by Michelle Kuo
“How do you think Douglass is feeling?” I asked, though I already knew what he thought from the way he read.
“Hopeless,” Patrick said. He was tense, keen-eyed. “Because freedom, opportunity, all the things that he missing out on, that all be”—he paused, searching for the right word—“weighing on him. He learning to read depressing him. What the master said is coming true.” He looked back at the words. “And the pit”—he was referring to the line It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out—“that be a metaphor or whatever for how he be feeling, because he can’t leave.”
Without waiting for me to respond, knowing that he had answered my questions, Patrick continued reading. “In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it.”
Patrick grimaced, perhaps shocked by the passage’s direct applicability to him.
I asked, “How do you think he relates to the other slaves?”
Patrick shook his head, as if I had already answered the question by asking it. “What Frederick mean here,” he said, “is that slaves be like beasts or dogs who got nothing to worry about. And he jealous of them ’cause they ain’t know any better. They be in pain but not the mental kind, you know. They ain’t worried the way he be worried. Like my jail mates. They be spitting and cursing all day. They make all that noise, everybody moaning and groaning, a thousand noises; I hate that sound. So Frederick, he don’t got nobody to relate to. He be a little smarter now, he know about the past and the present,” he said, with an emphasis that made me recall the way he had said cause and effect. “For him to know how to read—that change everything.”
We kept going. We read how, over the holidays, the masters gave slaves gin, knowing the slaves would get very drunk. This was a way to disgust slaves with their freedom. Slaves would return to the fields sick and staggering and so conclude that freedom did not suit them, that they could not handle freedom.
Reading this, Patrick moaned out loud.
And quickly he swallowed his sounds, then kept reading. He didn’t look up; he didn’t stop. He did not wish to undo or unlearn the feeling most painful to him. To keep reading was urgent—in fact, not a choice at all.
—
IF WHAT PATRICK felt in reading Douglass was recognition and aching clarification, I felt something different.
I had imagined that reading Douglass would bring Patrick and me together, in shared contempt for slavery, but now I felt more separate from Patrick than when we had first started to read it. When I was growing up, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass had been synonymous with aspiration—literacy was a means to freedom; literacy had freed him. That is the trope of the slave narrative: Reading and writing ignite self-awareness, creating both the practical and spiritual conditions for escape.
But I did not anticipate the visceral psychic feelings that Douglass seemed to trigger in Patrick—the panic and dread and shock. And depression. Kafka wrote that we must read books that wound, that affect us like disaster, that act as an ax for the frozen sea inside us. For Patrick, Frederick Douglass was that ax, and it broke him apart.
Douglass had written from the standpoint of having made it. Douglass had taught himself, even after Mrs. Auld repudiated him. If books were a source of illumination for Douglass, they reminded Patrick of his failure. He looked up words. He wasn’t sure if he understood their meaning. He was goaded to do his homework with cigarettes. He had duped his teacher into smuggling in pot. He was in jail.
Patrick could not know—or would not accept—how much he seemed like Douglass to me. How he read in county jail, without table or light, how he wrenched self-discipline out of himself among inmates who were waiting for him to crack.
9
* * *
I Have Read Everything on This Paper
(The Guilty Plea)
“I think speaking Latin is a betrayal of the poor because in lawsuits the poor do not know what is being said and are crushed; and if they want to say four words they need a lawyer.”
—MENOCCHIO, a sixteenth-century miller,
from Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms
DRESS CODE FOR COURT
NO SHORT PANTS
NO SAGGING PANTS
NO HATS OR CAPS ON MEN
NO VULGAR T-SHIRTS
NO HALTER TOPS
NO MUSCLE SHIRTS
NO FLIP-FLOPS
NO HOUSE SHOES
AS I PUSHED OPEN THE door to the courtroom, I noticed, with surprise, that every word on the sign was spelled correctly.
Inside, a pair of American flags flanked a balding white judge. His head was bent over his papers. To his left sat a row of young black inmates, dressed in either fat-zebra-stripe or garish-orange jumpsuits. To his right was an empty jury box, that hypothetical congregation of the community.
I had gotten a phone call from Rob. “It’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“Court!” he barked.
“Okay,” I said, as if it were perfectly normal for a state court system, after nearly a year and a half of delay, to administer a case with less than a day’s notice. Rob said that Patrick had to show up today but he was near the bottom of the list, so the judge might not get to him.
Sitting in the back, I searched for Patrick and we found each other at the same time. Then he looked down and started to fidget with his sandal straps, self-conscious in his oversize jumpsuit, its black and white stripes now on public display.
Rob’s counterpart, the other Phillips County public defender, approached an inmate. In a millisecond that young man’s posture utterly transformed: Taut, alert, he leaned forward, trying to catch the lawyer’s every word. I realized it was likely the first time the lawyer had seen his client. Even from where I was sitting, halfway across the courtroom, I could discern his desperate attentiveness.
The judge called the courtroom to order.
He read the first inmate’s name.
A man shuffled to the center.
The judge asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
And then: “How far did you make it in school?”
“Ninth grade.”
