“Handle what?”
“Everything that’s about to come your way.”
“Like what, exactly,” she said reluctantly.
“Well, that’s what we need to discuss. I need to see how bad they are going to try to paint the picture. You know, you being a single mom from the inner city, poor, black. All that stuff.”
He was casual about the truth. He seemed unfazed by it.
“Well, that’s a pretty accurate picture.”
“No, the picture is what we will see on TV. You’ll be surprised at how bad or good they can make it. It’s all in the story they want to tell.”
“What do you think the story will be?”
“Oh, that’s easy. We are trying to get your son off on a murder charge. We live in a society where someone must pay. And we are trying to say, ‘Hold up, let’s give this a second look-see here.’ ” He looked at her intently and spoke soberly. “They’ll paint you as the ignorant ghetto mom, and Malik as a delinquent not worth that second look.”
Janae’s palms began to sweat. She suddenly felt winded. She searched for a place to direct her pain. A tear coursed down her cheek. How could I do this to Malik? How could I keep him there with violence all around him? Why didn’t I do more?
Humiliated, she avoided Roger’s gaze. Instead, she studied the dashboard as though she was going to be quizzed on the intricate patterning of the wood grain.
“Janae,” Roger said. “Let me tell you something that my mother always used to tell me when I was a kid. She’d say, ‘Roger, there’s a difference between facts and truth. It’s a fact that we ain’t got much of anything, but the truth is we are hardworking folk. Your daddy works hard, and so do I, and one day you will see that it will pay off.’ ” He touched her hand lightly. “Neither of my parents graduated from high school. That’s a fact too. But the truth is, out of all the people I have encountered in my life”—he peered at her from over his glasses—“and I have encountered a lot of people, no one has taught me more about life and what’s important than they did. Now”—and he slapped the steering wheel as if to say that settled the matter—“you need to play your own game of facts and truths. Where are we off to?”
“Thirty-eight-hundred block of West Cambridge Street,” she said, while thinking that she would do anything for Malik. “From here I would just pick up the Expressway heading west.”
It was late morning and traffic was pretty clear. Roger was moving slightly above the speed limit.
“You need to get off at exit 351 and then make a right.” Janae was nervous. She imagined that Roger lived in some big white house surrounded by a vibrant green, expansive lawn.
The Taurus maneuvered over that bump right at the start of the exit ramp. Her heart contracted as the front tires touched road again. At the top of the exit ramp there was a traffic light that she prayed would be green. But of course it was red when they got to it. There, seated aimlessly on the road divider, was Mr. Johnny. He wasn’t always a crackhead; he used to work for the Water Department. When Janae was a young girl he was still a good-looking man. Tall, with muscles galore bulging from his light-blue button-down work shirt. Inevitably, he stopped going straight home to his wife and kids, and would hang out on the corner with other men from the neighborhood. They would down some beer, maybe smoke a little weed, shoot dice, and flirt with the ladies that passed by. After a while, he was no longer Mr. Johnny to the neighbors, but Crackhead Johnny.
Before Janae realized what Roger was doing, his arm was already hanging out the driver’s window with a dollar bill in his hand. Mr. Johnny was shuffling toward the car looking worse than ever, darting his head from left to right as if he was about to take something that didn’t belong to him. She squirmed in her seat. As Mr. Johnny reached for the money, his eyes locked with Janae’s for just a fraction of a second.
As Roger raised the window she said, “You know he is just going to buy drugs with that.”
“You don’t know that, Janae. He might just buy something to eat. He’s gotta eat at some point, right?”
She sucked her teeth. “Yeah, okay. Let’s hope you’re right.”
Janae’s neighborhood was a collection of dilapidated structures. Abandoned and burnt-out houses were mixed in with occupied ones, which were in only slightly better repair. Some of the lived-in houses had broken windows that were painstakingly covered with a trash bag and held in place with electrical tape. A thin blanket of snow covered unkempt yards strewn with trash.
The owners were mostly absentee landlords who were just waiting for gentrification—which surely would happen, just a matter of when.
There were only a handful of long-term neighbors left: retired schoolteachers, corner-store owners, even a few police officers. They were there when kids rode their bikes up and down Poplar Street, played Double Dutch and hide-and-seek, ate water ice on ninety-degree summer days, and played in the shower from the sprinklers attached to the fire hydrants when the water ice wasn’t enough to cool them off.
There was a time when people mattered to each other. Those who remembered held tight to those memories, and to their deteriorating properties.
Janae studied Roger. Her thoughts raced back to his comment: “You black girls.” Those three words were loaded with accusation. It was belittling to be summed up in that way, but Janae sucked it up. This was about Malik, not her ego.
“When you get to the corner, make a right and then a left at the stop sign. That’ll be my block. My apartment is three houses in.”
“Oh, okay,” he said with a genuine smile.
There were a few people on their porches. There would have been plenty more if the weather wasn’t so damn nasty. Victor Mann, a boy a few years older than Malik, hand-maneuvered his wheelchair along the passenger side of the car. He looked into the vehicle at Janae and nodded his head in acknowledgment. She raised her hand, slightly moving her fingers. It had been three years since he was paralyzed by a gunshot wound while on his way to the corner store for his mother.
