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 m
e. “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.
All white?
Not right.
All white?
We fight.
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.”
All white?
Not right.
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 gall
ery 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.
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