Dead Man Walking: The Journey

by Helen Prejean, CSJ

Opening address at the Call To Action National Conference Nov. 3, 2000 in Milwaukee (transcribed from the tape and edited by Bill Thompson. Printed with permission.)

I want to tell you the story of the journey that led to Dead Man Walking, — the book, then the movie, then the opera. And now Tim Robbins is about to send me the first draft of the play, written not for the elite audiences of Broadway, but so theater groups in every state across the country can perform it. Think what a change of consciousness that will bring. And when consciousness changes, hearts change, and then we put our hands to action.

The movie Dead Man Walking was a bloomin’ miracle. Like the virgin birth. It wasn’t supposed to happen. But nothing is impossible with God. Susan Sarandon is the midwife that made the movie happen. When Tim Robbins went around Hollywood with the screenplay, every studio turned it down. You know, there are three magic bullets for a movie: lots of sex, violence, and action. Not a movie about a nun. But that’s why Dead Man Walking isn’t a Hollywood movie. It’s a Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn movie. They are like salmon: they swim against the Hollywood stream — the way Roy Bourgeois, my fellow Louisianian fighting to close the School of the Americas, goes against the military stream.

Against all odds! Hollywood didn’t think people would pay to see a movie about a nun and a death row inmate who’s guilty as sin! And Tim Robbins and I agreed: the moral question here is not what to do with innocent people. We know we shouldn’t execute innocent people. But what about when they are guilty? And when we don’t even like them? Like the death row inmate in Dead Man Walking. You don’t like this guy. And he’s not remorseful.

But the story’s got redemption in it, said Robbins to the studios. They weren’t interested. They didn’t believe the American public would go to a theatre for a two-hour sustained meditation on the death penalty.

Yet, on the feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1996, Susan Sarandon accepted the Oscar before a worldwide television audience of 1.3 billion people for playing the part of the nun in the movie. Is this or is this not an act of God?

Even before the movie, the book was a bloomin’ act of God. I wasn’t going to write a book. I said to myself: the people for the death penalty read the Rush Limbaugh books, and the people against the death penalty read Amnesty International. Why should I write a book? I didn’t know about the personal power of a book. And all the gifts I had been given, all that education — I didn’t know how I would be using them. Our gifts get eked out of us, pulled out of us, when we walk into a fire, see injustice, and begin to find a voice.

Before I wrote the book, we were saying: how will we ever get a voice? Everybody and their cat is for the death penalty in Louisiana. So we had a little meeting, four people around a table. Someone said: let’s do what Martin Luther King did. Let’s walk. Sacrificial action. So the first thing we ever did was a walk from New Orleans to Baton Rouge — a ragtag little group of people going along the road saying no to the death penalty. People would pull up and ask: What are y’all marchin’ for? Against the death penalty, we’d say. Oh-oh, they’d say and drive off. Instead of community support, we got a lot of hand signals! My good Catholic mama said, “Helen, honey, you may not see this ended in your lifetime.” “Mama,” I said. “We will see it ended!”

Writing the book

When we pursue a cause persistently, Providence begins to act for us. Somebody gave me an agent in New York. The agent talked to Jason Epstein at Random House, possibly the most influential editor in North America. I didn’t know who the man was from Adam’s cat. The agent showed him some stuff I’d written, about being with death row inmates, and being with the murder victims’ families, and got me an appointment. My mama bought me a suit, my community gave me travel money, and I was off to New York.

Sure, I’m an English major. I kept a good journal. But I had never written a book. And here I am, traveling to New York with my friend, Liz Scott, who had written a comedy book entitled, “Never Heave Your Bosom in a Front-hook Bra.” We were both going to see our editors. I met with Epstein. This Jewish person and the nun proceeded to have the best conversation about the death penalty I ever had with anybody. “Helen,” he said. “Nobody has written a personal book, one that will take people on their own personal journey, and show them faces on both sides. We need this book. It could be for the death penalty what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to end slavery. Your book is going to show people that death row inmates have faces.

