Alex Cross's Trial

Chapter 89

JACKSON HENSEN, the harried senior personal assistant to the president, entered the Oval Office with a bloodred leather folder under his arm. He took one look at the president and dropped the folder. The morning’s correspondence scattered all over the carpet – telegrams and official greetings from the king of England, the shah of Persia, and the Japanese ambassador, letters from congressmen, ordinary citizens, and all manner of federal bureaucrats.

“Har-de-har-har!” The president was laughing and singing. Also, he was dancing a jig. He was waving a golden Western Union telegram in the air as he capered in a circle behind his desk.

“Is anything the matter, sir?” Jackson Hensen asked.

“Does it look like there’s anything the matter, Hensen?”

“Well, sir, I’ve never actually seen you dancing, except at state dinners. Never at your desk.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever been happy enough to dance at my desk,” Roosevelt said. “Read this.” He thrust the telegram at Hensen and collapsed onto a sofa, out of breath, but still chuckling and congratulating himself.

Hensen scanned the telegram. It was stamped 11:50 p.m. of the previous night, signed CROSS AND CORBETT, and originated from a telegraph station in McComb, Mississippi. The report described in detail events that had occurred during the previous several days – lynchings, Klan meetings, the attack of the White Raiders, the gun battle, the arrest of three Raiders on charges of first-degree murder.

It was this last piece of information that so delighted the president.

“There it is!” Roosevelt shouted. “White men charged for killing black men, right down there in the heart of Dixie. Now let Du Bois and that Wells-Barnett woman try to tell me I have ignored the Negro problem!”

Hensen’s eyes came up from the telegram. “It is excellent news, sir.”

“Worth dancing about, Hensen?”

“Well, sir… certainly.”

For a moment Jackson Hensen feared that President Roosevelt was going to make him dance.

“Do you know why I am fortunate enough to receive this most excellent news, Mr. Hensen?”

“Why is that, sir?”

Roosevelt peered around the sofa. “Where’d you go, Hensen?”

“I’m here, sir. Picking up the mail.”

“Never mind that, Hensen. Get your pad, will you? I gave Margaret the afternoon off. I want to send my congratulations to Abraham Cross and Ben Corbett. What shall it be, then, a letter or a wire?”

Hensen took a little notebook and pencil from his vest pocket.

“Those men must have thought I’d forgotten all about them.” He laughed, a big booming Roosevelt laugh. “I think I showed great wisdom not to respond to their first report, but to let them draw their own conclusions as to what should be done.”

“Yes, sir, it most certainly was wise of you.” Hensen was often amazed at the depth and breadth of the president’s self-regard. He licked the point of his pencil. Roosevelt perched on the edge of his desk, mindful of the fine figure he cut as he dictated his message of congratulations.

“What a magnificent ending to this project!” the president exclaimed.

Chapter 90

PHINEAS EVERSMAN’S FIRST ACT was to release two of the five prisoners. He told us it was for lack of evidence, but I assumed there was some family connection. (There had to be; this was Mississippi.) I was so surprised and impressed that the chief had actually arrested the other three men that I offered no word of protest.

The three still in custody were named Chester Madden, Henry Wadsworth North, and, ironically enough, Lincoln Alexander Stephens, a man whose name evoked both the Great Emancipator and the dwarfish vice-president of the Confederacy. Henry North was the redheaded bully I’d encountered before, at Jenkins’ Mercantile.

Some folks called it “the Niggertown Trial.” Others called it “the White Raiders Trial.” The New Orleans Item dubbed it “That Mess in Eudora.” Whatever people called it, everyone was obsessed with it.

The citizens of Eudora were divided on the issues, but they certainly weren’t evenly divided. A small group welcomed the prospect of punishment for the violent, night-riding Raiders. But many folks, unbelievable as it might seem, thought the Raiders were being treated unfairly.

The Eudora Gazette, a weekly four-sheeter usually devoted to social notes, was now publishing five days a week, churning out a breathless new front-page report on the White Raiders Trial every day. The formerly lazy and slow-moving editor, Japheth Morgan, was a whirl of energy, placing expensive telephone trunk calls nearly daily to consult with his “unimpeachable sources of information in the capital.”

Japheth Morgan had never worked this hard before. He was losing weight and smoking cigarettes, one after another. He had dark circles under his eyes.

“You’d best settle down a bit, Japheth,” L.J. told him. “This trial could end up being the death of you.”

“But you don’t understand,” Japheth answered. “For me and for the Gazette, this isn’t the opportunity of a lifetime, it’s the trial of the century!”

The trial of the century.

As soon as he said it, I knew it was true. This was the trial of the century – not just for Eudora, not just for Mississippi, but for the entire country.

Chapter 91

“NOTICE HOW NOBODY COMPLAINS about the heat anymore,” L.J. said to me one morning over breakfast at his home. “Nobody talks about the mosquitoes, or the price of cotton, or any of the things that mattered before. None of those things means a damn now. All anybody cares about is the trial.”

I had to smile. “I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, L.J., since nobody in this town speaks to me.”

“Maybe they’re like me, they just hate talking to a damn lawyer.”

I’d been given a bedroom on the second floor at L.J.’s, with a sitting room attached and a small balcony where my first cup of coffee was served every morning. There were fresh sheets, starched and ironed, every day; the best sausages for breakfast, aged beef for supper.

Most important, L.J. posted three armed guards around the house: one at the front, one in the back, and one baking on the roof. At L.J.’s I’d gotten the first really good night’s sleep I’d had since coming back to Eudora.

L.J.’s wife, Allegra, bustled into the dining room.

“Japheth Morgan insists on seeing you two right now,” she said.

Indeed, Morgan did mean right now. He had followed Allegra and was standing directly behind her. In his hand was a fresh broadsheet, the ink still shiny. At the top of the page I saw in enormous type the word EXTRA!!!

“I thought you two gentlemen would want to be the first to read this,” Morgan said.

L.J. shook his head. “What the hell have you done now, Japheth?”

Morgan began to read aloud. “The Mississippi Office of Criminal Courts has announced the venue and date for the proceedings currently known far and wide as the White Raiders Trial. Following a ruling by the Mississippi Supreme Court, the prosecutor’s petition for change of venue has been denied, and the trial will be held in Eudora, Mississippi, scene of the alleged offenses.”

“Well, hell, that’s no big surprise,” L.J. said. “We all knew nobody else wanted to grab hold of this hot horseshoe.”

“I agree,” I said. “It’s disappointing, but it does provide the prosecution with its first proper grounds for appeal.”

“Appeal to whom?” said L.J. “The Supreme Court has ruled.”

“There’s another Supreme Court, in Washington,” I said with a wink.

Japheth looked relieved. “Do y’all want to hear this or not?”

“Please,” L.J. said, straightening his face into a serious expression. “Please read on.”

“Jury selection will begin on September the seventeenth at nine o’clock a.m.,” he read.

“Goddamn, what is that, next Monday? That’s six days from today,” L.J. said. “Ben, you’re gonna have to scramble.”

“Wait. Wait. Wait,” Japheth said.

He read slowly, emphatically:

“Further, the Supreme Court has exercised its judicial discretion to appoint a judge to oversee this important and much-noted trial. The judge appointed is…”

Japheth glanced over to make sure we were listening. We absolutely were.

Then he read on:

“The judge appointed is a lifetime citizen of Eudora, the Honorable Everett J. Corbett.”

Chapter 92

SON OF A BITCH!

It was not illegal for the Mississippi Supreme Court to appoint my father to preside over a trial in which I was assisting the prosecution.

Not illegal, but wildly unusual, and absolutely deliberate.

I could have fought it, but I already knew that I wouldn’t. It gave us a second, decent ground for the eventual, inevitable appeal.

Most people in town, Japheth reported, were positively delighted with the news. Everyone knew that Judge Corbett was “fair” and “honest” and “sensible.” Judge Corbett “understands the true meaning of justice.”

“That is exactly what I am afraid of,” I said.

Having spent the first part of my life listening to my father pontificate, I knew one thing for certain: he might cloak himself in eloquence, reason, and formality, but underneath it all he believed that although Negroes might be absolutely free, thanks to the detested Mr. Lincoln, nowhere was it written that Negroes deserved to be absolutely equal.

Judge Corbett and men of his class had gradually enshrined that inequality in law, and the highest court in the land had upheld its finding that “separate but equal” was good enough for everybody.

Now the trial was less than a week away, and one huge question was still outstanding: who would the state of Mississippi send to prosecute the case?

“My sources in the capital have heard nothing about it,” Japheth told L.J. and me. “It’s a big, holy secret.”

Chapter 93

A WHILE LATER, the three of us were sitting on the west veranda of L.J.’s house, watching the sunset and sipping bourbon over cracked ice.

“Well, you gentlemen are always acting so all-fired high and mighty,” Japheth said, “but you’ve yet to give me a single piece of information that I can use. Why don’t you start by sharing the names of the prosecution witnesses?”

“Watch out, L.J., he’s using one of his journalist’s tricks to get you to spill it,” I said.

“Me?” L.J. scoffed. “What do I know? I don’t know anything. I’ve been cut off by the entire town. I’m almost as much persona non grata as Mr. Nigger-Lover Corbett. Everybody from here to Jackson knows whose side I’m on. And you know any friend of Ben Corbett’s doesn’t have another friend between here and Jackson.”

I clapped his shoulder. “I appreciate what you’ve done, L.J.”

It was right then that we heard a deep tenor voice, with a hint of something actorly in the round tones, accompanying a firm bootstep down the upstairs hall.

“If you need a friend from Jackson, maybe I can fill the bill.”

We looked up to see a man whose appearance was as polished and natty as his voice. He wore a seersucker suit of the finest quality and a straw boater with a jaunty red band. He could not have been much more than thirty, and he carried a wicker portmanteau and a large leather satchel jammed with papers.

He introduced himself as Jonah Curtis and explained that he had been appointed by the state of Mississippi to prosecute the White Raiders.

“I had my assistant reserve a room at Miss Maybelle’s establishment,” he said. “But Maybelle took one look at me and it turned out she had misplaced my reservation. She suggested I bring myself to this address.”

“Welcome to the house of pariahs, Mr. Curtis,” said L.J. “You are welcome to stay here in my home for as long as this trial takes.”

“I do appreciate that, sir. And please, call me Jonah.”

Jonah Curtis was almost as tall as I. He was what anyone would call a handsome man.

And Jonah Curtis was one other thing besides.

Jonah Curtis was a black man.

Chapter 94

ONE IMPORTANT PIECE of the puzzle was still missing.

Who would be defending the White Raiders?

The next morning that puzzle piece appeared. L.J. came rushing into the house yelling, “Those goddamn leaky slop buckets have gone and got themselves the best goddamn criminal defense attorney in the South!”

Jonah looked up from his book. “Maxwell Hayes Lewis?”

“How did you know that?” L.J. asked.

“You said the best.” Jonah turned to me. “Ben, if you needed a lawyer to defend a gang of no-good lowlifes who viciously attacked a colored man’s house, who would you get?”

“Maxwell Hayes Lewis,” I said.

“And why would you want him?”

“Because he got the governor of Arkansas acquitted after he shot his bastard son – his half Negro son – in full view of at least twenty-five people.”

“So, our little pack of rats managed to get themselves ‘Loophole Lewis,’” Jonah said.

Loophole Lewis. That’s how he was known wherever lawyers got together and gossiped about others of their species. Lewis’s philosophy was simple: “If you can’t find a loophole for your client, go out and invent one.”

Jonah carefully closed his well-thumbed copy of the Revised Civil Code of the State of Mississippi. “You know, I have always wanted to meet Counselor Lewis,” he said.

Jonah must have made a special connection with the good Lord, because we were still sipping coffee ten minutes later when L.J.’s butler announced that a Mr. Maxwell Lewis was there to see us.

“I thought it would be the mannerly thing to do, to come by and introduce myself to you distinguished gentlemen of the prosecution,” Lewis said, coming in.

He was plainspoken and plain-looking. My mother would have said he was “plain as an old corn stick.” Then she would have added, “But that’s just on the outside, so you’d better watch yourself.”

We all told Mr. Lewis we were pleased to meet him. He said he was pleased to meet us as well. No, thank you, he said, no tea or coffee for him. Bourbon? Certainly not at this early hour, he said, although he asked if he might revisit the question somewhat later in the day.

This display of southern charm was not the reason for his visit, I was sure. Fairly soon he sidled up to the real reason.

“I must say, Mr. Corbett, I was a mite surprised when I saw that the trial judge will be none other than your distinguished father,” he said.

“As was I,” I said. Clearly he wanted me to say more, so I stayed silent.

“It’s an unusual choice, and highly irregular,” he continued on. “My first instinct was to try to get a new judge from the powers that be in Jackson, but then I got to thinking about it. This is an open-and-shut case. Why bother causing a fuss? I’m sure Judge Corbett will preside with absolute fairness.”

“If there’s one thing he’s known for,” I said, “it’s his fairness. And already we find ourselves in agreement, Mr. Lewis. We also believe that this is an open-and-shut case. I’m just afraid the door will be shutting on you.”

Lewis chuckled at my sally. “Ah! We shall see about that,” he said. “I’ve been checking on your record in murder trials up in Washington, D.C. And yours too, Mr. Curtis. We shall certainly see.”

Chapter 95

OVER THE NEXT DAYS we transformed the sitting room off my sleeping quarters into the White Raiders War Room, as L.J. soon nicknamed our paper-strewn maelstrom of an office.

Conrad, the Cosgrove brother who had survived the assault at Abraham’s house, went up to McComb every morning to collect every newspaper and pamphlet having to do with the upcoming trial. We hauled an old chalkboard up from L.J.’s basement and made two lists of possibilities: “Impossible” and “Possible.”

Among the latter were some terrifying questions:

What if Maxwell Hayes Lewis leads with a request for dismissal?

Bang, the gavel falls! The case is over!

What if Abraham is too ill to testify? What if he dies before or during the trial?

Bang! The case is over!

What if Lewis tampers with the jury? It wouldn’t be too difficult in this town.

What if…?

We made our lists, erased them, improved and reworked them, and studied them as if they were the received word of God.

After spending a few days working beside him, I decided that Jonah Curtis was not only a smart man but a wise one. Jonah clearly had intelligence to spare, tempered with humor and a bit of easygoing cynicism – the result, I supposed, of growing up always seeing the other side of the coin toss we call Justice. He was the son of a sharecropper who spent most of his life as a slave, on a cotton plantation near Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta. When Jonah got his law degree and passed the bar examination, his father gave him a gift, the gold pocket watch for which he’d been saving since before Jonah was born.

It was a beautiful timepiece, but the chain, clumsily hammered together from old scraps of iron, didn’t match its quality. Jonah told me that his father had made it himself, from a piece of the very chain that had shackled him to the auction block the last time he was offered for sale.

Sometimes Jonah got a little ahead of himself with his legal theories, at least as far as L.J. was concerned.

“A verdict depends on the culture of any given town,” Jonah said. “A man held for killing a Negro in New York City will have a very different trial – and a very different outcome – than a man held for the same crime in Atlanta. Bring him to Eudora, and again the crime and the resulting trial would be different. We might say this White Raiders case is sui generis.”

L.J. sighed heavily. “Talk English, for God’s sake,” he said. “Down here, we say ‘soo-ey’ when we’re calling hogs.”

L.J. already considered me the worst know-it-all in the room, so I left this for Jonah to explain.

“Sorry, L.J., it’s Latin,” said Jonah. “Sui generis– ‘of its own kind,’ literally, ‘of its own genus.’ In other words, this case… well, there’s never been another one anything like it.”

Chapter 96

THE CHANTING OUTSIDE L.J.’S HOUSE grew louder. The voices came closer and closer.

