Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  Moira wasn’t surprised. Opinions inside the courtroom yo-yoed too. Over the years, she’d become used to the roller-coaster rides trials could become. Listening to a lawyer lead his witness gently through a field of marshmallow questions, you couldn’t help but wonder why the person hadn’t been inducted into sainthood. But once the other lawyer got the chance to grill the saint-in-waiting, the witness, even one as peripheral to the case before the court as the head of a school breakfast program, emerged as a deeply flawed, most likely criminal sinner.

  Moira would not want to be on this jury. Up and down. Back and forth. Convict, acquit, convict, acquit . . .

  The outcome would ultimately come down to whether the eight men and four women seated in the jury box were brave enough—or foolhardy enough—to substitute their own judgment for the Criminal Code.

  Moira already knew, from sitting through the pretrial arguments, that jury nullification—when a jury returns a verdict of not guilty even though it believes the accused is guilty, either because it thinks the law is an ass, or that it’s being wrongly applied to the defendant du jour—was a much tougher sell in the real world of Canada’s judicial system than on the make-believe American TV shows she watched. For starters, the defence in Canada wasn’t even supposed to tell the jury it had the right to judge the law as well as the facts. That had been part of the fallout from the Morgentaler cases. The jurors had to figure it out themselves.

  Which made choosing the jury critical. Which made Moira wonder. She still had no clue why the defence had done what it had during jury selection. Moira had tried to broach the subject with Melesse during a serum at the end of the day, but he, not surprisingly, wasn’t saying anything more than a blandly predictable, “The defence is satisfied with the jury we have.”

  So Moira had added that to the growing list of questions she wanted to put to Melesse after the trial. If he would talk to her, of course. He would, wouldn’t he? There were things she could tell him—truths she could trade—that he might not know. But what if he said no? Would that be the end of her plan . . . ? Stay focused on what’s happening now, she told herself. How was the jury reacting to Melesse’s closing argument?

  “Members of the jury, the defence answered the whodunit question the day we began these proceedings,” Uhuru’s eyes swept back and forth across the jury like a searchlight. “We said, ‘Our client did it.’ James Joseph Howe personally appropriated every single penny of the $335,456.56 the Crown claims he took.

  “So to see this as a simple whodunit is to ignore the important questions and the larger issues that flow from answering those questions. Question number one, of course, is: Why? Why did J. J. Howe do what the police and the Crown say he did, and what he himself has admitted he did? To answer that question, we must begin by doing what the Crown will not do. We need to follow the money. What happened to the money?”

  Finally. Uhuru Melesse was coming to a point. But the point, which was that J. J. was justified in playing Robin Hood with taxpayers’ money because the City had dragged its feet in negotiating with the former residents, and because the causes he supported were good, still seemed pretty thin to Moira. Not that it mattered what she thought. What would the jury think?

  “You heard Mrs. Althea Thompson, the director of Square Deal, a breakfast and lunch program for poor children from Maynard Square. She told you how important that program is to her community, and how it was in danger of folding three years ago after City Council cut off its funding, and how it was saved by an anonymous donor who allowed Square Deal to continue its important work, an anonymous donor who asked for nothing in return, an anonymous donor we now know was . . .” he turned to look at the defendant, “James joseph Howe.” J. J. nodded at the jury. Acknowledgement.

  Uhuru Melesse pointedly did not mention Gettings’s attempt to put a very different spin on J. J.’s donation during his cross-examination of Thompson.

  “You come before this court,” Gettings had thundered at her, his tone incredulous, “and you swear an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then you tell us this . . . story . . . this tale . . . about some mystery man who sends you a cheque for ten thousand dollars, and you aren’t even curious to find out his name?”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t curious,” Thompson corrected him. “I just said I never found out.”

  “Isn’t it true, Mrs. Thompson,” Gettings pushed on, riding a wave of faux righteous indignation over her caveat, “that you knew all along exactly where this money was coming from, and that you were, in fact, in collusion with the accused, with Mr. Howe, to obtain the funds you decided you were entitled to after City Council, the elected representatives of the people of Halifax, did what they are legally entitled to do and turned down your group’s request for more funding? Isn’t that so?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Gettings’s goal, Moira realized, had not been to get Mrs. Thompson to confess—Moira was convinced Gettings had invented the whole collusion scenario—but to plant the seed of doubt, any doubt would do, in the jurors’ minds.

