A city loses its prince
Handsome as he was, you might not have given Willie Walker a second look if you passed him strolling around Castle Island on a warm afternoon. Maybe you wouldn't have noticed him tucking into his haddock at the small table near the counter at Victoria's Diner every Friday night, or registered his face as you dropped a dollar into his collection basket at St. Mary of the Angels in Roxbury on Sunday mornings.
But he was a great man.
This son of a Mississippi sharecropper was a prince of the city. He went everywhere, gathering up people who adored him, and a few who owed their lives to him though they didn't know his last name.
For years, alcohol had gripped Willie as tightly as the shackles that bound him as a teenager, drunk and locked up already, until the Sunday morning more than 40 years ago when it made him hate his own reflection. He told his beloved wife, Edna, he'd be staying home from church, and she said, "I don't care what you do."
If the woman he lived for had given up on him, he was done with alcohol.
Willie didn't love drinking. Sobriety set him free - from the humiliations suffered by every addict, and from some of the barriers he might have faced otherwise. Nobody in South Boston or Brookline, or anywhere else he went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, cared that he was black, illiterate till his late 30s, and not from around here. His fellow travelers were factory workers, like him, and rich people with well-known names. They were all drawn to Willie's optimism and gratitude and, above all, his steadiness.
On Tuesday nights, Willie was always in his spot (fourth row, on the center aisle) at a meeting in Brookline. Ellen L. kept going back to those meetings because she knew he'd be saving her a seat.
"Keep coming," he told Diane J. after her first meeting, when all she could do was look at the floor. She says she might have drunk herself to death by now without Willie's encouragement.
Willie's greeting helped pull Alice P. from despair 15 years ago. Back then, she was a tough case, her buzz-cut bleached blond, her wasted frame buried in baggy black clothes. But, "Willie had a way of welcoming you as if, oh, it made his day, like he had been waiting for you. I stuck a little bit harder because of Willie. It was something to look forward to every week - that smile, that hug."
People were adrift, and Willie gave them mooring. And the meetings were just one part of a life crowded up with kindnesses - for strangers, like the elderly shoppers he drove home from the supermarket, and for the huge family he might have lost.
Each summer, he piled his children into his green Dodge station wagon and took them on road trips that ended with his relatives in Jackson. His sister Dorothy loved those visits, because "Willie made people feel important. He would come home and encourage people so much."
After his beloved Edna died in 1999, Willie needed mooring too. He went to six meetings a week, in Brookline, West Roxbury, and South Boston. When he got sick a few years ago, the people who owed him so much brought AA meetings to his Jamaica Plain nursing home.
Willie died March 30. At his funeral, Willie's children and grandchildren sat with his AA family and his St. Mary of the Angels family and they all celebrated his big life.
Together, they reflected on the breathtaking breadth of Willie's loving reach, and on the simple fact that sometimes a person's greatness, spread over a million hidden kindnesses, isn't fully revealed until he's gone.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com. 
