Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  I didn’t move. He caught my eye in the mirror.

  “You can do it,” he said.

  That was how it began.

  2

  Bea

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 25

  By the fall of her senior year of high school, Bea had made some assumptions about what would happen next in her life. She assumed she would be premed and that after graduating from Miss Porter’s, she’d join her closest friend, Lorn, at Vassar or Amherst or Dartmouth or, if they got lucky, maybe Harvard or Yale, where she would go into medicine, following in her mother’s footsteps. An OB and surgeon turned hospital administrator, Bea’s mom had spent Bea’s childhood accumulating small, shiny statuettes with gold scrawl lauding her contribution to women’s health. What other career could Bea possibly choose?

  But then, in September of senior year, Bea’s AP Government teacher, Mr. Canon, assigned a book called Radical Justice, by Lou Friedman, a criminal defense attorney and legal scholar whose high-profile work fighting capital punishment, along with his prolific, accessible writing on the topic, had garnered him widespread popularity in liberal circles. His book profiled five generations of men from the same black southern family, starting with the enslaved great-great-grandfather, followed by his descendants through Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and, finally, the 1990s, by which time the youngest man, in jail awaiting trial for larceny because he couldn’t afford bail, had hung himself after serving two years. The charges were ultimately dropped. The man’s imprisonment and suicide, Friedman argued, were emblematic of the deep systemic abuse of his family for over a century.

  Friedman proposed a radical notion of justice in light of the country’s historical mistreatment of black citizens: that government-sanctioned justice must be intentionally and wholly blind to retribution. To Lou Friedman, an acceptable definition of justice could be about only two things, lest it replicate black subordination: rehabilitating the offender and restoring the victim’s sense of dignity. This was achievable through restorative justice. He argued an approach focused on reconciliation that was being adopted in pockets around the world.

  Bea read the book in one sitting one October Thursday night, enamored of the author’s idealistic tone and probing research. In what she found to be the most moving parts of the book, he told the stories of victims of heinous crimes who’d found, by working with their wrongdoers, a sense of resolution. The family of a woman killed after a break-in was moved to forgive a twenty-one-year-old perpetrator, who’d since become a woodworker and a playwright.

  “I’m going to write about how he’s Christ-like,” Lorn had said after Bea had summarized the book for her—Lorn had not found it as compelling as Bea had and hadn’t finished reading, which was causing her some difficulty with her two-page response paper.

  “Did Christ write plays?” Bea asked.

  “He was a woodworker,” Lorn said. “Don’t steal that.”

  Bea had not stolen the Jesus parallel but instead, on a lark, wrote her paper about Friedman himself. This book, along with his other ones that followed, had been a New York Times best seller. She’d discovered a feature about the book in which he’d pledged to donate his royalties from it to a nonprofit dedicated to criminal justice reform. But Bea wondered—and wrote her class response essay asking—why, as interested as he was in the ongoing, changing face of black subjugation for white gain, as illustrated by this particular family, hadn’t he given them the money? Wasn’t he himself enacting the dynamic he’d written about: a white man profiting off black experience, one more rung in the ladder? His pledge to donate royalty monies didn’t much solve the problem, Bea argued, since it was to a nonprofit he’d chosen. A more cynical view might even be that he had ties, financial or otherwise, to the organization or that he’d made the “donation” more to protect his reputation than anything else, to avoid precisely the kind of critique Bea was making. She wrote her paper quickly, pleased with herself and high on her critical insight, and emailed it in a full day before it was due.

  A week later, Mr. Canon announced a surprise: Dr. Friedman had been a schoolmate of his growing up and would be paying the class a visit.

  Friedman—“Lou,” as he introduced himself—looked younger than Bea expected. In his forties with a buzz cut, he opened his hands wide and chopped the air as he regaled the class with stories—of a recent trip to Rome to teach a course about the Italian judicial system to NYU undergrads studying abroad, of his new book in progress, and about a program at Carter University in North Carolina that he ran for students interested in justice.