These were not questions judges typically asked defendants, and this judge didn’t appear surprised by the man’s answer or even interested in it. Perhaps, I speculated, the judge had once asked these questions to humanize the defendant, but over time they’d become perfunctory.
The prosecutor stated the charges: residential burglary. “A plea bargain has been made, Your Honor.”
And then, the judge: “Do you understand that you have a constitutional right to a trial by jury? Do you understand that by entering a plea of guilty to the charges you are waiving your constitutional right to appeal of issues in the charges against you? Have you discussed all possible defenses with your lawyer?”
The judge spoke in a flat, efficient monotone. The man’s answers were barely audible, recognizable only by their percussive rhythm: Yes. Yes. Yes.
The judge said, “The record will show that the defendant knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily understood the charges against him.”
Thus commenced the tedium.
The defendants’ ages ranged from sixteen to sixty, they were all black, and their education generally fell somewhere between the fifth and tenth grades. No one spoke to what we all saw happen; no one said, No, I just met my lawyer five minutes ago. To me, the procedure was farcical, but nobody around me laughed or looked aggrieved.
It would have been pleasing to witness a crisis, anything to shake up the malaise of bored power and powerlessness. But the judge and bailiff seemed sleepy. The court was not efficient enough to be called machinery, not organized enough to be called bureaucracy, not malicious enough to be
called dehumanizing. Sitting there, waiting for something interesting to happen, I felt within me the absence of rage, an inarticulable nothingness in the spacious courtroom, which Patrick later described as “full of fresh air.”
—
RECESS WAS CALLED. Rob showed me where Patrick’s name was on the docket to explain why it hadn’t been called yet. It was a long list, and a bunch of the cases, he explained, had already been delayed and wouldn’t be heard until spring. Some were out on bail, and others had already been sent back to jail to wait, as Patrick had waited, for another trial date.
Every third or fourth name I recognized as that of a former student—sometimes, two in a row. Each name triggered a wave of associations. Samuel Toggins. He wrote in light, nearly imperceptible cursive. William Batts. William had been stealing with Brandon the day Brandon died. He’d gone to jail for robbery. “How can they put him in jail?” someone had said. “His best friend dying is punishment.” He must have served his sentence, gotten out, and then returned. Jemarcus Lane. Face round and flushed, like a valentine; had a learning disability. Cameron Storey. Another learning disability; could not spell dog; kept asking me if I had a boyfriend. Ms. Jasper had paddled him. Later I would ask a jailer what Cameron was in for. She said, “I ain’t sure. Probably for getting mad. Or stealing little things. I tell you one thing, it sure ain’t for selling drugs. He ain’t got a mind for that.” She chuckled to herself.
The names went on. Ray Reed. The fifteen-year-old who’d stolen my Picasso poster. Malik Jones. Hot-tempered; surprisingly toothy smile. Wrote a paper that began: The hardest thing in my life is not growing up with a father.
I tried to count the number of black males of my sixty-something students over two years who had at some point gone to jail, and I ran out of fingers. The docket was the coda to the STUDENT DROPOUT REPORT—the county jail was where the dropouts landed. There were no jobs in Helena. They had no skills. Most had a disability or an emotional or mental disorder. Where else had I thought they would go?
—
THE JUDGE LOOKED up from his papers and swiveled his head toward an inmate at the far end of the wall. “Now, who are you, sir?”
Unaware, the inmate stared emptily at his lap.
“You,” the judge repeated.
The inmate jerked up, gestured toward himself questioningly.
The judge asked, “Who’s your lawyer?”
The people in the courtroom turned toward him expectantly, and the inmate opened his mouth but no words came out. “Garvin,” he finally stammered.
The prosecutor and judge started to shuffle through papers.
“Mr. Garvin has withdrawn,” said the judge to the prosecutor. “We need to find who this man’s lawyer is.”
The judge shifted more papers in front of him. The prosecutor made a slight shrug, apparently unsurprised that a man whose fate hung partially in his hands had no counsel.
The judge finally said, “Come up.”
The inmate now walked to the front. He tried to straighten his shoulders, but they remained hunched.
“How long have you been here?”
“Eight months.”
The judge looked down, made some marking with a pen, and said, “A public defender will be appointed for you tomorrow morning.”
It was obvious that the judge was done with the man, but the man continued to stand, back facing us, apparently waiting for permission to leave.
The rest of the courtroom said nothing, pitying the inmate. I looked over at Patrick. He had grown used to being seen and now sat slumped, like the others.
The judge finally spoke. “That’s the last case we’ll be hearing today.” I looked at my watch; it wasn’t yet three-thirty. No wonder there was such a backlog. Patrick would have to wait until tomorrow. The gavel sounded, the judge stood, and Patrick was taken away as we, like an obedient flock, rose in unison.
—
PATRICK WAS BARELY recognizable on his second day in court, in a collared shirt with baby-blue stripes and freshly ironed khakis. Kiera had brought him clothes from home.
Today was the big day: the day of “closure,” the termination of legal limbo, the final conclusion to a night of September 2008.
Kiera waved to me as I walked into the private alcove in the courthouse. Her red nails flew in the air. Mary sat next to Kiera, resting her hands on her thighs. They had all been waiting for me to arrive. Rob had disappeared already; he was talking to the prosecutor.
