Till I see you again, I remain
Your loving husband,
Ben
Chapter 125
THE JURY HAD A VERDICT.
My father banged his gavel furiously, but it did no good. “Quiet!” he bellowed. “I will clear this courtroom!”
Spectators pushed this way and that, tripped over one another, stumbling to find seats. My father continued hammering away at his bench. The jurors began to make their way to the jury box, blinking nervously at the uproar their appearance had provoked.
“I will clear this courtroom!” my father shouted again, but this had no effect at all on the level of noise and excitement in the room.
“Very well,” he said. “Bailiff, get ’em all out of here. Get ’em all out!”
Those were the magic words. Instantly the courtroom came to perfect attention. The crowd fell silent, and everyone sank into the nearest available seat.
“Very well. That’s much better,” said Judge Corbett. “Mr. Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict?”
“Yes, Your Honor, we have.”
The foreman handed a white slip of paper to the bailiff, who handed it up to my father. Though this took only seconds, it seemed much longer than that. Time was slowing, and my senses were unbearably acute.
My father opened the paper and read it with no visible emotion. He raised his head and looked my way, still betraying nothing about the verdict.
Then he spoke. “Mr. Foreman, in the matter of the State of Mississippi versus Madden, North, and Stephens, how does the jury find?”
In that moment, it seemed to me, all life stopped on this earth. The birds quit chirping. The ceiling fans stopped spinning. The spectators froze in midbreath.
The foreman spoke in a surprisingly high-pitched whine.
“We find the defendants not guilty.”
As he uttered those impossible words, I was staring at the piggish face of Henry Wadsworth North. The hardest thing of all was seeing the joy that broke out all over his hateful visage.
A smattering of cheers went up from the white audience. Reporters rose and sprinted for the doors. A collective groan, and then sobs, arose from the Negroes in the gallery.
My father banged his gavel again and again, but no one seemed to care.
Chapter 126
AFTER THE COURTROOM HAD CLEARED, I sneaked out a side entrance to avoid the crowd of journalists out front, and did what I had done so many times lately. I got my bike and headed for the Eudora Quarters.
The first person I saw was the old man in the blue shack who had showed me the way to Abraham’s house the first time I came out here.
“You done your best, Mist’ Corbett,” he called. “Nobody coulda done better.”
“My best wasn’t good enough,” I called back. “But thank you.”
He shook his head. I continued down the dirt road.
A large brown woman was coming the other way, balancing a wicker basket of damp clothes on her head and carrying another under her arm. She picked up the conversation in midstep: “Aw, now, Mistuh Corbett, that’s just the way things goes,” she said.
“But it’s not fair,” I said.
She laughed. “Welcome to my life.”