When I first started writing the script for the graphic version of Dead Man Walking, I was staggered by the amount of research I needed to do for it. After all, I had Sister Helen’s already well-researched text to work from, together with the 242 footnotes contained in the original. Surely that was enough to go on?
Oh no!
Bringing a classic up to date
For starters, the book is 30 years old. So very many things have changed in those years, from the statistics about crime and poverty, to the crucial death penalty cases heard by the US Supreme Court, to the methods used by states to kill their citizens.
To provide current context, I had to make sure all those changes and trends were reflected in the book, in some cases by updating the information (via the device of the Owracle, whom you will meet again soon), in others by either revising or omitting sections that were no longer relevant.
What, no pictures?
Dead Man Walking also lacked something vital to this new literary endeavor: images!
When you’re writing a script for an illustrator, a crucial task is to provide visual source material. Newspaper clips, correspondence, maps, photos, drawings—all these things are grist for the illustrator’s mill.
So as well as research necessary for writing the script, we also needed images to help Catherine Grünewald ground her illustrations in the Deep South, where the story takes place. Our shared Dropbox contained everything from photos of 1970s car makes and models to leaf shapes and the colors of azalea blossoms to high-school graduation photos.
Google proved helpful for some of this, So, too, did the newspaper archives at Louisiana State University and on newspapers.com. But the real gold mine for our research were the Sr. Helen Prejean Papers, housed in the archives of DePaul University in Chicago.
The archives that almost weren’t…
About those Prejean Papers: But for the savvy intervention of DePaul’s Professor Susanne Dumbleton, they might never have survived.
Susanne, in the course of researching a book about women and leadership, came to New Orleans in 2010 to visit Sr. Helen. I’ll let Susanne provide an account of what happened during that visit:
I didn't know that it was Helen’s birthday, but when I was interviewing Sr. Margaret [Maggio—Sr. Helen’s assistant], she invited me to come to the celebration that was going to take place at the office.
I arrived as the setting up was under way, so Margaret offered to take me on a tour of the office. Along the way she pulled open sliding doors for a closet and said, "Helen likes to save things." There, and in a second closet, were the cartons holding folders, binders, loose sheets of paper, and "stuff."
I caught my breath. Being by training a "medievalist," by which I mean a person chronically aware of the value of documents, objects, photographs, etc. to bring events and people and opinions alive over time—and to bring authenticity for the moment and subsequent eras, I imagined that some things in those boxes were of value to the question of social justice within criminal justice.
Margaret noted that Helen would place things in the cartons with not much attention to order but intuiting that they might be of use. Because it was relatively early in the public awareness of the value of using paper efficiently (and nuns were among the most efficient), I could see that many of the sheets were two-sided, with one side being irrelevant and the other containing probably-important information or jottings.
Included in those papers stored willy nilly were correspondence, drawings, manuscript drafts, a bible owned by Robert Lee Willie (the second of the two condemned men in Dead Man Walking), and a pair of boots worn by Sean Penn in the film version of the book.
Professor Dumbleton, recognizing the richness of what she saw, and its vulnerability (the apartment and office had already been through Hurricane Katrina), asked if Sr. Helen would be willing to speak to the archivist at DePaul, to which Helen said “Sure.”
Susanne again:
When I returned to Chicago, I contacted Fr. Ed Udovic (a Vincentian and an historian, who was in charge of the library and the Special Collections at the time). I asked Ed if he thought Helen's materials would be of interest, and he took over from there—engaging the archivists in the question. I believe archivist Kathryn DeGraff flew down to meet with Helen.
I got the sense that "suddenly" other universities showed interest (Notre Dame and Georgetown), but I don't have anything to support that, only that Helen said she chose DePaul because she was sure the materials would not be subject to clerical whim (my words).
