“Yes, we have, Your Honor.”
Like every lawyer since the Romans invented the Code of Justinian, I had tried to learn something from the jurors’ faces as they filed into the courtroom – the haberdasher, the retired schoolteacher, the pale young man who was engaged to Congressman Chapman’s daughter and had cracked a tentative smile during my summation.
Several of them were looking directly at Gracie, which was supposed to be a good sign for a defendant. I decided to take it that way and said a hopeful little prayer.
The judge intoned, “How find you in the matter of murder against Grace Johnson?”
The foreman rose in a deliberate manner, then in a strong, clear voice he said, “We the jury find the defendant guilty as charged.”
The courtroom erupted with exclamations, some sobs, even an ugly smattering of applause.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
“I will have order in my court,” said the judge. Damned if I didn’t see a smile flash across Judge Warren’s face before he managed to swallow it.
I slid my arms around Gracie. One of us was trembling, and I realized it was me. My eyes, not hers, were brimming with hot tears.
“It be all right, Mr. Corbett,” she said quietly.
“It isn’t all right, Gracie. It’s a disgrace.”
Two D.C. blueboys were heading our way, coming to take her back to jail. I motioned for them to give us a moment.
“Don’t you worry, Mr. Corbett,” Gracie said. “Jesus works in mysterious ways.”
“God bless you, Gracie. We’ll file an appeal.”
“Thank you, Mr. Corbett. But now I got to tell you something.”
“What’s that?”
She leaned close to me, dropping her voice to a whisper. “I done the crime.”
“What?”
“I done the crime.”
“Gracie!”
“I got five chillun, Mr. Corbett. That old lady, she don’t pay me hardly nothing. I needed money. So I meant to take the silver.”
“And… what happened?”
“I was coming through the dining room with the silver chest in my hands. Miz Davenport walk in. She ’posed to be having a nap. Well, she screamed at me like she the devil. Then she come a-running at me.”
Gracie was composed, very calm, almost in a trance as she spoke to me.
“I had the bone-handle carving knife in my hand. Not for her – I don’t know, just in case of something. When she run at me, I turned. She run straight up on that knife, sir. I swear I never meant to do it.”
The policemen apparently felt they’d been patient long enough. They came up alongside us and, taking hold of Gracie’s arms, began to lead her away.
“But I tell you, Mr. Corbett…”
“What, Gracie?”
“I would do it again.”
Chapter 7
AS I WALKED all the way home from the courthouse on that hot June day, I still had no idea what life-changing things were in store for me and my family. Not a hint, not a clue.
Our house was quiet and dark that afternoon when I arrived. I walked through the front parlor. No sign of Meg, Amelia, or Alice.
In the kitchen a peach pie was cooling on a table. Through the window I saw our cook, Mazie, sitting on the back stoop, shelling butter beans into a white enamelware pan.
“Has Meg gone out, Mazie?” I called.
“Yes, suh, Mr. Ben. And she took the littl’uns with her. Don’t know where. Miz Corbett, she was in some bad mood when she went. Her face all red like, you know how she gets.”
How she gets. My Meg, my sweet New England wife. So red in the face. You know how she gets. The gentlest girl at Radcliffe, the prettiest girl ever to come from Warwick, Rhode Island. Burning red in the face.
And she gets that way because of me, I couldn’t help thinking. Because of my failure, because of my repeated failure. Because of the shame I bring on our house with my endless “charity cases” for the poor and disenfranchised.
I walked to the parlor and lifted my banjo from its shelf. I’d been trying to learn to play ragtime tunes since I first heard the new music that had come sweeping up from the South late in the old century. It was music as noisy and fast as one of the new motorcars that were unsettling horses all over the country.
I sat on the piano bench and tried to force my clumsy fingers to find the first offbeat notes of that skittering melody. The music seemed to be in such a hurry, but something about it took me back to a place and a time much slower, and maybe better, than any in Washington, D.C. The bumpy syncopation reminded me of the sound I used to hear coming from tiny Negro churches out in the country, in the woods outside Eudora, Mississippi, where I was born and raised.
