by Sam Bourne
‘Quite so, Mrs Henderson. Quite so.’
Liston smiled, as did her lawyers.
‘Now Mrs Henderson, my mamma always told me there are certain questions you never ask a lady, and I like to think I’m a gentleman so I hesitate to—’
‘I’m ninety-nine years old.’
The whole court dissolved into laughter at that, the judge included. Liston and the rest of the defence team wore broad smiles. Over in the press seats, journalists leaned forward, wondering if Keane was, at last, about to be bettered in verbal combat.
‘Oh, you are ahead of me, Miss – I beg your pardon –
Mrs Henderson. You are way ahead of me.’ Keane theatrically turned over the first in a sheaf of papers and cleared his throat.
‘Your honour, the witness has told us that she was born nearly a century ago, born – correct me if I’m wrong, Mrs Henderson – in the small town of Warren, Arkansas.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And the reason we’ve called you to the court today is that you’ve become something of an institution in Arkansas, a statewide treasure, isn’t that right, Mrs Henderson?’
‘I don’t know about no treasure,’ she said. ‘I ain’t seen no treasure, I tell you that.’
More laughter.
‘You are modest as well as elegant, Mrs Henderson. Can you tell the court why you’ve become well-known in Arkansas, please?’
‘Well, I suppose you’re thinking about the talks I give. To the schoolchildren. About my family.’
‘That’s right!’ Keane pivoted to face the jury and the press benches. ‘That’s exactly what I have in mind. Do tell us about those, please.’
‘Well, I’m an old lady now. And my father was old when I was born. And his father was old when he was born. And that man, I mean my grandfather—’
‘I don’t want to interrupt you, Mrs Henderson, but would I be right if I simplified things by saying you are old enough to have had a grandfather who told you that he remembered slavery?’
‘Didn’t just tell me he remembered slavery. He did remember slavery.’
‘All right. So let’s start with some of what he told you.’
‘Well, he told me about those long days in the fields. Starting with the sun, working till dusk. How the sweat on his back would boil, like oil on a pan.’
‘What else, Mrs Henderson? Did he speak about any people in particular?’
‘I remember him telling me about the master’s son, John Jr. That man was so cruel, he used to set traps on his land, with alligator’s teeth so sharp they’d bite through a man’s ankle, clean through to the bone. Those traps. He set them in the fields—’
‘He, Mrs Henderson?’
‘John Jr. If any of his boys – that’s what he called men like my grandfather – tried to escape or even strayed out of line, they’d get their legs caught in one of them steel traps. Like they was a fox or a hare. This John Jr, he’d leave a man in there. Wriggling and howling. Not just an hour or two, neither. But for a day and a night. Those men would be baying like wolves at the moon.’ Her delivery was practised, like a tour guide in a museum. These were lines she had clearly uttered a hundred times before.
‘That’s what your grandfather told you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And he named this horrific individual, this monster, as John Jr?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Singled him out? By name?’
‘He sure did.’
He nodded. ‘And your grandfather, he’d seen this John Jr and his infinite cruelties, he’d seen all this with his own eyes?’
‘You bet.’
‘That’s what he told you.’
‘He told me, “A face as cruel as that, you never forget.” ’
‘That’s powerful testimony, Mrs Henderson. Powerful testimony.’ Keane looked towards his feet and shook his head, as if once again moved by the agony of it all.
He lifted his eyes and quietly, sensitively, asked, ‘Do you remember when he died? Your grandfather, I mean.’
‘I do, sir. It was when I was ten years old.’
‘And how old do you think he was then? Roughly?’
‘I was always told he lived till he was ninety.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Henderson. That’s what I thought. That’s what I’ve read. And using those numbers, I’ve done the math. I worked out all the dates. When you were born, when your daddy was born, when your grandpappy was born. And I assumed – for the sake of argument – that he was born right there in that plantation, back in 1840. That’s the earliest he could possibly have been there. I have the records here in front of me. It’s exhibit one hundred and thirty-three, your honour. Mrs Henderson, do you know what the documents say about this plantation of yours?’
