more sober. As they became still and perfectly quiet, the boy hummed a note in a beautiful tenor voice. His pitch was perfect. Then he slowly waved his arms to prompt these extraordinary children to sing. Their voices bounced off the walls and ceiling of this ancient hall and fell into a glorious harmony the likes of which I’d never heard. After starting his classmates in song, the young man stepped off his chair and joined them in performing a heartbreaking melody with tremendous care and precision. I could not understand a word of the Swedish lyrics, but it sounded angelic. Dissonance and harmonic tension slowly resolved into warm chords—the sound was transcendent. The singing built gloriously with each line.
Standing on a stage above the singers with the headmaster beside me, I looked up at the ceiling—at the majestic artwork. My mother had died a few months before this trip. She’d been a church musician most of her life and had worked with dozens of children’s choirs. When I looked up and saw the drawings of angels on the domed ceiling I thought of her. I quickly realized I would never recover my composure looking up there, so I looked back at the students and forced a smile. When the students finished their song, the rest of the students cheered and applauded wildly. I joined the applause and tried to hold myself together. When I left the stage, students came up to thank me for the talk, ask questions, and take pictures. I was completely charmed.
It was a long and exhausting but beautiful day. When I got back to the hotel I was grateful for the two-hour break before my next speaking commitment. I don’t know what prompted me to turn on the television, but I’d been away from home for four days and hadn’t seen any headlines. The local news blasted into my room. The unfamiliar Swedish TV anchors were chatting away when I heard my name. It was the piece the crew had filmed with me; familiar images filled the screen. I watched myself walking with the reporter into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, then up the street to the Civil Rights Memorial. The scene then switched to Walter, standing in overalls amid his pile of discarded cars down in Monroeville.
Walter gently put down a little kitten he’d been holding as he started to answer the reporters’ questions. He’d mentioned to me previously that all kinds of cats had sought shelter in his field of abandoned metal. He said things I’d heard him say dozens of times before. Then I watched his expression change, and he began talking with more animation and excitement than I’d ever heard from him.
He became uncharacteristically emotional. “They put me on death row for six years! They threatened me for six years. They tortured me with the promise of execution for six years. I lost my job. I lost my wife. I lost my reputation. I lost my—I lost my dignity.”
He was speaking loudly and passionately and looked to be on the verge of tears. “I lost everything,” he continued. He calmed himself and tried to smile, but it didn’t work. He looked soberly at the camera. “It’s rough, it’s rough, man. It’s rough.” I watched worriedly while Walter crouched down close to the ground and began to sob violently. The camera stayed on him while he cried. The report switched back to me saying something abstract and philosophical, and then it was over. I was stunned. I wanted to call Walter, but I couldn’t figure out how to dial him from Sweden. I knew it was time to get back to Alabama.
Chapter Fourteen
Cruel and Unusual
On the morning of May 4, 1989, Michael Gulley, fifteen, and Nathan McCants, seventeen, convinced thirteen-year-old Joe Sullivan to accompany them when they broke into an empty house in Pensacola, Florida. The three boys entered the home of Lena Bruner in the morning, while no one was there. McCants took some money and jewelry. The three boys then left. That afternoon, Ms. Bruner, an older white woman in her early seventies, was sexually assaulted in her home. Someone knocked on her door, and as she went to open it, another person who had entered through the back of her home grabbed her from behind. It was a violent and shocking rape; Ms. Bruner never even saw her attacker clearly. She could describe him only as “quite a dark colored boy” with “curly