“But, Helen. If you don’t talk about the crime in the first ten pages of this book, nobody will read it. And if you don’t maintain the tension — on every page — between the suffering of the victim’s family and the suffering of the death row inmate and his family awaiting execution, this book will collapse.” With that advice, he sent me home with a contract under my arm, and I said to myself: Well, I guess God wants me to write the book!

It took me two years. Day after day, I would sit there, putting my little rows of words on the page, like planting corn. I would wake up thinking about the words. I was living with the words, and it was like praying, because you distill out the truth.

Jason Epstein had also told me: “Helen, share your mistakes. Don’t soft-pedal your terrible mistake that you didn’t reach out to those victims’ families in the beginning. Don’t just share the peaks of the waves when you did everything right. Take people down into the troughs. When you were cowardly, say so. People will be looking for your honesty.” It was wonderful advice.

So for two years I wrote. It was like being in a cave. But the writing helped me, because by then I had to deal with the deaths of three people who’d been executed in the electric chair. By weaving the words, telling the story, facing it, you begin to heal. Random House published it in 1993, and in paperback a year later.

It wasn’t a best seller. You just hope for a modicum of success. But when you write a book, it has a life of its own. Susan Sarandon called me: “I’m reading your book, and I’m coming to New Orleans to see you.” (I had to go rent “Thelma and Louise” to see what she looked like. All through the movie I thought Geena Davis was Sarandon.) And that led to the movie. And then the opera! I got another call. Terrence McNally was going to write the libretto.

From movie to opera

They created an opera of Dead Man Walking. I was there on opening night. So were Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Sean Penn. Julie Andrews was in the box seats. She said she could hear the audience breathing. The beauty of the opera is that it is a live performance. And the genius of it is that it begins with the crime. With every audience, we must deal with the ambivalence we feel about the death penalty, and part of the ambivalence is our outrage at the death of innocent people. We read about the crime in the paper, we are outraged, we say the killers deserve to die, and then we shut down. But here are 3,240 people at every performance, and the first thing they witness is two beautiful, innocent teenage kids being killed right before their eyes. So they start their journey where we all have to start: with outrage. And we know who did it. We know who’s guilty. We watched him. Then we meet him, and we don’t like him. He’s not remorseful. He keeps saying: I didn’t do it.

And me? I’m “everyperson.” I’m just somebody who starts going to visit the guy, and as I make my journey, the audience is making theirs. My character’s music theme goes: “My journey, my journey to the truth…” My journey — to Christ, to God, to the poor. And everybody is making the same journey.

The biggest star is Frederika von Stade. She could have had any role. Instead of the leading role, my character, she chose to be the mother of the death row inmate. She comes before the pardon board to plead for the life of her child. I’ve lived this scene so many times in Louisiana. You know going in that for the people on the pardon board, it’s not about pardoning. They’ve already got their marching orders from the governor. This shy little mama comes to the microphone, fumbles in her big purse for her notes, and starts to sing about her Joey. She knows he did a terrible thing, but he’s her Joey. She fiddles in her purse and takes out this comb. Look what my Joey gave me for my birthday. A boy that would give his mama a beautiful comb like this can’t be all bad. Don’t kill my Joey. She sings, “Haven’t we all suffered enough?” And the audience is thinking: Oh my God, we’ve got another mother here. Another family. They suddenly realize that with this execution they are about to multiply victims’ families. Not just the families of the murder victims, whom we hear singing a medley that tears your heart out: “You don’t know what it’s like.” Now it’s Frederika von Stade singing: you don’t know what it’s like — to give birth to a boy, to raise him, and to realize now that he has done such a terrible thing that you must have raised him wrong.

Everyone is on a journey. Joseph DesRochers, the death row inmate, dealing with his own responsibility, a journey toward redemption. The victim’s journey. My journey. The audience’s journey. And we all witness the execution together. And when they hold up the gurney, the gurney is shaped like a cross. And he sings his last words, and they put him down. And then the opera has a minute and a half of silence as we watch him die.