‘What do they say, Mr Keane?’
‘Well, it’s the darnedest thing.’
‘What is?’
‘This John Jr.’
‘Yes.’
‘He exists.’
‘Well, I know he exists. My grandpa told me all about him.’
‘But he did not exist then.’ Keane brandished a sheet of paper, holding it high in the air, for all to see, though of course no one could read a word of it at that distance. ‘There was a John Jr at the Stamps plantation, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. There sure was. He was the son of the first master. And he may well have been a tyrant and a bully and a wicked, wicked man. But he was dead and in his grave by the year of our Lord 1837. And that, Mrs Henderson, is fully three years before your grandpappy drew his first breath.’
‘Well, all I can tell you is what he had seen with his own eyes, a man so cruel—’
‘I hear you, Mrs Henderson. We all hear you. Half the schoolchildren of Arkansas have heard you tell this story. And it’s a wonderful story. Don’t get me wrong. But it can’t have happened.’
‘Don’t you tell me it didn’t happen. My grandfather, Bailey McGraw, told me what he had seen with—’
‘With his own eyes, yes, yes, you said that. A man doing unspeakable things. But that man, this evil monster, was already dead. So I ask you, is it possible that you – or maybe your grandfather – made a mistake. I mean, this was a long, long time ago. You already shared with the court how old you are, Mrs Henderson. It means your grandpappy was telling you these stories – even if he told them to you on his deathbed, with his last gasp of God’s sweet air – what, eighty-nine years ago? Memories fade, don’t they, Mrs Henderson? I mean, I can’t remember where I parked my car some mornings, and that can be a matter of eighty-nine minutes, let alone eighty-nine years!’
He laughed warmly, charitably, and much of the court laughed along with him. Susan Liston looked around the room from her table full of lawyers, with its stacks of ring binders, trying to gauge the temperature.
Now he lowered his voice. ‘Mrs Henderson, is it possible that your grandfather was, in fact, telling you about John Jr’s son ?’
‘What’s that?’
Keane repeated his question at the same, softer volume. The old lady began fiddling with her hearing aid, sending another piercing squawk of feedback through the room.
Keane offered his question a third time, his patience now of the strained, unsmiling variety. ‘Could we be talking about John Jr’s son?’
‘Well, maybe, I suppose,’ she faltered. ‘Was he called John too?’
‘You know what,’ Keane said encouragingly, ‘maybe that’s it. Maybe there were two John Jrs! I mean, that can happen, right? That would clear this whole thing up. Let’s look right here, shall we.’
He began rummaging through his papers, as if genuinely seeking to resolve a question in his own mind. ‘Here we go,’ he murmured, like a librarian thumbing through a stack. ‘Your honour, exhibit one hundred and twenty-nine. This records the heads of household at the Stamps plantation. There’s the first John, dead in 1820. And there’s the notorious John Jr, the villain of our story, dead in 1837, just like I said. And who do we have here? Yes, th
is is the son. And he’s called . . .’
Keane let the sentence hover, incomplete, in the air for a while. A second, then another second, as he busied himself with the documents, apparently squinting and checking, when of course he knew exactly how this sentence ended. The court was hushed, waiting for the word that might answer this riddle. Finally, Keane spoke.
‘George,’ he said, with what sounded like heartfelt disappointment. ‘The son’s name was George. After that came another George – George Jr – then a Thomas. No more Johns, I’m afraid.’ He looked at Vivian Henderson, saying nothing.
Then, as he knew she would, she sought to fill the void. ‘I don’t understand. He told me all about him, about the way the blood would splatter on his shirt during a whipping, about the metal teeth on those traps . . .’ The phrases ran away from her, until she was quiet.
‘Is it possible that he was talking about someone else?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That maybe he got confused somewhere down the line. A different plantation maybe?’
‘I don’t think so. He was only ever on that one.’
