James PATTERSON - Alex Cross’s Trial

We all told Mr. Lewis we were pleased to meet him. He said he was pleased to meet us as well. No, thank you, he said, no tea or coffee for him. Bourbon? Certainly not at this early hour, he said, although he asked if he might revisit the question somewhat later in the day.

This display of southern charm was not the reason for his visit, I was sure. Fairly soon he sidled up to the real reason.

“I must say, Mr. Corbett, I was a mite surprised when I saw that the trial judge will be none other than your distinguished father,” he said.

“As was I,” I said. Clearly he wanted me to say more, so I stayed silent.

“It’s an unusual choice, and highly irregular,” he continued on. “My first instinct was to try to get a new judge from the powers that be in Jackson, but then I got to thinking about it. This is an open-and-shut case. Why bother causing a fuss? I’m sure Judge Corbett will preside with absolute fairness.”

“If there’s one thing he’s known for,” I said, “it’s his fairness. And already we find ourselves in agreement, Mr. Lewis. We also believe that this is an open-and-shut case. I’m just afraid the door will be shutting on you.”

Lewis chuckled at my sally. “Ah! We shall see about that,” he said. “I’ve been checking on your record in murder trials up in Washington, D.C. And yours too, Mr. Curtis. We shall certainly see.”

OVER THE NEXT DAYS we transformed the sitting room off my sleeping quarters into the White Raiders War Room, as L.J. soon nicknamed our paper-strewn maelstrom of an office.

Conrad, the Cosgrove brother who had survived the assault at Abraham’s house, went up to McComb every morning to collect every newspaper and pamphlet having to do with the upcoming trial. We hauled an old chalkboard up from L.J.’s basement and made two lists of possibilities: “Impossible” and “Possible.”

Among the latter were some terrifying questions:

What if Maxwell Hayes Lewis leads with a request for dismissal?

Bang, the gavel falls! The case is over!

What if Abraham is too ill to testify? What if he dies before or during the trial?

Bang! The case is over!

What if Lewis tampers with the jury? It wouldn’t be too difficult in this town.

What if…?

We made our lists, erased them, improved and reworked them, and studied them as if they were the received word of God.

After spending a few days working beside him, I decided that Jonah Curtis was not only a smart man but a wise one. Jonah clearly had intelligence to spare, tempered with humor and a bit of easygoing cynicism – the result, I supposed, of growing up always seeing the other side of the coin toss we call Justice. He was the son of a sharecropper who spent most of his life as a slave, on a cotton plantation near Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta. When Jonah got his law degree and passed the bar examination, his father gave him a gift, the gold pocket watch for which he’d been saving since before Jonah was born.

It was a beautiful timepiece, but the chain, clumsily hammered together from old scraps of iron, didn’t match its quality. Jonah told me that his father had made it himself, from a piece of the very chain that had shackled him to the auction block the last time he was offered for sale.

Sometimes Jonah got a little ahead of himself with his legal theories, at least as far as L.J. was concerned.

“A verdict depends on the culture of any given town,” Jonah said. “A man held for killing a Negro in New York City will have a very different trial – and a very different outcome – than a man held for the same crime in Atlanta. Bring him to Eudora, and again the crime and the resulting trial would be different. We might say this White Raiders case is sui generis.”

L.J. sighed heavily. “Talk English, for God’s sake,” he said. “Down here, we say ‘soo-ey’ when we’re calling hogs.”

L.J. already considered me the worst know-it-all in the room, so I left this for Jonah to explain.

“Sorry, L.J., it’s Latin,” said Jonah. “ Sui generis – ‘of its own kind,’ literally, ‘of its own genus.’ In other words, this case… well, there’s never been another one anything like it.”

THE CHANTING OUTSIDE L.J.’S HOUSE grew louder. The voices came closer and closer.

I hurried to the balcony off the War Room, with L.J. and Jonah at my heels. An astounding sight met our eyes. There were black people, scores of them – two hundred or more – slowly marching down the middle of Willow Street in Eudora, Mississippi.

This was almost unbelievable. In the South, black people were not supposed to assemble in these numbers.

L.J. let out a whistle. “That is one angry bunch of Negroes,” he said.

“I think the word I would use is ‘passionate,’” said Jonah.

Though I had never expected to see black people marching through the streets, I knew instantly what this was about. Tomorrow the trial would begin, and the first order of business was jury selection. No Negro had ever been permitted to serve on a jury in the state of Mississippi. Many of the liberal Yankee newspapers had declared it an outrage. They suggested that the White Raiders Trial might be just the occasion for the presiding judge to allow one or possibly even two colored men to serve as jurors.

We stood at the railing of the veranda, watching the marchers slowly pass. It was plain that they had taken a detour from Commerce Street to go past L.J.’s house. Some of them waved or lifted their hats to us.

Just when we thought we had seen the last of the marchers, another phalanx turned the corner onto Willow.

I was amazed. “Gentlemen. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

L.J. smiled. “Yessir, it’s one hell of a crowd.”

“Not just the size of the crowd,” I said. “Take a look at who’s leading it.”

L.J. squinted to see. “Those two old folks at the front?”

Jonah answered for me. “The lady is Ida Wells-Barnett,” he said. “And the gentleman, if I am not mistaken, is Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois. This is history being made, indeed.”

WHEN I WAS A BOY, my mother would sometimes take me to watch my father conducting a trial.

“It’s a presiding day,” she’d say. “Let’s go see Daddy scaring the pants off of everyone.” And away we’d go to the courthouse.

To my child’s eyes the old Pike County Courthouse looked exactly like a church. The second-floor gallery where the colored people got to sit was like the choir loft. The benches below were the pews. And my father stood at the high altar in the front of the room, delivering thunderous sermons and running the whole thing like a very strict minister who happened to wield a hammer instead of a Bible.

More than twenty years later, here I was, back in the church of Judge Everett Corbett.

But today, as L.J. and Jonah and I arranged our papers and books on the prosecution table, the old courthouse felt like something else entirely.

Not a church.

It was more like a theater now.

The upstairs colored section had been transformed into balcony seats. The benches on the main level were the orchestra seats, jammed to overflowing with an audience that had stood in line for hours to see the hottest entertainment in town. And that altar? Well, that was now center stage.

That was Everett J. Corbett’s stage. He could be a dynamic, exciting performer, and I felt sure he would not let his audience down today.