The audience was in tears, clutching each other’s arms, holding hands, to help each other through it. The opera ends with me and a group of African American children singing a spiritual: “God will gather us around. Sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, God will gather us around.” It is the song of the Spirit of God, of church, of coming into community. But the death penalty is all about separating. About steps of removal, step by step, until we kill people. It’s one of the most profound struggles of our society: we are so separated. We don’t touch each other. We don’t go into those inner city neighborhoods. We’re not looking into the faces of the people who are suffering. So the opera ended with such a simple, almost a children’s, song. God will gather us around. In love.

The curtain came down, and the audience exploded. TV cameras were there, and 90 journalists from all over the world. And now, already, eight opera companies across the U.S. — two of them in Texas! — are talking about performing this opera. You can’t stop the truth. The truth sets us free, if we find ways to tell the story, to let the truth be known.

Prejean’s journey My journey began with an awakening to the poor. An awakening to justice. Here at CTA, I don’t have to awaken you to justice. But in most of my audiences, it’s like people have five pairs of gloves on so they won’t touch what’s real. The more affluent and separated people are, the more gloves they’ve got on. But you tell the stories, and one by one the gloves come off. That’s what compassion is about. And that includes compassion for the audience, for the American people. The people of America are not tied to the death penalty. They just need someone to take them through the stories.

A few years ago, I understood about charity, and being kind. I prayed for the poor. But I didn’t know any poor people. I was in New Orleans over by the lakefront, and we’ve got 10 public housing projects, and I hadn’t been in any of them. By the time I moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in 1981, our sisters had already been there since 1969. All those years the civil rights activists were marching with Martin Luther King, I hardly knew C, A minor, F and G7 on my guitar and I was singing, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind!”

I woke up when Sister Maria Augusta Neal, who for 40 years had been teaching sociology and plugging people into the social gospel, came to our motherhouse in Terre Haute to talk to our sisters. I wasn’t happy she was there. We were pretty polarized between the social justice sisters and the spiritual sisters, and I was with the spiritual sisters. Telling people to pray, and if people pray, they’re not really poor. I made it unscathed through the first day. She gave all those statistics about the rich and the poor, and I already knew all that. But on the second day, she talked about Jesus — and she got me. She said, “Jesus preached good news to the poor…,” and I thought I knew the next line: God is Abba and God is loving. But she said: Integral to the good news that Jesus preached was that they would be poor no longer. And I got it. I got it. That meant justice. That meant Jesus wasn’t a dreamer, floating about history and the real struggles of people, just going around in his Jesus-mobile saying ‘God loves you.’ Jesus went where the poor and marginated were, the people thrown away and despised by both religion and the Romans. I got it. I didn’t know what I would do, I didn’t have a plan, but I did decide to move into the public housing project to be among poor people.

Now I was in the soil where the seed can grow. One day a friend from the prison coalition around the corner came up to me on the street. It was so casual. It was so sneaky of God. (There should be a whole session on the sneakiness of God. We’ve all experienced it!) Hey, Sister Helen. You wanna be a penpal to someone on death row? Sure, I said. It was 1982, and we hadn’t executed anyone in Louisiana since the 60s. He wrote this name down for me: Patrick Sonnier. That scrap of paper was to be my passport into a strange country where I was going to watch this man be put to death in front of my eyes. Did God let me know that? Of course not. I’d just be writing a few letters.

But there’s the human contact. It’s the only way the gospel happens. I write. He writes back. I write. He writes back. He’s got no one to come and see him. And how many years had I been meditating on Matthew 25, “I was in prison and you came to visit me”? But we are all our own spin doctors when we read the gospels. For 30 years I’d been reading that verse as “in prison psychologically” or “in prison when we lack education.” But now Patrick Sonnier was in prison writing me, and I wrote back and said I would come and visit him.

