Chapters 17-20 Summary
Adam's aunt, Lee, has managed to live a fulfilling life despite her family's past. She married into a wealthy family by hiding her father's shameful past. As the wife of Phelps Booth, Lee is well known and liked in social circles. The love in her marriage eventually subsides, and she and Phelps live apart but are content with their arrangement. They make a handful of appearances together every year and stay married because divorcing late in life would be distasteful to his family. Lee works as a counselor at the Auburn house, a home for young, unwed mothers. Her time there is on a volunteer basis and she also donates large sums of Phelps' money to keep it running. She finds her work there rewarding, but she has difficult times as well. Lee is a functioning alcoholic, an artifact of her painful upbringing and unhappy marriage. Her son, Walt, has been raised in the Booth way. Following a legacy of every generation before him, he attends prestigious, private schools and is introduced to people of the proper social class. Per his father's instructions, he associates only with people who also belong to this elite group, and is essentially a snob. Phelps encourages him to participate in sports, but Walt is not athletically inclined. Phelps is busy at work and rapidly becomes disillusioned with parenting. Walt is sent away to boarding school at fifteen years old. This is followed by a year of college before he drops out and never returned home. Walt travels to Europe and falls in love. He decides to live permanently in Amsterdam. Lee looks forward to her once a year visits with her son. She always arrives alone, however, because the discovery that their son was gay was intolerable to Phelps.
Adam is dismayed by Lee's admissions. He wonders how his family could be so dysfunctional, and it is a lot of information to learn at once. The following morning he learns even more. He arrives at the prison and meets with Sam in the law library. Sam chides his grandson for speaking to the press and pretends to be angry. Once they settle that matter, they focus on the execution process. Adam hopes to challenge the gas chamber as Sam's place of death. He doesn't expect to overturn Sam's conviction right away, but wants to file appeals on any ground possible. The purpose is to gain some extra time to thoroughly research Sam's history. Eyewitnesses had reported that the last two gas chamber deaths in Mississippi had not gone according to plan and the supreme court had since then ruled the gas chamber inhumane. The gas chamber had been replaced with lethal injection at the court's suggestion, yet Sam is still scheduled to die by gas inhalation. While Sam searches the law library for more relevant cases, Adam researches another angle. He visited with Wyn Lettner, the FBI agent who had led an intense investigation encompassing the Klan in Mississippi in the '60s. After an afternoon of fishing and a long night of drinking, Adam does discover that, just like himself, Wyn also believes that Sam had had an accomplice for the Kramer bombing.
The one person who could truly stop Sam's execution is hiding deep in the countryside. Rollie Wedge, the man who actually planted and detonated the explosives in the Kramer bombing for which Sam was found guilty, is now going by the name of Roland. He possesses many forged documents and has at least three different identities. He no longer considers himself a member of the Klan, but instead is a fascist. Rollie has threatened both Dogan and Sam. Dogan is dead and Sam has never revealed Rollie's identity. It appears that he would take their secret to his grave, but if he was going to tell the truth, he would be likely to do so as his date of execution approached. This makes Roland nervous and he follows the newspapers closely.
Chapters 17-20 Analysis
These chapters delve deep into the life of Adam's aunt, Lee. Lee confesses to being an alcoholic. For her, alcohol is an escape from her father's sordid past and her marriage. Although her marriage seemed happy to outsiders, Lee admits that she and her husband live apart. He had a voracious appetite for younger women and she does not enjoy the life of a socialite. Their son made choices which his father found disagreeable, so Lee's only child lives abroad, which is another source of pain for her. The reader comes to understand that Lee grew up in a dysfunctional family and, despite her best intentions, her own nuclear family has also evolved to be dysfunctional. Lee recognizes her alcoholism and is not proud of it. She tries to stay sober, enters and completes rehab repeatedly, and volunteers for worthy organizations, most notably the Auburn House. She wants to be a strong, healthy woman. Although Lee loves her nephew, his presence and constant line of questioning revive memories that Lee has buried deep within herself. For this reason, Adam's visit signals the collapse of Lee's sobriety. In all fairness, as Sam's execution date drew closer, Lee might have relapsed whether or not Adam had arrived. Lee was not the only one contemplating her life's path.
Sam has much to consider from his cell. A welcome thunderstorm temporarily cools the temperature inside the prison, which ordinarily is squelching. Sam enjoys the storm and considers it a triumph over the state of Mississippi, which so poorly designed the prison in which he was forced to live out the rest of his life. The paragraph reads, "But the state of Mississippi could not control the weather, and when rains came and cooled the air, Sam smiled to himself and offered a small prayer of thanks". The idea of Sam praying to and believing in a higher being causes the reader to pause. One wonders if he has always believed in a higher being, and if so, how does he justify the crimes he committed. Alternatively, maybe he has found spirituality since being convicted and sentenced to die.