Roger shoehorned his car into the only available parking spot and turned the ignition off. He sat beside her, totally calm and collected, as though he showed up in the hood every day of his life.
“Look, Roger, if you like . . . if you prefer to do this at your office, that’s fine by me. We can, we can turn around and go straight there.” She stumbled over the words.
“Well, that’s just silly, Janae. We’re here.”
“But”—and she paused, not sure what she had planned to say.
As she exited the car, Janae saw an old friend whom she hadn’t seen in years. She’d lost contact with Antonio Reed when she started dating David, back at the beginning of high school. The last she had heard of him was he was serving time for having held up a store.
“Antonio?”
“Hey, shorty,” he said with a smile of recognition.
“What you doing around here?”
The man, who looked older than his years, stuffed a brown paper bag in his coat pocket. “My moms lives on this block.” He pointed to a converted apartment building several doors down from Janae’s home. “I’m staying with her, you know, just until I can get on my feet.”
Janae’s head bobbed up and down slowly. “Oh, okay. You, you take care of yourself,” she said, turning away.
“I heard about your son.”
Janae turned back around. Her eyes locked onto Antonio’s.
“Get him out as soon as possible. He don’t need to be in there. It’s bad news.” Antonio put his hands in his pockets and walked away.
Janae’s eyes met Roger’s, and then she began searching her overstuffed handbag for her keys. Her thoughts wandered to the roaches in her apartment. She wondered if they would be on their best behavior or come and show themselves, like they were expecting company.
Inside her cramped apartment, Roger made himself comfortable, even commandeered the hand-me-down coffee table for a makeshift desk. He pulled out his court files, clearly ready to get their
meeting started.
Roger didn’t even seem to notice that no two pieces of furniture in the entire place matched. There was a hole in the ceiling right above him that she patched together with some plaster that a friend had left over from one of his subcontracting jobs.
“Janae, have a seat. Let’s get started.”
She pointed over her shoulder behind her to the kitchen. “Would you like something to drink or anything?”
“I’ll have some water.” He smiled.
“Um, I don’t have any bottled water.”
“Tap is fine.”
“You sure? I have cans of soda. They’re unopened.”
“Tap is fine. Really.”
She wrung her hands together in the kitchen. She opened her cabinets, already knowing what was in them—not one piece of glass. She had plastic cups up the wazoo, some she bought from the dollar store and others she collected. Malik was not allowed to use her personal favorite; she knew it would have ended up in the trash, like all the chipped glasses she used to have, if he got his hands on it. It looked like glass, even felt like glass, but was really a tall, clear, hard-plastic cup tinted red. She grabbed it from off the shelf, washed it with dish detergent, and then filled it up. She walked it over to Roger.
He’s going to think I’m so ghetto.
“Why are you acting like you don’t see?” She swung her arms wide from left to right, covering the span of her apartment. “You see this?”
“I see it all right.” He shrugged his shoulders and looked down at his notes. “I’ve seen worse. Much worse.” A smile crept up on his aging face. “Okay, so you don’t live in the lap of luxury. But I’ve been to every continent. I’ve seen kids nearly naked walking the streets, searching through trash for their next meal. There are parents who sell one of their children into prostitution in order to feed the rest. I see it, Janae, and it could be much worse. Can we get down to business now?”
“Fine!” She crossed her arms.
Roger took a large gulp of water and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Okay, so where are we? We’re going to have a press conference, hopefully tomorrow morning if Margaret can get everything set up by then.”
Janae nodded.
“We’re inviting all the major news outlets. We should expect national interest in this case, particularly with my filing the complaint to broaden the scope of the Endangered Species Act.”
“I guess this is the part that’s not about Malik?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. The entire case is about Malik.” He paused. “I am going to do everything in my power to get Malik out. You need to get clear on that or this is not going to work. If you don’t believe I have your son’s best interest at heart, then you are not going to trust me. And this case requires absolute trust. This is not going to be easy.” He sighed.
She nodded again, not making eye contact. “But we are talking about my son.”
“I know, Janae. I have children of my own. I know this is hard for you.”
Janae pursed her lips, and her brow creased. “Do you even have a son?” She shook her head. “Even if you do, I bet you never had to tell him how to act around the cops in order to make sure he’s not hurt by them. You can’t possibly understand that. There’s just no way.”
The two of them sat in silence for a while before Janae asked, “What am I going to do at this conference?”
“You are going to stand beside me. I am going to introduce you as Malik’s loving mother who would do anything for her son.”
“But you said earlier that they would paint me as the ghetto mom.”
“They will. They’ll flash pictures of your home as proof. They’ll say over and over again that you are a single mom from one of the roughest and most drug-infested parts of the city. Oh, and if there is anything from your past, some dirt that paints this picture even more, they’ll include that too, if we’re lucky.”
She looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “Where’s the luck in that?”
