Response

by Paul Volponi

  Chapter TEN

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE TRIAL STARTED I left my job at Mickey D’s around nine o’clock. The wind was biting cold and the streets were nearly deserted. Suddenly sleet began blowing sideways and I pulled my hoodie up, knotting the string. Then I ducked my head down low to keep my face from getting slapped at.

  I thought I heard something behind me.

  But when I turned around it was just my own footprints swirling through that white sleet on the sidewalk, till the wind made them disappear, like I’d never been there.

  That’s when I decided to keep my feet facing in the opposite direction, and I started walking back through no-man’s-land towards Spaghetti Park.

  I guess I’d been through too much to be afraid anymore.

  But I kept a sharp eye for every crack in the cement in front of me.

  When I got there, the park was dark and totally empty.

  I walked along the outside fence, past the swings and monkey bars to the big athletic field that connects to it.

  I looked up at the telephone wire over the street to find my sneakers from that football game we’d won freshman year.

  There they were, still hanging in the Crackers’ Hall of Fame. And in that fierce wind, every pair of shoes up there looked like they were running.

  For a while, I just watched them all going nowhere.

  I knew that wasn’t how I wanted my life to be—just kicking in the wind, never getting ahead to someplace worth being.

  I’d made it to that goal line for a touchdown once before, with all those Armstrong High racists trying to stop me. Now I had to do it again. Only instead of holding a football, I’d be carrying something much bigger. Something for every brother and sister in East Franklin, and probably everywhere else. And especially for my baby daughter who was going to grow up around here.

  So I pulled my hoodie back down and started home with my head held high, deciding I could take whatever that wind had to dish out.

  The next morning, the city sent two cars to take my family and me to the courthouse. I rode in one black sedan, sandwiched in the backseat between a pair of lawyers who went over last-minute questions and answers with me.

  In the car right behind us rode Dad, Mom, Grandma, Deshawna, and Destiny Love.

  “Men aren’t born. They’re made. Remember that,” my father told me before we left the house.

  “Yeah? How long does it take?” I asked him.

  “I’ll let you know, son,” he answered. “When I find out, I’ll let you know.”

  Those were the words ringing in my ears, not anything those lawyers were saying.

  Standing on the highway overpass was an old man covered from head to toe in American flags. He had his jacket collar turned up, gloves on his hands, and huge oversize sunglasses that nearly blocked out his face, making it hard to tell what color his skin was.

  He just kept waving those flags for everybody stuck in traffic.

  It was funny to see him, but it wasn’t like a joke.

  He looked serious about it.

  It made me think of the times in the first grade when I stressed over getting the words to the Pledge of Allegiance right. How I was about to put my hand on a Bible in court now, swearing to tell the truth. And how I would probably hear Scat do the same.

  Both of those lawyers were still talking at me, looking at long yellow notepads in their laps. So I don’t think either one of them even noticed that old man up there, as we inched our way underneath him.

  In the courtroom, I sat with the city lawyers at a big oak table. My family was in the first row of seats, right behind us. Farther back, my social-studies teacher, Mr. Dowling, was there, too.

  There were mostly black folks in the rows of seats on our side, with white people from Hillsboro, including Scat’s mother and his cousin Spanky, on the other. And it reminded me of how the cafeteria tables at Carver usually filled up.

  Most of the white people there in court had the same look on their faces—like they’d just spit at us when nobody was watching and were mad as hell that we even thought they might have done it.

  Only I didn’t want to turn the other cheek. I wanted to spit back on all of them, with their eyes right on me.

  “Garbage. That’s all this is. A setup by the politicians,” I could hear Scat’s mother telling the people around her, and all of them agreeing.

  Then I saw her try to eyeball Mom.

  “Our sons all bleed the same blood,” Mom said, loud enough for her to hear.

  “Lord, you know that’s true,” echoed Grandma.

