I am already walking toward the driveway. “Pretty sure that’s the last thing you’re supposed to say to someone who’s about to try her first murder case,” I reply, and I slip into the driver’s seat without spilling a drop of my coffee.
I mean, that’s got to be a sign, right?
—
IDRIVE AROUNDthe front of the courthouse just to see what’s happening, even though I’ve arranged to meet Ruth somewhere I know she won’t be accosted. A circus, that’s really the only way to describe it. On one end of the green, Wallace Freaking Mercy is broadcasting live, preaching to a crowd through a megaphone. “In 1691 the wordwhitewas used in court for the first time. Back then, this nation went by the one-drop rule,” I hear him say. “You needed only one drop of blood to be considered black in this country…”
On the other end of the green is a cluster of white people. At first I think they are watching Wallace’s shenanigans, and then I see one hoisting the picture of the dead baby.
They begin to march through the group that is listening to Wallace. There are curses, shoving, a punch thrown. The police immediately join the fray, pushing the blacks and the whites apart.
It makes me think of a magic trick I did last year to impress Violet. I poured water into a pie pan and dusted the top with pepper. Then I told her the pepper was afraid of Ivory soap, and sure enough, when I dipped the bar of soap into the bowl, the pepper flew to the edges.
To Violet, it was magic. Of course I knew better—what caused the pepper to run from the soap was surface tension.
Which, really, is kind of what’s going on here.
I drive around to the parish house on Wall Street. Immediately, I see Edison, standing lookout—but no Ruth. I get out of my car, feeling my heart sink. “Is she…?”
He points across the lot, to where Ruth is standing on the sidewalk, looking at the foot traffic across the street. So far, nobody has noticed her, but it’s a risk. I go to drag her back, touching her arm, but she shakes me away. “I would like a moment,” she says formally.
I back off.
Students and professors pass, their collars turned up against the wind. A bicycle whizzes by, and then the dinosaur bulk of a bus sighs at the curb, belching out a few passengers before moving away again. “I keep having these…thoughts,” Ruth says. “You know, all weekend long. How many more times will I get to take the bus? Or cook breakfast? Is this the last time I’ll write out a check for my electricity bill? Would I have paid more attention last April when the daffodils first came up, if I’d known I wasn’t going to see them again?”
She takes a step toward a line of adolescent trees planted in a neat row. Her hands wrap around one narrow trunk as if she’s throttling it, and she turns her face to the bare branches overhead.
“Look at that sky,” Ruth says. “It’s the kind of blue you find in tubes of oil paint. Like color, boiled down to its essence.” Then she turns to me. “How long does it take to forget this?”
I put my arm around her shoulders. She’s shaking, and I know it has nothing to do with the temperature. “If I have anything to say about it,” I tell her, “you’ll never find out.”
WHENEDISON WAS LITTLE,Ialways knew when he was getting up to no good. I could sense it, even if I couldn’t see it.I’ve got eyes in the back of my head,I would tell him, when he was amazed that even if I turned away, I knew he was trying to steal a snack before dinner.
Maybe that is why, even though I am facing forward like Kennedy told me to, I can feel the stares of everyone sitting behind me in the gallery.
They feel like pinpricks, arrows, tiny bug bites. It takes all my concentration to not slap at the back of my neck, swat them away.
Who am I kidding? It takes all my concentration not to stand up and run down the aisle and out of this courtroom.
Kennedy and Howard are bent together, deep in a strategy session; they don’t have time to talk me down from the ledge. The judge has made it clear that he won’t tolerate disruption from the gallery, and that he has a zero tolerance policy—first strike, you’re out. Certainly that is keeping the white supremacists in check. But they are not the only ones whose eyes are boring into me.
There are a whole host of Black people, many faces I recognize from my mother’s funeral, who have come to lift me up on their prayers. Directly behind me are Edison and Adisa. They are holding hands on the armrest between their seats. I can feel the strength of that bond, like a force field. I listen to their breathing.
All of a sudden I’m back in the hospital, doing what I did best, my hand on the shoulder of a woman in labor and my eyes on the screen that monitors her vitals. “Inhale,” I’d order. “Exhale. Deep breath in…deep breath out.” And sure enough, the tension would leach out of her. Without that strain, progress could be made.
It’s time to take my own advice.
I draw in all the air I can, nostrils flaring, breathing so deeply I envision the vacuum I create, the walls bending inward. My lungs swell in my chest, full to bursting. For a second I hold time still.
And then, I let go.
—
ODETTELAWTON DOESnot make eye contact with me. She is completely focused on the jury. She is one of them. Even the distance she puts between herself and the defense table is a way of reminding the people who will decide my fate that she and I havenothingin common. No matter what they see when they look at our skin.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she says, “the case you are about to hear is horrible and tragic. Turk and Brittany Bauer were, like many of us, excited to become parents. In fact the best day of their lives was October second, 2015. On that day, their son Davis was born.” She rests her hand on the rail of the jury box. “Unlike all parents, however, the Bauers have some personal preferences that led them to feel uncomfortable with an African American nurse caring for their child. You may not like what they believe, you may not agree with them, but you cannot deny their just due as patients in the hospital to make decisions about the medical care of their baby. Exercising that privilege, Turk Bauer requested that only certain nurses attend to his infant. The defendant was not one of them—and, ladies and gentlemen, that was a slight she could not stomach.”
If I weren’t so terrified, I would laugh. That’s it? That’s the way Odette glossed over the racism that led to that damn Post-it note on the file? It’s almost impressive, the way she so neatly flipped it so that before the jury got a glance at the ugliness, they were looking at something else entirely: patients’ rights. I glance at Kennedy, and she shrugs the tiniest bit.I told you so.