I hurried to the balcony off the War Room, with L.J. and Jonah at my heels. An astounding sight met our eyes. There were black people, scores of them – two hundred or more – slowly marching down the middle of Willow Street in Eudora, Mississippi.

This was almost unbelievable. In the South, black people were not supposed to assemble in these numbers.

L.J. let out a whistle. “That is one angry bunch of Negroes,” he said.

“I think the word I would use is ‘passionate,’” said Jonah.

Though I had never expected to see black people marching through the streets, I knew instantly what this was about. Tomorrow the trial would begin, and the first order of business was jury selection. No Negro had ever been permitted to serve on a jury in the state of Mississippi. Many of the liberal Yankee newspapers had declared it an outrage. They suggested that the White Raiders Trial might be just the occasion for the presiding judge to allow one or possibly even two colored men to serve as jurors.

We stood at the railing of the veranda, watching the marchers slowly pass. It was plain that they had taken a detour from Commerce Street to go past L.J.’s house. Some of them waved or lifted their hats to us.

Just when we thought we had seen the last of the marchers, another phalanx turned the corner onto Willow.

I was amazed. “Gentlemen. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

L.J. smiled. “Yessir, it’s one hell of a crowd.”

“Not just the size of the crowd,” I said. “Take a look at who’s leading it.”

L.J. squinted to see. “Those two old folks at the front?”

Jonah answered for me. “The lady is Ida Wells-Barnett,” he said. “And the gentleman, if I am not mistaken, is Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois. This is history being made, indeed.”

Chapter 97

WHEN I WAS A BOY, my mother would sometimes take me to watch my father conducting a trial.

“It’s a presiding day,” she’d say. “Let’s go see Daddy scaring the pants off of everyone.” And away we’d go to the courthouse.

To my child’s eyes the old Pike County Courthouse looked exactly like a church. The second-floor gallery where the colored people got to sit was like the choir loft. The benches below were the pews. And my father stood at the high altar in the front of the room, delivering thunderous sermons and running the whole thing like a very strict minister who happened to wield a hammer instead of a Bible.

More than twenty years later, here I was, back in the church of Judge Everett Corbett.

But today, as L.J. and Jonah and I arranged our papers and books on the prosecution table, the old courthouse felt like something else entirely.

Not a church.

It was more like a theater now.

The upstairs colored section had been transformed into balcony seats. The benches on the main level were the orchestra seats, jammed to overflowing with an audience that had stood in line for hours to see the hottest entertainment in town. And that altar? Well, that was now center stage.

That was Everett J. Corbett’s stage. He could be a dynamic, exciting performer, and I felt sure he would not let his audience down today.

Ringing the front steps of the courthouse were Scooter Willems and several dozen men like him, bristling with tripods and huge black accordion cameras. Accompanying the photographers were at least a hundred reporters flashing pencils and notebooks, trading tidbits with each other, rushing this way and that in pursuit of the latest rumors.

Inside, the colored spectators had dutifully filed upstairs to the cheap seats. The benches below were filled to maximum capacity by the white citizens of Eudora. Only the first two rows had been left empty, roped off for the pool of potential jurors.

Dominating the wall above the judge’s bench was an enormous Fattorini & Sons regulator clock nearly as long as a grandfather clock, with a carved dark-wood case, elegant Roman numerals, and a pair of gleaming brass pendulums. Growing up, I always thought of it as the Clock of Justice.

Now every tick brought us closer to nine a.m.

Here came a pair of Chief Eversman’s newly recruited deputies, leading in the defendants. Three White Raiders. No shackles, ropes, or handcuffs. The deputies chatted and laughed with the men as they led them to the defense table.

And then the great Maxwell Hayes Lewis strode from the back of the room to greet the Raiders and shake their hands so that everyone in the courtroom could see how normal, how average and amiable, these men were. After a moment’s discussion the defendants turned to look at our table. They looked back at each other and grinned. The sight of Jonah, L.J., and me seemed to amuse them greatly.

The bailiff entered with a solemn expression, carrying the heavy cast-iron imprinting seal, which he placed at the right end of my father’s bench. This was the seal he would use to mark evidence as it was admitted.

“All rise,” the bailiff called. “The court is now in session, the Honorable Everett J. Corbett presiding.”

Daddy’s big entrance was always a highlight. Here he came through the door at stage left, his hair gleaming with brilliantine, his silky black robe pressed to perfection by Dabney.

He lifted the heavy mahogany gavel. I was surprised to see him using the gavel I had sent him on his sixtieth birthday, since I had never received a thank-you note.

He brought the gavel down with a thunderous bang.

“There will be order!” he commanded. “There will be silence! There will be justice!”

Chapter 98

NOW TO PICK A JURY.

That summer had been one of the hottest on record. It seemed to me that God had saved up all the excess heat and humidity in the world and brought it down upon Eudora today. It was already so hot in the courtroom that the hand fans were flapping like a flock of restless birds.

Judge Corbett had evidently taken measures to spruce up the courtroom for the national press, who were allowed inside between sessions to gather scraps of news. He had ordered all the spectator benches and tables and chairs sanded and revarnished, and indeed they all gleamed as if brand-new. But the new varnish turned soft and sticky in the heat and gave off fumes that set heads spinning. I breathed the sweetish, medicinal smell; the seat of my trousers stuck to my chair.

This was going to be a very long day.

I saw at once that Judge Corbett still ran an efficient courtroom. It took only ten minutes for the first three candidates to be interviewed, approved, and seated in the jury box: three middle-aged white men.

Jonah made little fuss over any of them. I assumed he was saving his objections for an occasion when they might prove persuasive.

It didn’t take long.

The clerk read a name from the list: “Patton William Taylor.”

Chapter 99

FROM THE FRONT ROW rose a mousy little man commonly known as Patsy-Boy Taylor. I knew him as a helper of Lyman Tripp, the undertaker in whose wagon I had ridden to the Klan meeting at Scully’s barn.

I scribbled a note and passed it to Jonah.

Taylor served time in La. State Prison for assault of Negro girl. Believe he broke her leg.

Jonah scanned the note, nodding. It was his turn to question the prospective juror first.

“Good morning, Mr. Taylor,” he said. “Tell me, sir, have you ever been to Louisiana?”

“Once or twice,” said Patsy-Boy.

“How about the town of Angola? Ever been there?”

The man frowned. “I reckon I have.”

“And how long was your most recent stay in Angola, Mr. Taylor?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Perhaps I can help refresh your memory, sir,” Jonah said. “Mr. Taylor, did you recently finish a five-month term in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola?”

“I might’ve,” said Taylor. “I can’t quite remember.”

“Your Honor, if it please the court, could you direct Mr. Taylor to answer my question?”

The ice in my father’s water pitcher had melted away, but there was plenty of it in his voice. “He did answer, Mr. Curtis,” he said. “He said that he couldn’t quite remember.”

“Your Honor, with all due respect, I don’t believe–”

“Your beliefs are of no interest to me, Mr. Curtis,” my father said. He turned to the defense table. “Mr. Lewis, do you have any objection to this gentleman sitting on this jury?”

“None whatsoever, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Taylor will be sworn in to serve,” my father said. The gavel came down.

By reflex L.J. and I came up off our chairs. I can’t say I couldn’t believe what had just happened, probably because I’d watched justice being meted out in Mississippi for too long. But still.

“I most strenuously object, Your Honor,” Jonah said in a loud voice.

A young colored woman in the gallery called out, “That ain’t justice!”

My father pointed his gavel at her. “Contempt of court. Ten days in jail and a dollar fine. Get her out of here!”

Two of Phineas’s deputies ran to do his bidding. Everyone heard the woman’s noisy protest as he dragged her down the stairs.

Meanwhile, my father’s attention was seemingly riveted by the sight of a fly trapped in the soft varnish of his bench. The insect was hopelessly stuck, its wings buzzing. The judge closed his thumb and forefinger on the fly, plucked it up, and placed it in the center of his desk.

Bang! He brought his gavel down on that fly.

“Let me tell you something, Mr. Curtis,” he said. “Let me explain something to you. I would advise you to listen, and listen well. I am in charge of this courtroom. Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, sir,” Jonah replied.

“What did I say?” My father’s voice was deadly calm. “Repeat it for me, please.”

“You are in charge of this courtroom, Your Honor.”

“You’re damn right I am. Now, you may object to Counselor Lewis’s comments. He is your opponent; he represents the defense. But you may not ever – ever – object to something I have said. For any reason.”

The only sound in the courtroom was the ticking of the clock and the hum of the ceiling fans.

“Thank you, Mr. Curtis. And tell those two clowns you brought with you to sit themselves down, or I’ll have them removed from my courtroom.”

The trial of the new century – the proceedings known as the State of Mississippi v. Madden, North, and Stephens – was officially under way.

Chapter 100

THERE THEY SAT, three White Raiders facing a jury of their peers.

It was a true statement in every way. Once Judge Everett Corbett cut off all objections from our side, he quickly empaneled a jury of twelve middle-aged white men who looked just like the men they would be called upon to judge.

“We have a jury,” the judge announced, “and so we will proceed to trial. Is the prosecution prepared to begin in the morning?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Jonah said.

“And I’m sure the defense is ready.”

“Defense is certainly ready, Your Honor,” said Maxwell Hayes Lewis.

“Then without further ado–” my father began.

Jonah Curtis stood up and dared to interrupt him again.

“Your Honor, begging the court’s pardon, I feel compelled to state for the record that the prosecution has not seen a fair and representative jury selection here today.”

My father’s voice was dangerously soft. “All right. I have warned you, Mr. Curtis, and I will not warn you again. I am in charge of this trial. I am in charge of this courtroom. I have ruled that this jury is fit to serve.”

“But Your Honor–”

Suddenly my father rose up and bellowed, “And I will not warn you again! Try me, my friend! Just try me once more! Challenge my jurisdiction again, and I will declare a mistrial here and summarily dismiss all the charges. Which, I remind you, is within my power.”

My father turned on his heel and swept out of the room. I knew the drill: he would walk straight into his office and pull off his robe. His clothes would be damp with sweat. I pictured him settling into his swivel chair in that office lined with law books, oak filing cabinets, diplomas, and certificates of appreciation. On his desk he permitted himself one personal touch: the sad-beautiful honeymoon photograph of him and Mama, arm in arm on the boardwalk at Biloxi.

While the defendants stood shooting the breeze with their jailers, Lewis took a detour by our table.

“I guess they didn’t teach y’all everything up in those Ivy League law schools,” he said. “Down here, we believe the first responsibility of a good criminal attorney is to make friends with the judge.”

“Oh, they tried to teach us that,” Jonah said. “I guess I just didn’t do a good job of learning it.”

“Me either,” I said. “And I’ve had decades of practice with the man.”

Loophole Lewis chuckled genially and brought out a couple of cigars from an inside pocket. “May I offer you boys a Partagás? Best quality, fresh off the boat from Havana. I’m sure you enjoyed a few of these fellows when you were down in Cuba, Ben.”

“No, sir,” I said mildly. “We didn’t have much time for smoking cigars.” I was about to say more when I saw Conrad Cosgrove pushing into the courtroom through the crowd.

“Mr. Corbett,” he said. “A messenger brought this to the house. I figured you’d want to see it right away.”

Conrad handed over a small envelope.

On the front, in an elegant hand, were the words BENJAMIN CORBETT, PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE.

The words engraved on the back flap were just as simple: THE WHITE HOUSE.

“If you gentlemen will excuse me,” I said. I didn’t wait for an answer.

Chapter 101

AS I WALKED down the courthouse steps, a reporter from the New Orleans Item took my elbow to ask how I thought the first day had gone.

“Exactly as expected,” I said. “Justice will be served here.” I took my arm back and kept walking.

I followed the cinder path around the side of the building. The giant oak trees in the square provided the only real shade in the center of town. I felt twenty degrees cooler the moment I stepped under their branches and took a seat on a bench.

I sliced the edge of the envelope with my fingernail. Inside was a single typewritten sheet on gold-embossed White House stationery.

Dear Capt. Corbett,

The eyes of America are upon you, and upon the proceedings in Eudora. I can assure you that with my own (four) eyes I am personally watching you and the trial at every moment.

I know you will continue to do your best, and I know that you will succeed in this endeavor, as we succeeded together during the late War.

Ben, know that your president is with you every inch of the way.

Sincerely yours, I remain

Your obt. servant,

Theodore Roosevelt, Pres’t.

I smiled at the president’s little joke about his “four eyes,” but when I realized the meaning of his subsequent words, my stomach took a nervous dive. As if I didn’t have enough tension to deal with, now the president of the United States was “personally watching” me “at every moment.”

I read the letter again and put it back in the envelope.

A voice called, “Mr. Corbett, sir.”

I looked to both sides and saw no one.

Again the voice: “Mr. Corbett? Over here, sir, behind you.”

Chapter 102

I TURNED AROUND QUICKLY to find a tall, slender colored man standing on the sidewalk. He was perhaps ten years older than me and beautifully dressed, down to the club scarf in his pocket and the jeweled pin in his necktie.

“May I have a word with you for a moment, sir?” he asked.

“Well, of course,” I said. “Come have a seat.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Corbett, I can’t. That park is White Only.”

I had forgotten – or maybe I’d never realized – that the old wooden benches, the little fountain, the shade of the big old eudoras, all were reserved for the exclusive use of white Eudora.

I walked across the grass to the man and extended my hand. “Ben Corbett.”

“I’m a correspondent for the Indianapolis Cross,” he said.

“Ah yes,” I said. “I’ve read your paper. Y’all have published some of the best general reports I’ve seen on the question of lynching.”

“Why, thank you, sir,” he said. “I’m honored that you’ve heard of us.”

“Welcome to Eudora,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not my first time,” he said. “I grew up in Eudora.”

I looked at him harder. I rattled around in my memory, but I couldn’t place where I had seen him before.

“I used to work for Mr. Jenkins at the mercantile store,” he said.

All at once I knew him.

I said. “Is that – Marcus? Is that you?”

His eyes lit up. “You remember me?”

“I’ll be damned if I’ll ever forget you, Marcus,” I said.

I reached out my arms and embraced him. He was surprised, but he let me do it, and even patted me on the back.

“You were the only one who helped my mother,” I said. “You helped me get her to Dr. Frederick. If you hadn’t, she might have died.”

Marcus told me that his family had left Eudora for the Midwest not long after the time of Mama’s stroke. They wound up in central Indiana, where his father worked for a cattle farmer. Marcus went on to study English at the Negro teachers college in Gary and had landed a job with the largest colored newspaper in the state.

And now, he said, he had convinced his editors to send him to Mississippi to cover the White Raiders Trial because he had a personal interest in one of the defendants. “Henry North,” he said. “I knew him. You did, too.”

“I did?”

Marcus said, “Do you remember that redheaded boy that worked with me at Jenkins’ Mercantile? He helped us carry your mama out that day. That boy is Henry North.”

Sure, I remembered the loutish boy. He was thin and raw-boned in those days. He had said Mama was drunk, to leave her where she lay.

“I remember the day your mama took sick,” Marcus said, “like it was yesterday. You weren’t more than about seven years old, but you acted like a grown man. You answered old Sanders back like he deserved. And you helped me carry her to the doc. I always knew you were going to turn into a fine man.”

I was speechless. Marcus’s words made me feel humble. The truth was that after years of remembering Marcus’s example every day, as my mother had told me to do, I hadn’t thought about him in quite a while.

“I’ve paid close attention to your law career, Mr. Corbett – helping people up in Washington, helping wherever you can. When I saw how you were turning out, I tell you, it gave me a little hope along the way.”

Seeing Marcus again, hearing him speak like this, gave me a transfusion of energy. As if I’d just received new blood, a whole body’s worth of it.

