The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter

by Kia Corthron

  “I’d like to offer you a punch in the nose.”

  “So would Invisible Man over there, but right now he’d rather play the Noble Savage.” He sits back smiling. “Well, my esteemed Hebrew colleague, aren’t you even curious as to what I’ve written regarding our adorable little black predators and their second-grade sluts?”

  “Every word. I’ll read it when Eliot’s done. Meanwhile I will offer you a cup of coffee. Would you like that?”

  “I’ve never seen you in pants so snug, Diana. What a pleasant change from your usual schoolmarm look! Wear them tomorrow. If we have nothing else in our favor, the outlined curve of your little round bottom might be somewhat inspiring for the judge.”

  Diana opens her mouth, reconsiders, closes it. She gathers her mug and Eliot’s before ascending the stairs, muttering something unintelligible.

  “Have you read it? Invisible Man. By one of your people. Extraordinary. Or perhaps Native Son?”

  “Yes.” Eliot does not look up from Steven’s wrinkled papers, moving on to the next sheet. Water is heard running in the kitchen overhead.

  “Which?”

  “Both.”

  “Well! Then you can understand why a white man might feel a little bit nervous. I mean it’s one thing with the wild masses, but these notions of violence coming from the darkie intelligentsia. Oh what did that gentleman from the so-called Harlem Renaissance call it? The Niggerati!” and Steven throws his head back laughing.

  “It’s good.” Eliot has finished reading and is looking at his partner. “Different than we planned but. It might sway him.” He gently touches the text Steven had penned. “They’re the words of a white man, Diana and I couldn’t step in. Are you going to be there to say them?”

  Steven turns to him. “I am no Cyrano de Berge—de Berge—” He giggles. “I’m afraid I am one drink past the limit of French pronunciation! What I mean to say: If I create the words, they are for me to utter.”

  Diana descends the steps, carrying a tray holding three mugs of coffee and a pitcher of ice water. She sets the tray on the table in front of the couch where Steven sits, takes Eliot’s mug to his desk, puts hers on the floor near her cards, then picks up the pitcher and flings its full contents into Steven’s face. He stands sputtering, his mouth and eyes flung open.

  “Sober yet? Colonel?”

  In that moment he recovers his composure, turning forty-five degrees so as to easily look from Diana on his right to Eliot on his far left and, in fact, suddenly does appear to be sober.

  “Your honor.

  “Between the brief you have before you and the oral arguments we have presented, we have quite comprehensively examined our concerns vis-à-vis our current system of juvenile justice, which in the parens patriae mode has abandoned children’s constitutional rights in favor of a benevolent, paternal role to be played by the court. We have weighed the consequences of this state of affairs, challenging the presumption that the reformatory is a place where wayward youth may be rehabilitated, given that evidence has universally demonstrated reform school is merely a juvenile penal institution, complete with all the unspeakable perils and alarming recidivist rates.

  “In maintaining this legal path, however, we have tiptoed around the elephant in the room: the sensationalism engendered by this case. We have been speaking of Maxwell Williams and of Jordan Price, as is appropriate, yet we all know the issue is bigger than these two boys, far bigger. The incident has caused great embarrassment for Red Bank, and though I know, Judge Farn, you would never let such factors as the picketers outside influence the judgment of this court, I do feel we would be remiss not to directly address the basic facts—that two little black boys kissed two little white girls—so that you may make a most informed decision on what is best to be done about it.

  “To try to put it all into perspective, let us briefly again go back to that notorious date, Thursday the 31st of March, or perhaps more accurately for most of us, the next morning, April Fool’s Day, when we opened our papers and were shocked. And confused. How to deal with such a transgression when the children are so very young. We, a community of white folks and colored folks who have gotten along well for generations, but of course the international media was not interested in that. No, it took one dispute that has divided us to bring in all this worldwide attention, and I would wager we would not be so divided were it not for the egging on of the busybody outsider press.