As a boy I’d walked past those churches a thousand times. I’d heard the clapping and the fervent amens. Now that had all gotten blended in with a fast-march tempo and the syncopated melody of the old work songs. Mix it all together, speed it up, and somehow, from that corner of the South, down around where Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas meet up, the music came out ragtime.
Whenever I heard that sound, whether issuing from a saloon on the wrong side of Capitol Hill or a shiny new phonograph in Dupont Circle, it sent me out of my Washington life and down the memory road to Mississippi.
And whenever I thought of Mississippi, I couldn’t help seeing my mother’s face.
Chapter 8
EUDORA, THE COUNTY SEAT, is located in an odd corner of southern Mississippi, sixty miles east of the Big Muddy and fifteen miles north of the Louisiana state line.
My father, the Honorable Everett J. Corbett, may have been the most important judge in town, but the only truly famous citizen in Eudora was my mother, Louellen Corbett. They called her “the Poetess of Dixie.” She wrote sweet, simple, sentimental verses in such noted periodicals as Woburn’s Weekly Companion and the Beacon-Light that captured the hearts of southern ladies. She wrote poems about everything dear to the southern heart – paddle wheelers on the Mississippi, moonlight on the magnolias, the lonely nobility of the aging Confederate widow.
But that one particular day in Eudora…
I am a boy of seven, an only child. I’m downtown with my mother on a summer afternoon.
Downtown consisted of the Purina feed and seed store, the First Bank, a few shops around the courthouse square, the Slide Inn Café, specializing in fresh seafood from the Gulf, and the Ben Franklin five-and-dime about which my mother was fond of saying, “They sell everything you need and nothing you really want.”
July was wide-open summer in south Mississippi, featuring a sun that rose early and stayed at the top of the sky all afternoon. The air near the Gulf is so humid at all times of year that you have to put your shoes near the stove at night to keep them from turning white with mildew.
I was wearing short pants, but Mama was “dressed for town” – a lacy flowing dress that swept the ground, a sky blue shawl with dark blue fringe, and her ever-present wide-brimmed straw hat. A boy always thinks of his mother as pretty, but on that afternoon, I remember, she seemed to be shining.
Our chore that day was to pick up eighteen yards of blue velvet Mama had ordered from Sam Jenkins’ Mercantile for new dining room curtains.
“Mornin’, Sam.”
“Why, good morning, Miz Corbett,” he said. “Don’t you look nice today.”
“Thank you.”
For Mama, that was mighty few words to utter. I turned to look at her, but she seemed all right.
Sam Jenkins stood there peering at her too. “Is there something I can help you with, Miz Corbett?”
“Yeah,” she said, “Sham. Oh. Excuse me.”
Something was wrong. Why was my mother slurring her words?
“Did you come to pick up that fabric, Miz Corbett?” said Sam. Instead of answering, Mama squinted hard and rubbed the front of her head.
“Miz Corbett? You all right?”
Silence from my mother. Only a puzzled gaze.
Then that slurred, wea
k voice again.
“When doesh shoe… when…”
“Miz Corbett, have you been… have you been drinking?”
Mama shook her head slowly and kept rubbing her forehead. I felt the blood flush through my body.
“Don’t be shilly. I sh… I… don’t…”
I spoke very quietly. “Mama, what’s wrong with you?”
“Ben, you better take your mama home now. Looks like she may have had a little touch o’ the grape.” He forced a laugh.
“My mama never drinks. She must be sick.”
“I’m afraid she is, son. Whiskey sick.”
Suddenly my mother’s knees buckled. She drooped over to one side and then fell to the floor with a heavy thud.
Sam Jenkins turned to the back of his store. “Henry, come up here! I got a lady passed out drunk on the floor.”