Without knowing it, I had given Marcus “a little hope along the way.”

And now Marcus had given me hope for the difficult murder trial that lay ahead.

Chapter 103

AFTER CAREFUL DELIBERATION, Jonah Curtis had chosen to wear a navy blue suit, a crisp white shirt, and a bright red tie. He didn’t look exactly like an American flag, but all the colors were there for the patriotic effect he intended for his opening statement to the jury.

“Gentlemen, I did not come to Eudora to make history,” he began. “I was sent here by the Supreme Court of the state of Mississippi to seek justice. If in the name of justice you reach the verdict I truly believe you must reach, the state will ask you to assign a degree of punishment that you feel is appropriate for these crimes.”

“Let us begin, though, not at the ending,” he said, “but at the beginning. A hot summer night. You know what that means, surely I don’t have to tell you. Talking to a Mississippi man about the heat is like talking to a fish about the water.”

This little joke brought an involuntary smile to two or three faces among the jury.

“So there we are on that hot summer night. Sweltering. Down in the Quarters, inside a poor man’s house.

“And here, on a bed in the parlor, an old man lies dying. His granddaughter is tending to him, his trembles and tremors, his rackety cough.”

All the men on the jury were watching him now, even those whose expressions revealed their innate distaste for a Negro attorney dressed in a suit.

“On the porch of this home, there are two gentlemen standing guard. These are not fighters or thugs. One is an attorney, well known to the most powerful men in our nation’s capital. The other is the inventor of the Stringer Automatic Baler, the most successful businessman in Eudora – heck, let’s be honest – in all of south Mississippi.”

There was a patter of quiet chuckling; everyone in the courtroom shot a look at L.J., beaming at this description of him.

“These gentlemen have come to the Quarters on this night,” Jonah said, “because the dying man is their friend. They’ve heard rumors of trouble. They have a well-reasoned fear that some kind of tragedy is in the offing.

“Lord, it’s hot. The old man struggles to breathe. The granddaughter cannot help the tears that come to her eyes. The old man is all she has on this earth.

“Then there comes a sound, the sound of hoofbeats on the road. There are men on horses, raising a cloud of dust in the darkness.”

A couple of the jurors looked ostentatiously bored, and a man in the back row was already dozing. But the others seemed attentive, and a few were even transfixed, as if Jonah were telling them a scary story.

And that’s exactly what he was doing.

“Suddenly, gentlemen, all is pandemonium – uproar and violence and chaos. Men firing guns everywhere. Glass flying. Women screaming. Suddenly there are men all around the house, trying to shoot their way in. Trying to kill the old man. Trying to kill his granddaughter.

“The old man is terrified. The young woman throws herself over him, shielding his body with her own. The assault lasts only a few minutes, but it seems like hours and hours.”

Jonah paused. He studied the faces of the jurors, each one in turn.

Finally he spoke again, in a hushed whisper.

“Two men lie dead on the ground. One is a man who’s been a friend and neighbor to you all, all his life – Luther Cosgrove, an employee of Mr. Stringer for nearly thirty years. He lies dead in the side yard, shot in the face by the men on horseback. The other is a much younger man from out in the county, a fellow named Jimmie Cooper, who had come to that house of his own free will that night and volunteered to stand guard over that dying old man. Jimmie Cooper lies dead on the ground in front of the house.”

Jonah paused and shook his head sorrowfully, as if he couldn’t believe the price Jimmie and Luther had paid.

“But then there is a miracle,” he said. “Three of the killers are arrested. For once, they are not allowed to pull on their Klan hoods and go riding off into the darkness, unmolested, unpunished. For once, there are men who are interested in capturing the killers, in bringing them to justice – in bringing them here today, to face trial before a jury of their peers. And that, of course, is where you gentlemen come into the story.”

He turned, pointed his finger at the defendants. “There they are. Mr. Chester Madden. Mr. Henry North. Mr. Lincoln Stephens.”

The defendants put on the smirk they had evidently practiced beforehand, but they couldn’t hold it. Their nerves and the silence in the room got the best of them.

It was now time for the most difficult, delicate portion of the opening statement. Jonah and I had spent hours in the War Room going back and forth over this part, trying to find the best way to say what he needed to say.

“Gentlemen, you may have noticed there is one fact I left out of my account,” Jonah said. “You may think it’s the most important fact of all. And that is the fact that these defendants are white men. They attacked a colored family in a colored neighborhood. One of the men they killed was white. The other was black. I didn’t mention any of this to you.

“And do you know why? I’ll tell you why – because the pursuit of justice knows no color! The pursuit of justice admits only that which is fair, and honest, and true.

“This case is not about race. It is not about the black versus the white. This case is much easier than that. It’s a simple matter of justice.

“Now, as the prosecutor representing the great state of Mississippi, it will be my job to show you how these three men attacked and pillaged, how they came to the Eudora Quarters planning to kill, intending to kill. How they planned and then executed the deliberate, premeditated murder of two men on a hot, awful night in the Quarters. On a night when these three men, and all the ones who got away, were hoping that justice had taken a holiday. Well, justice has not taken a holiday here in Eudora!”

I heard a sound from the jury box. Glancing over, I was astounded to see one of the jurors, old Lester Johnson, a retired teller from the First Bank of Eudora, clapping. So taken was he by Jonah’s presentation that he was applauding. The sound was very loud in the room.

Then there was a louder sound: the gavel coming down. BANG!

My father jumped to his feet. “Lester!” he shouted. “Have you lost your goddamn mind?”

Chapter 104

“WELL, WELL, WELL,” Maxwell Hayes Lewis said slowly. Then he rose from his chair to begin his opening statement.

Those three words were all it took for me to realize what he was up to.

Lewis was appropriating the style of Clarence Darrow, a Chicago labor lawyer renowned all over the nation as the “lawyer’s lawyer.” Darrow was the most effective courtroom presenter of the day, his style casual, colloquial, at times downright homey, with ample doses of country wisdom and sentiment tossed in.

Lewis scratched his head, then slid his hand down, cupping his face in his hand, squeezing his cheek, as if he were sitting in his study, lost in thought.

Then he appeared to notice the jury for the first time, and ambled over.

“Now, Mr. Curtis here says, and I quote, ‘the pursuit of justice knows no color. The pursuit of justice admits only that which is fair, and honest, and true.’”

He turned around and stared hard at Jonah. But when he spoke, his voice was gentle. “Thank you for saying that, Mr. Curtis. All I have to say to that is, Amen.”

The jurors visibly relaxed. The lawyer had brought them to a point of tension, then eased up.

“But let me tell you fellows where Mr. Curtis and I are absolutely not in agreement,” he said.

Lewis’s face was glistening with perspiration, and he hadn’t been talking a minute yet. He mopped his face with a handkerchief, a gesture that afforded him a dramatic pause.

“We are not in agreement on the story itself. Mr. Curtis tells a tale of night riders galloping in and shooting up a house in a frenzy of violent and lawless behavior. I have another version of that story to tell you. Now, the story I have to tell you is about eight upstanding white citizens of Pike County. Three of them were wrongly accused and arrested, the three gentlemen you see before you today.

“But on the night in question, there were eight. They climbed up on their horses, calmly, and in a neighborly way they rode over to Abraham Cross’s house. Why did they go there? Were they looking for trouble? Well, no – the trouble had already come and found them.”

He paused, turned around, and walked the other way along the jury box, meeting the eyes of each man in turn.

“Those eight men rode over that night to investigate a complaint against Mr. Cross’s nephew, a Mr. Richard Cross, known as Ricky, a Negro who was suspected of molesting and raping a young white girl of the Cedar Bend community.

“Understand, my friends, that the prosecutor’s story and this story fit together perfectly. The entire evening can be seen, from one perspective, as a gigantic misunderstanding. If the people in that house in the Quarters had not shot first and asked questions later – if they’d all been informed that they harbored a rapist in their midst, if they’d known about the assault on the girl, and the legitimate reasons my clients had for going to Mr. Cross’s house that night – why, none of this would have happened.

“But even so, it did happen. And it is a tragedy.

“And yet, gentlemen, it is not murder. I am here to tell you about Abraham Cross – a dying man, according to Mr. Curtis, although just for your information he is still alive and well, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you all get to meet him. I’m going to show you how Mr. Cross and his granddaughter and his hired gunmen, some of whom are in this room trying to intimidate you gentlemen here today…”

As he said this he was looking directly at L. J. Stringer and me.

“… I will show you how this armed band of Negroes and their white friends set about to deny my clients any access at all to the suspected man. How they, in fact, attacked my clients, and sought to visit great bodily harm upon them – even though my clients had a written legal warrant deputizing them and empowering them to question the accused, they were set upon by a pack of armed men.

“My clients fired their own weapons, gentlemen, in self-defense. The case is simple. It’s what is known in our game as ‘open and shut.’ My clients are facing these terrible charges, they have been jailed and denied their most basic rights as Americans, as Mississippians.”

You could see the jurors straightening with pride as he said this. “And all because of a story! A fable! A fiction, my friends. Mr. Jonah Curtis is a very eloquent lawyer, gentlemen, anyone can see that, but what he’s telling you is nothing more than a bedtime story!”

Several jurors laughed out loud.

“That is right, gentlemen of the jury. A bedtime story. We have two versions being told here. Mr. Curtis has told you a fairy story, and I have told you the truth. As God above knows it to be!”

Chapter 105

“GODDAMN THEM, BEN. Goddamn them all to hell!”

L.J. slammed his fist on the dining room table, rattling the crystal goblets. “Goddamn their lying, cheating asses!”

L.J. was doing all the shouting. Jonah and I were standing back, watching him scream in a way only rich men can. We didn’t try to stop him or calm him down.

“The biggest lie of all,” L.J. said, “is when he says these White Raiders had some kind of official warrant to come into that house after Ricky.”

Jonah looked at me. “All right, Ben, how is Lewis going to demonstrate that in a credible fashion?”

“Easy,” I said. “He’ll put Phineas Eversman on the stand.”

“The policeman?”

“Chief of police, and the only full-time officer on the force,” I reminded him. “He’ll put Phineas on and Phineas will lie through his teeth.”

Jonah looked quizzical. “I thought Eversman was on our side. Or at least neutral.”

“He was on our side for exactly one night,” I explained. “He only arrested those men because L.J. pushed him into it. He’s been looking for a way out ever since.”

I speared a slice of Virginia ham before passing the platter to L.J.

“It didn’t look like it would rain tonight, did it?” said Jonah.

“Not to me,” L.J. replied. “Why?”

“That sure does sound like thunder outside,” Jonah said.

I walked over to the window and pulled back the drapes. First I was surprised; then I was frightened.

“What is it, Ben?”

“About thirty, forty fellows with guns,” I said, “and a few with pitchforks. They appear to be just standing there, watching the house.”

“That’s a mighty big crowd for Eudora,” L.J. said.

“No,” I said. “It’s a mighty big mob.”

Chapter 106

THE MOB CAUSED US no trouble that night. For about an hour they watched us watching them through the windows, then they turned and went away. Every few minutes I peeked out the window, but the streets of Eudora stayed quiet and dark that night.

The next morning the trial began in earnest. I spent a long minute studying the face of Henry Wadsworth North, trying to match the man with what I remembered of the boy on the day Mama took sick. Too many years had intervened. This sallow, blotchy-faced fat man bore only a vague resemblance to the surly kid I remembered from Jenkins’ Mercantile.

Jonah called his first witness: Abraham Cross.

Abraham was wearing his best church suit, of speckled brown wool, and a matching fedora. He rolled in in a rickety wheelchair Moody had borrowed from a crippled neighbor of L.J.’s, a nice woman who sympathized with us.

“Now, Mr. Cross,” Jonah said, “why don’t you take us back to the night of August twenty-fifth. Tell us what you remember.”

Abraham nodded. “Well, sir, I was in the parlor, a-layin’ in my bed, and Moody was tendin’ after me–”

“Excuse me, sir,” Jonah said. “Who is Moody?”

“Moody Cross. My granddaughter. She looks after me.”

“Thank you, sir. Please go on.”

“Like I say, I was a-layin’ in my bed. Not quite sure if I’d been sleeping or not. But then sure enough I come awake. Sound like the cavalry done showed up outside the house. A bunch of horses, I don’t know how many. And men shootin’ off guns, and yellin.’ Like to scared me half to death – and I don’t need to be any closer to dead than I already am.”

Laughter rolled through the courtroom, from whites and Negroes. My father slammed down the gavel to kill it.

Abraham continued telling his story in precise, unwavering detail. Without any prompting from Jonah, he pointed out and positively identified two of the defendants.

“That one there, I saw him through the front window,” he said, pointing at the defense table.

Jonah asked him to be more specific.

“That one on the right,” he said. “Stephens. He shot Jimmie Cooper dead.”

“You’re sure it was Mr. Stephens you saw?”

“No doubt about it,” said Abraham. “And then that one there – Mr. Madden – he come into the parlor where I was, with another one of them Raiders. A man he called Harold.”

“And what did Mr. Madden do?”

“He says to this Harold, ‘You watch this old nigger real good. Keep your gun on his neck.’ Then he went back outside, Madden did.”

“And the one he called Harold – he stayed there with you?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did he keep a gun on you?”

“Yes, sir. Up against my skull. And he grabbed Moody too. Not in a nice way.”

“And how did you respond to that, Mr. Cross?”

Abraham scratched his old head, closed his eyes for a moment. Then he spoke.

“Well, sir, to tell you the truth I didn’t have to respond.”

“And why is that?”

“Because a minute later, Ben Corbett come into the room, and my granddaughter Moody…”

He stopped.

“Please continue,” Jonah said.

“She pushed a kitchen knife into Harold’s back.”

Chapter 107

“SO, LET ME SEE if I’ve got this straight, Mr. Cross.”

Maxwell Hayes Lewis stood up to begin his cross-examination of Abraham.

“You were lying in your living room, half asleep. Or maybe you were asleep and dreaming part of the time, you’re not really certain. You woke up… or you think you woke up… you looked out that window and saw a man you thought was Mr. Stephens pulling the trigger on a pistol.”

Jonah said, “Your Honor–”

“Overruled,” my father said.

“This is supposed to be a cross-examination,” Jonah said. “Could he get to a question sometime today?”

“I said overruled,” my father repeated.

“Oh, I’m asking him a question,” Lewis said. “I’m asking him if I’ve got his story straight. Mr. Cross, you said you saw this man shooting a pistol. But in fact you never saw him shoot anyone. You never saw anyone take a bullet from Mr. Stephens’s gun, did you? You can’t follow the path of a bullet with your eyes.”

“Your Honor–”

“Hush.” My father waved his hand as if Jonah were a fly that needed swatting. He turned to Abraham. “Answer the question. Are you sure who you saw?”

Abraham worked his jaw, as if chewing a wad of tobacco. Then he spoke.

“I know it was Mr. Stephens shooting, ’cause I saw him clear as day. I heard Jimmie when he fell and hit the roof. I knew that’s who it was ’cause I’d watched him climb up on the roof. And I saw him again, when he fell.”

Good for you, Abraham, I cheered silently. Give it back to him. Stick him with the truth.

“And that’s the way you remember it?” Lewis said.

“Yes, sir. But not only that. That’s how it was.”

“How is your memory these days, Mr. Cross?”

“Sharp as a serpent’s tongue, sir,” he said.

That got a chuckle from the spectators.

Lewis smiled too. “How old are you now, Mr. Cross, sir?”

“Mama always said I come into Miss’ippi the same year Miss’ippi joined up with the United States.”

“And Mississippi became a state in 1817,” said Lewis. “So that would make you…”

“Eighty-nine,” Abraham said. “Same as Miss’ippi.”