“Your lips be chapped, Ms. Kuo,” said Kiera. “Want my lip gloss?”
I declined. “You look cute,” I said. She had a nice blouse and wore tall brown boots with laces on the sides.
“I wanted to wear me some blue earrings, but I thought that’d be too much. You know, ghetto.”
She turned to Patrick. “You like the clothes I picked for you?”
She beamed; it was not meant to be a question. Then she sighed: She’d caught sight of his broken sandal. “I sure wish I knew about them shoes. I didn’t know they got you wearing flip-flops.”
He wore the same broken sandal he’d been so self-conscious about when I first visited him in prison. Scraps of orange plastic now hung from the flap.
“I got a string,” he said. “Tied it together.”
We all looked at it in silence. Then Kiera announced, “I’m gonna get you some nice shoes. Some clean Nikes for you to take back there.”
Patrick waved his hand. “Naw, they just gone throw it away.”
Then he asked, “How Cherry?”
“She look just like you, man,” Kiera said.
Patrick looked pleased at this. No matter how many times someone said it to him, he always lit up.
“Well, you looking good, Pat. Your skin got lighter. You got some pretty skin.” She paused. “But you still got ugly feet.”
We laughed.
Kiera disappeared, looking for a bathroom. Patrick said to his mother, “Kiera, she got a boyfriend now, ain’t she?”
“She got a couple boyfriends,” Mary said, and let out a sigh. She began rocking back and forth. “I just be praying every night.” She squeezed her eyes shut, as if she was praying here.
“Don’t worry about me, Ma,” he said.
Mary opened her eyes but stared ahead, still rocking. She wrapped her arms around herself.
“You set aside your prayers and take your medicine.”
“I don’t eat no sugar, and my sugar still be high. It’s stress. Got to be stress. At work, at home.”
“You still be cooking that gravy and biscuits?”
“It been a long time.” Now she turned to look at her son. “Kiera’s sure right. You do look nice in those clothes.”
I asked if they’d like a picture together. A picture was something I could give them.
They glanced in unison at the guard. He nodded, giving permission.
At once Mary and Patrick leaned closer, having reason now to touch each other. She hugged him sideways. They smiled, then, inexplicably, broke into near laughter.
I put down my camera phone and Mary took her arm away. But Patrick still held on to her, his arm hanging over her shoulder.
“Want to see it?”
They leaned forward, heads touching, and quietly studied the image of themselves.
A sound: The door opened to Rob in his sharp black suit and bright-yellow tie.
Patrick and Mary jumped away from each other.
Unconcerned, cradling a stack of files to his chest, Rob announced, “I got a pretty good offer.” He motioned for them to come sit at a table, and they obeyed.
“Is there really going to be a trial?” Kiera came back into the room. “Twelve strangers? From here? With your name? Patrick Browning? Naw,” she said definitively. She made a clucking sound. “They know your daddy,” she said.
Patrick said, “I ain’t going to no trial.”
I was surprised. Patrick’s family assumed that jurors would be prejudiced against him because of his father’s record. But
the prosecutor’s charge—first-degree murder—seemed quite clearly an overcharge. A jury would likely lower that charge.
“Isn’t there good evidence for a self-defense strategy?” I asked. “Marcus was drunk and aggressive, on your porch. And Marcus got—” I stopped myself. “Marcus’s death happened because Patrick got scared, and Marcus was really drunk. I just think, you know, the real story we could tell is that Patrick was protecting his younger sister, who’s a little slow.” I was relieved Pam wasn’t here. “And the jury might think that the guy on the porch was—”
“There’s some material here for character assassination,” Rob said carefully.
Rob was an old hand. He understood there was no need to pressure a client into a deal: They were ready to take the plea even before they knew the terms.
Impossible assumptions of human behavior were embedded in the plea bargain: It envisioned a self-possessed rational actor who would assess his choices, argue, push back, calculate the risk of a trial. But Patrick and his family didn’t think the justice system could help them. Nor had their lives provided evidence that they might have any power over a trial’s outcome.
Nobody in Patrick’s family wanted to fight. Even now, sixteen months later, it was too painful to speak about what had happened that night or to parse out fault. Patrick’s mother had cried with Marcus’s mother, and that had been, for her at least, enough of a resolution. So instead of a trial, which might have forced everyone to ask questions and attempt to answer them, the family took the deal. Patrick would sign the plea.
Now Rob spoke, not hiding his tone of triumph. “I got the charge reduced from first degree to manslaughter,” he said. “That means anywhere between three to ten years. I think you can get out before five. The prisons are overcrowded; I got clients serving five who are out in three.” Rob added, “This is one of the best deals I’ve gotten.”
Rob’s assurance sealed their decision.
I tried to understand why I felt so troubled. It was a good deal, yes. But what was the relationship between a “good deal” and justice? Had Patrick gotten what he deserved? Or—and more unnerving to consider—what if he had somehow cheated the system, getting away with something even “better” than what he deserved? The law wouldn’t tell us. Afraid to condemn Patrick, none of us dared to ask this question out loud.