  Bea sat still, fixated. In the presence of this man, she felt as she had around her mother—as if she were bearing witness to a person who mattered. Being in his company made her want to be around him more, as if by staying close enough for long enough, the substance igniting him might rub off on her.

  And yet she knew better. She’d discovered the fallacy of this notion upon her mother’s passing two years earlier. Phaedra had vanished overnight—cardiac arrest in a seemingly healthy fifty-two-year-old woman—and, in addition to grief, Bea was surprised to encounter something else in the wake of Phaedra’s death. An unmooring. An identity void. Scattered—not just her mind, but her selfhood. Stripped of association to her magnetic, larger-than-life mother, Bea felt aimless, a balloon unhinged from its bunch. As the months passed, she came to recognize that this had always been the case; she was always going to have to chart her own future. With a living parent, she had unknowingly viewed the world as a game. It had all felt like play.

  She didn’t know that Mr. Canon was going to share their papers with Dr. Friedman. She certainly didn’t know that she would then have to face him. As she exited the classroom after his presentation, the man with friendly eyes stopped her.

  “Bea?”

  “Yes?” she said, startled.

  “Your paper. Thank you for putting such thought into it.” Then he gave her his card, and she hurried back to her dorm.

  Later that day, she learned she’d won the National Science Award—only the sixth student from Porter’s ever to do so. The headmistress made an announcement at lunch and had her pose for a picture holding a calculator by the fountain.

  That night, she checked the school’s Facebook page. Scrolling through the comments, she found that in addition to the chorus of “Congratulations!” and “Way to go, Bea!” were almost as many references to her mother.

  “Your mother would be proud!”

  “Following in her mother’s footsteps!”

  “Is there any question she’s Phaedra’s daughter? What a remarkable woman. May she rest in peace.”

  Irritated for a reason she couldn’t identify, she closed the tab and reached for Dr. Friedman’s card.

  She opened a new email, entered his address into the “to” field, and began to type. That she didn’t think he’d see the paper; that if she had known, she’d never have been so rude; that she’d loved hearing about his work, particularly about the Justice Scholars Program at Carter; that she’d googled it, and it looked intriguing, but that didn’t look positive enough, so she changed it to “fascinating.”

  After sending it off, she went to bed.

  By the next morning he’d replied, inviting Bea to New York for coffee.

  AS THE TRAIN inched its way out of the station in Greenwich, where she was staying with Lorn’s parents before taking Metro-North down to New York to meet with Dr. Friedman, Bea compiled a list of questions about the Justice Scholars Program he ran at Carter, mainly because she didn’t want to show up with nothing to say. Her cursory online research about the program had provided some details. She knew that only ten to twelve first-years were admitted, that three to four of them were “scholars” and received partial tuition grants, that the program entailed a preset curriculum of first-year courses on the theme of justice, and that Dr. Friedman taught one of these courses.

  What kind of time does the program leave for outside activities?

  Does it help stud
ents obtain summer internships?

  She’d closed her eyes. Bea didn’t know why she found herself daydreaming about a school she’d never visited, a green campus she’d never laid eyes on. She pictured herself crossing the quad, a stack of books on criminal law in her arms. In the fantasy, no one knew her as Phaedra’s daughter. She was a blank slate.

  When she arrived at Johnny’s, an old New York diner in the West Village, Dr. Friedman was already seated in a booth, his laptop open before him on the table.

  “Bea, hi!” He shut it and slid it into a canvas satchel as she slipped into the seat across from him. “How was your trip down?”

  “Smooth,” she said. The commute from New England to Manhattan was familiar to her. In seventh grade, her mother had briefly worked in the city before they’d missed Boston too much and returned. They’d lived on the Upper East Side, by the park, and Phaedra had allowed Bea to take the train alone on weekends to visit her friends—all by herself, at twelve. She’d felt incredibly mature and had become fond of trains, found their timetables and rumbling and musty smell comforting.

  Dr. Friedman ordered grilled chicken and cottage cheese from their aproned server. Bea ordered a blueberry muffin and a coffee.

  “I meant to warn you, the coffee here is not good,” he said.