  Uhuru Melesse’s task this morning was to root out that seed before it could germinate and plant a few of his own. He had to get the jurors thinking about J. J. Howe’s personal story, about the evils the City had wrought on the sons and daughters of the former citizens of Africville, about the good J. J. had done with the money he’d redeployed.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is not a whodunit. It’s a why-dunit. We have tried to show you why James Joseph Howe felt compelled . . .” Uhuru stopped then, eyed the jurors one by one, continued, “why he felt justified, why he felt he . . . had . . . no . . . choice,” his voice rising with each word, then falling to a whisper, “but to do what he did. Now it is up to you to decide whether what he did was a crime or a cry from the heart for justice for the people of Africville. The defence is confident you will make the right decision.”

  Ward justice struggled for breath. Again. He had tried to keep his rehash of the evidence and his explanations of the law as brief as possible, but even those had taxed his lungs beyond their capacity. He was exhausted, he needed to sleep. Less than a page to go now. Home stretch. He tried to take a deep breath, couldn’t, coughed, felt the phlegm rise in his throat, swallowed, paused again.

  “So,” he said finally, looking down at the jurors, “it is now . . . up to you. How much . . . weight . . . should you give . . . to the evidence the defence . . . offered . . . to show that . . . Mr. Howe . . . was justified . . . in doing what . . . he is alleged . . . to have done.”

  Had he cut “purporting” simply to shorten his charge to the jury, or was he trying to send them a message? The word indicated a lack of proof, a doubt; he didn’t want to convey that. What did he want to convey, and how could he say what he wanted to say without going too far and risking an easy reversal by a higher court?

  “If you look simply . . . at the statute . . . as the Crown . . . believes you should,” he continued, “the evidence is . . . clear. Mr. Howe is . . . guilty. But the defence wants . . . you to look at . . . the bigger picture. Should you? Can you? No one . . . will ask you . . . to explain . . . your decision. And I cannot . . . instruct you . . . how to weigh . . . and balance . . . the evidence before you. I can only . . . explain and interpret . . . the law as it . . . is written. You must decide . . . if the facts . . . support the contention . . . that what . . . Mr. Howe has done . . . constitutes . . . a crime. It is . . . up to you now. May wisdom . . . guide you . . . in your deliberations.”

  “Members of the jury,” the clerk began, reading from the neatly typed card in front of her, “have you agreed on your verdict?”

  “We have,” replied the jury foreman.

  It had taken them nearly four days. What did that mean? The Talking Heads, who’d initially predicted the jury would be back in an hour with a guilty verdict, had had to keep revising their estimates of how long
it would take, and then, last night, Talking Head Number One had even broached the possibility of a hung jury. “Someone is holding out in there,” he’d suggested petulantly.

  Moira had watched the jurors file in; not one looked at J. J. That was supposed to be a sign too. If the jurors didn’t make eye contact with the defendant, conventional wisdom was that the verdict would be guilty.

  “What is your verdict on count number one,” the clerk read, “theft over five thousand dollars?”

  The silence seemed to stretch into next week.

  “Not guilty,” the jury foreman declared in a fiat, unemotional voice.

  So much for conventional wisdom. No one drew a breath as the clerk continued, asking for their verdict on the second count. Fraud.

  “Not guilty.”

  Breach of trust.

  “Not guilty.”

  It was if everyone exhaled at exactly the same moment. And then it was pandemonium. Everyone was on their feet. Shouting. Cheering. Hugging. Shaking hands. Slapping backs. Reporters rushed past the railing to be the first to get to the lawyers. Moira grabbed her tape recorder and hurried after them. The sheriff’s deputies didn’t even try to stop them.

  Henry Gettings was sitting at the Crown bench dwarfed by the reporters surrounding him.

  “. . . naturally disappointed . . .”

