In vivid cobalt blue, Julie Green carefully paints a hamburger seasoned with salt and pepper, a stack of onion rings, french fries, cherry limeade, and a big bowl of vanilla ice cream on a white porcelain plate. The crude contour lines illustrate the final meal of death row inmate Paul Everette Woodward. “He told me he was saving room for his last meal,” the warden had told the local paper. “He ate everything except a few fries.”
Seemingly prosaic details reveal a painfully intimate portrait of the condemned. We read the simple menus—”one jar of dill pickles,” “one bag of assorted Jolly Ranchers,” “one honey bun”—in search of clues. Brian Price, a former inmate in Huntsville Unit, prepared 218 final meals. He writes in his book Meals to Die For, “When I was preparing Kenneth Gentry’s last meal, I found myself trying to get into the mind of the man who would request butter beans for his last supper. I began to picture him as a child, sitting at the dinner table with his siblings as their mother spooned out a big helping of the buttery leguminous seeds to each of her children.”
