Old Sparky
Old Sparky is the electric chair at Cold Mountain Penitentiary, the fixed point toward which every condemned man on E Block is ultimately directed. It sits on a plank platform in the southeast corner of the storage room at the end of the Green Mile, a squat, oak-armed throne that has absorbed the terrorized sweat of scores of men in the last minutes of their lives. The inmates make jokes about it—calling it Old Sparky or the Big Juicy, cracking wise about the power bill—but for the men who actually have to sit down in it, the humor vanishes the moment their ankles are clamped to its stout legs. The realization comes then, rising in their eyes as a cold dismay, that their own legs have finished their careers; they are never going to walk another country mile or dance with a girl at a barn-raising. A black silk bag is rolled down over their heads after their last remarks, ostensibly for them, but Paul Edgecombe always believed it was really for the witnesses, to keep them from seeing the awful tide of dismay in the eyes of a man who realizes he is going to die with his knees bent.
Design and Location
The chair is built of stout oak, with broad arms and legs, and a metal cap that usually hangs jauntily on the back of the chair, like some robot kid's beanie in a Buck Rogers comic-strip. A cord runs from the cap through a gasket-circled hole in the cinderblock wall behind the chair, connecting to the prison generator. Off to one side stands a galvanized tin bucket containing a circle of sponge, cut to fit the metal cap; before executions, the sponge is soaked in brine to better conduct the charge of direct-current electricity through the wire, through the sponge, and into the condemned man's brain. The chair is housed in a miserable room without heat and with a metal roof, cold enough to see your breath in winter and stifling in summer. At the execution of Elmer Manfred in July or August of 1930, nine witnesses passed out from the heat. The room is reached through a small door from Paul Edgecombe's office—a door so low that John Coffey has to sit and scoot through it—then down three cement steps to a board floor.
Ritual and Procedure
The execution follows a rigid, rehearsed ritual. The condemned man walks the Green Mile, turns right into Edgecombe's office, drops to his knees to pray, then proceeds through the little door into the storage room. He is escorted to the platform, where he sits in the chair. Two guards kneel to clamp his ankles—the clamp on the right side is slightly bigger because it carries the juice—while others secure his wrists and a restraining belt across his chest. The mask is rolled down over his face, the brine-soaked sponge is tucked into the metal cap, and the cap is snugged down over his head. The officer in charge calls "Roll on one" to the switch room, which gooses the prison generator, causing the lights all over the prison to brighten. Then, after the condemned man is given a chance to speak, the order "Roll on two" is given, and the current passes through his body until he is dead. The doctor listens with a stethoscope; if the heartbeat is disorganized, a second or third jolt is administered. The body is then loaded onto a stretcher, carried down twelve wooden steps to a tunnel that runs thirty feet under the highway, and placed on a gurney for removal.
Key Executions and Failures
Old Sparky is the site of several pivotal executions in the story. The execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, a Cherokee council elder, goes smoothly; he walks strong, prays with Brother Schuster, and dies with dignity, though his left braid smoulders and has to be slapped out. The execution of Eduard Delacroix is a catastrophe. Percy Wetmore, placed out front as part of a deal to get him transferred, deliberately uses a dry sponge, which fails to conduct the current properly. Instead of a quick death, Delacroix suffers an agonizing, prolonged electrocution: his body jitters and twists, smoke pours from the cap and mask, his eyes are blown out of their sockets, his face catches fire, and he screams for nearly two minutes before dying. The execution of John Coffey, by contrast, is quick and relatively clean, though Coffey begs not to have the mask put over his face because he is afraid of the dark, and Edgecombe grants that request. The chair's shadow, elongated and spidery, climbs one wall like a threat, and after Delacroix's death, John Coffey says of the chair, "They're still in there. Pieces of them, still in there. I hear them screaming."
Symbolic and Thematic Significance
Old Sparky is more than a machine; it is the physical embodiment of the state's power to kill, and the ritual surrounding it is designed to make that killing orderly and bearable for those who carry it out. The chair's oak arms have absorbed the terrorized sweat of scores of men; the metal cap and the brine-soaked sponge are the instruments of a technology that reduces a living man to a corpse in seconds. Yet the novel repeatedly questions the justice of what the chair does. John Coffey, who is innocent of the crime for which he is executed, is killed by the same mechanism that killed the guilty Delacroix, and the chair makes no distinction. Edgecombe, who presides over seventy-eight executions, comes to see the chair as a thing of perversity and folly, a deadly bit of machinery that destroys what it cannot create. The chair's presence haunts the narrative, a constant reminder that the Green Mile leads to a fixed and inescapable end, and that the men who walk it—whether guilty or innocent—are all, in the end, reduced to the same smoking, charred remains.
