The Sun Does Shine. Anthony Ray Hinton 2018, 265 pp.

Death row humour. “What does capital punishment mean? It means a guy without capital gets punished”. This is just one of many memorable quotes from this remarkable autobiography of a poor black Alabama labourer who, from age 29 spent thirty years in prison, mostly on death row, for two murders that it is obvious from the start he did not commit.

I love reading biographies but generally shun autobiographies with their almost inevitable self-aggrandizement and ego boosterism. But there is little of that here, as Hinton readily acknowledges making poor choices in his life before his death sentence, including stealing a car, writing bad cheques and extensive womanizing, and makes no excuses for those bad decisions. But the truth that he tells is of a corrupt, inept, incredibly complicated and racially biased system that is quite willing to kill innocent people in the name of justice and maintaining the myth of being tough on crime.

In school, and as long as she was alive, Ray Hinton was a mamma’s boy, and he often quotes her homespun admonitions in droll southern black vernacular. He was also a talented athlete who, in a just world might well have become a Major League Baseball star. Instead, because he was poor, black and lived in Alabama, he went to work in a coal mine where his father had been crippled for life. Going down into the mine “felt like climbing into your own coffin every day”.

Life on death row is vividly depicted with the alternating hope and despair, the wry gallows humour, and the friendships and unwritten cultural rules that develop between men confined to adjacent 5×7 foot cages every day for years. Hinton developed a strong friendship with a white supremest KKK killer, mourned with him when the man’s father died, and cried when the man was electrocuted a few feet outside his cell. He heard the generator start there for 54 electrocutions and smelled death with them all. According to one myth, one secret that never escaped from Pandora’s Box was the date of one’s death as no one could live with that knowledge. But these men were told exactly when they would die weeks before.

But Hinton also had a vivid imagination and dreamt of visiting exotic sites, playing for the Yankees (he fired an appointed Boston lawyer, joking to fellow inmates that he didn’t want to be defended by a Red Sox fan) and marrying in succession, Halle Berry, Sandra Bullock, and then Kim Kardashian. He prayed and read the Bible, but it is not clear what his religious beliefs were, and at one point questioned the existence of God. What is not said in a biography is often as interesting as what is said; he never mentions any visitors to him on death row from members or leaders of the evangelical church he had attended regularly. He tried to start a book club on death row-“it was a gift to spend time in your mind away from your own reality”- but the prison officials cruelly nixed that escape.

The title derives from the only words Hinton could think to say when he walked out of prison as a free man in April, 2015, with media cameras flashing all around him. He admits to having difficulty adjusting to a life of freedom, and now works for the Equal Justice Initiative and his lawyer, whose persistence was the only thing that spared him from the electric chair. Will he maintain his equanimity and forgiving nature as a celebrity advocate for abolition of the death penalty in years to come? Celebrity has torn the moral fabric of many who achieved it, but I doubt that it will change this humble wise man who never wanted publicity.

This is a true story that must be told, and no one can do that as well as Anthony Ray Hinton. It is not always a pleasant story- it will make you cry as often as you laugh, but I encourage you to read it, and share it.

One last quote: “No one can understand what freedom means until they don’t have it.”