Just Mercy

The "character in a Victor Hugo novel" Stevenson is thinking of is most likely Fantine in Les Misérables. Fantine is a poor single mother who arranges for her daughter, Cosette, to stay with some innkeepers so that she (Fantine) can go work a factory job that will not hire an unwed, "fallen" mother. The innkeepers begin abusing Cosette and extorting Fantine for increasing sums of money. They falsely claim that they need the money to take care of Cosette while she suffers from an illness. Fantine, who will do anything for her daughter, ends up doing sex work to make ends meet. She loses her factory job and resorts to selling her hair and teeth. She eventually gets sick and dies.

Fantine's story is incredibly sad—so sad, in fact, that it seems a bit over the top. Stevenson can hardly believe that a real person's story can remind him of hers. This woman is spending a decade of her and her children's lives in prison because she tried to find a way to give them toys for Christmas. The suffering the legal system has inflicted on her family is beyond disproportionate to her crime. It is plainly cruel. Her case, which Stevenson mentions is "not unique," demonstrates that the legal system routinely exacerbates harm rather than righting wrongs.

The woman instantly recognizes Stevenson as someone else who has committed his life to helping the helpless. She calls them both "stonecatchers," a title that, as Stevenson explains, alludes to a Christian parable about mercy. In the story, Jesus tells his followers that before throwing stones at sinners, they should consider whether they themselves have always behaved perfectly. Stevenson and this woman are surrounded by people throwing stones, heedless of this lesson. The woman recognizes how tired Stevenson is from catching stones before they can hit their targets.

While Stevenson is resting against her shoulder, the woman tells him that he needs to sing "sorrow songs" to cope with the ongoing struggle of catching stones. W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term "sorrow songs" in The Souls of Black Folk (a foundational work of sociology) to describe a genre of soulful vocal music developed by enslaved Black people as they labored on American plantations. Often religious and sometimes called "spirituals," these songs were a defiant expression of enslaved people's humanity under the most dehumanizing of conditions. Sometimes the songs were a way for enslaved people to pass messages to one another in code. The songs were instrumental in facilitating escape, rebellion, and forbidden relationships. Sometimes, though, the songs' only use was to express or cope with the experience of enslavement. Many of the songs that Stevenson hears his clients and others singing throughout the book were originally "sorrow songs." When a client is on his way to be executed in the most cruel and humiliating way, all he wants is a song for comfort.

One way to read the musical motif in Stevenson's book is as a reminder that mass incarceration of Black Americans is intimately linked to the system of slavery. These two systems are so disturbingly similar that they have the same soundscape. By invoking Du Bois's term for sorrow songs, the woman in this passage invites the reader to connect the motif with Du Bois's larger project in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois wrote his book in response to racist claims that Black Americans were unworthy of full citizenship because, supposedly, they were incapable of producing their own art and culture. Du Bois urges White readers especially to see sorrow songs as an artistic tradition that is just as legitimate and culturally significant as Western classical music. Essentially, he defines the genre of sorrow songs to prove that Black people are fully developed humans.

In light of Du Bois's musical project, it is apparent that sorrow songs connect Stevenson's clients not only to the institutional history they can never seem to escape, but also to the culture their communities have created and sustained themselves on through generations of oppression. They are making and appreciating art and culture, even and especially on death row. Stevenson thus uses music to show the reader that incarcerating a person or condemning them to die cannot make them less human.