Another laugh. If the jury was anything like the audience, some of them had to be enjoying Abraham’s company.

Lewis ambled over to his desk, picked up a piece of paper, and carried it to the bench. “Your Honor, if it please the court, I submit article number one as physical entry and evidence, a warrant from the chief of police to search the premises of one Abraham Cross in the Eudora Quarters.”

“Very well,” my father said. He took pleasure in sliding the document into the maw of his heavy iron stamp, bringing down the lever to imprint his seal and admit it into evidence.

He handed the warrant back to Lewis, who carried it to Abraham.

“Mr. Cross, would you please take a look at this document?”

Abraham slowly settled his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose and took the paper from Lewis.

“Mr. Cross, do you know how to read?”

Abraham straightened up and glared at him. “I’ve been reading the Good Book since I was five years old.”

“In that case, would you please be so kind as to read that for me – the sentences printed at the top, in the heavy ink.”

Abraham read: “‘This warrant renders unto the bearers the unchallenged right to examine all house, home, and household goods of the residence denoted below, by order of the Chief of Police in the township of Eudora, Mississippi.’”

Abraham looked up at the attorney towering over his wheelchair.

Lewis said, “Please read the name on the line marked ‘Residence.’”

“It’s my name. ‘Abraham Cross.’”

Lewis stuck his thumbs through his suspenders, a pose exactly like the photograph of Clarence Darrow I’d seen in the American Legal Companion.

“Now, Mr. Cross, when have you seen this document before?”

“Never in my life,” Abraham said.

“Are you sure about that?”

Yes, sir, he said. He was sure. Lewis asked him the question five different ways. Jonah tried to object and was gaveled into silence.

“Didn’t Mr. Stephens hand this document to you when he arrived at your house that night, Mr. Cross?”

Ah, here we go. Jonah jumped up. Objection overruled. He seemed to have reached a silent agreement with Judge Everett Corbett: he would be allowed to keep making objections as long as he understood he would be instantly overruled on every one.

“Mr. Cross, isn’t it true that you saw this document, you read it, and you threw it on the ground?”

“No, sir.”

“Didn’t you tell Mr. Stephens that if he wanted to search your house, he’d have to shoot you first?”

“No, sir. I did not.”

“Are you certain?”

“He didn’t bring no paper. They rode up and started shooting. If Mr. Stephens said he did that, he is a liar. And if you say he did it, sir, you would be a liar too.”

Chapter 108

AFTER ABRAHAM FINISHED testifying and Moody took him home to put him back to bed, Jonah challenged the admissibility of Phineas Eversman’s search warrant.

My father looked mildly amused. “It’s a search warrant, Mr. Curtis. It looks like a thousand others that I’ve seen over the years,” he said.

Since his profane outburst in the direction of the applauding juror, I thought, my father had been unusually patient with Jonah. He must have realized how bad that eruption would look once all these “two-bit newspaper reporters” put it into print.

Jonah decided to tack in another direction. “Your Honor, I know you are well aware that under the rules of civil procedure, all documents entered as evidence must be shared with all counsel before commencement of trial,” he said. “The first time I saw this was a few minutes ago.”

My father peered down his nose at the spectacle of a Negro lawyer daring to cite civil procedure to him. “Now, Mr. Curtis, you being from up in Jackson and all, and educated up in the North, well, I’m sure you are accustomed to practicing before the big-city courts like they have up there, with your civil procedures and all that,” he said. I had seen him perform this act before: the simple country judge, working his way through the facts of the case with nothing but his good ol’ horse sense. “But down here in Eudora,” he went on, “we do things in a simple and logical fashion. Mr. Lewis hands me a document, I take a look at it. I ask myself if it looks authentic. In this case I thought it did, and I admitted it into evidence. I’m sorry you didn’t get to see it earlier – Mr. Lewis, you should’ve showed it to him – but I’m not going to throw it away or declare a mistrial on account of a thing like that. Mr. Curtis, is that all right with you? Yes? Let’s proceed.”

He was so folksy, so mock-reasonable, that it made my stomach queasy. It was obvious that this judge was not the least bit worried about being overturned on any appeal. That could only be because he knew there would never be an appeal: Sheriff Reese and his deputy were Klansmen, and Phineas Eversman, the only other law enforcement officer in Pike County, had crossed over to their side. The defendants would be acquitted, they would go free, and no one would ever disturb them on these murder charges again.

“Now, I want both sides to listen,” my father said. “I’m going to recess this proceeding until tomorrow morning. Just because every reporter in America is interested in this case, doesn’t mean I don’t have other matters to adjudicate. This afternoon I will devote myself to the trial of a man who’s been charged with public drunkenness and urination. I’m going to have to settle a fence-line dispute between a planter and one of his colored sharecroppers. And I’m going to listen to that old German butcher, Henry Kleinhenz, tell me one more time why Sam Sanders should not be allowed to sell chicken parts at the general store.”

He banged his gavel once.

“Until tomorrow, nine o’clock. Sharp.”

Chapter 109

“ALL RISE! THIS COURT stands adjourned!”

My father swept out of the room. Everyone in the courtroom started talking at once, the newspaper reporters pushing through the crowd, hastening to beat each other to the telegraph stations at the depot.

Through the window I saw that the sunny morning was giving way to dark-bottomed clouds. Everyone had been hoping for rain, if only to cool things off for an hour or two before the sun heated it all up again.

Maxwell Hayes Lewis stepped over to the prosecution table.

“Mr. Curtis, gentlemen – I just want to say, I am mighty sorry for forgetting to show that search warrant to you fellows before we got started this morning.”

I looked him right in the eye. “Ah, Mr. Lewis, that is perfectly understandable. I’m sure you were too busy manufacturing that warrant this morning to bother showing it to us.”

Lewis chuckled. “Ben, I am sorry to see you have become such a cynic.”

“Let me tell you something, Mr. Lewis.” I straightened all the way up so as to look down on him from the maximum height. “You got Phineas to fake a warrant for you, and you found some justice of the peace who was happy to sign it and postdate it, and you got my father to admit it into evidence with a wink and a nod. But Jonah has a whole bunch of witnesses who saw what your clients did that night. They saw the death and destruction. And they will testify.”

The affable smile disappeared from Lewis’s face. He was gathering his wits for a comeback when Conrad Cosgrove burst into the near-empty courtroom, shouting.

“Mr. Stringer! Mr. Corbett! Come on out here, you got to see this!”

I followed the others down the center aisle to the doorway. Outside, the trees in the square were swaying in the breeze from the oncoming storm. A soft patter of rain had just started to fall.

Right in front of the door, in the center of the lawn fronting the courthouse, was a sight I had never witnessed before.

A huge cross was planted there.

And it was burning.

Chapter 110

THAT EVENING A nervous and troubled prosecution team met for supper in the dining room of the Stringer home. Allegra, who usually took her meals with the children, decided to join us.

“Louie, isn’t it just amazing how our Ella can turn one little handful of crabmeat into a she-crab soup worthy of Galatoire’s in New Orleans?” Allegra said.

I was thinking, I never knew his name was Louie. Even way back in grammar school, he was always L.J.

L.J. had no time to answer. At that moment a rock exploded the glass of the window above the dining table and skipped across the room. A second rock smashed through the window beside it, then a third. Glass flew everywhere.

“The girls!” Allegra screamed and hurried up the stairs.

I ran after L.J. into the center hall. He opened his gun cabinet and took out three rifles: one for me, one for him, one for Jonah.

L.J. moved quietly along the walls of the front rooms, reaching up to cut off the gaslights so that we could see out and the people outside couldn’t see in.

I saw at least fifty men milling about out there. They looked like the mob from the previous night, only larger. And they were chanting:

They carried rifles, pistols, and pitchforks, and torches to light their way. I saw some of them holding big branches they must have pulled down from the trees on their way. One man had a bullwhip he kept cracking with a pop like a pistol shot.

L.J. stuck his head around the window frame. “Let the jury decide who goes free,” he shouted.

A rock came hurtling across the veranda to shatter the porcelain urn on a pedestal behind me. Another rock crashed through a stained-glass panel beside the front door.

“L.J., get your head in!” Jonah cried. “Don’t be a fool. Or a martyr.”

L.J. stood in full view of the mob, waving his arms, trying to quiet them down, but soon realized that Jonah was right. He stepped back from the window.

“You’ve got to get Allegra and the girls out of here,” I said.

He nodded. “I’ll have Conrad hitch up the carriage. Allegra’s got a sister up in Pricedale. This whole town has gone crazy.”

As L.J. ran from the room, Jonah turned to me. “This town was crazy long before tonight,” he said.

I was sorry to say that I had to agree.

Chapter 111

JONAH AND I watched from the rear balcony as L.J.’s carriage clattered down the back drive and onto the Old Laurel Road. The crowd in front continued chanting for another half hour or so, but then the rain picked up and extinguished their torches, and their anger, at least for tonight.

Before long I was seated in the ground-floor parlor with a snifter of brandy and a pot of coffee. Two of L.J.’s house-men were sweeping up the broken glass and bringing in planks to nail over the windows. Quite the sight. And quite the night.

A knock came at the door. I looked up to see Nelson, one of the houseboys.

“There’s a Miz Begley here to see you, sir,” he said.

I went and met Elizabeth in the front alcove. Her bonnet was glistening from the rain, and she looked uncharacteristically disheveled.

She reached out and took my hand. “Oh, Ben, I was in the courtroom today,” she said. “It’s awful, just awful. We all see what’s happening. How can I help?”

I led her to L.J.’s study, toward a green damask sofa, where we sat. Elizabeth untied the bow of her bonnet and shucked it off. Her hair went flowing onto her shoulders.

“I want to help you Ben. Please let me in. These hangings, all of it, has got to stop. Most of us in town want it to stop.”

“I don’t know what to say, Elizabeth. L.J. just took Allegra and their kids out of town.”

“Don’t push me away again. Please. I live here. I have more to gain, and to lose, than you do. Ben?”

After a brief silence, I told her about a plan that had been forming in my head. It was quite a daring one, and I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off.

“Elizabeth,” I said. “You already are a help to me. Just knowing that I have your support and trust means everything to me.”

Chapter 112

SINCE THE NIGHT we had convinced Phineas to arrest the White Raiders, I’d known that if this trial ever came about, winning three guilty verdicts would be close to impossible. But this was the first time I had ever considered that it might be completely impossible.

I couldn’t think of a way to combat all the lies, the false testimony, the faked documents, the bigoted jurors – and, of course, the overwhelming and nearly laughable prejudice of the presiding judge.

Jonah Curtis, on the other hand, seemed to be clinging to his little tiny ray of hope. He kept urging me to have the courage to stand by him; he intended to fight Loophole Lewis to the bitter end.

So it was that Jonah went after every scrap of evidence with passion, intelligence, and no little amount of cunning. He did constant battle with my increasingly impatient father. On the third day of the trial, everyone was astonished when Judge Corbett actually upheld one of Jonah’s objections. “Don’t let that give you any ideas,” my father growled.

The next day Jonah put an emotional Conrad Cosgrove on the stand.

“That’s right, Mr. Curtis,” Conrad said, “they was at least eight of ’em coming from all directions. They never said a word, they just started shootin’ everything and everybody in sight.”

And later: “Yes, sir, Mr. Curtis, I seen my brother Luther take that man’s boot to his head at least six, seven times. Hard enough and long enough to kill him. I was standing closer to him than I am right now to you.”

But then Maxwell Hayes Lewis always got his chance at rebuttal.

“Now, Mr. Cosgrove, my dear Mr. Cosgrove, would you say that your opinion of what happened that night is influenced at all by your sorrow at the death of your brother?”

Conrad pondered the question, then shook his head. “No, sir. I do feel sad that Luther is dead, but that doesn’t have a thing to do with my opinion about what happened that night.”

It was a small trap, but Conrad had walked right into it.

Loophole Lewis pounced. “So the testimony you gave to Mr. Curtis just now was your opinion, not fact?”

“Well, sir,” Conrad said slowly, “it is my opinion, like you said, but it’s based on what I saw. And that’s just a fact.”

“But you’re not absolutely certain of those facts, are you? How could you be?”

Jonah climbed to his feet again. “Your Honor, Mr. Lewis is purposely trying to confuse this witness.”

Judge Corbett looked over his spectacles. “If the witness is so easily confused,” he said, “then perhaps you made a mistake calling Mr. Cosgrove to testify in the first place.”

And so it went. In that steamy courtroom, ripe with the smell of sweat and Rose of Sharon eau de toilette, the good people of the Eudora Quarters took the stand and swore to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. And they did. And then Maxwell Lewis ripped them apart.

One by one, Loophole Lewis plowed his way through our witness list. Whether defiant or docile when they took the stand, every one of those witnesses eventually stepped down looking foolish, stupid, or wrong.

It happened every single time.

At last Jonah stood up.

“If it please the court, the people call Miss Moody Cross to the stand.”

Chapter 113

MY GOD. She was dressed like a grown-up.

I had never seen her wearing anything but one of the three identical white jumpers she rotated through the laundry basket so that she always appeared to be wearing the same spotlessly clean dress. Today she looked like a grown woman: a formal blue skirt, a neat white blouse. On her feet were lace-up boots polished to a high shine. She wore white gloves and a straw hat.

Last night we had gone over and over the questions we would ask. “Just tell the truth,” Jonah kept saying, “and everything will be fine.”

“What are you talking about?” she scoffed. “In that courtroom the truth ain’t worth a bucket of piss.”

“Charming,” I said. “Try not to say that.”

Jonah said, “The truth is the only weapon we have, Moody. So we have to use it.”

“Maybe so,” she said.

I should have listened more carefully to that phrase of hers.

Under Jonah’s patient questioning, Moody told the same story her grandfather had told. The same story Cosgrove told. The same story every one of the witnesses from the Quarters had told.

By the time Jonah turned to Maxwell Lewis and said, “Your witness,” the gentlemen of the jury looked about ready for some dinner and a nice nap.

Lewis said, “Miss Cross, are you a permanent resident of the house where your grandfather lives, over there in the Quarters?”

“Yes, sir, that’s right. I live with him and take care of him.”

All morning I had been noticing that Moody sounded more mature. She had managed to hide the edge of anger that so often came into her voice. She was speaking carefully, politely.

“I wouldn’t really call it a house, though,” she added. “It’s more like a shack. But we do all right.”

“Now, would you say your first notice of the alleged intruders on that night was when they rode up, supposedly shooting their weapons and yelling?”

“Oh, no, sir,” she said in a very clear voice. “I would say my first notice was when Mr. North there, and Mr. Stephens, knocked on the door and showed me their search warrant.”

Chapter 114

SWEET JESUS IN heaven! Jonah and I had never discussed this with her. We had certainly never planned for her to say such a thing. But say it she had:

“… and showed me their search warrant.”

With those words Moody changed the whole atmosphere of the courtroom and the direction of this entire murder trial.

Jonah looked at me wide-eyed. Together we stared at Moody on the witness stand.

I thought I detected a hint of amusement behind her serious expression. She watched Loophole Lewis swivel all the way around to shoot a goggle-eyed look at my father. She heard the defendants whispering frantically among themselves. She was aware that her words had set off a buzz of confusion in the gallery. Even the jurors had snapped to wakefulness.

And Moody was enjoying every minute of it. Maybe she knew our cause was lost, and she was out to confound everybody. To confuse us. To throw the whole trial up in the air and see where the pieces came down.

This was every lawyer’s nightmare: the rogue witness, off on her own.

My father banged his gavel several times. “Order!” The buzz subsided. “Mr. Lewis?”

Lewis turned back to the witness stand. “Now, Miss Cross,” he said, “every previous witness, including your grandfather, claimed that they never were presented with a search warrant that night.”