  Across the aisle, a table of four middle-aged men bickered loudly.

  “I fuckin’ told her—I—I—I fuckin’ told her. . .” One of the men, determined to tell a story, was repeatedly being interrupted by his tablemates.

  “Excuse me, miss!” another called to the server’s back as she disappeared into the kitchen. “What, is she fucking milking the cow back there?” he said to his buddies.

  “About the Justice Scholars Program,” Bea said, trying to ignore the men. “I was wondering if it helps students with summer internships.”

  Dr. Friedman nodded and interlaced his large hands on the table. He leaned forward as he spoke, looking her in the eye. His attentiveness and openness calmed her.

  “We encourage all of our students to find internships in criminal justice, but there’s only one funded position that we’re able to offer at the moment. It’s with me in New York. Well, partly with me. You’d be working for the CJRI—that’s the Criminal Justice Reform Institute, my organization. Over three months, you’d spend a month working with me on research, a month working with the advocacy group, and a month working with the direct services group. Last year’s fellow is actually publishing his paper in the Journal of Criminal Justice. That’s essentially unheard of for an undergrad. Law students don’t even author publishable scholarship often. But Kyle is exceptional. His study on medicinal interventions and juvenile recidivism has already been cited in state law. Colorado. Can you believe it? He’s starting at Columbia Law in the fall.”

  “Like, a judge referenced his paper?” Bea asked, astonished.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Wow,” she said. “But that slot’s just for one student.”

  He folded his hands.

  “Funding is an eternal battle, my dear. Criminal justice is not the sexiest charity for philanthropists. People want to give to good poor people, not bad poor people.” He chuckled. “You and I both know that systemic oppression gives rise to criminal behavior, plus the designation of ‘criminal’ loses its heft when you consider who defines it. Did you ever hear the saying that when the guy on top makes the rules, the guy on the bottom hasn’t got a damn chance? Point is, growing a program like this one takes time. We’re building. Slowly. My hope is that one of these days all of the scholars can have funded summers.”

  As her coffee and muffin arrived, Bea relished his phrasing—you and I. He’d included her! She tore her muffin in half and picked off the sugary top while, a few feet away, their neighbors began complaining to the server about their coffees being cold.

  “So are you going to apply for the program?” Dr. Friedman asked.

  “I’m thinking about it,” she said, though she didn’t know why she didn’t just say yes.

  “Why?”

  “Would I? Or would I not?”

  “Would you?”

  Plucking up a blueberry that had rolled onto the table, she realized why she hadn’t answered yes: She didn’t have a good response to this question. It wasn’t as if she had negative personal experience with the law, or any at all for that matter—she’d never even gotten a parking ticket. At fifth-grade graduation, to her embarrassment, she’d been given the Most Likely to Follow Directions award. The one time she’d been pulled over for not wearing a seat belt, while driving Lorn’s car to Whole Foods, the cop spotted her wrist brace (from slipping off a horse—the end of all things equestrian for her) and escorted her two miles back to the Birches’ house.

  But there was one thing. The summer after ninth grade, in the Hamptons with Lorn and her family. She and Lorn had agreed to sneak out at midnight and meet up on the beach with a few boys whose families also had houses in East Hampton. They had been trying unsuccessfully to build a fire, and Hugh, the other black kid in their group that summer, had run back to the car to get some more newspaper. Within twenty minutes, he hadn’t come back and wasn’t responding to calls or texts. By the time anyone heard from him it was hours later. Someone had seen him rifling through the trunk of a car and had called the police to report a break-in. The cops who had showed up hadn’t believed Hugh’s story that it was his friend Tom’s car. They’d called Tom’s dad, who, of course, had thought the car was supposed to be in the driveway. (Also, they were all fifteen and not supposed to be driving in the first place.)

  It was a story the group of friends recounted for years—that one crazy night Hugh got taken in, when they were all being stupid. No one talked about the unspoken underbelly of the story, racism. (Bea had brought it up once to Lorn, but not a second time after Lorn had said, “You don’t know that’s why they called the cops.”)