  That’s when two court officers brought Charlie Scat in through a side door. And even with his hands cuffed behind him, my heart jumped, like he was coming at me swinging that bat all over again.

  The officers undid his cuffs, and Scat kissed his mother on the cheek.

  “Let’s hope we get justice today,” he told her.

  That was the first time I’d heard his voice since he’d screamed “Nigger” at me.

  Then he tugged at his shirt collar and tie, and sat down staring straight ahead, like I wasn’t even there.

  His lawyer, Aaron Chapman, unbuckled his briefcase and the pop echoed through the courtroom.

  “All rise!” shouted a court officer.

  The sound of my heart beating got covered up for a second by shuffling feet and chairs sliding back.

  The judge was white and wore a long black robe that touched the floor.

  “The People versus Charles Scaturro,” another officer announced.

  I wondered exactly who those “people” were. I wanted to know how many of them were from East Franklin and how many were from Hillsboro.

  The jury came inside. Seven of them were black and five were white, with three alternate jurors behind them in case anybody got sick or something.

  My lawyer was the first one to speak.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the facts here are simple and undeniable,” he started out. “On the night of August ninth, Noah Jackson, Asa Jenkins, and Robert Bonds entered the community of Hillsboro, on foot, with the idea of stealing a car. But they never actually did. The defendant, Charles Scaturro, and two accomplices, Thomas Rao and Joseph Spenelli, saw the trio of African Americans in their neighborhood, with absolutely no knowledge of their plan. Then, solely because their race, Scaturro and his two accomplices, including Thomas Rao, who will later his testify to this, chased down these three men while hurling epithets at them. And when Noah Jackson tripped to the ground, Scaturro slammed him in the head with an aluminum baseball bat, fracturing Mr. Jackson’s skull. That hate crime, that racially motivated attack, severely jeopardized the life of this student, son, and young father to an infant girl.”

  Most of the juror’s eyes turned towards Destiny Love, who was sitting on Deshawna’s lap.

  My eyes went to her, too.

  But I didn’t bring my baby daughter for the jury to peep.

  In my mind, she wasn’t anybody’s prop.

  I’d talked it over with Deshawna. I’d brought Destiny Love there for one reason—I wanted to be able to tell her one day that she was sitting in that courtroom watching when her father finally stood up for himself in front of everybody.

  “My daughter and I both want to see that,” Deshawna had said.

  The trial lasted for another three days, and everybody in court heard from Aaron Chapman all about those two times I’d been nabbed by the cops. And how Asa had just got arrested at school for starting a fight. They heard it even though the city lawyers objected, saying it had nothing to do with this case.

  “I’ll allow it,” said the judge.

  Chapman would ask me questions about those arrests on cross-examination, and all the time he was talking, I’d look at his big white horse teeth, past his gums and straight down his throat, knowing I wasn’t about to let him chew me up.

  “You make mistakes when you’re young,” I answered from the witness stand. “I’ve made some. But that’s all behind me no
w.”

  I had to look at pictures of myself with my skull split open, and of my cell phone covered in my blood. My hands were sweating as I held those photos, and the feeling left my fingertips. I looked right over at Charlie Scat, too. But he wouldn’t let his eyes come anywhere close to meeting mine.

  When Rao came in, people sitting behind Scat’s side let him have it good.

  “Rat! Where’s your cheese? Better find someplace new to live!”

  That’s when the judge pounded his gavel, screaming, “I’ll clear this courtroom, and hold the perpetrators in contempt if I hear another word directed towards the witness!”

  Charlie Scat stared Rao down like he was made of butter, and Scat could melt him. The whole time Rao was on the witness stand, Scat had his eyes drilled into that kid’s forehead. Rao was squirming bad, sweating up a storm, as he drank glass after glass of water. And if that bastard wasn’t going to spend a single day in jail because his father was a detective, at least he was having the worst day of his life right in front of me.

