The Confession

By tradition, a high school class ring affirms membership in a community: Classmates wear identical rings, symbolizing their collective academic achievement. Nicole’s class ring, however, shows the opposite: her isolation as the victim of a horrific and vicious crime. After murdering her, Boyette puts her class ring on a gold chain around his neck as a memento. The novel often ignores Nicole’s personhood, since its focus is on Donté’s fate. However, the ring does symbolize her missing body. For most the novel, all that represents this innocent young woman is a gold band, “narrow and small and obviously worn by a female” (66).

Some of the novel’s legal plotline hangs on the issue of habeas corpus—the need for the state to produce a victim’s body when charging someone with illegal killing (the Latin phrase literally means “you have the body”). Absent the body of Nicole, the ring is proof of Boyette’s story: It convinces Schroeder to drive Boyette across state lines, allows Flak to give record Boyette’s confession, and prompts Nicole’s mother to realizes that the wrong person had been executed for her daughter’s murder.

Nicole’s gold ring has another, even more disturbing resonance. Gold bands are traditionally exchanged during a wedding ceremony as symbols of unity between bride and groom. That Boyette keeps and wears Nicole’s gold ring—coupled with his unhinged desire to see her dead body and his gleeful pride in his horrible crime—symbolizes that Nicole and her murderer are linked forever.

The egg-shaped brain tumor, “malignant, deadly, and basically untreatable” (9), that afflicts Travis Boyette and is at least in part responsible for his decision to approach Reverend Schroeder about the murder of Nicole Yarber symbolizes a kind of karmic retribution in an unfair world.

As Donté’s execution approaches, Boyette, the actual murderer, lives under a kind of parallel death sentence. While Donté’s fate is obviously wrong, Boyette’s end is fitting. Readers, otherwise on tenterhooks about whether Donté will get a reprieve, can at least rest assured that the novel’s sociopathic villain won’t be around for long.  Donté’s harrowing experiences imprisoned on death row for something he did not do are presented alongside Boyette’s physical suffering: his limp, headaches, nausea, seizures, facial tics, labored breathing, the unbearable pressure on his skull, frequent lapses into unconsciousness, as well as his panic over dying young. Premature death creates a symbolic parallel between the two characters. Both know that hope is illusive.

However, the novel muddles this neat parallel when Boyette is sentenced to death for Nicole’s murder. While readers have become aware of the deep injustice of state-sponsored killing as punishment for crimes, readers are also deeply convinced that Boyette should not be alive after his actions—his execution undercuts the divine retribution angle of his tumor, seemingly arguing that capital punishment does have a place in the system after all.

In one of the most moving scenes in the novel, Donté’s mother gently and lovingly prepares her son’s body for burial in the Slone funeral home. The scene centers on the inconsolable grief of a mother coming to terms with the needless death of her “beautiful boy, lying there so peaceful, and so healthy. Dead but not diseased. Bead but not injured. Dead but not maimed” (367). As she cuts off her son’s prison garb, takes away all evidence of his incarceration, and then carefully washes her son’s body while recalling moments from his childhood, she hums the gospel song “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”

The hymn holds a particular place within the culture of the Black civil rights movement. Written in 1932 by Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993) after his wife died giving birth to their stillborn son, the song records the anguish of loss and the need to rely on God to make it through boundless grief: “I am tired, I’m weak, I am worn / Through the storm, through the night / Lead me on to the light.” The hymn later became a favorite of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly the stirring rendition by gospel icon Mahalia Jackson. King used the hymn frequently in his public appearances to inspire followers to keep the faith in the darkest moments of the civil rights movement. The hymn was played at King’s memorial service after his assassination.

Thus, the hymn brings together consolation for parental grief and righteous anger over racism and hate. Its use in the novel is a reminder that the execution of Donté Drumm is part of a long tragic history of violence and hate directed against Black people in the US.