Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green by Cahill Thomas

Author:Cahill, Thomas [Cahill, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780385530156
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 7153917
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2009-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

“The most unlikely person, the most improbable situation— these are all ‘transfigurable—they can be turned into their glorious opposites.” These are the words of Desmond Tutu, archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his many years of sublimely courageous work in the struggle against the apartheid of his then white-ruled homeland. A few months after I first went to Livingston, Tutu was about to visit Dominique, a visit that would be surrounded by as much hubbub and media attention as Dominique could ever have hoped for.

“The Arch,” as Tutu is called by many of his many friends, was coming to the United States on a speaking tour in March 2004. I had been his publisher at Doubleday during the previous decade, and over the course of that time he and I had become friends. I was also a friend of his literary agent, Lynn Franklin, a woman of considerable sympathy for others. She shared with me the details of the schedule for Tutu's speaking tour. He had one day off during his tour, March 24. Even more serendipitous, on March 23 he would speak in Oklahoma City; on March 25 he was due in Dallas. So—at least theoretically—it would be possible for him to fly from Oklahoma City to Houston on March 24, meet with Dominique, and then fly on to his appointment in Dallas.

The obstacles to such a plan were considerable: in order to keep him on schedule, I would need to arrange for private planes and chauffeured cars. And somehow I would have to get him to agree to go far out of his way to meet a man he'd never heard of, causing considerable disruption to his schedule. I would also need to secure the cooperation of his lecture agency, a brusquely efficient organization not especially known for its devotion to causes unconnected to their bottom line.

But the most daunting objection to this emerging scheme lay in my knowledge of Desmond Tutu's delicate health: he had prostate cancer and had recently undergone treatments that left him less vigorous than usual; moreover, he had struggled his whole life against the effects on his body of diseases he had contracted in childhood, tuberculosis and polio. The polio, in particular, had left his right side weak, to such an extent that he had a soft handshake and, when tired, a pronounced limp. He would soon turn seventy-three. As if all this did not speak against my plan, there was the archbishop himself, a man who craves the oasis of silence, meditation, and prayer the way others crave human society. I knew he would be depending on the one day he had off to restore his spiritual equilibrium.

Well, I reasoned, if anyone I know is a grown-up, capable of making his own decisions and saying no to what he knows is beyond his strength, it is Desmond Tutu. So I would send him an e-mail message, telling him of Dominique's situation and

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