  The toughest time I had during the trial was when the city called an engineer from Louisville Slugger, the company that made the aluminum RESPONSE bat, as an expert witness.

  “You can see from this demonstration video how a baseball loses its perfectly rounded shape and compresses as it comes in contact with the barrel of the bat,” she testified. “There can be up to eight thousand three hundred pounds of force delivered on impact.”

  I watched the face of that baseball nearly go flat like a pancake for a half second in slow motion.

  “Oh, God!”

  “Lord, no!”

  I could hear Mom’s and Grandma’s cries cutting through the rest of them in that courtroom.

  And the anger just rose up stronger through every part of me.

  SURPRISING WELCOME IN HILLSBORO —From The Morning Star Herald

  An African American male from out of state stopped his car in front of Mario’s Pizza in the heart of Hillsboro. Within moments, 39-year-old Monte larson was mobbed by a group of white teens. Only on this occasion, they wanted their picture taken with him, as the residents of this nearly all-white community attempt to shed their racist image.

  “We love black people here,” said a teenage male, who put his arm around larson’s shoulder. “This is the best pizza and calzone in town. Come inside and we’ll get you a table.” larson, who was traveling north to begin a new job, knew nothing about the ongoing hate-crime trial, in which Noah Jackson, an African American teen from East Franklin, was beaten on the streets of Hillsboro with an aluminum baseball bat more than four months ago. Nor did he know that nearly two decades prior to that incident an African American man was chased into traffic by a mob of white teens before being struck and killed by a car.

  “That would be surprising to me by the way i’m being treated now,” said larson, after being informed of those events by our reporter, who was in Hillsboro to do a story on that community’s legacy of violence. “i’ve encountered that kind of hatred before, and this isn’t it. But i don’t want to be too naïve, either.”

  According to the latest census, Hillsboro, which is comprised of some 25,000 residents living in mostly single-family homes, is 98 percent white. Neighboring East Franklin, which is eight square miles smaller, has a population of almost 40,000 living for the most part in multifamily apartment complexes. The vast majority (86 percent) of East Franklin residents are African American.

  “it’s the media that’s given us this label. See? look at how this man’s getting treated. We don’t have anything against these people,” said a woman, who declined to give her name, as she stepped out of a store to observe the scene. “if my daughter brings one home to marry, so be it.”

  Chapter ELEVEN

  CHARLIE SCAT NEVER TOOK THE WITNESS stand.

  Instead, he kept his fat ass glued to a chair.

  By the second day of the trial, Scat had picked up a pen and started scribbling on a long yellow pad while the lawyers and witnesses talked. I’d follow his hand, and sometimes, it didn’t even look like words he was writing.

  Maybe that dunce was drawing pictures or doodling.

  I would have paid money to be looking over his shoulder and see what was running through his sick mind. But he tore out every paper when he was finished. Then he’d fold it over and bury it deep in the pocket of his blazer.

  “He’s not even getting up there to defend himself,” Dad told me one night while we were playing dominoes in our living room. “That’s because he’s got no defense. His side’s just praying one of them white jurors from Hillsboro is gonna tow that racial line and vote not guilty, no matter what comes out in court.”

  “I heard justice is supposed to be blind, like the statue of that lady with the scales in her hand outside the courthouse,” I said snide, playing another tile.

  “But people ain’t,” Dad said, locking the game at both ends and showing me that he was holding the double-blank to win. “And some of them especially ain’t color-blind.

  “Remember that boy they killed in Mississippi back in the fifties—Emmett Till?” Grandma asked Dad, shifting her eyes to me.

  “Sure do,” answered my father, shuffling the dominoes for another game.

  “Nobody can forget!” hollered Mom from the kitchen.

  “They murdered him for whistlin’ at a white woman, then sunk his body in the river,” Grandma went on, laying her sewing down on the table. “The law put the killers who did it on trial. But they sat in court smoking cigarettes, calm as a Sunday picnic, because they knew a white jury from their town would never convict them.”

