The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

Bryan Stevenson is Hinton’s eventual lawyer, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). Hinton’s response and imagining of Stevenson is mercurial. He appears, first, only as a mirage—a kind of fleeting, mythical figure. As Hinton hears others discussing his name, they seem convinced he is the best lawyer in the world; Hinton, however, jaded by repeated disappointments, is unconvinced. He states he is happy with his current lawyer (though this is not really true).

Years later, after Hinton makes a desperate phone call to Stevenson’s office, Stevenson comes to visit. Hinton says, “He looked smart. He also looked tired. There were lines around his eyes and a sort of sadness hidden in the creases” (169). Eventually Hinton understands why Stevenson looks so world-weary: He has represented more death row inmates than he can count, and he hasn’t always won.

Stevenson is always smartly dressed; he smiles easily. Eventually the two become friends, and discuss casual topics like sports and weather. At the same time, Hinton is impressed by Stevenson’s legal acuity; their casual conversations compliment the weight of the information being exchanged. He always signs off correspondence, to Hinton's relief, with the phrase “Hang in there.” 

In the book's Foreword, Stevenson describes, too, how Hinton changed him, and others. He notes that, during visits, prison staff would ask how they could help Hinton, and concludes, “[N]o one I have ever represented has inspired me more than Anthony Ray Hinton” (xi).

Buhlar Hinton, Ray Hinton’s mother, shows unconditional love to her son throughout his ordeal. Hinton describes her as a sharp dresser; during an initial visit, she wore “ivory gloves, green-and-blue flowered dress, and her wife blue hat rimmed in white lace” (2). During a later Fourth of July party, she, Hinton notes, “wore her best white hat and her blue dress with red piping at the sleeves” (40). She is also powerful in her speech; for that reason, she “could say more in silence than most people could say in a ten-minute speech” (34). When she tells him he’ll have to decide how he intends to live his life, there is a “little hitch” in her voice (34). The power in that hitch makes Hinton unbearably ashamed. 

While she is not a tiny woman, when Hinton hugs her, she feels small. She is a tremendous cook. Hinton notes, too, her generosity and naiveté: She paid small but regular amounts to his inept public defendant. And she is unfailingly honest and law-abiding. Hinton asks her to bring him some pie, adding, jokingly, that he could use it as a bribe. She laughs, and Hinton says, “My mom would no sooner break the law than she would grow two heads” (113).

On September 22, 2002, Hinton receives the news that his mother passed away. That evening he can hear her speaking to him, trying to console him: “My mother was always the flicker of light […] but now there was nothing but darkness” (199).