‘Really? I thought in one of your talks – I’ve seen it on YouTube – you said he was sent to Louisiana for a while. Could he have met this “John Jr” there, perhaps?’
‘No, but that was later. I mean it was—’
‘You mean earlier, don’t you?’
‘What? I don’t . . . I don’t . . .’ The woman looked imploringly at the judge. ‘Could I have a drink of water?’
The carer brought a glass of water and watched the old lady as she drank it down. He placed a hand on hers, then as he returned to his unofficial sentry post, he shot a hard stare back in Keane’s direction.
‘I’m sorry to labour this point, Mrs Henderson. But a moment ago you told us your grandfather was only ever on that one plantation, the Stamps plantation. But in the YouTube film of one of your talks – your honour has the reference for it in the bundle – you definitely speak about the years he spent picking cotton as a slave in Louisiana. Would your honour like me to play that extract to the court?’
‘That won’t be necessary, Mr Keane.’
‘All right.’
‘And Mr Keane?’
‘Yes, your honour?’
‘The witness is feeling the strain somewhat. Can we proceed to the core point, do you think?’
‘I surely can, your honour, I surely can.’ He smiled and dipped his head in a show of courtly manners. ‘Mrs Henderson, none of us wants to keep you here too long. So if I could ask you again: was your much-loved grandfather on one plantation or two?’
In a voice quieter than the one she had used when she first took the stand, and with a slight tremble, she replied, ‘He was only ever on the Stamps plantation.’
‘And Louisiana?’
There was a long pause before the old lady, clutching the top of her cane and with a slight shake of her head, as if disappointed in herself, answered. ‘I got confused. Maybe that was his father.’
‘What’s that now, Mrs Henderson?’
‘I say I got confused.’
‘Oh, I hear you. We all hear you.’ He smiled kindly and then tapped his temple. ‘It can get hard keeping it all straight in here, can’t it? The memories get kinda jumbled and tumbled, don’t they?’
Now he turned towards the jury, even as he continued to address his witness who clutched her stick and stared down to the ground.
‘You see, I mean no disrespect to our elders, none at all. I only have respect in my heart for our most senior fellow citizens. But I suppose the reluctant conclusion I drew long ago, as a scholar of these events, is that we cannot always rely on personal testimony, not in matters of this import. Especially when the evidence they convey is second-hand. You’ve been relying on memories of memories, Mrs Henderson. Stories about stories that you’d picked up as a child. And as we’ve seen, our memories can play tricks on us.
‘It’s not just you, Mrs Henderson, even though you’ve become famous.’ Here he raised his voice with a showbiz flourish: ‘ “The last human link with the age of slavery!” ’ He shook his head with what seemed to be genuine sadness. ‘We’ve all been relying on those same tales. And you’ve shown us today that we can rely on them no longer.’
He cleared his throat and said, ‘Mrs Henderson, I want to thank you. I believe you’ve performed a valuable service for your country today and for future generations. Because if even you can’t remember some of the most basic details, then what else in the conventional understanding of “slavery” ’ – he put air quotes around the word – ‘what else might be wrong? So I’m grateful to you, Mrs Henderson. Truly grateful. Your honour, I have nothing further.’
Chapter Nine
Charlottesville, Virginia, 9.35pm
Maggie was struggling to keep her eyes on the screen. She knew she should. She knew she could: she had removed all distractions, even putting her phone into flight mode, which these days was the equivalent of retreating to a cave and fasting for forty nights. She also knew that what she was reading was important.
The trouble was, it was also deathly dull. Page after page filled with dates, transactions and prices, with next to no narrative to connect them. After a while, she had the sensation of staring at a random collection of dots, just waiting for someone to get a pen and start joining one to another so that, at last, some kind of picture would emerge.
