The Green Mile

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1996

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Part 3, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: Coffey’s Hands

Chapter 1 Summary

In Georgia Pines, Paul has become a “special friend” (163) to Elaine, an elderly woman he is romantically involved with after his wife’s death. Paul has a reputation for being standoffish, but Elaine does not seem to mind. One day, Paul wakes up early to watch TV while others at Georgia Pines are asleep. Elaine finds him shaking on the couch, as if he has seen a ghost. He tells her that he was watching the film, Kiss of Death, and saw the scene where the villain, played by Richard Widmark, pushes an old woman in a wheelchair off the stairs. Paul explains that Widmark’s character looks just like inmate William Wharton. Paul tells Elaine about his time in Cold Mountain, an experience that Elaine has heard before. She encourages him to keep writing about his days in the penitentiary. They depart to their separate beds to sleep while Paul fights off visions of Wharton’s ghost in his head.

Chapter 2 Summary

Chapter 2 returns to Wharton’s attack on Dean. Paul has his gun trained on the inmate, unable to shoot because of how Wharton had positioned fellow guard Dean’s body. Luckily, Brutal happens on the scene and acts swiftly to hit Wharton’s head with a baton, rendering him unconscious. Dean falls to the floor, out of breath and rasping. Percy remains petrified. The guards work together to lift Wharton’s body to his cell. When the inmate wakes up three hours later, he watches Paul from the bars, threatening that Paul will be his next victim. Paul responds evenly that they are well past his welcome speech, a response Wharton does not expect.

Chapter 3 Summary

Once the guards place the unconscious Wharton in his cell, Paul orders Percy to give an oral report of what happened to Warden Moores. Before Percy turns to leave, he asks if Paul is okay since he is sweating and walking funny. Paul dismisses him and then proceeds to rush to the bathroom to painfully urinate white discharge. When he returns to E Block, Coffey urges Paul to come see him. Paul approaches but Coffey insists that he must come into the cell with him. Delacroix, who has been watching with Mr. Jingles, warns Paul that he should not be doing that without the other guards present. Against his better judgment, Paul enters Coffey’s cell and sits beside him on his bed. Coffey places his hand above Paul’s crotch, which stuns Paul at first until he begins to feel warmth around his groin. He feels something change in his crotch before Coffey pulls his hand away. Coffey turns to cough and expels black insects that eventually turn white before disappearing. Delacroix cries for help, thinking Coffey has injured Paul. Paul assures him that he is fine and asks Coffey what he has done. Coffey refuses to answer. Delacroix insists to Paul that Coffey is a “gris-gris man” (186), someone who is capable of magic, and says that Mr. Jingles has whispered this to him. Paul dismisses his reasoning. To test the change in his condition, he urinates in the nearest washroom and finds himself to be completely cured.

Chapter 4 Summary

Paul arranges to have Brutal cover for him one morning so that he can pay a visit to Burt Hammersmith, the full-time reporter for the Tefton Intelligencerwho covered Coffey’s case. Paul ends up at Hammersmith’s house where the reporter wonders suspiciously if he is there to hear the gruesome details of the murders Coffey was charged with committing. Paul secretly wants to find an explanation behind Coffey’s healing powers. He asks Hammersmith if he has learned of Coffey’s past crimes. The reporter says that he has not uncovered any evidence of Coffey’s past crimes, and in fact, it seems as if Coffey had “dropped out of the sky” (199). He describes the latticed scars on Coffey’s back, and how his defense attorney had attempted to use the scars to suggest a past life of abuse that might have led to his murderous actions. Paul is unwilling to let go of the possibility of Coffey’s innocence, and describes the inmate’s gentle demeanor to the reporter. To make a point, Hammersmith calls his son, Caleb, to them. Caleb’s face is disfigured due to being attacked by the family dog. Hammersmith explains that although the dog had been in the family for years and had played well with the children, he still attacked Caleb one day. Without hesitation, he shot the dog and placed the body in the doghouse, which remains in the backyard. He cannot bring himself to take apart the doghouse and remove the dog’s body due to his grief. Hammersmith offers this story to illustrate a point about unsuspecting murderers, comparing the motives of Coffey, a black man, to that of a rabid dog. The story makes Paul uneasy. He drives back to Cold Mountain.

Chapter 5 Summary

Wharton tries to stir up trouble by urinating on Harry’s leg. The guards decide to grab the restraint jacket—an item they have never used—and put it on Wharton. To do so, they connect a hose to a water main and blast Wharton with water until he is subdued long enough for Brutal and Paul to strap Wharton into the jacket. Wharton seems genuinely frightened for the first time, and is also furious. The guards put him in the restraint room, to teach him a lesson. When they put him back in his cell the next night, he appears to be compliant, promising to be good. The next day, he purchases a Moon Pie from Toot-Toot and holds the chocolate dessert in his mouth until it melts. When Brutal walks by, Wharton spits the liquefied Moon Pie onto Brutal’s face. This leads to another stint in the straightjacket and restraint room, this time for two days. Wharton keeps acting up despite his punishment. Paul is concerned that one day someone will not be watching closely enough, and Wharton will cause grave trouble for the guards. In the meantime, Wharton’s defense attorney is making a case for his client, stating that his youth and whiteness should be reasons enough to keep him from a death sentence.

Chapters 1-5 Analysis

These chapters continue to escalate the tension of Part 2 via Wharton’s attack on Dean. Given the traumatic content of this memory, Paul returns to his present time in Georgia Pines to recuperate from the emotional weight of remembering. However, even though many years have passed, Wharton still haunts Paul’s waking life. When Paul watches an old film and sees an outlaw onscreen that resembles Wharton, he is triggered into remembering the former inmate’s extreme violence. As a narrative gesture, Paul’s occasional returns to the Georgia Pines timeline illustrate his inability to forget.

Back at Cold Mountain, Wharton’s fighting instincts demonstrate a thirst for violence. He exhibits thrill in attempting to end Dean’s life. His ability to recognize quickly that Paul’s gun is trained on him from a distance shows his high awareness even in moments of extreme action and violence. He watches all the guards, including when they do not know they are being observed. His hypervigilance differentiates him from the other inmates, who seem more willing to behave compliantly. It also foreshadows the possibility that his keen awareness of his surroundings will create problems for those around him.

In Chapter 3, Coffey demonstrates his healing powers for the first time by curing Paul of his urinary tract infection. When Coffey beckons him to his cell, Paul feels inexplicably drawn to him, much in the same way he did when he first encountered the inmate and shook his hand, something that Paul had never done with an inmate prior to Coffey. The process of healing seems to require Coffey to inhale the disease into his own body and expel it in the form of black insects that turn white before disappearing. The healing process also appears to require some sacrifice to Coffey’s health to work. In this way, Coffey’s gift begins to resemble a divine ability, much like Jesus Christ’s healing touch. Just as Christ’s healing powers are linked to sacrifice and belief, Paul experiences a crisis of faith in the legal system, as well, disbelieving in the correctness of Coffey’s guilty verdict and setting out to discover more about his case. He has difficulty reconciling how someone with divine healing powers can be capable of murder.

Paul’s encounter with the reporter, Hammersmith, exemplifies the extremity of racial tension in the South in the 1930s. When Paul attempts to find out more about Coffey’s case through Hammersmith, the reporter draws an analogy between the case and a tragic incident in his home. He compares shooting his dog to the practice of killing a black man for the theoretical danger he represents. The subtext of Hammersmith’s analogy is the perception of blackness as a domestic disturbance, and insists that even though Coffey appears benevolent at first glance, he surely harbors the same violent capability as his once-beloved dog.