“I know that, sir,” she said. “Papaw’s getting pretty old now; he doesn’t always notice everything. And when those men came with the warrant, there wasn’t anybody out in front of the house except me. I was the only one.”

I’m sure that almost everyone else thought Maxwell Lewis looked as confident as ever, but I saw signs that he was flustered. He was forgetting to slouch casually against the railing of the jury box. He was standing at attention and speaking a little too quickly. His countrified Clarence Darrow lilt had all but vanished. Moody had rattled him.

“This is, to say the least, a most unusual bit of testimony, Miss Cross.”

“Why is that, sir? You – all said they came there with a search warrant. You said they showed it to us. All I’m saying is… well, that’s exactly what happened.”

She was lying. I knew it for sure. I was with Abraham in the parlor that night, and I knew nobody came to the door with any warrant. All had been quiet, there was a clatter of horses, then the Raiders started shooting at anything that moved.

Maxwell Lewis put on an uncomfortable smile. “All right, they showed you the warrant,” he said. “And then what happened next?”

Suddenly I knew where Moody was going with this, why she was lying. What she was hoping to demonstrate with her lie.

Damn! It was brilliant! Why hadn’t I thought of it?

But of course, if I had thought of it – if I’d even asked her to do such a thing – I could have been disbarred.

As it was, she was on her own.

“Well, sir,” she said to Lewis, “I was looking over the warrant, you know, and I said, ‘I still don’t think y’all have the right to do this. But if that’s what the paper says, I reckon we’ve got no choice but to let you come on in.’”

“You said that?” Lewis turned to the jury, hoping they would share his skepticism.

None of them even noticed. Their eyes were on Moody. She had them under her spell, and they were finally listening.

“Yes, sir, I did, and I no sooner got the words out of my mouth than a bunch of ’em rode up on their horses and started shootin’ and yellin’ and everything. Just like Papaw said.”

“If we can,” Lewis said, “let’s return to the issue of the search warrant.”

“Yes, sir,” said Moody, as proper and polite as I had ever heard her.

“Now, who showed it to you?”

“Mr. North was the one holding the paper,” she said. “And Mr. Stephens was with him.”

“You are absolutely certain they presented that warrant to you?”

“Well, yes, sir, I mean – that’s what happened. Just like y’all said. Don’t you believe me?”

She looked the very picture of confounded innocence.

Maxwell Lewis turned to my father and shrugged.

My father spoke from the bench in a dangerous growl: “Moody Cross. You have sworn to tell the truth in this court. Do you understand that?”

“Oh, I certainly do, Your Honor, that’s just what I’m doing,” she said. “For the life of me, I can’t figure out why me telling the truth has got y’all so confused. It’s almost like you’re angry at me.”

She even had the nerve to smile. I thought, Don’t get carried away now, don’t go too far. You’ve got them right where you want them.

Before she took the stand, Moody and her grandfather had been uncooperative liars, uppity Negroes, troublemakers. Agitators defying a legal search warrant. Now they were innocent citizens who had agreed to a search of their premises and then, without warning, were unfairly and savagely attacked. For no reason at all.

Chapter 115

THE MOMENT MOODY stepped off the witness stand, my father declared a recess until Monday.

I followed Moody, L.J., and Jonah down the steps of the courthouse into a barrage of questions accompanied by that acrid gunpowdery smell of flash powder exploding. Moody moved through that crowd of newsmen like a ship slicing through a wave, holding her head up, walking straight ahead.

We brushed off the last pesky reporters and walked three blocks to the Stringer house. We waited until we had Moody in the War Room before anyone spoke.

“What did you think you were doing?” I asked. “You got up under oath and told the biggest, fattest lie in the history of Mississippi. And all the time grinning like a fool!”

She was grinning like that now. “I tried to keep the smile off my face,” she said.

“Why didn’t you tell us you were going to do that?”

“’Cause if I had, you’d have told me not to do it. This way I could scare the devil out of that Loophole Lewis, and your daddy the judge, and Phineas Eversman, and everybody else who was in on the lie.”

“But you lied in order to counter their lie,” I shouted. “That’s perjury!”

“So what?” she said. “You fight fire with fire. Lewis can’t contradict me. If he does, he’ll have to admit they made up that warrant out of thin air, a long time after the raid.”

“Oh, I understand what you were doing, all right,” I said. “I just want to know what gives you the right to–”

“Ben,” said L.J. “I don’t see how this hurts us. I think it can only help.”

I sank onto a chair. “I think so too, as bad as that is. What do you think, Jonah?”

Jonah was looking out the narrow second-floor window.

“It must be six-thirty. The usual mob is beginning to form,” he said.

Then he turned from the window and faced the three of us.

“So, what do you think?” I repeated.

“I think what Moody did was… interesting. I must say, I did enjoy watching Loophole Lewis and Judge Corbett squirming like worms on a hook…”

I smiled. We had all enjoyed that sight.

“… but it won’t make any difference,” Jonah finished. “I’m afraid it won’t.”

“Yes, it will,” Moody protested. “It’ll cast doubt in their minds. It’ll make it seem like we tried to cooperate, and they attacked us anyway.”

Jonah shook his head. “Oh, Moody. Those jurors have lived here their whole lives. They don’t care who’s telling the truth and who’s lying! The phony warrant? Some of the jurors were probably down at the town hall when Eversman was writing it up.”

There was silence then. A long minute of it.

The chanting outside began again.

Moody stood and smoothed her blue skirt. She adjusted her straw hat and slipped on her white gloves.

“I got to go. Papaw is in bad shape. Coming to the court, he didn’t hardly know who he was,” she said.

Without thinking about it I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Tell Abraham I’m coming out tomorrow to see about him.”

Jonah said, “Thank you for trying to help, Moody. From the bottom of my heart.”

Chapter 116

IT WAS TIME TO TRY OUT the plan I had concocted. Maybe it was even past time, too late. Moody and L.J. had come with me. Jonah wanted to but knew he couldn’t. After all, he was representing the great state of Mississippi, and we were about to break the law in too many ways to count.

“Stinks bad in here,” Moody said.

The awful smell was everywhere, a sharp, nauseating odor, like a cross between bad patent medicine and rancid moonshine. It was the foul scent of the chemicals Scooter Willems used to develop his photographs.

I had just climbed through an unlocked window, with Moody and L.J. behind me, into Scooter’s old cabin off the East Point Road. Now we were in his studio, one large room with black curtains dividing it into three. The front part was a portrait studio, with a backdrop and a stool for the subject to pose on. In the middle section two large wooden tables held trays of foul-smelling chemicals. But it was in the last section that we found what we’d come for: boxes and boxes of Willems’s photographs, with dozens more pinned to the walls.

There was one box full of nothing but photographs of lynchings. Scooter Willems had been busy these past months. Beside that box sat a stack of postcards manufactured from the photos, souvenir pictures of hanged corpses, burned bodies, twisted victims, like the one I’d received in the mail.

“God Almighty,” Moody said. “The man has taken pictures of everybody who ever got hanged.”

“Look here,” said L.J., working his way along the wall. “These are all from the Bobby Burnett lynching.”

I held up the lantern to see.

“First, take a look at poor old Bobby hanging there,” L.J. said. “Now look who’s standing next to him. There. By his feet.”

There they were, plain as day in the flickering lamplight: Chester Madden and Lincoln Alexander Stephens, two of the three White Raiders on trial. They grinned up at the bloated, bloody, bursting head of Bobby Burnett.

One by one I pulled the photographs down from the wall, gathering them in a manila folder I found on Scooter’s desk.

“Look at this!” Moody exclaimed, holding a photo up to the light.

I came up beside her. There was her brother Hiram, dead on the ground, with a rope around his neck. His grinning killers each had a foot on his body, as if he were a prize lion they’d slain on safari.

L.J. pointed to the man on the end. “I’ll be damned if that ain’t Lester Johnson.”

I almost stopped breathing. “And now he sits on our jury.”

Then I recognized the man beside him. It was Jacob, Jacob Gill, with his foot resting on Moody’s dead brother. I felt my eyes filling.

Scooter Willems was nothing if not thorough. Everyone who’d ever had a hand in a lynching in this part of Mississippi had been assiduously recorded, their faces plainly recognizable. Some of the lynchings were of victims I’d heard about, others were news to us.

The horror increased with just about every picture. Before we were through, we’d seen the faces of many prominent Eudora citizens enjoying a night out, a night of murder and mayhem.

What a record of guilt! What amazing evidence! I couldn’t take the pictures down fast enough.

“Just put ’em all in the box,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”

“No, y’all can stay,” I heard.

Chapter 117

THE BLACK CURTAIN was yanked aside, and the studio flooded with light. At first I couldn’t make out who they were, but there were five of them. Their torches were much brighter than our lantern, and they dazzled us.

“I don’t recall inviting any of you folks here,” a voice said. That high nasal whine had to be Scooter Willems’s.

As he moved his torch I saw them all.

Two men with guns whom I didn’t recognize.

Phineas Eversman, chief of police.

And Senator Richard Nottingham, Elizabeth’s husband.

“Go ahead and finish packing up,” said Nottingham, waving his pistol. “Saves us having to do it.”

Another man stepped into the cabin. “Yeah, y’all get to work, would you?” I knew that voice. And that face. It was Jacob Gill.

“’Preciate you gathering ’em up for us, Ben,” he said. “We were just gonna have ourselves a little evidence – burnin’ party.”

“We knew we’d find you here,” Phineas said with a smirk on his face.

L.J. growled, “How did you know? Who the hell told you we were comin’ here?”

There was a silence, then the others looked at Richard Nottingham. Finally he said, “My wife.”

The words stabbed me in the heart. I felt my throat closing and thought I might be sick.

“Elizabeth was spying for me. She told us every word you ever said, Corbett. She’s a good girl. Thanks for keeping us up to date. It was damn useful to Maxwell Lewis.”

Phineas took the box of photographs from Moody. One of the pictures caught his eye. “We don’t need this one,” he said.

He handed it over to me. “In case you want a souvenir.”

It was a picture of me – half naked, hanging from a lynching tree.

Scooter did a fine job with the picture. The detail was crisp; you could see every leaf on the tree. The dog licking my bloody foot, the flies swarming over my face.

“You always took a nice picture, Ben,” said Jacob Gill.

Chapter 118

“ALL RIGHT NOW, Ben, we tried your plan, and you might say it didn’t work out so well. So now we’re going to try my plan.”

Jonah was not in the mood to butter me up.

“You know those photographs would have worked,” I said bitterly. “All right, all right, tell me your plan.”

“Well, it’s not quite as audacious as yours. Matter of fact, it’s very logical, very well thought out.”

“Damn it, just tell us,” L.J. said.

“Tomorrow,” Jonah said, “I want Ben to give the summation to the jury.”

L.J. didn’t hesitate a beat before answering, “That is a fine idea.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “I was there on the night of the murders. I’m a witness but you’ve chosen not to put me on the stand. You’re the one who’s been telling them the story of these crimes all along. Why change now?”

“You know why,” said L.J.

“Because I’m white?” I said. “That’s no reason!”

“It never hurts,” Jonah said with a faint smile. “Look, you come from here,” he explained. “You know these people. The judge is your father. These jurors will trust you more than they will me. And not because you’re white – because you were there. You can give a summation that comes from your heart. For God’s sake, you’ve been lynched yourself. You have to tell them a story, Ben. They need to hear it from you.”

I dreaded the truth in what he was saying. The next thing he said cinched it for me:

“I tried the case. I fought the case. I pled the case. But all along, even before I got here, it was always your case, Ben.”

Chapter 119

IT LOOKED AS IF half of America had come to tiny Eudora for the conclusion of the White Raiders Trial.

Outside the courthouse that morning, hundreds and hundreds of spectators jammed the town square. Little boys had climbed trees for a better view of the action. Photographers muscled their tripods through the crowds, jostling for the best angles. A few of the more enterprising had bought out Russell Hardware’s entire stock of ladders to get an over-the-heads-of-the-crowd view.

Judge Everett Corbett had petitioned Governor Vardaman for state militiamen from Jackson to keep order. The soldiers had set up temporary wooden fences along the sidewalk in front of the courthouse to control the spectators who’d been flooding into Eudora by train, carriage, horseback, and on foot.

Inside the courtroom there was no question who was in control: Judge Everett Corbett.

During the course of the trial, he had expelled four colored women from the gallery for reacting too loudly. He had found three reporters in contempt of court for referring in unflattering terms to his dictatorial ways. And he had sent an old colored man to jail for shouting, “The Lord hates a liar!” during one defendant’s testimony.

The first thing my father did on the trial’s last morning reaffirmed his imperial status.

“Now we are ready to deliver this case to the jury,” he said. “The testimony has been passionate on both sides. Tempers have run high. Outside interest has been remarkable by any standard. And thus, gentlemen of the jury, we have come to the crux of the matter. You have to let the facts speak for themselves. You will now hear from the prosecutor, Mr. Curtis, his last and best argument about how you’ll decide. Then you’ll hear the same from Mr. Lewis. And finally, it will be entirely up to you, the jury, to make your decision, as the framers of the Constitution intended. Mr. Curtis?”

Jonah rose with an impassive face. “Your Honor, the jury has heard quite a lot from me in this trial. More than enough, I think. So I’m going to let my colleague Mr. Benjamin Corbett deliver the summation for the state.”

Chapter 120

I GOT TO MY FEET, a little wobbly in the legs. The dumb-founded faces of my father, Loophole Lewis, and his three murdering clients gave me at least some pleasure.

It took my father only a moment to make the calculation: I had the right to speak, and there was nothing he could do about it. He smiled, crossed his arms, and sat back in his chair.

“I wondered if we were ever going to hear from Counselor Corbett,” he said. “Of course, as his father, I have heard a great deal from him over the years, and I look forward to sharing that pleasure with the rest of you.”

Appreciative laughter rolled through the room. I had no choice but to smile and try for a little joke of my own. “And, of course, as the proud son of my father, I can only say I have done at least as much listening over the years as talking,” I said. “I have learned a great deal that way.”

“Please proceed, Mr. Corbett,” my father said, “and let us decide for ourselves if that is true.”

The audience laughed again. My old dad had definitely won the first round.

I wondered what he saw, peering down at me from his bench. Did he see a Harvard Law graduate, a well-known Washington defense lawyer? Did he see a man of passion, righteousness, ambition?

No. He saw a boy crying when he fell off his rocking horse, a child furiously resisting a spoonful of the hated mashed carrots. He didn’t see me. He saw a powerless boy.

So I was determined that when I finished speaking, he would see a man; he might even see the real Ben Corbett.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. “I will try not to disappoint you.”

Chapter 121

BENJAMIN E. CORBETT’S SUMMATION to the jury:

“Judge Corbett just told you that you have to let the facts speak for themselves. The only problem with that is, facts do not have voices of their own; they can’t actually speak. So I’m the one who is standing here to give voice to the facts. That is my job today, and I appreciate your willingness to give me an ear.

“It’s the middle of the night in the Eudora Quarters. Three men ride up to execute a search warrant. It’s two o’clock in the morning – hardly the most traditional time to conduct a search of private premises – but that is what these men have decided to do.

“Ah, but wait. There’s a girl in the house, granddaughter of the old dying man. She reads the warrant and accepts it. She doesn’t like it, she says, but it’s the word of the law, so she will not resist. Come on in, she says. Search our house. Torment us. Question us. Rifle through our belongings. We have committed no crime, there is no actual legal reason for you to want to search here. But she allows it. She opens the door. She lets them in.

“And yet even her total submission, her complete and immediate cooperation, are not enough for these men. The search warrant was simply a ruse to get in the door. They have not come here to do anything legal.