I didn’t suddenly change my whole ministry, drop my work at the adult learning center. I just started weaving in these visits to a man on death row. I got there, and discovered that his brother is in prison too. One got a life sentence and one got a death sentence — and that was my first question about the legal system. I didn’t know anything about it, even though my Daddy was a lawyer.

Discovering death row

When I first looked through the heavy mesh screen at Patrick Sonnier, what blew me away was his humanness. I knew he was there for doing something terrible. But the dignity of the human person. I looked into his eyes. He was smiling. He said, “Sister Helen, you came. You came all that way to see me!” Can you imagine waking up every morning looking at the same cell? (We now incarcerate close to two million people in this country.) Waking up and wondering, “Is this the day they’re going to kill me?”

You cannot be in the presence of another human being, and not know what redemption and the gospel of Jesus is about: that every human being is worth more than the worst thing we do. So I accompanied him. One day, after visiting him and his brother, I went over to the coalition office and asked for some information about the Sonnier case, because I didn’t want to be naive about the victims. I opened up the file, and there in this newspaper, The Daily Iberian, from the Acadian part of Louisiana, were the faces of two beautiful teenage kids, a boy and a girl, who had been killed by the man I was visiting, and by his brother. Shot in the back of the head, lying face down near a sugar cane field, Nov. 4, 1977, a day their parents would never forget, their lives changed forever by this violence that had taken their children. I thought: I ought to go and visit those parents. But I held back. What if they said, “Sister, we want justice for our child. Can you sit with us in the front row and watch this guy get executed?” I knew they were pumped for that. In their vulnerability and rage, often victims’ families will go for the death penalty if it is offered. What would I say to them?

The victims’ families

Our culture says: you’re either going to be on the side of the death row inmate or on the side of the victims’ families, but you’re sure not going to be on both. But spirituality and reconciliation says: Yeah, I’m going to be on both sides. But I didn’t know yet how to do that, so I stayed away from the victims’ families. A terrible mistake. I first meet them at the pardon board hearing, the worst possible time, because the two sides couldn’t be more polarized. When you enter the room, you sign the register by which side you’re on: to execute, or to ask clemency. We’re out in the hall waiting for the pardon board to vote. By the way, everyone is Catholic: Patrick Sonnier and his mother, me the nun, the Bourque family of the girl killed, the LeBlanc family of the boy killed. The Bourque family are furious that this nun has come to the hearing. “Sure didn’t reach out to us,” they said. They were right. Right behind them is Lloyd LeBlanc and his family. Inside I am bracing myself for their anger. And they walk right up to me. The surprises of grace. “Sister, I’m Lloyd LeBlanc. It’s our son David who was killed. Sister, where have you been? We haven’t had anybody to talk to, and you can’t believe the pressure we’ve been under, about the death penalty.” I said, “Mr. LeBlanc, I’m so sorry.” But his was the grace, not mine. He took me by the hand. He is the hero of Dead Man Walking, not me. I’m just bumbling along, trying to find my way.

Gradually I come to where I go and pray with him in a little chapel. He keeps vigil before the Blessed Sacrament from 4 to 5 a.m., and we say the Rosary together. We Catholics have such riches, so many ways we can pray, can meditate, can be before God. I drive across the swamp in the middle of the night to pray with this man who lost his son. There is something special about a night pilgrimage, going to pray when the rest of the world is asleep. To kneel by this man, and gradually to hear the story of how he went to the morgue to identify the body, and they pulled out David’s body in that cold, terrible tray, and he looked down on the face of his son, and said the Our Father. When he comes to the part, “as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he says the words. He told me, “Sister, I didn’t feel the words at first, but Jesus told us to forgive.” So he set his face to go down that road.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Sonnier, mother of the death row inmate, couldn’t even go into town to buy groceries, because she would hear people saying, “There’s that white trash mother with the two sons that killed the Bourque and LeBlanc children.” She became like a hermit. People were cutting up cats and throwing them on her front porch. She disconnected her phone. Once you have the lightning rod of hatred on people who have killed other people, it extends to their family. One day her doorbell rang, and standing at her door with a basket of fruit was Lloyd LeBlanc. “Mrs. Sonnier, I want to give you this. I just want to say to you, that as parents, we never really know what our kids might do. I don’t hold you responsible for what your boys did to our son.”

