Grif Stockley - Blind Judgement

“The typical white guy who is moving to our town from the Delta does it… to get away from the Delta. Race enters into it about 100 percent of the time. But there are other things going on.

That area is becoming too depressing for people.

No one wants to be from one of those towns with all those problems.” (Quote from an Arkansas businessman speaking on condition of anonymity to an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter in a December 31, 1995, article on white flight from the Arkansas Delta.) It appears only a matter of time before complete political control passes to the African American racial majority in small Southern towns nourished by the Mississippi on its way to the sea. At the time of the Civil War, Arkansas, a diverse state geographically, with mountains to the north and west and rich bottom land to the east, was the second fastest-growing slave state in the Union (next to Texas). That legacy continues to haunt and obsess those of us who have been part of the landscape. This book is dedicated to those Arkansans, black and white, who remain and struggle in the Delta.

“Are you Gideon Page?”

I turn to my right and see an attractive-looking black woman in her thirties seated in our waiting room. She is wearing jeans and a red cotton jersey sweater and tennis shoes. On the chair beside her is a faded cloth coat that can’t be much protection in the raw February wind that is blowing fiercely outside the Layman Building.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, and look for Julia, our receptionist, who is

probably already taking a break though it is only a quarter after nine.

This woman isn’t a scheduled client. I don’t have an appointment until ten.

“I’m Lattice Bledsoe. I drove over from Bear Creek,” she says, standing up.

“My husband was charged with murder yesterday and needs a lawyer.”

Bear Creek! My old hometown in the Arkansas Delta. A good two hours’ drive away. I’ve never tried a case over there, nor have I ever wanted to.

Too many skeletons rattling around in those cotton fields. I lay my briefcase on Julia’s desk, covering up her latest issue of Cosmopolitan, and take off my overcoat. Thanksgiving weekend I had the delightful experience of confirming during a trip to Bear Creek with my twenty-year-old daughter Sarah that my paternal grandfather had impregnated a Negro girl in the 1930s. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen at the time. He had been her mother’s landlord. Still alive, Mrs. Washington, who lives there in a housing project for the elderly, was perhaps too circumspect to characterize the relationship between them as rape. Since my grandfather went to her mother’s shack every month to collect the rent, I’m not so sure.

“Who was the victim?” I ask, wondering if I will recognize the name.

“Willie Ting, an old Chinese man who owned the meat-packing plant,” Mrs. Bledsoe says, “where Class worked.”

I do know the name. Even though nobody else is in our waiting room, this is an inappropriate conversation to be having out here, and I invite Mrs. Bledsoe to follow me back to my office.

Thirty years ago I had regularly played tennis with Willie Ting’s son Tommy when I came home during the summers from Subiaco Academy in western Arkansas. The Tings, like the three other Chinese families in town, had owned a grocery store in the black area of Bear Creek. Tommy, like his younger sister Connie, had been popular and an outstanding student. I wonder what became of him. I should try to find out even if I don’t take this case, which I can’t imagine I can afford to do. A meat-packing job in the state’s poorest county can’t pay for much of a defense.

After Mrs. Bledsoe sits down in my office and declines a cup of coffee, I ask, “What’s the evidence against your husband?” Mrs. Bledsoe says, her voice dropping to a whisper, “They say they found his butcher knife with the old man’s blood on it, and Class doesn’t have an alibi when Mr. Ting was killed. He was home by himself.” She paused to look hard at my face.

“I know my husband, Mr. Page. He isn’t a killer.”

I begin to doodle on my note pad. Too bad she can’t be on his jury. I glance at my watch. I’ve got some time to kill before my ten o’clock appointment.

“What do the authorities think his motive was?” I ask, interested because of Tommy. God, he was a human backboard. The Arkansas Michael

Chang. I could never beat him. His father I barely knew. I never saw him outside his crowded little convenience store. Mr. Ting’s English was only fair, and he had a heavy accent.

Sent by my mother to pick up a bar of soap or a box of salt, sometimes I’d see the whole family.

Tommy would seem a little embarrassed, but maybe it was my imagination.

“Supposedly, he was hired,” Mrs. Bledsoe says solemnly, “by Paul Taylor to kill him so he could buy the plant cheap.”

“Paul Taylor?” I exclaim, my voice jumping high enough to shatter crystal.

“A white man whose family owned half the county?” It can’t be.

Paul was an asshole, but he was too rich to have to commit murder.

“The very same,” Mrs. Bledsoe confirms.

“My husband hardly even knew him.”

My stomach begins to knot up. I hated the Taylors. Oscar, Paul’s father, had cheated my mother after my father died, and then years later as an adult, Paul had picked up eighty acres of her land at a tax sale. Because of them. Mother died in a shabby three-room apartment on the outskirts of town. Come to think of it, I still hate the Taylors.

“Now, tell me again why would he hire your husband?” I ask. In junior

high, Paul and I had been best friends. Before my father’s death, my parents would drive out to parties with other couples to Riverdale, the Taylor plantation on the banks of the Mississippi about fifteen miles from town. Many nights in those years, Paul would spend the night in town at our house. Six feet tall in the ninth grade, Paul had girls eating out of his hand while the rest of us were still borrowing our daddies’ razors. After my father hanged himself in the state hospital, Paul never darkened our door again, and my mother never returned to Riverdale.

“He didn’t!” Lattice Bledsoe says urgently.

“Class is being framed!”

“Who does he think is framing him?” I ask, paying more attention by the second. The memory of my mother’s face when she learned that Oscar Taylor was foreclosing on the building my father had been buying registers in my brain like it was yesterday. Mother was trying to find a buyer for the pharmacy, but Oscar snatched the building away before she could sell it. It was the only time I ever heard her curse.

“He doesn’t know; maybe one of the other workers,” Mrs. Bledsoe says, her voice weary.

“Maybe it was Paul Taylor,” I suggest, but unable to believe it. I can’t imagine why he would do it. Not with all their money.

“Couldn’t he have planned with someone else to set up your husband?”

I would love to prove that in a court of law.

Mrs. Bledsoe shrugs. She obviously hasn’t made that leap yet.

“We wanted to know,” she says, her voice shy as she approaches the topic at hand, “how much you charge.”

It has barely been two months since I regularly commuted to the northwest part of the state for a rape trial. Though the publicity was worth it, I lost money on that case with all the traveling and being away from the office. Though I think I know, I ask, “How did you find out about me?”

“You were the lawyer for Dade Cunningham, and you used to live in Bear Creek. Lucy Cunningham recommended you.”

I nod, though I am a little surprised. Though Dade was acquitted, his mother wasn’t all that happy with me by the end of the trial. Dade Cunningham was a wide receiver for the University of Arkansas who was accused of raping a white cheerleader. His mother, who lives in Hughes, a few miles east of Bear Creek, retained me to represent him, and I took his case hoping that if I got him acquitted I could negotiate his pro contract.