“They are here to torture and torment, and to kill, because they think it’s their right to kill anyone who gets in their way. To skirt around the law and execute anyone they decide is guilty. To evade juries like the one you gentlemen are sitting on today. They are there to kill the idea of fair trial, a jury of a man’s peers. They have come to get their way by using the gun, the knife, the rope. And the terrible rule of the mob.”

Calmly, meticulously, I began to lead them through the events of that night – the shooting and wounding of the guards at Abraham’s house, the death by kicking of Luther Cosgrove, the fatal shooting of Jimmie Cooper up on the roof, the spectacle of poor Abraham with a gun to his head.

And finally, I told them about my part in the whole thing: why I’d gone to Abraham’s house that night, how I knew the Raiders were coming, what I did and thought and felt at every moment. I explained how lucky Abraham and I had been to avoid being killed and to manage to bring these three Raiders to Phineas Eversman so the law could work as it is supposed to work.

“Now, Chief Eversman did his duty that night as an officer of the law. Not only that, he stuck his neck out, gentlemen. He did the honest, moral, upright thing – and that’s not always easy to do. He arrested these men and charged them, and he saw that they were brought to trial. He may have changed his mind since then about some things, but the fact remains that Chief Eversman knew instinctively that these men had to be stopped.

“He had no choice. He saw the blood. He smelled it – that’s how fresh it was. The blood of their victims was on the defendants’ hands when we brought them to him. It was on the toes of their boots.

“Now you gentlemen are in the same position the chief of police was in that night. You have heard the truth from the people of the Quarters who witnessed these brutal attacks, these murders. You have seen the blood.

“Let me put it to you frankly: the evidence has not been refuted, because it cannot be refuted.

“Gentlemen, outside this courthouse, there is a whole nation watching us. Reporters from all over the country have come to Eudora to see if our little town can rise above itself, rise above the customs and prejudices that have held sway down here.

“But that’s not why I want you to deliver the verdict you know to be right: a verdict of guilty on all counts. I don’t want you to do it because I think you should rise above your prejudices, whatever they may be. Or because I want you to show the world that Mississippi is not a place where murderers get away with their awful crimes.

“I don’t want you to consider what the outside world thinks. Who cares about them? I want you to think about your own soul, your own self, inside, where you live, when there is no one else around.

“I hope that you will find these men guilty, because it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they are. The only thing that might prevent your rendering such a verdict is fear – fear that some of your neighbors will think less of you if you send these guilty men, these murderers, to prison. You must conquer that fear. The people of this country are depending on you to prove yourselves worthy of the grave responsibility they have invested in you. Show them that here in Mississippi, the light of justice is still shining.”

I saw Jonah and L.J. smiling at me. I glanced up to my father. For a moment I thought I saw the ghost of a smile on his face too. Or maybe I just wanted to see it.

I turned back to the jury.

“There’s someone who said it better than I ever could. And he said it in the first book of Samuel.”

I recited from memory. “For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”

Now it was Maxwell Lewis’s turn.

Chapter 122

MAXWELL LEWIS’S SUMMATION to the jury:

“Eloquence like young Mr. Corbett’s has rarely been heard in any courthouse in our nation,” he said.

Then he turned to face the judge. “Wouldn’t you say that’s right, Your Honor?”

This time my father withheld his smile. “Let’s just get on with it, Counselor.”

I was anxious to see what tone Lewis would take now. Would he appear as the mighty Darrow? Would he try to play humble country lawyer? Would he be a preacher hurling fire and brimstone, or a kindly old grandpa proffering wise advice?

Of course he would be all those things.

“Gentlemen, I begin with a simple question… Where is the evidence? What the prosecution calls evidence is not what I would call evidence. If it seems to you that Mr. Curtis and Mr. Corbett have paraded the entire population of the Eudora Quarters in front of you, one after the other accusing these citizens of Eudora of murder, rioting in the streets, and general mayhem – well, sir, that’s because that is exactly what they’ve done.

“But now, when you consider charges of this magnitude and gravity, you must, as Mr. Corbett told you, consider the evidence. The prosecution’s evidence, mainly the statements of various witnesses, is like any kind of evidence: it’s only as good as the people who give it.

“And where does this so-called evidence come from? Who are the people giving this testimony? What is the quality of these people that would lead us to believe their testimony? Well, I’ll tell you.

“These allegations come from people who wash your clothes, and chop your weeds, and clean out your barns. They come from the old uncle who sits in front of the store all day, shooting the breeze. From the people who pick cotton all day. This is testimony from people who resent you because you happen to have the blessing and good fortune to be white, and therefore you have more privileges than they have.”

A dramatic pause. Then he whipped around.

“And you are being asked to take their word as truth.

“Why on God’s green earth would anyone suppose that you would take the word of this bunch of worthless rabble-rousers over the word of three gentlemen from Eudora?”

I shot a glance at my father, who was watching Lewis with the same contemptuous expression he’d been aiming at me since the trial began.

I wanted to shout, “The people who wash your clothes and pick your crops can tell the truth. The truth is not based on how much money you have. It’s based on… the truth.”

Of course, I did not interrupt the summation.

“Gentlemen,” Maxwell Lewis continued. “Be aware. There are forces at work here that would like nothing better than to take away your freedoms, your right to live life the way you have always lived it here. I warn you to do what you must to make sure that does not happen. Gentlemen, be alert. And acquit these three innocent men.”

I turned to Jonah. He shrugged.

Lewis went on in a quiet, humble voice.

“Gentlemen, I am sorry for the rough times the people in the Quarters have had. But that gives them no license to come here and lie to you. And it gives you no license to ignore the plain facts in front of you.”

What facts? I thought. Moody’s dramatic lie had undercut the entire thrust of the Raiders’ argument. They had no facts on their side. Lewis wasn’t anything like a great lawyer; he hadn’t even bothered to counter that revelation. He was counting on the famous prejudices of white juries to carry the day for him.

“Mr. Corbett quoted the Good Book to you. He quoted a verse from First Samuel. Well, I too would like to leave you with a phrase from God’s holy word. The book of Exodus.”

He paused, and then spoke in a clear, loud voice: “Thou… shalt… not… lie!”

That was it? That was Lewis’s big dramatic finish?

I wanted to laugh, and I could swear I saw my father roll his eyes.

Chapter 123

JUDGE CORBETT’S INSTRUCTIONS to the jury:

“All right, that brings the evidentiary phase of this proceeding to a close,” said the judge.

He rubbed his chin, then adjusted his spectacles. He took a sheet of paper from a folder and placed it in front of him.

“Gentlemen of the jury, I need not remind you that many people outside Eudora are watching our little town now, because of this case. You have seen the signs of it – the streets of our town are filled with strangers, including, but not limited to, the so-called gentlemen of the press. And I understand that over at the Slide Inn Café they keep running out of chocolate pie as fast as they can make it.”

He paused, waiting for a laugh.

It didn’t come.

The courtroom was too tense for frivolities now.

The sight of all those soldiers outside had made everyone nervous.

“You heard the testimony as it was presented,” he said. “And now it is up to you to decide the truth as you see it, using the laws of our great state of Mississippi as your guide.

“Once you decide this case,” he went on, “those reporters will write their stories, and then they’ll leave. Once the circus is gone and the streets are quiet again, we folks in Eudora will be left with… each other.”

I had heard my father give his charge to a jury many times. Usually his words were dry, precise, legalistic. Today, for some reason, he was being unusually lyrical.

“And what you decide in that jury room will influence… for a very long time… the way we live our lives in this town.”

Suddenly he seemed to snap out of it. When he spoke again, he was all business.

“You will adjourn to the jury room now. I’ll have the bailiff standing right outside your door, if there’s anything you need.”

The jury members looked at one another, waiting for a signal that Judge Corbett had finished his instructions.

But he was not quite done.

“One other thing, gentlemen… I know you enjoyed hearing the defense counsel just as much as I did, but I do want to give you my point of view on a matter he chose to address.”

He claimed to be speaking to the jurors, but his eyes stayed on Maxwell Lewis the whole time.

“The people who wash your clothes and pick your cotton are every bit as capable of telling the truth as any other kind of people.”

Lewis’s face flushed so red I thought he might explode.

But I knew exactly what my father was up to. For the spectators and journalists, some of whom he had allowed into the courtroom to hear the closing arguments, Judge Corbett was showing himself to be a courageous man, boldly making a statement of racial tolerance.

I was neither a spectator nor a journalist, however. I wasn’t buying his act for a minute. I had sat through fifty-four objections that were overruled fifty-three times. My father had systematically sabotaged the prosecution’s chances of getting a fair trial in his court.

The judge banged the gavel I had given him. “Gentlemen, kindly repair to the jury room and do your job.”

Chapter 124

I TRIED TO HURRY past the mob of reporters. I was becoming quite adept at avoiding them, but the more skilled ones – the fellows from New York and Washington – were relentless. They pulled at the sleeve of my jacket. Some actually planted themselves in the middle of my path.

Finally, I had to push them out of my way. It was the only way to get past these rude and opportunistic fellows.

“Mr. Corbett, do you think you have a chance?”

“Jonah, why’d you let a white man give your summation for you?”

“Mr. Stringer, what’s your angle? What’s in it for you?”

I felt someone push something into my hand and looked down to find a twenty-dollar bill.

A reporter I recognized from Washington was grinning at me. “That’s for a private interview, and there’s more if it’s really good!” I wadded the bill and tossed it back at him.

I heard Jonah calling to me across the throng: “See you at the War Room, half an hour.”

The reporters lost interest in me and turned on Jonah. The War Room? What War Room? What war? Do you think of this trial as a war? Do you think you will lose?

I used this opportunity to escape. I crossed Commerce Street and hurried downtown, to the platform by the nearly deserted depot. One old colored man was attaching a feedbag to a fine brown horse hitched to a flat truck.

I found a bench in the shade near the stationmaster’s house from which I could survey most of Eudora.

The mob was still swirling around the courthouse, a jam of horses and wagons and honking automobiles.

Out on the edge of town, on the dirt road leading out to the Quarters, I saw columns of smoke rising into the sky, the camp-fires of Negroes who’d come from all over southern Mississippi to await the verdict. I had ridden through their camp yesterday, smelling the smoke of fatback, hearing the hymns they sang.

“Sing loud so He can hear you,” I said to the distant columns of smoke.

This was the first time in weeks I’d been alone, without the trial looming in front of me. It was time I did something I had put off for too long.

I took out a sheet of paper, turned the satchel over my lap, and started to write.

Dear Meg,

I have waited weeks to write this letter.

I have waited because I kept hoping that you would reply to my last. I envisioned an envelope with your return address on it. I imagined myself tearing it open to discover that you had changed your mind, that the thought of us living apart was something you had come to believe was a mistake. That you once again believed in the two of us. But that letter never arrived. I am alone, as separated from you and Amelia and Alice as if I were dead – or, perhaps, as if I’d never existed.

Meg, much has happened in the time we have spent apart. I have been involved in a highly provocative trial here in Eudora. I’m sure you’ve read about it in the newspapers. I will not waste time in this letter describing the trial, except to say that as I write to you now, the jury is deliberating the outcome.

I know that this might anger you, but I must tell the truth. I am convinced beyond any doubt that I am doing the right thing when I try to use my skills as a lawyer to help those who can’t find justice anywhere else.

Meg, I know that I alone cannot right the wrongs of this society. But I cannot and will not stop trying. I know you feel that effort takes too much energy and time away from you, our girls, and my love for the three of you.

Should you decide to continue our marriage, I promise I shall try to be a better husband and father.

But I must also warn you that I will not (and cannot) abandon my ideals. As much as you may long for it, I cannot become just another government lawyer.

Please, Meg, give it another chance. We have so much to lose if we abandon each other. We have so much to gain if we try to move forward together.

My time here in Eudora is drawing to an end. Soon I will be coming back to Washington, and to you. I know now – I have learned – that Washington is my home. You are my home, Meg. The girls are my home.

I pray that when I open that front door, I will hear your sweet voice again, and you will speak to me with love.

Till I see you again, I remain

Your loving husband,

Ben

Chapter 125

THE JURY HAD A VERDICT.

My father banged his gavel furiously, but it did no good. “Quiet!” he bellowed. “I will clear this courtroom!”

Spectators pushed this way and that, tripped over one another, stumbling to find seats. My father continued hammering away at his bench. The jurors began to make their way to the jury box, blinking nervously at the uproar their appearance had provoked.

“I will clear this courtroom!” my father shouted again, but this had no effect at all on the level of noise and excitement in the room.

“Very well,” he said. “Bailiff, get ’em all out of here. Get ’em all out!”

Those were the magic words. Instantly the courtroom came to perfect attention. The crowd fell silent, and everyone sank into the nearest available seat.

“Very well. That’s much better,” said Judge Corbett. “Mr. Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict?”

“Yes, Your Honor, we have.”

The foreman handed a white slip of paper to the bailiff, who handed it up to my father. Though this took only seconds, it seemed much longer than that. Time was slowing, and my senses were unbearably acute.

My father opened the paper and read it with no visible emotion. He raised his head and looked my way, still betraying nothing about the verdict.

Then he spoke. “Mr. Foreman, in the matter of the State of Mississippi versus Madden, North, and Stephens, how does the jury find?”

In that moment, it seemed to me, all life stopped on this earth. The birds quit chirping. The ceiling fans stopped spinning. The spectators froze in midbreath.

The foreman spoke in a surprisingly high-pitched whine.

“We find the defendants not guilty.”

As he uttered those impossible words, I was staring at the piggish face of Henry Wadsworth North. The hardest thing of all was seeing the joy that broke out all over his hateful visage.

A smattering of cheers went up from the white audience. Reporters rose and sprinted for the doors. A collective groan, and then sobs, arose from the Negroes in the gallery.

My father banged his gavel again and again, but no one seemed to care.

Chapter 126

AFTER THE COURTROOM HAD CLEARED, I sneaked out a side entrance to avoid the crowd of journalists out front, and did what I had done so many times lately. I got my bike and headed for the Eudora Quarters.

The first person I saw was the old man in the blue shack who had showed me the way to Abraham’s house the first time I came out here.

“You done your best, Mist’ Corbett,” he called. “Nobody coulda done better.”

“My best wasn’t good enough,” I called back. “But thank you.”

He shook his head. I continued down the dirt road.

A large brown woman was coming the other way, balancing a wicker basket of damp clothes on her head and carrying another under her arm. She picked up the conversation in midstep: “Aw, now, Mistuh Corbett, that’s just the way things goes,” she said.

“But it’s not fair,” I said.

She laughed. “Welcome to my life.”

There I was, trying to explain the concept of fairness to a woman carrying two huge baskets of other people’s washing.

At the crossroads in front of Hemple’s store, I saw the usual two old men playing checkers. I stopped in front of their cracker barrel. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” I said.

One man looked up at me sadly. The other one said, “Well, suh, ain’t nobody strong enough to beat ’em. And so what they did was, they got off scot-free. Nothin’ new ’bout that.”

“Ben.” A soft voice, a hand on my arm. I turned. It was Moody.

She was wearing her white jumper again. She even had a little smile on her face.

“You planning to go door-to-door, explain to everybody in the whole Quarters what happened in the white man’s courtroom?” she asked.

“I would,” I said.

“Don’t you worry your purty head about it,” she said. “All the explaining in the world won’t change a thing.” She took me by the elbow, leading me away. The men watched us go.

“Papaw is worse sick,” she said. “I think the excitement of the trial done it. You want to see him? He wants to see you.”

Chapter 127

ABRAHAM LAY in the narrow iron bed in the front parlor, just the way he was lying there the night the White Raiders attacked. His voice was so faint I barely heard him. His lips were cracked and dry. “I imagine you been going around beating yourself up pretty good about this verdict, eh, Ben?” he asked.

