Beverly McCall

Beverly McCall was the only woman ever housed on E Block, Cold Mountain's death row, during Paul Edgecombe's tenure as block superintendent. She was described as "black as the ace of spades and as beautiful as the sin you never had nerve enough to commit." Her crime was a violent act of marital revenge: after enduring six years of beatings from her husband, Lester "Cutter" McCall, she discovered he was cheating and, on the evening of that discovery, waited for him at the top of the stairs leading to the apartment over his barber shop. As he got his overcoat half off, she used one of his own razors to "drop his cheating guts onto his two-tone shoes."

Death Row and the Name Change

Two nights before her scheduled execution in Old Sparky, Beverly called Edgecombe to her cell and told him she had been visited by her African spirit-father in a dream. The spirit-father instructed her to discard her "slave-name" and die under her free name, Matuomi. She requested that her death warrant be read under the name Beverly Matuomi. Edgecombe, who had learned never to refuse the condemned unless absolutely necessary, agreed. He noted that the spirit-father had not given her a first name, or at least one she could make out. The change made no practical difference, because the governor called the next day around three in the afternoon, commuting her sentence to life in the Grassy Valley Penal Facility for Women. Edgecombe was glad to see her "round ass going left instead of right" when she reached the duty desk.

Later Life and Obituary

Thirty-five years or more later, Edgecombe saw her name on the obituary page of the newspaper, under a picture of a "skinny-faced black lady with a cloud of white hair and glasses with rhinestones at the corners." The obituary reported that she had spent the last ten years of her life a free woman, had single-handedly rescued the small-town library of Raines Falls, taught Sunday school, and was much loved in that little backwater. The headline read "LIBRARIAN DIES OF HEART FAILURE," with a smaller subheading: "Served Over Two Decades in Prison for Murder." Only her eyes, "wide and blazing" behind the rhinestone glasses, were the same as the woman Edgecombe had known. He recognized them as the eyes of a woman who, even at seventy-whatever, would not hesitate to pluck a safety razor from its blue jar of disinfectant if the urge seemed pressing.

Narrative Significance

Beverly McCall's story serves as a crucial early example in Paul Edgecombe's narrative of the complexity of condemned prisoners. She is the first prisoner he mentions who was not defined solely by her crime, and her transformation from a death-row inmate to a beloved community figure illustrates the novel's central theme that people are more than their worst actions. Edgecombe explicitly uses her case to frame his own moral crisis: "You know murderers, even if they finish up as old lady librarians in dozey little towns. At least you do if you've spent as much time minding murderers as I did. There was only one time I ever had a question about the nature of my job. That, I reckon, is why I'm writing this." Her story also establishes the pattern of last-minute reprieves and the arbitrary nature of state power that will later contrast so starkly with John Coffey's fate.