“We need this story to catch on. We’re competing for attention with the very existence of the first black U.S. president. And the local news has been fixated on that courtroom murder-suicide. We need as much news coverage as possible, and historically that’s not what usually happens with these types of cases. Think about it, Janae. You live here. Murder happens all the time. And not just murder. Have you ever gone to Walmart and looked at those bulletin boards? They have a whole section devoted to missing kids. A substantial number of the kids on those boards are black and Hispanic. But when you watch the news it’s as if the only kids that ever go missing or are murdered are white. Hell, there was a little British girl who went missing from a hotel in Portugal; her case got a lot of attention here, too.”
“Why does this matter to you?” she said, frowning with confusion. “I just feel like the more I am around you, the less sense everything makes.”
“Because it’s not right. I am tired of living in a world in which how you look determines your value and ultimately your newsworthiness. It’s not right. Oh, and by the way, the reason I confuse you is because I don’t fit into your racist box,” Roger said matter-of-factly.
“Huh, we’ll see,” Janae said, with a slight smile, which quickly faded when she realized what Roger was saying. “Hold up, I am not racist. I’m not even sure if a black person can be racist.”
“Sure you are. And absolutely you can. Well, maybe not racist. I should have said prejudiced.” He nodded at his correction. “Yeah, some of the most prejudiced people I’ve ever met were black.”
Janae rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you, my dear, are trippin’. Just this morning you said to me”—she gestured with her fingers, making air quotes—“‘you black girls.’ Now, if that ain’t racist, then nothing is.”
“That’s a fact and you know it. Black women have a lot of attitude. I personally don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing. It can get you in trouble, though.”
“First, nothing about me is a girl. Second, it’s not a fact, it’s a stereotype.”
“Touché,” he conceded and threw his hands up in surrender. “We can have this conversation until the cows come home. The point that I am trying to make is we need this case to get as much media attention as possible. The more the better. The fact that the case deals with black-on-black crime dramatically reduces the chances of me getting that attention.”
“So, we’ll have this press conference tomorrow. What do you hope will happen because of it?”
“I want to get people talking. I want them . . .” and he stopped. His heart fluttered. He had pondered the question of equality all of his adult life. It was such a simple idea supported by every religion, culture, and the will of individuals. The notion of life, abundant life. “I want them to care as much about these kids as they do about saving animals, or saving the environment.”
“I don’t know, Roger, your logic seems circular to me. On the one hand, they don’t care because the players are not the right color, and on the other hand, you need them to care in order for this to work. What if they don’t care, what if they simply don’t care and you can’t get them to care? And”—now her voice jumped up an octave—“what will that do to Malik?”
Pensively, Roger uttered, “No, no, people care. Give them the chance and they will care. I’ll never believe anything different. They just need to know how bad it really is.”
“What if they ask me a question? I don’t know if I could talk on TV, Roger.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. I will field all the questions. Just stand beside me and look concerned.”
Roger’s bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows arched upward. “It was a really good day in court for Malik. I am not going to sugarcoat this; he is still in a lot of trouble. Though it would have been much more challenging to have his case transferred back to juvenile court than to get it to stay there. Today was about how he would be tried, and of course if things don’t go the way we hope that impacts sentencin
g tremendously.”
Sentencing. The word sickened her. She swallowed hard against the bile in the back of her throat. Tears rolled down her face. She couldn’t imagine her little boy in prison. It would surely kill his spirit, and that would be her failure, not his.
“How do we stop him from going to prison?” She shook her head, determined. “He cannot go to prison.”
“Finding the real perpetrator would make this clean, which would help with the other part of the case. Malik says he doesn’t know who it is, though, and right now the police are not even looking for anyone else. They’re convinced they have the right guy.”
Janae huffed. “The police. It boils down to the police?”
Roger’s bushy eyebrows did that archy thing again.
“The way things stand right now. Malik had motive. There was the argument between him and the victim earlier that day. And there was opportunity. His records show he cut school that day.”
Janae shook her head. “This is not right. There has to be another way to find out who killed Troy. What about what the judge said?” She scrunched her shoulders and held them in that position. “He thought that given Troy’s criminal background anyone could have done it. Everyone around here knows Troy sold drugs.”
“That’s a theory.” His voice lowered. “It’s not evidence, though.”
“So, you’re telling me”—she poked eagerly at her breastbone—“that what’s standing in the way of Malik getting out of that detention center is a little bit of evidence.”
Roger’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. He pointed his thick index finger at her. “Your only role is to be the concerned parent. My job is to build the case. I don’t need to worry about Malik and you, too. If I need to go door to door myself, I will get the evidence we need.”
Janae rolled her eyes. Yeah, that would go over real well. The concerned neighbors will just open up to the strange white guy.
“Okay, Roger, whatever you say.”
Chapter Thirteen
A WHITE BANNER, EMBLAZONED WITH THE CPHR LOGO IN VARIOUS SIZES, draped the back wall where the press conference was to be held. The room was the smallest conference space available at the hotel, which was just down the street from the courthouse. The room had only a small wooden podium in it, and standing space for no more than ten people.
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