Chapter 9
FROM SEPARATE DIRECTIONS CAME two teenage boys. One was white, with red hair. The bigger one was black, as tall as he was skinny.
“Y’all help this boy take his mama out of here,” Sam Jenkins said.
The white boy leaned down to Mama and tried to lift her. She was small, but he couldn’t find the right angle to maneuver her into a standing position.
“Marcus, you gonna help me?”
“Mist’ Sam, I think this lady sick,” said the black kid.
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Mr. Jenkins. “Just get her out of the store!”
They lifted my mother up and carried her out to the sidewalk, where they set her on a bench near the watering trough.
“Shit. She ain’t sick,” said the redheaded boy. “She’s drunk as a monkey.”
I was trying my best not to cry, but I couldn’t stop the tears blurring my eyes. I was helpless and small, and something was terribly, terribly wrong with my mother. I believed that she might die right there.
The white boy disappeared back into the store, shaking his mop of red hair in disgust.
Then Marcus spoke very softly to me. “Want to hep me carry her down to the doctor?”
I remember nothing of how we got my mother to Dr. Hunter’s house. I do remember hearing the doctor say, “Louellen isn’t drunk. This is apoplexy. She’s had a stroke, Ben. I’m so sorry.”
I burst into tears.
Later on, when I understood what the doctor’s words really meant, I wished Mama had been drunk. Everything in our lives was so different from then on. The next day she was in a wheelchair and looked twenty years older. Eventually she regained her ability to speak, but she left that chair only when she was lifted into the washtub or her bed.
She wrote a few poems about her condition – “A View from a Moving Chair” and “Words You May Not Understand” were the most famous ones – but she was always weak and often distracted.
To my surprise, she sometimes enjoyed talking about that day in Jenkins’s store. She would laugh at the idea that she had been mistaken for a drunk, but she always repeated the lesson she had learned that day: “Just remember one thing, Ben. That was a black boy who helped us. He was the only one who helped.”
I did as she instructed. I remembered it through grammar school, high school, college, and law school. I remembered it whenever colored people came to my office in Washington with worried faces and tears in their eyes, asking for my help.
But sometimes I couldn’t help them. The way I couldn’t help Grace Johnson.
I rested the neck of the banjo against my arm and began to pick out the notes of “Bethena,” the saddest rag Joplin ever wrote. Every note in that jaunty, quick tune is minor, every shading of the melody is dark.
For all that, it made me feel better – a little homesick, maybe, but what’s so wrong with that?
Chapter 10
I HEARD THE CLICK of the front door, then the happy, giggly sounds of Amelia and Alice hurrying inside.
This was followed by Meg’s icy voice.
“Say a quick hello to your father, girls. Then wash up for supper.”
Amelia poked her head through the parlor door, a happy little angel of seven in a red-and-white gingham sundress, shortly followed by Alice, another helping of strawberry short-cake in an identical outfit.
Those dresses were the only thing identical about the girls. Although they were twins, they barely looked like sisters.
Amelia was small, with fine, dark, beautiful features exactly like her mother’s. Alice was taller, blond and lanky, and had the misfortune of taking after her father, though I will say that our family looks had settled better on her face than on mine.
“Remind me again which one of you is which,” I said with a stern expression.
“Daddy, you know,” said Amelia. Alice squealed in delight.
“No, I’ve completely forgotten. How am I supposed to be able to tell the difference when you look exactly alike?”
To Amelia, that was a scream.
Meg walked into the front hall. “Come along, girls. You heard what I said.”
I pointed at Alice. “Oh, now I remember. You are… Amelia.” And then, pointing at Amelia, “So that means you must be Alice.”
“And you must be Mommy!” Amelia pointed at me, giggling at her own cleverness. Was there any sweeter sound in the world?
I knelt down and kissed her, then her sister, and gathered them both for a big daddy-hug.
“Where have you two been causing trouble today?”
In a ridiculously loud stage whisper Alice said: “We’re not allowed to say… but we were hiding in church.”