“I thought I could accomplish something,” I said. “The country was watching, from the president on down. I thought we could make a little bit of progress.”

“Who’s to say we didn’t?” he asked.

Moody gently dabbed his forehead with rubbing alcohol, then blew lightly to cool his skin. Every time she touched his face, Abraham’s eyes closed in gratitude. I thought he must be seeing clouds, getting ready to dance with the angels.

“When you get to be as old as me, Ben, you can’t help but remember a lot of things. I was thinking about my mama… one time I stole a nickel from her purse. She knew it before she even looked in there, just by peering in my eyes. She said, ‘Abraham, I don’t know what you guilty of, but you sho’ nuff guilty of somethin’, so you might as well go on and confess.’ I cried for an hour, then I give back that nickel.”

Moody kept rubbing his face, rhythmically massaging the skin with her fingers. His eyes closed, then opened. He went on.

“I was just a young man during the war,” he said. “You ever heard that expression, how they say the ground ran red with blood?”

I said I had heard it.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” he said. “I saw the ground run red. I was up at Vicksburg, just after the fight. I saw… oh, Lord. Hurts to remember. I saw legs, you know, and arms, and feet, big heaps of ’em outside the hospital tent. All rottin’ in the sun.”

I could see the horror of it all in my mind’s eye.

“But bad as it was,” Abraham went on, “that’s when things begun to change. A big change at the first, then they took it back. But what happened in that courtroom… that’ll change it. You just wait. You’ll live to see it.”

He fell into such a deep silence that I thought he might have fallen asleep. Maybe he was beginning his passage into the next world.

But he had a few more words to say.

“Moody said you told the jury a saying from the book of Samuel,” he said.

I nodded.

“That’s one of my favorite passages,” he said. “I sure hated to miss you. Would you say it out to me now?”

“Of course, Abraham,” I said.

I cleared my throat.

“For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”

Then Abraham spoke the last words he would ever say to me.

“You did fine, Ben. You did just fine.”

Chapter 128

“HE’LL SLEEP NOW,” Moody said. “Maybe he won’t wake up this time.”

I followed her out to the little front porch. We sat in the chairs where L.J. and I had spent a long hot night waiting for the Raiders to come.

The worst heat had finally broken. You couldn’t call it a cool day, exactly, but the wet blanket of humidity had lifted.

“I’m glad I got to talk to him,” I said. “His words mean a lot to me.”

Moody said nothing.

“I feel terrible about the way the trial turned out,” I said.

I was hoping, I suppose, that Moody would say something like Abraham had said: that I had done my best and it wasn’t my fault.

She turned to face me. “I know you’re going to think I’m nothin’ but a cold, ungrateful girl. But I don’t just feel bad – I’m angry. Damn angry. Oh yeah, you did your best. And Mr. Curtis did his best. And Mr. Stringer spent all that money… but those murderers walked away free.”

“You’re right, Moody,” I said. “They did.”

“Papaw keeps saying it takes a long time for things to change. Well, that’s fine for him – he’s almost run out of time. I don’t want to be old and dying before anything ever starts to get better.”

I nodded. Then I did something I didn’t know I was going to do until I did it.

I reached over and took Moody’s hand.

This time she did not pull away.

We said nothing, because finally there was nothing left to say. After a few minutes she leaned her head on my shoulder and began to weep softly.

Then she pulled away and sat up. “Listen, Ben, do me a favor. I’m afraid Papaw’s going to get bedsores, and Hemple’s is all out of wintergreen oil. You reckon you could go into town and bring some?”

“Gladly,” I said. “But only if you go with me. You’ve been trapped in this house for days.”

“You are plain crazy, Ben Corbett,” she said. “You think the people of this town want to see you and me parading together downtown? You want to get yourself lynched again?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Do you care about what the people of Eudora think?”

She pondered that a moment. “No. I s’pose I don’t.”

She wiped her eyes with a corner of the dishtowel. “Oh, hell, Ben, what goes on in that crazy brain of yours?”

I was wondering the same thing.

“Will you go with me?” I said. “I need to do something in town.”

Chapter 129

I HELPED MOODY DOWN from the handlebars of the bicycle. She had hollered most of the way into town, threatening bodily harm if I didn’t let her down off that contraption this instant! The noise we made was enough to turn heads all the way up Maple Street, onto Commerce Street, and into the center of town.

Eudora had just begun to settle down again. The last of the photographers and reporters had gone away on the one o’clock train.

I heard the rhythmic clang of iron from the blacksmith shop, and the pop-pop report of a motorcar doing a circuit around the courthouse square.

A few hours ago the eyes of the nation were upon Eudora. Now it was just another sleepy little southern town, happy to go back to living in the past, looking toward the future with nothing but suspicion and fear.

“Shall we?” I asked Moody.

“You’re gonna start a riot,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

I clasped her hand tightly in mine. Then we began to walk down the sidewalk of the busiest street in Eudora.

To anyone who didn’t know us, we would seem like lovers out for a romantic stroll on a late-summer afternoon.

But of course there was a complication: I was white, Moody was black. My hair was blond and straight, hers was black and tightly curled.

The citizens of Eudora had never seen anything like the two of us.

They stopped in their tracks. Some got down off the sidewalk to put some distance between us. Others groaned or cried out, as if the sight of us caused them physical pain.

Corinna Cutler and Edwina Booth came out of Miss Ida’s store, a couple of plump old hens cackling to each other – until they laid eyes on our joined hands.

Both their jaws dropped.

“Afternoon, Miz Cutler,” I said. “Afternoon, Miz Booth.”

Their faces darkened and they hurried away.

Ezra Newcomb saw us through the window of his barber-shop. He abandoned his lathered-up customer in the chair and stalked to the door. “Ben Corbett,” he shouted, “I oughta take this razor to your damn throat!”

I relinquished Moody’s hand and wrapped a protective arm around her shoulder. “Nice to see you too, Ezra.”

Word of our coming spread down the street before us. About half the town stepped out onto the sidewalk to see what was causing the commotion.

At the drugstore I held the door for Moody.

Doc Conover stared down at us from his pharmacist’s bench at the rear. “What do you want, Corbett?”

“A bottle of wintergreen oil, please,” I said.

“We’re fresh out,” he said.

“Aw now, come on, Doc,” I said. “It’s for Abraham Cross. He’s dying, and it would bring him relief. You’ve known Abraham all your life.”

“I told you we’re out,” he said. “Now clear out of here.”

“There it is, up there next to the camphor.” I pointed to the row of bottles on the shelf above his head.

“You callin’ me a liar?” said Conover. “Take off, or I’ll have the police throw you out of here.”

Moody pulled at my sleeve. “Let’s go,” she said.

I followed her toward the front door.

There was a crowd waiting outside to point and jeer at us. We turned left and headed down the block. “Let’s go to the Slide Inn and have some iced tea,” I said.

“I can’t go in there,” she said.

“Sure you can. Who’s going to stop you?”

“Get out of here, nigger-lover!” called a man in the crowd.

We came to Jenkins’ Mercantile, passing the bench where Henry North and Marcus had carried my mother after she had had her stroke.

We walked the rest of the way to the Slide Inn, trailing our little mob of catcalling spectators.

Lunch service was over. There were only three customers in the café – two young ladies sipping coffee and an old woman chewing on a cheese sandwich.

I’d hoped Miss Fanny was on duty today, but it was another waitress who approached us. “Can’tcha read?” she said, poking her thumb at a brand-new sign posted above the cash register:

WHITES ONLY

“I’m white,” I said.

Without a pause the waitress said, “You got a nigger with you. Now go on, get outta here.”

“Where’s Miss Fanny?” I said.

“She don’t work here no more,” the woman said. “’Cause of you.”

We turned to the door. I felt something hit my sleeve and I glanced down. It was a gob of spit, mixed with what looked like cheese. It could only have come from the little old lady.

When we stepped out the door our audience had swelled to a couple of dozen angry people.

They gawked at us. They yelled. They mocked.

“Kiss me,” I whispered to Moody.

She looked up at me as if I were insane, but she didn’t say no.

I leaned down and brought my lips to hers.

A cry of pain ran through the crowd.

A woman’s voice: “Look, he got what he wanted – a nigger girl to take to his bed.”

A man’s voice from behind me shouted, “Y’all goin’ to hell and burn for all time!”

“Niggers! You’re both niggers!”

“You make me sick in my gut!”

“Get out of here! Just get out!”

I whispered, “You ready to run?”

Moody nodded.

And we ran, and ran, and ran.

Chapter 130

WE WERE HALFWAY to the Quarters before the most persistent of our pursuers gave up. We stopped to catch our breath, but I kept an eye out, in case anyone was still following.

As it dawned on me what we had done, I realized that I was – well, I was delighted. Who would have thought two people holding hands could make so many wrong-minded people so very unhappy? We had put the citizens of Eudora in an uproar, and that realization warmed my heart.

I had abandoned my bicycle downtown. Maybe the mob had strung it up in a noose by now.

As Moody and I walked the muddy boards that passed for a sidewalk, folks began coming out of their houses to have a look at us. As fast as we’d run, news of our public display seemed to have preceded us.

“Y’all damn crazy,” said one old lady.

“Naw, they in love,” said a young man beside her.

“Well, hell, if that ain’t crazy, I don’t know what is!”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “We’re not crazy and we’re not in love, either.”

“You just tryin’ to cause trouble then, white boy?” she demanded.

“All I did was kiss her,” I explained. “But we did cause some trouble.”

The old lady thought about it a moment, then she cracked a smile.

It was like a photographic negative of our march through Eudora. By the time we got to the crossroads by Hemple’s store, we had a crowd of spectators tagging along with us.

One of the old men looked up from his checkerboard, his face grim. “Now see what you done,” he said to me. “You done kicked over the anthill for sure. They comin’ down here tonight, and they gonna lynch you up somethin’ fierce. And some of us, besides.”

“Then we’d better get ready for them,” Moody said.

“Ready?” said the other checkers player. “What you mean ready, girl? You mean we best say our prayers. Best go make the pine box ourselves.”

“You got a gun for shootin’ squirrel, don’t you?” said Moody. “You got a knife to skin it with, don’t you?”

The old man nodded. “Well, sho’, but what does that–”

“They can’t beat all of us,” Moody said. “Not if we’re ready for them.”

The people around us were murmuring to one another. Moody’s words had started a brushfire among them. “Let ’em come!” cried a young man. “Let ’em come on!”

Moody looked at me with soulful eyes. And then she did something I will never forget. I will carry it with me my whole life, the way I have carried Marcus’s kindness to Mama.

She took my hand in hers again. Not for show, because she wanted to. We walked hand in hand to Abraham’s house.

Chapter 131

I THOUGHT I would be standing guard alone on the porch that evening, but at midnight Moody appeared – wearing a clean white jumper, of course.

“I couldn’t sleep, thinking how you hadn’t had nothing to eat the whole day long.” She set before me a plate of butter beans, field peas, and shortening bread.

The minute I smelled it, I was starving. “Thank you kindly,” I said.

“You’re welcome kindly,” she said, easing down to the chair beside me.

I dove in. “There was this old colored lady who raised me,” I said, “and she always sang, ‘Mammy’s little baby loves short’nin’-’”

“Hush up, fool!” Moody said.

I held up both hands in surrender. “All right, all right,” I said, laughing.

“You can’t help it, I reckon,” she said, shaking her head. “No matter how hard you try, you are always gonna be a white man, the whole rest of your life.”

“I expect I am,” I said, taking a bite of bread.

We watched the moon rising over the swamp from Abraham’s front porch. We heard the gank, gank of the bullfrogs and the occasional soft call of a mourning dove staying up late.

We sat in silence for a while. Then Moody spoke.

“You think they coming tonight?”

I sighed. “You know they’ll want to teach us a lesson.”

We heard a groan from inside. Moody leaped up and I followed her into the parlor.

Cousin Ricky was there, at Abraham’s bedside, reading from the open Bible on his lap. Abraham looked too peaceful to have given out that groan just a moment before.

“You are the light of the world,” Ricky read. “A city set on a hill cannot be hid.”

We crept back out to the porch. After a time Moody said, “You made Papaw’s last summer a good one.”

“He’s one of the finest men I’ve met,” I said. “Of course, you know that.”

She touched the back of my hand. It crossed my mind that we might kiss each other now. Also it crossed my mind that we might not.

I’ll never know what could have been.

Suddenly there was a gunshot, then another, the clatter of hoofbeats, lots of horses.

We stood up, unable to see the men yet, but we could hear their voices in the darkness. We hurried inside before they could drop us where we stood.

“There they go, Sammy,” a man yelled. “Nigger-lovin’ Yankee and his nigger whore.”

It was unfolding just like the first White Raiders attack: gunfire everywhere, men jockeying their horses into position in the dark, the hatred in their voices.

This time though, there was a difference.

The Eudora Quarters was ready – at least I hoped so.

Chapter 132

THERE HAD NEVER BEEN A FIGHT like this one in the state of Mississippi, and maybe anywhere else in this country. One way or the other, we were about to make some history.

The Raiders must have thought we were too stupid to know what was going to happen or too scared to defend ourselves. It never occurred to them that Moody and my little stroll down the sidewalk might have been deliberate, a provocation, and that they were riding into a trap.

There were nine of them this time. That’s how confident they were that we wouldn’t resist. What arrogance – to come into the Quarters with this pack of their friends, nine of them among hundreds of Negroes.

“Ricky, go around!” Moody yelled through the window. “We’ll meet you on the other side!”

“You stay here,” I told her. “Your job is to guard Abraham.” She started to argue but gave up when I placed a snap-load pistol in her hand.

I stuck a loaded pistol in each of my trousers pockets, lifted the shotgun, and swung around just in time to stop three men dead in their tracks at the door.

I recognized them at once. There was Roy, who’d been shot in the arm in the first White Raiders attack, and Leander Purneau from the cotton gin. Best of all was the fat redheaded man in the middle, the surprised-looking fellow at whose nose both barrels of my shotgun now pointed. This was none other than Henry Wadsworth North, former defendant, murderer.

In my mind I squeezed the trigger and watched his limited supply of brains spatter all over the screen door behind him. I felt a jolt of pleasure at the prospect of being the one to end Henry North’s life.

But I couldn’t shoot the man like this. It just wasn’t in me.

His mouth twisted up into a smile. “What you gonna do, Corbett, have me arrested again?”

From out of nowhere he brought up a small pistol.

My finger tightened on the trigger. “Drop it or I’ll blow your head off,” I said. “Do not doubt me for a second! I want to shoot you!”

He let the pistol drop to the floor. All at once hands seized him and dragged him over backwards–

Here they were, the people of the Quarters, bearing guns and knives, pitchforks and sharpened sticks, clublike lengths of straight iron. A dozen men swarmed in from the porch, seizing the Raiders and dragging them outside.

Gunfire echoed, and I heard more horses – a second wave of Raiders. But here came our reinforcements too, pouring out of nearly every door in the Quarters, bearing weapons or no weapons at all, swarming down the street and around Abraham’s house. They dragged Raiders down off their horses and set upon them with clubs, rocks, and farm implements.

Every blow they struck was violent payback for a lynching, a hanging, a beating, a murder. I heard the thud of club against flesh, the crack of rock striking bone. Terrible cries erupted as the colored men overwhelmed the Raiders, avenging the lynchings of their brothers, the oppression and torture and murder of fathers and friends.

I saw Doc Conover swinging a long rifle like a club at a woman who was down on her knees, covering her head with both arms. Then I saw a man knock Conover senseless with a fireplace poker to his skull.