  “I don’t believe those incensed citizens are out there on the steps because of this isolated event. No, this episode which sent a chill down their spines was the latest in a string of setbacks: the bus trouble in Montgomery, these recent disturbances in Greensboro. And most frightening for all of us: the forced desegregation of our schools. What happened with Max Williams, Jordan Price, Ginny Dodgson, and Leecy Pike confirmed all our worst fears about where school integration might lead.

  “But was the incident with these children really an abomination? Or a blessing in disguise? Something happened, yes, something undeniably unfortunate happened, this kissing game had ramifications unforeseen by any of its players as they engaged in it, but oh have little Max and little Jordan been thoroughly upbraided for it since. You may have heard something of the surprise visit to the children in custody from our local Klan, and I am certain I needn’t tell you that little black children in Georgia may not know what kissing is but they definitely know what the Klan is. Yes, Max and Jordan may not have understood that what happened with those little white girls was wrong when they did it, but they surely do now! Anyone who has looked into their terrified little eyes will know they will never ever make that mistake again. And as far as an example being made, the boys have already provided it: Negro mothers and fathers have learned it is never too early to tell your little boys that they are forbidden to ever kiss, or anything else, a little white girl. Problem solved.

  “But what about retribution? Isn’t society owed justice in the matter? The outraged cries of our neighbors are an assertion to the world that we have had enough, that we will not allow this manipulation of the South from the outside to go one step further. But I as a Southern man would like to show the meddlers, whether they be from Europe or New York, that we are not the vicious barbarians they claim us to be, brutes out to destroy innocent children. We are decent law-abiders who defend our customs, and who handle the breach of those customs in a just and dignified manner befitting Southern gentility. We are not here as reactionaries to the judgment of intruder fools, we are not stubborn crackers but reasonable men. And whether the world likes it or not, we can solve our own problems.

  “Because I must say I worry. If these little boys, on top of everything else they’ve been through, are asked to spend their entire childhood in a dubious environment away from the loving guidance of family, I do fear a different lesson will be learned by them, and by all our colored folks: Go to the outside for justice.

  “So let me return to the salient question: Have the boys learned their lesson? Are they reformed? It would be hard for you to fathom as their testimony today may have seemed tentative in the intimidating atmosphere of this courtroom, but if you were ever to talk to them one-on-one you would find that little Jordan is the chatterbox. It was very clear to me from the beginning how sorry he was, he said as much over and over, but then there was nine-year-old Max. The quiet one. Frankly I often just didn’t quite know what he was thinking. The addendum we submitted this morning to the brief. It is testimony from our visit with the boys on Monday, our last time to speak with them before this hearing. I decided to take Max aside. He sighed, I would wager because he assumed he would be interrogated for the thousandth time regarding what happened that awful day when he and Jordan played with Ginny Dodgson and Leecy Pike. Instead I simply asked him if he was ashamed of what he had done. He stared at me. Again I asked, ‘Are you ashamed?’ and again he did not reply. I asked a third time, and a fourth, now beginning to become exa
sperated. ‘I am not playing a game with you, Max, you must answer the question! Are you ashamed? Are you ashamed? Are you ashamed?’ and finally little Max spoke, very quietly: ‘What ashame mean, Mr. Netherton?’ ‘Well, Max, shame is an awful sad feeling that you did something terribly wrong, and you’re very sorry and you won’t ever do it again, but not just because you got into trouble. It’s because you know you were bad, and it hurts to know you were bad, it hurts so much that you can’t ever ever erase that you were bad, the best you can do is just try and be better.’ And little Max stared at me, and slowly the shine came to his eyes, and as he tried hard not to cry he said, ‘I didn’t know that word before, Mr. Netherton. I kept looking for that word but I couldn’t find it, I kept looking for that word, that word’s in my heart.’ I believe, your honor, that is about as rehabilitated as rehabilitated gets. I’d hate to see Max and Jordan spending the rest of their tender years in the reformatory, two small boys raised away from their parents, in the company of robbers and rapists and a murderer or two, these innocent children growing into their manhood and becoming increasingly bitter with what life has dealt them for a mistake they made before they were old enough to begin to comprehend it. I would hate to see that shame, which would have stayed with them and guided them on the right path, well I’d just hate to see that shame knocked right out of their hearts.”