It reminded her why the academic life had never appealed. Her teachers – even at that bloody convent – had always said she was smart. Her problem was application. She lacked the patience for serious study. ‘Margaret, you’re the cleverest girl here, by a mile,’ one of the nuns had told her, before predicting that she would amount to nothing. ‘All those brain cells of yours will be as useless as a chocolate teapot if you don’t learn to sit still.’
But of course that was not the only reason she was finding it so hard to concentrate. She was in a hotel room with Uri Guttman, a man she had loved so intensely he still appeared, every now and then, in her dreams. And now here he was, just a few feet away. Judging by the look of him, seated at the narrow hotel ‘bureau’, hunched over a laptop, he was having no such trouble: his gaze was focused intently on the words in front of him. He didn’t even seem to notice when she stared at him.
She forced herself back to the screen, curled up on her knees as she sat in a rigid armchair, under a faux-retro floor lamp. (She didn’t dare go anywhere near the bed.)
It had been her idea. ‘This is probably a coincidence, Uri,’ she had said. ‘There is almost certainly nothing to it. For all we know, Mitchell Boult had an undiscovered heart condition. And it just so happened to kill him within a few days of Aikman. Just a horrible coincidence.’
‘But.’
‘But if there is a connection, then it will be in their work.’
He gave her that crinkled brow she hadn’t seen in so long.
She went on. ‘They’re historians. If someone wanted them both dead, it’ll be because of something they were working on. Something they wrote. Which means—’
‘We get reading.’
So she had Googled a few academic papers published by Russell Aikman while Uri took on Boult. She could see, just by glancing over, that he was being methodical: he seemed to have drafted a list on a single sheet of paper, occasionally ticking off items one by one. She, meanwhile, would lose focus and click out of one scholarly article, open a new tab and find another one. Or she’d dip into a book, using that ‘look inside’ feature. Each time, she’d be briefly energized by the novelty, only to find her interest waning.
It was her fault, she was sure of it. She told herself her intellectual skills were eroding; she had grown so used to the near-constant adrenalin rush of recent years, her ability to do slow work had become degraded. Her faculties had deteriorated; they were desensitized. She was like those people who need to eat ever hotter, spicier food: without a shot of Tabasco they can barely taste at all.
; At last, she pushed the computer to one side, with a sigh of resignation. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this.’
Uri remained fixed on his screen, pen in hand.
She sighed again, louder this time. ‘I mean it.’
‘Mean what?’
‘This! I can’t do it. Reading all this . . . stuff. It’s like watching paint dry.’
He looked at her, puzzled. Was this a rare example of an English idiom that he had not yet come across?
She tried again. ‘It’s just too dull. OK, there’s no story: I get that. No narrative, fine. Not every historian has to pretend they’re on telly. But there’s no argument. He’s not actually saying anything.’
‘Really?’
‘Unless I’m missing it. Which is perfectly possible, given that—’
‘No, no. It’s the same with me.’
‘Really? With Boult?’
‘I keep waiting for him to argue a case. But it’s just “This happened. And then this happened.” Event, then a number, then a date. Then another one.’
‘Fact, fact, fact, right?’
‘Exactly.’
‘I thought it was just me.’
‘No, it’s not you. It’s me also.’
The sentence hung in the air, brimming with memories. Maggie smiled a cautious smile. Uri smiled back, his eyes, almost involuntarily, looking beyond her face, taking in the shape of her. Noticing that she’d noticed, he glanced back at his screen. ‘Listen to this.’ He began reading:
‘On November twenty-third, the governor of Alabama issued an edict to the penitentiary in Birmingham, requesting the transfer of thirty-three able-bodied prisoners within the week. Six days later, the transfer was complete, so that on November twenty-ninth, thirty-two prisoners arrived. It seems the thirty-third prisoner was incapacitated by injury. That brought to one hundred and fifty-five the number of prisoners moved under compulsory requisition . . .’
Maggie was laughing now. ‘That’s positively dramatic compared to what I’ve got. Listen, listen.’ She began flicking through the tabs, searching for the driest paragraph. Once she found it, she leapt to her feet, holding the computer in front of her.
