Epilogue
Walter died on September 11 , 2013.
He remained kind and charming until the very end, despite his increasing confusion from
the advancing dementia. He lived with his sister Katie, but in the last two years of his life he
couldn’t enjoy the outdoors or get around much without help. One morning he fell and
fractured his hip. Doctors felt it was inadvisable to operate, so he was sent home with little
hope of recovery. The hospital social worker told me that they would arrange home health
and hospice care, which was sad but dramatically better than what he feared when he was on
Alabama’s death row. He lost a lot of weight and became less and less responsive to visitors
after returning home from the hospital. He passed away quietly in the night a short time
later.
We held Walter’s funeral at Limestone Faulk A.M.E. Zion Church near Monroeville on a
rainy Saturday morning. It was the same pulpit where over twenty years earlier I had spoken
to the congregation about casting and catching stones. It felt strange to be back there. Scores
of people packed the church, and dozens more stood outside. I looked at the mostly poor,
rural black people huddled together with their ungrieved suffering filling the sad space of yet
another funeral, made all the more tragic by the unjustified pain and unnecessary torment
that had proceeded it. I often had this feeling when I worked on Walter’s case, that if the
anguish of all the stressed lives, the pain of all of the oppressed people in all of the menaced
spaces of Monroe County could be gathered in some carefully constructed receptacle, it could
power something extraordinary, operate as some astonishing alternative fuel capable of
igniting previously impossible action. And who knew what might come of it—righteous
disruption or transformational redemption? Maybe both.
The family had a large TV monitor near the casket that flashed dozens of pictures of Walter
before the service. Almost all of the photos were taken on the day he was released from
prison. Walter and I stood next to each other in several of the photos, and I was struck by
how happy we both seemed. I sat in the church and watched the pictures with some disbelief
about the time that had passed.
When Walter was on death row, he once told me how ill he had become during the
execution of one of the men on his tier. “When they turned on the electric chair you could
smell the flesh burning! We were all were banging on the bars to protest, to make ourselves
feel better, but really it just made me sick. The harder I banged, the more I couldn’t stand any
of it.
“Do you ever think about dying?” he asked me. It was an unusual question for someone like
Walter to pose. “I never did before, but now I think about it all the time,” he continued. He