  At which point Steven drops to sit on the couch. “And that, lady and gentleman of the rec room, is that.” He picks up his cup and saucer, sips. “Mmm. Now this is good coffee, Diana, you will make your future husband proud. If only it had just a shot of” and Steven is dead asleep, sitting up.

  His partners stare at him, looking incredibly balanced and poised holding his cup, The Thinker at tea. Gradually Diana finds her voice. “We were trying to avoid it but.” She turns to Eliot, dazed. “It might work.” She turns back to Steven, hypnotized. Then snaps out of it. “That might do it! We’ll have to drag his dumb ass off that couch early, you’ll dress him, I’ll coffee him up but.” She beams in the direction of her conscious colleague. “We might win. Eliot! We might win!” She throws blank index cards into the air and laughs. “Oh my God, playing fire with cracker fire! You said, ‘Whatever it takes,’ well!” She shakes her head at the irony. Then realizes in the dimness she has not been able to see clearly across the room to the desk. “Eliot?”

  “Yes. Optimism,” she hears quietly from the corner, and it is because she knows it is not sarcasm, that Eliot does believe now they stand half a chance for the boys’ release and his tone is nevertheless so devastatingly hollow and wretched that she will never be able to bring herself to utter the word again.

  11

  “Oh I made every mistake in the book first year out. Rape cases?” He whistles. “I remember this one. College girl trying to press charges against her professor. Her white professor, I gotta hand it to her, she had cojones! Clearly forced himself on her but this was some tenured guy, published about a hundred books, Reconstruction and Scottsboro and a crack at fiction, his own slave narrative, you get the idea. And the girl loves his class, obviously infatuated with the guy, now how the hell’m I supposed to prove it wasn’t consensual? That Professor Progressive is really a skunk? It didn’t help that the girl lived with a man, of the Caucasian persuasion no less, so in the first place she plainly wasn’t a virgin, and in the second I don’t care if we are ‘up North,’ those sorts of choices don’t exactly sit well with the general populace. So I enter into the voir dire. First error: I’m so thrilled to get a Negro on the jury, any Negro, I don’t stop to investigate where my only rep of the race is coming from. What do you think he thought of a promiscuous colored girl and her white boyfriend? That she’s willing to give it away to any Anglo-Saxon dick, that’s what! Another beginner’s misstep: selecting some sculptor beatnik. You’d think given who I was trying to prosecute I should have known better than to make any assumptions about white liberals or perceived liberals. Guy turned out to be the biggest cracker of all!”

  Eliot, at his desk, wonders if Beau Greene plans to stand in his doorway the rest of the day, lest the junior attorney misconstrue the reasons for his legal team’s losing the children’s case as related to anything other than his own rookie naïveté. A redundant exercise: on the long drive back after Wednesday’s decision, Eliot had fluctuated between blaming himself for what he had or hadn’t said in court and blaming himself for failing to quit early on and finding a more experienced replacement. And of course his haughty, uncompromising drive toward the habeas, refusing to even entertain the notion of an appeal. Steven’s oral arguments were at least as effective as they had been in Diana’s basement, and with what appeared to be minimal deliberation on the part of the judge over his lunch hour, it had all gone exactly as Didi Wilcox had predicted. And now seeming worse than before. How long would it take for an appeal? Had they gone that route in the first place, they could have already been through it, with a panel of comparably impartial judges in Atlanta having no connection whatsoever to Red Bank. And her suggestion to come to the judge after a year to ask for a modification of the disposition orders. Had the clock started over on that? Five and a half months the boys had already moldered behind those walls, and Eliot feels a little ill now, remembering the look of eager expectation on their faces in the courtroom, with their families near and the attorneys they had come to trust. Though it had been explained to them numerous times that the hearing might result in their release, their innocent child’s hope interpreted might as will, and thus the boys were not merely disappointed but stunned to find out at the end of the day they would be returning to the reformatory. And Eliot was suddenly aware of how much he had also accepted that the children would be eating supper with their families that very evening, feeling stupidly jolted back to the miserable reality of what he as attorney, while not presuming, certainly should have been emotionally as well as strategically prepared for: Judge Farn’s concurrence with Sawyer’s decision that Max and Jordan stay put until twenty-one, near Eliot’s age now.

