while, he just mouthed off about this stuff. Then 9/11 came, and he felt he had a mission. He would make America great again, by gun.

Thus began his shooting spree. He shot and killed two immigrant gas-station workers. A third -- Rais -- survived.

Mark went to Death Row.

Rais was urged by his family to come home to Bangladesh. But he insisted on staying in America, refusing to quit the journey he'd started, wanting to pursue his own, different vision of greatness.

And nine years ago, when Rais felt whole, healed, after he had become an American, after a pilgrimage that reminded him of his pledge, while laying in a pool of blood, to dedicate his life to others, he decided his cause would be to grant mercy to his white-supremacist attacker.

It wasn't a weak mercy. It wasn't a letting off the hook. It was a fierce gesture of power. Just as the relatives of those slain in Charleston would show some time later. And Rais thought that an act of mercy might change Mark Stroman -- and people like him.

And so Rais set out to free Mark from Death Row. On this day nine years ago, Mark was waiting on a gurney to find out if Rais, in a faraway courtroom, would succeed at rescuing him.

Mark knew he had received a strange grace: something he didn't deserve but that came to him anyway. And that grace, and his own longer-running evolution in prison, seemed to change him drastically. He realized how hate had eaten him alive. He repented.

On that fateful day, he would say these words: "The Lord Jesus Christ be with me. I am at peace. Hate is going on in this world, and it has to stop. One second of hate will cause a lifetime of pain."

And then he said this: "I'm still a proud American, Texas loud, Texas proud. God bless America. God bless everyone. Let's do this damn thing."

In his own way, he had stumbled toward a way of being American that didn't depend on the subjugation of Others.

Mark called himself the "true American."

That name became the title of the book I wrote about these two men and two Americas colliding in a mini-mart.

But when people read it, they often come to believe it was Rais who was the true American.

https://wwnorton.com/books/The-True-American/