I have met these living saints. Like Bud Welch, whose daughter Julie was the last one they dug out of the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing. He goes around this country giving witness, and talking about his daughter, who could speak four languages, and was translating for a Mexican-American man when the bomb went off that morning in the Murrah Building. Everybody’s on a journey. No one can automatically say, “I forgive.” And the whole American people are on a journey. We can’t short-circuit it. We’ve got to go to both sides, to feel the pain of it. The cross has two arms, and we must get on both of those arms: the death row inmates and what we are doing to them and their human rights on one side, and the murder victims’ families on the other. Through Lloyd LeBlanc first, I came to where I would go to meetings of murder victims’ families, and hear person after person say, “People stay away from us. They don’t know what to do with our pain.” Lloyd LeBlanc wrote Bishop Fry of Lafayette, La., a letter, asking why we never see the Church standing with the murder victims’ families. So the bishop started saying an annual Mass for the victims of violence. I spread that model all over this country.

Execution

On the other arm of the cross, I was with Patrick Sonnier when he was executed. He was the first. There have been four others. I have also visited with two women, Karla Faye Tucker in Texas, and Betty Lou Beets, before they were executed. They show that it doesn’t matter how much you’ve been redeemed, how much you’ve changed. Fourteen years after she killed two people with a pickaxe, everybody at Mountain View unit in Gatesville, Texas — the warden, the inmates, — everybody knew that Karla Faye Tucker had become a loving human being, and that Jesus had changed her life. They killed her anyway. Betty Lou Beets, age 62, a grandmother, an abused woman, asked to see me before she died so I could help to get her story out. She didn’t even know that she was a battered woman. She hoped that by her story being told, maybe one woman would recognize herself in it, and manage to get free. Everybody tries to make their death redemptive. I haven’t met the death row inmates that aren’t human as we are. We create those stereotypes, so then it’s easy to kill them. It’s all about connection. When we don’t connect with each other, we can kill each other, we can do anything. And the death penalty is just one more military solution to a social problem. All the dynamics are there: target the enemy, dehumanize the enemy, terminate the enemy — whom we never see.

The most surreal experience of my life was the death house in Louisiana. When you go in, the tile’s all polished, the coffeepot’s percolating, the secretary’s typing the forms. What forms? The ones the witnesses are going to sign after the…uh…… event tonight. Patrick Sonnier can hear the typewriter. He can hear the door swooshing as the associate wardens enter in their three-piece suits, and the witnesses file in. The electrician comes in to check the electric chair and all the lights dim. This human being sits there while the hum of events around him prepares to end his life.

I had now been visiting him for two and a half years. He said, “Look, Sister, you can’t be there at the end. It could scar you. It’s going to be bad. It’s the electric chair.” But there was no way this man was going to die alone. I said, “You look at me, Pat. I will be the face of Christ for you, Pat. Christ doesn’t want us doing this to each other.”

Then I took that walk with him. And he looked at me. I carry his face inside of me — just like I carry Robert’s face, and Willie’s face, and Joseph’s face, and Dobie’s face. I looked into their eyes, and I was there for them.

When I walked out that night after they killed Patrick Sonnier, I was in a daze. Thank God for the sisterhood. The sisters are waiting for me, with a coat to put around me, candles held against that dark night. How many candles and vigils have there been by now, and almost always, you find sisters among those who are gathered. In so many ways, we sisters are the hands of the church. We don’t need a lot of plumes and processions. We are the hands.

They put me in a car and started driving. They had to stop the car so I could throw up. It took me time to realize what had happened. I had watched somebody be killed in front of my eyes. I got home at 2:30 A.M., and there was my good Catholic mama, her rosary wrapped around her hand, her arms open for me.