Lyman Tripp, the undertaker, was on the ground, surrounded by men kicking him in the ribs. I remembered how happy he had been to hang a Jew, so I didn’t feel sorry for him. Not for any of them.

But then, over the racket of punches and shouts, I heard more horses approaching. There were many horses, bearing reinforcements for the other side.

Chapter 133

“CORBETT!” A MAN SHOUTED at the top of his lungs.

I stepped out onto the porch to see none other than Phineas Eversman on a fine black mare, wearing his black cowboy hat with the badge pinned to the brim. “You are under arrest,” he said, “and that nigger girlfriend of yours.”

The fight was swirling all around us, defenders chasing and shouting, new waves of attackers coming in from the woods. It seemed unbelievable that Eversman would be trying to make an arrest in such a setting.

I trained my shotgun on his chest. “Get your ass down off that horse, Phineas.”

“You put your gun down, Ben,” said a voice behind me.

I turned to find a revived Doc Conover with a nasty twelve-gauge shotgun leveled at me.

“Hey, Ben,” Doc said. “I meant to bring your oil of winter-green, but I forgot.” He chuckled.

A shot rang out and the gun flew from his hands. Conover screamed and grabbed his elbow. Ricky ran up and scrambled after his gun.

I glanced around to see who had fired the shot. Good God! – It was ancient Aunt Henry in the doorway of Abraham’s shack, blowing smoke from the long barrel of a Colt revolver. She nodded at me and went back inside.

I heard a loud crack and turned to find Eversman down off his horse with a big bullwhip in his hand, a whip straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It had a black leather-wrapped stick for a handle and three little stinger-tips at the end of the whipcord. Eversman cracked it again, with a report louder than a pistol shot.

His arm swept around, and the whip shot out and wrapped around my ankles with a sting as fierce as yellowjackets. It snatched me off my feet, and I landed hard on my back in the dirt. I felt blood running down where the whip was cutting into flesh and then Eversman was on me, hitting with both fists at once. But I was stronger, and angrier too. I managed to roll over and fling him on his back. Seizing the slack end of the whip, I wrapped it around his neck so tight that with one hard tug I could break his windpipe. He gurgled and coughed like the two men I had seen lynched – like the sound I must have made when they lynched me.

Eversman’s eyes bugged out horribly. The leather cord bit into his neck, making a deep red indentation.

And then…

I let go of him. He would kill me if he could, but I couldn’t kill him.

He fell into the mud. Somehow I had opened a big cut on his cheek just above his mouth. Blood oozed out. I began unwinding the whipcord from my ankles.

I stood over him, breathing hard. “You’ve cut your face, Phineas. Ask Doc if he’s got any wintergreen for that.”

Chapter 134

IN THE BACKYARD I FOUND the old checker players from Hemple’s store tying up Byram Chaney, the retired teacher in whose wagon I’d been taken to the Klan rally. That rally and the lynching that followed seemed to have taken place a hundred years ago.

I heard an odd glunking sound behind me and turned to see two men with kerosene cans working their way along the side of Abraham’s house, splashing fuel on the foundation.

The one nearest me was the renowned legislator Senator Richard Nottingham, Elizabeth’s husband. The military jacket he wore for this night’s action was too small for him; the fabric gaped open around the buttons.

“Bring a match to that fuel,” I called out, “and I’ll shoot you dead. Be my pleasure.”

The other man was bent over, facing away from me. He whirled and pulled a handgun. To my horror, it was Jacob Gill.

“Drop your gun, Ben,” he said. “I would shoot you dead too.”

Around us swirled a madness of yelling, fighting, and dust, screaming, cursing, and gunfire. Yet at that moment it felt as if Jacob and I were facing off all alone in the middle of a giant, empty room.

“Why, Ben?” he croaked. “Why’d you have to come back and ruin our nice little town?”

Chapter 135

JACOB JUST KEPT walking toward me.

Finally, my face hovered inches from his, so close I could smell whiskey and bacon grease on his breath. His face was covered with stubble, the skin on his nose peppered with gin blossoms.

I lashed out and grabbed his gun hand and twisted it hard until the weapon dropped. Jacob had always been smaller, but he could whip me at least half the time when we were boys. He was wiry and strong, and not afraid to fight dirty. I remembered the venom he could turn on our enemies when we got together in a schoolyard scrap.

“Goddamn you, Ben!” he yelled. Then I saw he had a knife. I took his arm and held it with all my strength. It felt as if we stayed that way for hours, grappling, neither of us gaining an advantage, the razor edge suspended between us. My arms ached.

I looked Jacob in the eye. “Jacob!” I yelled at him. “It’s me, goddamn it! It’s Ben!”

But his eyes were bulging with rage, one hand now gripping my throat, the other inching closer with the blade. If he killed me here, amid all this noise and insanity, no one would ever know it was Jacob who’d done the deed. I would just be Ben Corbett, another victim in another senseless attack in a small town.

And then I knew that was not how it was going to happen. I was not going to die here, at the hand of Jacob Gill. That knowledge gave me strength, just enough to jerk his arm sideways and break his hold on the knife.

I kicked Jacob hard and wrenched the knife away. I got on him, kneeling on his chest with the blade an inch from his neck. I could have slit his throat right then, but instead I poked the knife into his Adam’s apple, hard enough to draw blood. Jacob’s eyes widened. God, I knew those eyes.

“You gonna kill me, Ben?” he said.

I flung the knife away and heard it crash into the bushes beside the smokehouse. Then I got up. There were no words for this. So I turned and walked away from the man who had once been my best friend in the world.

Chapter 136

WHILE I WAS FIGHTING JACOB, the rest of the fracas had begun to die down.

I watched Sam Sanders, owner of the general store, jump off his horse and run away into the darkness. I saw two other White Raiders flee in his wake, one of them limping badly.

“We’ll come back for you, niggers,” one yelled as he ran.

“You ain’t won. You just think you won,” another called.

A flurry of hoofbeats, and the Raiders were gone.

Colored people were scattered all over the yard, nursing wounds. Four white men lay trussed up in the dirt in front of Abraham’s house. I remembered Abraham talking about the earth running red with blood – and I saw blood, tiny rivers of it, here on his home ground.

On the porch near the tied-up men, Aunt Henry was dressing the leg wound of Lincoln Alexander Stephens, another of the original White Raiders who’d come calling tonight. Aunt Henry would take care of anyone, I reflected, regardless of race, creed, or degree of idiocy.

There seemed to be only one fatality – Leander Purneau, who lay flat on his back in the mud across the road from Abraham’s house. I wouldn’t miss him for a second.

Cousin Ricky told the captured Raiders he could kill them. Or he could tar and feather them. Or he could do what he was going to do: drive them into town and leave them, tied up, for the citizens of Eudora to find in the morning. “Tell ’em what we did to you,” he said. “Tell ’em there’s as many of us in the Quarters as there is of you in town. Don’t come out here again, not unless you’re invited. Which ain’t likely.”

Richard Nottingham brought his flat-wagon out of the woods. Brown hands helped him lift Leander Purneau’s body up into the bed. Nottingham’s shoulder was bandaged.

The battle was over. Eudora Quarters had won – at least for one night. It would not help me or the people of the Quarters to shoot one more bullet. It was finished.

And if I needed more proof, from around the house came Jacob Gill, his shirtfront stained red with blood from where I’d nicked his throat. He walked between two colored men to the wagon and climbed in the back without looking at me. So be it.

“Mr. Corbett!” I looked up. It was Ricky, standing at the front door.

“Come on back in,” he said. “Abraham has passed.”

At the door, Ricky put his hand on my shoulder. “You all right?”

“I am.”

Moody glanced up as we came in, then went back to reading from the Bible:

“And he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingly power.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Truly I say to you, this day you shall be with me in Paradise.’”

Moody closed the Bible. She looked up and our eyes met.

We had already spoken our last words to each other.

Chapter 137

“ARE YOU STAYING for Abraham’s funeral?” L.J. asked. “I’ll go with you, Ben.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Moody already knows how I feel about him. And it’s definitely time for me to head back… you know…”

“North!” L.J. said. “Go ahead, say the word! You’re headed back up to damn Yankeeland to become a damn Yankee again!”

We were standing near the table in the War Room, where we’d spent so many hours plotting our strategies for the White Raiders Trial. I was just finishing packing.

“I’ve gone around and around in my mind, L.J., and for the life of me I don’t know what I would do differently,” I said. “If I had the luxury of doing it over again.”

“You did as much as you could, Ben. Most men wouldn’t even have tried to help.”

I slipped my razor and shaving brush into the little leather kit and tucked it in my valise. “Help,” I said. “Is that what we did? I think some of the help I gave ended up hurting them.”

“Go ask ’em. Go to the Quarters,” L.J. said, “and ask ’em if they’re worse or better off for what you did.

“I can have a man drive you up to McComb so you can get the earlier train to Memphis,” L.J. went on.

“No need for that. I’ll just take the good old two-oh-five.” I snapped the catches on my valise. “I might stop over in Memphis tonight and hear a bit of that music I told you about.”

“Sure you don’t want to stay here a day or two more?” L.J. asked. “Rest up?”

I shook my head. “It’s time to go. I’ve said my good-byes, and I suspect I’ve worn out my welcome in Eudora. In fact, I’m sure of it. My own father said as much.”

Chapter 138

THREE DAYS LATER I stepped off the train in Washington. My soles squeaked on the station’s marble floors when I walked across them, and I once again admired the acres of gold leaf and ranks of granite arches like victory gates. A man entering Washington through this portal was glorified and enlightened by the passage.

But one man, Ben Corbett, coming home after all these months, felt as lowly and insignificant as a cockroach scurrying along an outhouse floor.

My mind was a jumble, a clutter of worries. I couldn’t stop thinking about everything that had passed, and all the terrible things that might yet happen.

Meg had never answered my letters. I thought it likely that I would return to an empty house, shuttered and forlorn, my wife and children having gone off to live with her father in Rhode Island.

I could imagine the walls empty of pictures, white sheets covering the furniture, our modest lawn overgrown with foot-high grass and weeds.

These were my dark thoughts as I made my way through happy families on holiday, returning businessmen, flocks of government workers, Negro porters in red coats, and bellboys in blue caps.

“Mr. Corbett, sir,” a voice rang out down the platform. “Mr. Corbett! Mr. Corbett!”

I stopped, searching the oncoming faces for the source of the greeting – if indeed it was a greeting.

“Mr. Corbett. Right here. I’m so glad I found you.”

He was a young man, short and slight, with wire-rimmed glasses and an intensely nervous stare. I had seen him somewhere before.

“Mr. Corbett, I’m Jackson Hensen. The White House?”

“Ah, Mr. Hensen,” I said. “What a surprise to see you here.”

He smiled hesitantly, as if not quite sure whether I’d made a joke. “Will you come with me, sir?”

“I’m sorry?” I looked down at his hand cupped on my elbow.

“The president would like to see you immediately.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course,” I said. “And I would like to see him. But first I thought I would see my family.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Corbett. The president is at the White House right now. He’s waiting for you.”

So I followed Hensen outside to a splendid carriage drawn by the handsomest quartet of chestnuts I’d ever seen. All the way to the White House I kept thinking, Dear God, please see to it that Teddy Roosevelt isn’t the only person in Washington who wants to see me.

Chapter 139

THEODORE ROOSEVELT JUMPED UP from his desk and came charging at me with such high spirits I was afraid he might bowl us both over.

“Welcome home, Captain!” he roared. When he pumped my hand I recalled that Roosevelt didn’t consider a handshake successful unless it resulted in physical pain.

“And all congratulations to you, sir, on a difficult job extremely well done,” he exclaimed. “The White Raiders Trial was a smashing success.”

“But Mr. President, we lost the case.”

“Of course you did,” he said. “I knew you would – technically – lose the case. But you won a tremendous victory all the same.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

He sank onto the sofa to the left of his desk and patted the seat cushion next to his, as if I were a faithful dog being summoned. I sat. The president continued.

“I don’t know how much of our press you’ve seen while you’ve been away, Ben, but you’ve become something of a hero up here. The more progressive citizens see you as a kind of abolitionist, a figure of progress in the march of civilization toward full equality. And the coloreds in the South see you as some kind of protector, a hero. It’s damn good!”

“Mr. President, I was just in the South,” I said. “Believe me, I’m nobody’s hero there.”

“I’m meeting the newspaper boys in a few minutes,” he said. “You’ll be with me. I’ll announce that I masterminded your adventure in the South. I’ll disclose to them how I supported your efforts against the White Raiders. I’ll pick up votes in New England, and I’ll have the colored vote from now until the end of time.”

“But you sent me to Eudora to investigate lynchings.”

“Indeed I did. And if you’d reported back to me that lynching was a way of life among the leaders of the white South, I would have had to do something about it. Something that would enrage some white people, no matter how much it endeared me to the Negroes.”

“That’s why you didn’t answer my telegrams?”

“It wasn’t convenient for me to hear from you yet,” he said. “But then we had the most magnificent stroke of luck when the Raiders Trial came along!”

He was bubbling, but I couldn’t keep silent any longer.

“Luck? You call it a magnificent stroke of luck? People died. A town was torn apart.”

He ignored me completely, and he was still grinning at his good fortune.

“I know there was pain, Captain. That’s to be expected. Progress requires a certain amount of suffering. You did well, you worked hard, and eventually you managed to bring it all under control. I certainly chose the right man for the job.” He stood up from the sofa.

I stood as well. “Is that all, Mr. President?” I said.

“The reporters are waiting, Ben. I need you to help me explain what happened.”

“Is that an order, sir?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “Well, no,” he said. “Don’t you want to come?”

“No, sir,” I said. “If I may, I respectfully decline.”

Chapter 140

AS I LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE that day I noticed that my legs felt more limber, my body lighter. There was an actual spring in my step. To my astonishment I felt strangely, incredibly happy.

The White House was bathed in an intensely golden light, and as I walked northwest on the wide avenue, past the tattered rooming houses and saloons, I saw the Washington Monument sparkling in the distance like a gigantic diamond hatpin.

Certainly I was angry that Theodore Roosevelt had used me as a pawn in one of his electoral chess games. And I dreaded even more the moment when I returned home to find my house empty.

But still, there was something hopeful in the light sparkling on the monument, and the delightful smell of woodsmoke on the breeze.

I found myself remembering Abraham Cross a few nights ago, just before he drifted off to sleep.

“You did fine, Ben. You did just fine.”

To have a man like Abraham say that… well, that’s all anyone could ever ask for.

“You did fine, Ben. You did just fine.”

I turned off South Carolina Avenue onto our street. Everything looked so familiar that I might have left home only a day or two ago. No one had taken a paintbrush to our peeling little house. The second-floor shutters still hung tilted and broken, and the brick walkway was still perilously uneven.

As I mounted the front steps, three months’ worth of anxiety was twisting my insides into a hard knot.

I unlocked the door and stepped into the vestibule. All was still.

I walked to the bottom of the stairs and stood there a few moments. And then–

I heard Alice’s little voice.

“I think I heard the front door,” she said.

I knelt down to remove two identical boxes wrapped in brown paper from my valise. I shucked off the paper and opened them.

“Do you think it could be Papa?” Amelia asked.

Then I heard Meg’s voice.

“I certainly hope so,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

I ran up those stairs clutching the gifts for my girls – identical brown, fuzzy teddy bears, the most popular dolls of the day, inspired by President Roosevelt himself.

“Daddy!” screamed my girls, all three of them.

I took the little ones into my arms. “Now, which of you is Alice, and which is Amelia?” I asked as they giggled and snuggled into my chest.

Then I reached out my free arm. “And you – you must be Meg. I’ve missed you so much.” Then Meg came into my arms too. “I’ll never leave you again,” I whispered.

True to my word, I never did.