“Do you remember Uncle Leon?” I ask abruptly, sitting up. “What he used to call them?”
My mother sighs. “Yes. Uncle Leon was a bit of a character.”
I hadn’t even known what the N-word meant, back then. I’d laughed, like everyone else. “How come no one ever said something to him? How come you didn’t shut him up?”
She looks at me, exasperated. “It wasn’t like Leon was ever gonna change.”
“Not if he had an audience,” I point out. I nod toward the sandbox, where Violet is shoulder to shoulder with a little black girl, chipping away at the packed sand with a stick. “What if she repeated what Leon used to say, because she doesn’t know better? How do you think that would go over?”
“Back then, North Carolina wasn’t like it is here,” my mother says.
“Maybe that wouldn’t have been the case if people like you had stopped making excuses.”
I feel bad as soon as the words leave my mouth, because I know I’m berating my mother when I really want to beat up on myself. Legally I still know that the soundest course for Ruth is to avoid any discussion of race, but morally, I’m having a hard time reconciling that. What if the reason I have been so quick to dismiss the racial elements of Ruth’s case is not because our legal system can’t bear that load, but because I was born into a family where black jokes were as much of the holiday tradition as my grandmother’s bone china and sausage stuffing? My own mother, for God’s sake, grew up with someone like Ruth’s mom in the house—cooking, cleaning, walking her to school, taking her to playgrounds like this one.
My mother is quiet for so long that I know I’ve offended her. “In 1954, when I was nine years old, a court ruled that five black children could come to my school. I remember one boy in my class who said they had horns, hidden in their fuzzy hair. And my teacher, who warned us that they might try to steal our lunch money.” She turns to me. “The night before they came to school, my daddy held a meeting. Uncle Leon was there. People talked about how white children would be bullied, and how there’d be classroom control issues, because those kids didn’t know how to behave. Uncle Leon was so mad his face was red and sweaty. He said he didn’t want his daughter to be a guinea pig. They were planning to picket outside the school the next day, even though they knew there would be police there, making sure the kids could get inside. My daddy swore he would never sell Judge Hawthorne another car again.”
She starts collecting the nuts and the apples, packing them up. “Beattie, our maid, she was there that night too. Serving lemonade and cakes she’d made that afternoon. In the middle of the meeting I got bored, and went into the kitchen, and found her crying. I’d never seen Beattie cry before. She said that her little boy was one of those five who’d be bused in.” My mother shakes her head. “I didn’t even know she had a little boy. Beattie had been with my family since before I could walk or talk, and I didn’t ever consider she might belong with someone other than us.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“Those children came to school. The police walked them inside. Other kids called them horrible names. One boy got spit on. I remember him walking by me, the saliva running down into his white collar, and I wondered if he was Beattie’s son.” She shrugs. “Eventually there were more of them. They kept to themselves, eating together at lunch and playing together at recess. And we kept to ourselves. I can’t say it was much of a desegregation, really.”
My mother nods toward Violet and her little friend, sprinkling grass over their mud pies. “This has been going on so much longer than either of us, Kennedy. From where you stepped in, in your life, it looks like we’ve got miles to go. But me?” She smiles in the direction of the girls. “I look at that, and I guess I’m amazed at how far we’ve come.”
—
AFTERCHRISTMAS ANDNew Year’s, I find myself doing the work of two public defenders, literally, because Ed is vacationing with his family in Cozumel. I’m in court representing one of Ed’s clients, who violated a restraining order, so I decide to check the docket to see which judge has been assigned to Ruth’s case. One typical pastime for lawyers is storing away the details of the personal lives of judges—who they marry, if they’re wealthy, if they go to church every weekend or just on high-water-mark holidays, if they’re dumber than a bag of hammers, if they like musical theater, if they go out drinking with attorneys when they are off the clock. We store away these facts and rumors like squirrels put away nuts for winter, so that when we see who is assigned to our case, we can pull out the minutiae and figure out if we have a fighting chance of winning.
When I see who it is, my heart sinks.
Judge Thunder lives up to his name. He’s a hanging judge, and he prejudges cases, and if you get convicted, you’re going away for a long, long time. I know this not from hearsay, however, but from personal experience.
Before I was a public defender, when I was clerking for a federal judge, one of my colleagues became tangled up in an ethical issue involving a conflict of interest from his previous job at a law firm. I was part of the team that represented him, and after years of building the case, we went to trial in front of Judge Thunder. He hated any kind of media circus, and the fact that a federal judge’s clerk was caught in an ethical violation had turned our trial into just that. Even though we had an airtight case, Thunder wanted to set a precedent for other attorneys, and my colleague was convicted and sentenced to six years. If that wasn’t shocking enough, the judge turned to all of us who had been on the defense team. “You should be ashamed of yourselves. Mr. Dennehy has fooled you all,” Judge Thunder scolded. “But he hasn’t fooled this court.” For me, it was the last straw. I had been burning the candle at both ends, working for about a week without sleep. I was sick as a dog, on cold medication and heavy doses of prednisone, exhausted and demoralized after losing the case—so perhaps I was not as gracious or lucid as I could have been in that moment.
I might have told Judge Thunder he could suck my dick.
What ensued was a chambers conference where I begged to not be disbarred and assured the judge that I did not have, in fact, any male genitalia and had actually said,Such magic!because I was so impressed by his ruling.
I’ve had two cases in front of Judge Thunder since then. I’ve lost both.
I resolve not to tell Ruth about my history with the judge. Maybe the third time is a charm.
I button my coat, getting ready to leave the courthouse, giving myself a silent pep talk the whole way. I’m not going to let a tiny setback like this affect the whole case for me, not when we have jury selection next month.
As I walk out of the building, I hear the swell of gospel music.
On the New Haven Green is a sea of black people. Their arms are linked. Their voices harmonize and fill the sky:We shall overcome.They carry posters with Ruth’s name and likeness on them.
Front and center is Wallace Mercy, singing his heart out. And beside him, her elbow tucked in his, is Ruth’s sister, Adisa.
I’M WORKING THE CASH REGISTER,getting toward the end of my shift, when my arches ache and my back hurts. Although I took as many extra shifts as I could, it was a bleak and meager Christmas, and Edison spent most of it sullen and moody. He’s been back at school for a week, but there’s been a seismic shift in him—he barely talks to me, grunting out responses to my questions, riding the knife edge of rudeness until I call him on it; he’s stopped doing his homework at the kitchen table and instead vanishes into his room and blares Drake and Kendrick Lamar; his phone buzzes constantly with texts, and when I ask him who needs him so desperately he says it’s nobody I know. I have not received any more calls from the principal, or emails from his teachers telling me he’s slacking on his work, but that doesn’t mean I’m not anticipating them.
And then what will I do? How am I supposed to encourage my son to be better than most people expect him to be? How can I say, with a straight face,you can be anything you want in this world—when I struggled and studied and excelled and still wound up on trial for something I did not do? Every time Edison and I get into it these days, I can see that challenge in his eyes:I dare you. I dare you to say you still believe that lie.
School has let out; I know this because of the influx of teens who explode into the building like a holiday, filling the space with bright ribbons of laughter and teasing. Inevitably they know someone working table and call out, begging for free McNuggets or a sundae. Usually they don’t bother me; I prefer to be busy rather than slow. But today, a girl comes up to me, her blond ponytail swinging, holding her phone while her friends crowd around to read an incoming text with her. “Welcome to McDonald’s,” I say. “Can I help you?”
There is a line of people behind her, but she looks at her friend. “What should I tell him?”