  Moira, stuck behind a TV camera operator, her arm extending the tape recorder into the melee over his shoulder, could only make out snatches of what Gettings was saying.

  “. . . not supported by the evidence . . . not correct in law . . . seriously consider an appeal . . . yes, the decision on the pretrial motion was the turning point . . . not criticizing Mister Justice Justice . . . simply saying I believe his decision was wrong in law.”

  Moira pulled her tape recorder out of that scrum and hurried over to where Uhuru Melesse, Shondelle Adams and J. J. Howe were holding court. Cecil Montague had already disappeared. Moira had hoped for better from Melesse but, surrounded by a crush of well-wishers and reporters, he offered even more predictable responses to even more predictable questions.

  “ . . . never surprised by what happens inside a courtroom . . . just grateful the jury understood the case we were making . . . not worried . . . confident this is a proper judgment . . . be upheld if the Crown does decide to appeal . . . going out with our client to celebrate . . .”

  Moira felt the snap of the tape recorder, signalling it had reached the end of the tape. Not that it mattered. She pulled her arm back, stuffed the machine into her purse. She had more than enough material.

  She glanced over toward the judges’ exit. Ward Justice was standing beside the door, catching his breath, admiring the chaos he had helped create. He looked over at Moira, smiled and winked. She smiled back.

  Uhuru Melesse averted his eyes from the couple in the SUV, focused on the old white man in the distance walking his black Lab alongside the chain-link fence. Were white man and black beast treading on the sacred ground of Seaview African United Baptist Church? Uhuru thought so, then didn’t think so. The church was to the right, closer to the water. Or, was it still farther north . . . ?

  In his mind’s eye, Uhuru could recreate Africville whole: the church, Tibby’s Pond, Up the Road, Aunt Annie’s candy store, Aunt Lottie’s bootlegging establishment, the Deacon’s house, his father’s place, even the Dump. But when he opened his eyes, Seaview Park’s landfilled, landscaped green grass and gravel pathways overlaid his remembered Africville and disoriented him.

  He was standing beside his battered ’89 Volvo in the nearly deserted parking lot, waiting for the Judge to arrive. While he waited, he tried to find some landmark, some proof he really was where he was. To the north loomed the huge cranes of the new container terminal. New how long ago? Ten years? Fifteen? To the west, where the rocky scrubland rose up sharply, access roads now carved into the hillside looped up from Barrington Street onto ramps leading to the new bridge. The “new” bridge was even older than the container pier, but both were new since Africville was levelled. His eyes traced down the bridge’s huge steel pylon to its concrete base at the water’s edge. Though its supports were to the south of the boundary of Seaview Park, he knew they had been built on what was once also part of Africville.

  Uhuru heard a low rumble from the bridge above. He looked up, watched an eighteen-wheeler cross the span above him, disappear briefly behind trees and into a turn at the end of the bridge, then re-emerge a moment later hurtling down the off-ramp toward Barrington and some downtown warehouse.

  Almost involuntarily his eyes returned to the ground, to the parking lot, to the SUV facing him from across the gravel parking lot. Inside, a boy and a girl were fondling one another. Just two high school kids making a hormonal passion stop on their way home from afternoon classes? Except the boy was black, the girl white. Did their parents know? Would they care?

  Halifax had changed. He had seen it himself. Though still unusual, it wasn’t shocking now to see interracial couples strolling arm in arm downtown. Their mere presence didn’t seem to provoke the hard stares he remembered. Or was that just wishful thinking? Had Halifax changed? Or did it just hide its hostilities better?

  The boy’s hand was on the girl’s clothed breast. He was kissing her face, her ears, her neck, working his way south. Uhuru recognized the move. Then the girl, whose arms were around the boy’s shoulders, opened her eyes and saw Uhuru. Staring? She pushed the boy away. He seemed startled, then turned in the direction she’d indicated with her eyes. Uhuru looked away, turned on his heel and began to walk purposefully toward the sundial memorial in the middle of the park. As if that had been his plan all along.