Meg called again, with the business end of her voice: “Girls!”
“Mama says you’re in trouble,” Amelia reported. “She says you’re in the doghouse.”
“And we don’t even have a dog!” Alice crowed with laughter.
“Girls!” That voice brooked no nonsense.
They ran from my arms.
Chapter 11
I WILL NEVER FORGET the rest of that evening, not a moment of it. Not a detail has been lost on me.
“You and I are living in two different marriages, Ben. It’s the truth, a sad truth. I’ll admit it,” said Meg.
I was flabbergasted by this announcement from my wife of nearly eleven years. We were sitting in the parlor on the uncomfortable horsehair sofa Meg’s father had given us as a wedding gift. We had just finished an awkward supper.
“Two different marriages? That’s a tough statement, Meg.”
“I meant it to be, Ben. When I was at Radcliffe and you were at Harvard I used to look at you and think, Now, this is the man I could always be with. I honestly believed that. So I waited for you while you went to law school. All the time you were at Columbia, in New York, I was wasting away at my father’s house. Then I waited some more, while you went to Cuba and fought in that war that none of us understood.”
“Meg, I’m sorry. It was a war.”
“But I’m still waiting!” She twirled around, her arms outstretched. And in that one gesture, in those few seconds, I realized the complete truth of what she was saying. Our house was not the one on Dupont Circle that Meg deserved, but a small frame bungalow on the wrong side of Capitol Hill. Cracks were visible in our plaster walls. The piano had broken keys. The roof leaked.
Through soft sobs Meg continued, “I’m not a selfish woman. I admire the cases you take, really I do. I want the poor people and the colored people to be helped. But I also want something for my girls and me. Is that so wrong?”
She wasn’t wrong. Maybe I had let her down by worrying too much about my own conscience, not thinking enough about her expectations and the life she believed she was getting when she married me.
“I love you, Meg. You know I adore you.” I reached and touched her face. Her dark hair fell across my fingers. We could have been back in Harvard Yard or walking in the moonlight along the Charles.
A sudden knock, and Mazie entered the room. “’Scuse me, Mr. Ben. They’s a man at the door. Says it’s urgent.”
“Who is it, Mazie?” s
aid Meg.
“He say his name Nate, and…” She paused, reluctant to finish the sentence.
“Is he a colored man, Mazie?” I asked.
Meg said, “Of course he is, Ben. He’s here to see you, isn’t he?”
A pause.
“Please show the man in,” I said.
Chapter 12
RIGHT THEN AND THERE, everything changed in our lives, certainly in mine. Meg looked at me with those big eyes of hers, as much in sorrow as in anger. I reached to touch her again, but she pulled away. She shook her head as if I were a child whose behavior had disappointed her. “You know this one by name?”
“I only know one man named Nate, and that’s Nate Pryor. He was Tenth Cavalry. We rode together at San Juan Hill.”
Nate appeared at the door just in time to hear Meg say, “The hell with you, Ben.”
She walked past Nate and out of the room without so much as looking at him. Her passing set up the first decent breeze I’d felt all day.
“You can introduce us some other time,” Nate said. His voice was deep, his enunciation precise. I shook his hand warmly and clapped his shoulder.
“I don’t know what elixir you’re drinking, Nate, but you look younger than you did the day Colonel Roosevelt drove us up old San Juan Hill.”
“The only medicine I take is good old-fashioned hard work. The kind the Lord intended a man to make with his days. Maybe a little taste of ’shine once in a while, for a chaser.”
I nodded, but then I looked into his eyes. “What brings you here, Nate? What’s so urgent?”
“I’m here with a serious proposition. I wouldn’t bother you, but it’s something I believe only you can do.”
Whatever the favor he was about to ask of me, I was fast losing the desire to hear about it. A sad tale, surely – hard times, ill health, someone’s poor relative left penniless and in need of free legal assistance.
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