Telling the story Then the next part of my journey began. I remember thinking, as clear as that clear starry night, that if the people of Louisiana could be brought close and see what happened tonight, they would reject the death penalty. I began meeting with other death penalty opponents. I started giving talks in parishes, often to tiny turnouts. But then the movie came out. And two weeks ago in Oklahoma City, 2,300 people came out on a Friday night to hear the nun talking about the death penalty. On university campuses they pack in to hear. Some may come just to see the nun who was played by Susan Sarandon. It doesn’t matter. Give me an hour, and I’ll take them through this journey. I have confidence in the story now. The American people are good and decent people. When faced with the truth of this thing, they reject it. Now we have the added awareness of 88 people coming off death row. Polls now show that 90 percent of the American public knows that innocent people are on death row along with the guilty. In a national poll, 63 percent flat out support a moratorium.

A moratorium is a graceful way to stop killing. Of course we work for abolition. But moratorium means cease fire, stop the killing, because the closer you look at the death penalty, the more it will come unraveled. There is no way to do the death penalty fairly. Of the 3,600 people on death row, 8 out of 10 are there because they killed white people. When people of color are killed, often there’s a shrug of the shoulders and maybe not even an investigation. We would have to change this whole country, eliminate all the racism, to ever be able to give the death penalty fairly, and after we went through all that, we wouldn’t want to do the death penalty anyway!

A final story. Joseph Odell was on death row in Virginia. He was asking for a DNA test which would show his innocence and they wouldn’t give him one. Meanwhile, all of Italy gets involved! Ten thousand faxes are sent to the governor of Virginia. The mayor of Palermo visits Odell: “Joseph, if they kill you, we will bury you in Palermo rather than in Virginia soil.”

The night Joseph Odell was executed, while America slept, 2.5 million people in Italy were watching television till 2 A.M. to learn what had happened to Joseph Odell. On the streets of Rome, people knew who his name. People were demonstrating in St. Peter’s Square. An American delegation arranged to go to see the Pope. I couldn’t go, but organizers said that if I wrote the Pope a letter, they would deliver it personally.

So I wrote the Pope a letter. And a friend of mine in the Vatican said the Pope read every word. I praised the good things he’d said in his encyclical, “The Gospel of Life,” how modern societies have alternatives to the death penalty, how it should be rare if not non-existent. But he had left a gaping loophole: in cases of absolute necessity, the state may still execute. Providentially, Harry Connick, Sr., the Catholic district attorney in New Orleans, was in a new BBC documentary, saying that as a Catholic he could justify the execution of Dobie Williams, and citing the pope’s “cases of absolute necessity.” So I wrote the Pope: “Your words are being quoted to justify death.” How can we say we are for the dignity of life when people are being led to their death after the torture of death row? The Pope had mentioned the movement for human rights around the world. I told him we are all part of that big wave. There are 108 countries with no death penalty, including those of the former Soviet Union, and every year another country is added. And I asked the Pope: are we just for the dignity of the innocent? What about the guilty? I told him that when I talk to people who call themselves pro-life, they make a distinction. Pro-life means the innocent. The guilty deserve everything they get.

Changing Catholic teaching

One week later Cardinal Ratzinger announced a change in the Catholic Catechism about the death penalty. Not just because of my letter. The U.S. Bishops, bishops of many countries have spoken out. The dialogue had now led to an important change. In section 2266, they changed the criteria. For 1700 years the Church had said: for grievous and grave crimes, the state can execute. They cut that part out! It doesn’t matter what the crime is. We uphold the dignity of everybody. Nobody should be executed.

Once that change was made, the Pope began to speak out publicly. On four visits to the U.S., he had never mentioned the death penalty with the other life issues. When he came to St. Louis in 1999, he included it. It didn’t draw much applause, because Catholics haven’t heard that before. Now our real challenge begins: to bring our people in the pews on this journey. If we are ready to take them, they are ready to move.

Everything is connected. We are for life and we can stand in that seamless garment of life. That is the beauty of being a Catholic.