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.”
Chapter 95
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.”
Chapter 96
THE CHANTING OUTSIDE L.J.’S HOUSE grew louder. The voices came closer and closer.
All white?
Not right.
All white?
We fight.
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.