  Immediately after the 2:30 announcement, the legal team set aside its personal devastation to offer the parents assurances regarding appeal, and Eliot was on the road by three. He had gotten back to Indianapolis Thursday evening and lain on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Around nine his phone began ringing and he ignored it, as he did when it rang again at 9:30, and at 10, finally lifting the receiver off its hook.

  Andi had stared at him when he walked in this morning. It was presumed he would have had post-mortem discussions with his legal team after the hearing Wednesday, then driven Thursday and Friday, not getting back to Indianapolis till this evening after work, and thus not back to the office until Monday. His former girlfriend, or whatever she had been, offered her quiet, heartfelt sympathies, which he graciously and gratefully accepted. They had had little to say to one another in recent months, having not met outside of work since the Mother’s Day episode. Their relationship, never officially named, had been equally ambiguous in its breakup, although both parties seemed to have come to recognize that it was over. He wondered, in the way she had trouble looking at him when she had told him how sorry she was this morning, if she felt that he may hold it against her, her insistence that he stay with the case when he had wished to replace himself with someone more seasoned. But if there were blame there, he laid it on no one but himself. After her commiseration, she had told him Winston wanted to see him. Eliot had sighed.

  In his boss’s office he reported the details of the hearing, and then conveyed the preliminary thoughts he and his colleagues had bandied about regarding appeal. Winston offered quite copious praise of his young recruit for his work on the case before handing him the file on a local police brutality incident that had materialized while he was down South. This afternoon he would meet the man in the hospital. As Eliot returned to his desk, Will Mitchell had stopped him to express his condolences and to assure him that in his absence Winston could not stop talking about how imp
ressed he was with the junior member of his staff. While gratified by all the support from his colleagues, Eliot was still haunted by flashbacks of the children’s proceeding, and it was only when he opened the file and was flabbergasted by the graphic photos of his pulverized client-to-be that he was catapulted, for the moment anyway, out of Red Bank, Georgia, and into the present.

  He had just put the paperwork back into its folder and pulled out an ongoing accident claim when Beau had come to his doorway to offer his own brand of solace.

  “Well of course the prof walked. Though I believe things were shaken up at that school a bit, don’t think any Negro co-eds found themselves alone with Professor Broadminded again. As for that poor gal—”

  “Beau? Thanks, but I really need to get back to this fender bender.”

  “Oh. Oh sure.” Beau turns around to the reception desk. “Andi. Coffee?” And as if he is suddenly so busy that he cannot wait even the minute for her to pour and bring the cup, Beau enters his office and shuts the door, meaning she will have to knock. As soon as she is seated at her desk again, her phone rings.

  “Winston Douglas.” At that moment Eliot happens to glance up, and sees she is staring at him. “For you.”

  From the look on her face, he knows who it is.

  “Thanks, Andi.” He gets up to close his door just before the ring.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey. Am I speaking to the crazy attorney who rushed right out after speaking to the clients’ parents without saying goodbye lest he dare miss a day at the home office?”

  He smiles. “Sorry. How are you?”

  “How are you?”

  “I’ve been better.” He rolls his pencil between his pointer and thumb. “Well I think ‘I told you so’ is in order.” He laughs and is caught unawares by the subtle cry that escapes.