  Damn the Judge, anyway. Uhuru could have been back at his office, basking in the warm afterglow of his own success. The party was probably still going on. The celebrating had begun immediately after the verdict. Without saying anything to Uhuru, Shondelle had bought a dozen bottles of champagne the day the jury began deliberating and kept them on ice in a cooler in her car. “I knew we’d win,” she said as she hefted the heavy cooler onto her desk.

  “Oh, you did, did you?” Uhuru replied with a smile. “So why did you wait until now to bring them out?”

  “I didn’t want to jinx us, that’s all.” She opened the cooler, handed a bottle to J. J., who was standing beside her. “Why don’t you do the honours?” she said, then turned and kissed Uhuru. As everyone whooped and cheered, she whispered in his ear, “Congratulations, counsellor. You didn’t screw it up!”

  “And you,” he whispered back, “don’t weigh three hundred and fifty pounds.” It had become their private joke. The night they’d made love for the first time, they’d played a post-coital game of True Confessions. “Okay,” she’d started it, “so what did you really think that night in the Shoe Shop?”

  After he’d told her, he asked her the same.

  “I figured you were going to screw everything up. And . . .” She laughed. “I thought you were cute.”

  There had never been so many people in Uhuru’s office at the same time. Court clerks, sheriff’s deputies, reporters, a few courthouse regulars. Some tenants who shared the floor of the office building with Uhuru. Even the landlord dropped by to congratulate Uhuru—and remind him this month’s rent was past due. By noon there was pizza, and someone—Calvin?—volunteered to make a run to the liquor store for beer.

  Cecil Montague stopped by briefly, shook Uhuru’s hand. Uhuru tried to thank him. Montague waved him off. “I thank you,” he said, leaning in to be heard over the din in the office. “You slayed a few demons in there for me, too.”

  The phone kept ringing. Reporters. Uhuru had agreed to tape a phone interview with As It Happens later in the afternoon; he asked Shondelle to handle a live hit with Canada Now half an hour later. Canada AM had called several times to arrange for J. J. to fly to Toronto that night so he could appear live on the program tomorrow mo
rning.

  “Judge asked me to give this to you,” the deputy said. When the sheriff’s deputy handed him the note, Uhuru was huddled in a corner of the inner office, the phone receiver pressed to his ear, trying to hear questions from an interviewer for National Public Radio in Boston.

  “Legally, of course, a decision in Canada doesn’t have any impact on American law, or vice versa,” Uhuru was explaining as he absent-mindedly opened the folded sheet of paper, “but I think the outcome of this case represents a moral victory for the cause everywhere . . .” Uhuru had been too busy answering questions to take in what the deputy said. Now he tried to pull the pieces together. At the top of the page, someone had written “Ray,” then crossed it out and inserted “Uhuru.” Below, the message was short and choppy, as if the writer had as much difficulty writing as breathing.

  Can we meet? This afternoon, 4:00. Seaview Park.

  Call my secretary if you can’t.

  —Ward

  “Hello, hello? Mr. Melesse, are you still there?” the interviewer said, then asked his technician. “Did we lose him? Mr. Melesse?”

  “I’m here. Sorry. It’s very hectic here right now. What was the question?”

  He hadn’t told Shondelle where he was going. “When I was talking to the producer at As It Happens, I said I’d take his call at home because it’s quieter there,” he explained as he packed his briefcase with files he didn’t need.

  “But that’s not for nearly two more hours,” Shondelle said, looking at her watch. She was in party mode.

  “I know, honey. I just need a little quiet time to clear my head. Why don’t I pick you up at the studio after Canada Now? We can go out to dinner. Just the two of us. Valentino’s maybe? We’ve never been there.”

  She smiled, kissed him on the cheek. “Sounds good to me.”

  He wasn’t sure why he didn’t want to tell her about the note. Perhaps because they’d never been able to agree on anything connected with Ward Justice. If he told her about Ward’s note, she would discourage him from going and, if that failed, would want to know what happened. Uhuru couldn’t be sure what that might be. Better to tell her later. If . . . As he drove north along Barrington to the park, Uhuru promised himself he would get better at this couple thing. Secrets were no way to build a relationship. And he wanted this one to last.