  “I heard about that in Mr. Dowling’s class,” I said, pulling seven new tiles towards me.

  “After the killers got off, Emmett’s mother made sure the funeral had an open casket,” Mom said, as she walked into the living room, wiping her hands on her apron. “That way nobody could be blind to the way he looked after that vicious beating, and soaking in the river for days.”

  And I thought about those pictures the detectives took of me in the hospital.

  My lawyers said that Aaron Chapman would never put Charlie Scat on the stand because he could blow up like a volcano and lose his temper at any minute. They said he’d already cursed at a judge when he didn’t get any bail.

  But I didn’t have to see him on any witness stand to know everything about that pork chop. I just hoped the jury could see it, too. And that none of the white ones from Hillsboro would be blind to it on purpose.

  Then the day before the trial ended, the judge gave the boot to a white woman juror after a newspaper printed a story about how she’d once worked at the same job with Scat’s uncle.

  “I believe that could possibly sway your objectivity,” the judge told her in court before replacing her with the first alternate juror—a black dude with gray hair, who looked old enough to be my grandpa.

  On the last day of the trial, Aaron Chapman put on a real sideshow, giving his closing speech to the jury.

  “Baseball was meant to be a game—something to teach good values,” Chapman said, swinging an invisible bat. “There are other games that we learn to play from the time we’re very young, and many of those games and their values are reinforced by our communities.

  “My client, Charles Scaturro, learned that a man protects his friends and his neighborhood. That’s exactly what he was doing on the night in question—trying to prove himself a man.

  “His so-called friends, Rao and Spenelli, came to him upset and feeling threatened by strangers. They came to Charles Scaturro because they felt safe in his presence. They came to him because he’d learned to play the ‘protector’ game. A game he maybe learned to play too well.

  “Now I’ll tell you his actions were justified that night. But if you can’t agree with me, I’d like you to embrace this thought: Charles Scaturro was in protection mode when he encountered those criminals on the streets of Hillsboro. Not attack mode. Charles Scaturro was doing what teenagers
do naturally. He was acting out of passion, playing the cowboy sheriff, if you will. And yes, maybe taking too much authority into his own hands.

  “This was not a hate crime. Noah Jackson and his fellow car thieves or gold-chain hoodlums, however you want to view them, just happened to be black.

  “And as for that racial slur—the n-word. That’s a current hip-hop greeting. My client’s been inundated by it through movies, TV, and music. So blame Hollywood or the FCC for any cultural misunderstanding he may have possessed.

  “Now I want to ask you all to be honest with yourselves. Who here hasn’t heard teenage African Americans call each other the n-word? Not in malice. But in friendship. And how many of you who disagree with that usage of the word ever stopped to challenge them on it? How many of you here, black or white, have used that word yourself? And none of you have ever perpetrated a hate crime, have you? So don’t be a hypocrite and say that it proves something.

  “If you must find Charles Scaturro guilty, don’t say it was a hate crime. Thank you.”

  Then the judge gave the jury their instructions, explaining the law to them.

  “If you conclude that the defendant did not know that the young men he encountered were there to steal a car, and solely accosted them because of their race, then by law you must find Charles Scaturro guilty of a hate crime.”

  I watched the jury file out past the stars and stripes on the U.S. flag to their meeting room. Blacks outnumbered whites two to one. But that didn’t matter. The vote had to be unanimous in a criminal case, twelve to zero. And from what I knew about growing up in East Franklin and going to school at Carver High, I didn’t believe for a second that there wasn’t at least one die-hard cracker in that group of four white jurors who wished he’d been the one to beat me with that bat.

  The officers cuffed Charlie Scat and took him away to some cage.

  There were reporters on the steps of the courthouse. The city lawyers told me not to talk to them until a verdict came back.

  I didn’t have anything to say yet anyway.

  But Chapman was flapping his gums to a whole crowd of reporters.