  “I have a friend who got arrested once for something he didn’t do,” she said to Dr. Friedman. “It sort of made me interested in the subject.”

  “Did you read about the student advocacy piece?” Dr. Friedman asked, and Bea shook her head.

  Dr. Friedman explained that at Carter, students who found themselves involved in campus judicial proceedings, either as the complainant or respondent—those were the names for the parties—were assigned “student advocates,” peers who supported them through the process. The fellows in the Justice Scholars Program automatically joined the roster of student advocates.

  “You mean,” Bea said, “be a fellow student’s lawyer? As a freshman?”

  “Ha, no.” He smiled. “You’d be a support person. There’s a whole training. You’ll learn the details. You don’t argue on their behalf or anything. More like a resource. Nonetheless, it’s valuable exposure to what it means to be an advocate in an adversarial system.” Dr. Friedman’s food still hadn’t arrived. “Looks like you’re enjoying your coffee.” He’d nodded at her mug, which she hadn’t touched. They laughed.

  “About your paper,” he said suddenly.

  “Oh . . .” she’d stammered. “Like I said in my email, I didn’t think you’d ever see it.”

  He interrupted, “Here’s the real story. I couldn’t . . . not publicly. Would you want everyone to know you were suddenly coming into wealth? With the pressure that brings? The eyeballs? Think of the Powerball winners who go broke within a year, two years—is it because they’re financially foolish? They simply can’t manage their money?”

  By his tone Bea could tell that the answer he was searching for was no, but, in fact, that’s exactly what she’d always thought about those people.

  “Of course not,” he said. “They got the money, Bea.”

  “What?” Bea asked.

  “Of course, the Washingtons got the money. I just got it to them in a way that didn’t put them in the spotlight. Through a trust.”

  “Oh.” Bea felt a loosening in her chest. She had not realized she’d been holding it a
gainst him.

  Suddenly she noticed that one of the men at the next table, who was wearing ripped jeans, sunglasses, and a camo T-shirt, was staring at her. Despite his reflective, fuchsia-tinted shades, she could feel his burning gaze asserting its authority.

  Ever since she was a little girl, when people would study her as if trying to determine whether Bea belonged to the woman whose hand she was holding, Bea had been sensitive to stares. She could feel them thinking, The child isn’t white, but the woman is so much darker. Sometimes they’d outright ask Phaedra if she was the nanny.

  “Can I help you?” Bea said to the man’s mirrored lenses. The man’s eyebrows rose behind them. He grunted.

  “You’re staring, so I asked if I could help you,” Bea said. The man shrugged as his friend snickered. Dr. Friedman watched silently and, after a few seconds, stood. He pulled out his wallet and dropped a twenty on the table. His cottage cheese and chicken still hadn’t arrived.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Bea, eyeing the men. She followed him out, embarrassed that she’d allowed her temper to flare in front of him.

  On the sidewalk, he turned to her. “What happened?”

  “Oh, I just . . .” That he’d expected there had to be more to the story had deepened her embarrassment. “I just have a thing about being stared at.”

  “Sure,” he said after a pause. Looking past her, a mischievous expression came over his face. “Hey, look! Another coffee shop! What’re the odds? It’s a New York City miracle.” Across the street, under a sign that read MOCHA, large windows were lined with warm yellow bulbs. Inside, rows of red bistro tables were empty.

  She laughed.

  “There’s that smile.” He put a hand on her back to lead her into the crosswalk. They had the light.

  Only eleven days after sending in her application to the JSP (which was concurrently considered an application to Carter), she’d received a congratulatory email from the assistant director telling her she’d been admitted to both. In the spring she’d been awarded one of the program’s merit scholarships. At only ten grand a year, it barely covered a fifth of tuition, but with her inheritance and life insurance payout, she didn’t really need it anyway. Still, it offset the exorbitant cost of Carter. Ten months later, the Friday before classes began, Bea sat in the back of an Uber, traveling from the Greensboro, North Carolina, airport to Cartersboro to begin her first year.