by Kia Corthron
Saturday of their weekend together had even surpassed the high standards set Friday in the hotel. As planned they had met for lunch—she carrying a shopping bag from her morning tasks—but right after she took him to a shoe store. He said his six-month-old wingtips were fine, but she replied they weren’t buying, that the game was to select their “dream” shoes no matter how expensive and to walk around the store in them. He said he found window shopping dull and expressed his concern that this would waste the clerk’s time, she called him a worrywart and then they were in the store. As the merchandise was segregated by gender they divided, and twenty minutes later she walked up to him wearing four-inch heels, leopard or faux leopard. He told her in his opinion they were exceedingly ugly, that he hoped they were faux because killing an animal for the sake of high fashion disgusted him, and at any rate they hardly appeared comfortable given she had hobbled just the thirty steps from the women’s side of the store to the men’s. She smiled through his little diatribe, then said she agreed on every count but they were the most expensive ladies’ shoes in the place and therefore her dream selection. She was not surprised to see he had gone the dull conventional route, wingtips again and moderately priced at that, with all those posh styles staring him in the face. He countered that this was the pair he liked best in terms of fashion, comfort, and, yes, cost, because his dream shoes were those that suited both his aesthetics and his wallet. In fact, he’d decided he would purchase them to be ready for when his current pair wore out. Nope, she declared, putting them back into the box, it was a window-shopping game, no buying allowed, prompting the white balding clerk to glare at her as they walked out. They spent the next couple of hours at the Art Association of Indianapolis gazing at paintings mostly by Europeans, sometimes seriously discussing, sometimes whisper-giggling. They went to a diner for a leisurely coffee before she announced she would go off alone to change for dinner. After the evening meal they went back to his place where she surprised him, presenting him with the wingtips. Luckily the same clerk was still there, as she would have felt a little bad giving the commission to someone else. “He snarled when I first walked in, but as he rang up the sale he was beaming. ‘Please, come back again!’”
On Sunday they arrived sleepy-eyed at the depot, twenty minutes early for her nine a.m. departure, the only Indy-to-Chicago daily. Her train was delayed, allowing their farewell kissing to drag out a half-hour more. They planned for him to drive to her town the following weekend, though he would’ve returned crack of dawn Sunday to prepare for the Daughtery trial starting Monday.
But now, sixteen days later, he tries to suppress the needling worry that, since her night at his place, whatever communication had occurred between them had been initiated by him. When he’d brought up the planned Chicago visit she’d sighed and apologized, they would have to postpone as her first week with the firm was outrageously busy and she would probably have to work Saturday. Being in the middle of court the following weekend, the one just past, he couldn’t leave town, and activity at her office was again much too hectic for her to consider coming out to him. She sounded tired. If what she said was all true, her caseload and his combined could certainly be a damper on their future time together. But the more nagging concern was what if it wasn’t all true. If after such an intense intimate weekend, she was now backing off. He reasons that a new job, her first real job, and a new relationship simultaneously do amount to a lot of emotional information for one person to sift through, so while he still calls periodically it is not as often as he’d like, giving her space, and warily he hopes for the best.
Today Sam Daughtery’s mother, and likely Sam Daughtery himself, will take the stand. In the couple of weeks before his first jury trial began, Eliot had second-chaired a civil trial under Will in the magnificent Marion County Courthouse which, Eliot lamented, would soon be demolished to make way for the nondescript modern rectangular City-County Building being erected just behind it. In court with Will, Eliot had participated in a minimal way but was mainly there to learn, and during lunch hours had spent time observing other trials. Still on his first day in court in defense of Mr. Daughtery, Eliot had nervously hesitated to raise objections, and now would legally never be able to bring up those particular points, even in the case of an appeal. To make up for his initial reticence, on the second day he had objected to practically every sentence the prosecutor uttered, only to be nine times out of ten overruled by the judge and thus, he feared, pegged by the jury as a lunatic. He took a deep breath and, by Day Three, had begun to force his mind-set into a certain self-assurance or at least, for the sake of the jury, the outer appearance thereof.
By 8:45 everyone has arrived. Life at Winston Douglas had been mercifully less volatile. Beau, evidently warned by Winston and, Eliot would like to think, shamed by his own outburst, has been cordial to Andi, piling on less work and even thanking her when she brings him his coffee.
Eliot heads to the conference room himself for brew, on the way noticing Will and Andi chattering and laughing at reception. Having not glimpsed her the last week and a half, Eliot is ludicrously surprised and relieved to see she looks exactly the same. After drinks that terrible Friday, she and Will had made a pact to share an end-of-week liquid refreshment every Friday, three thus far. Eliot overhears Will asking her if they can reschedule this week’s outing for this evening—family obligations presenting a conflict for the end of the week—and when Eliot comes out of the conference room he is startled when Will asks him if he would like to join them. He surmises Will had assumed he’d heard them planning and thought it would be rude not to include him. Eliot looks at Andi, who is not looking at him, her smiling face fixed on Will. This could mean she does not want him to come as he would be crashing in on their fun, or that she does want him to come because she has hope that a spark may still exist between them and thus is afraid to look at him, or that she does not want him to come for fear that a spark may still exist between them. Eliot politely declines the offer, explaining he is back in the office every evening after court catching up until seven or eight. “Next time,” Will says, and Eliot nods, certain the next time will not come unless Eliot invites himself, which he won’t. Now Andi does turn to smile at him, a different smile from the one she shone at Will, and Eliot believes he detects in her eyes something like gratitude for his begging off. He goes to his office, closing the door for just a minute to settle his breath before the meeting. Finally he admits to himself that he is envious of Andi and Will’s friendship. That he wishes to have both Didi as a lover and Andi as a friend, but that’s fickleness and unfair. You can’t have everything, and at the moment he seems to have nothing.
The meeting takes place in Winston’s office. He announces that as of yesterday they had been assigned to help monitor the activities regarding Negro voter registration in a small Southern town. There were a couple of local NAACP officials, but they had asked for legal assistance as the anticipated large turnout would likely result in arrests and possible police violence. The mass gathering has been whispered to happen the penultimate registration day, Monday the 24th, twenty days hence. Winston details the traveling schedule before speaking a bit about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and its recent offshoot the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Eliot eagerly waits for an opening to express his interest, but before he has a chance to do so Winston tells them that he has already decided who would be going down South in three weeks: Beau and Eliot. Beau seems to accept this news with perfect composure. By contrast, it is only with gargantuan effort that Eliot’s eyes don’t pop out of his head, and there appears to be similar strain in the faces of Andi and Will: Beau and Eliot in close contact for six days? The meeting ends, and Eliot stands to spend the last half-hour before he has to leave for court in his office, a little work and a little brooding. But after dismissing the others, Winston asks him to stay a few minutes.
“Did I ever tell you I knew Ida B. Wells?” Eliot, concerned that his v
oice may betray his irritation over the meeting, shakes his head. “Wonderful lady. Spunk! Once during Reconstruction she was traveling on a train. Bought her ticket and sat in the seat she had paid for, but the conductor walked by, telling her since she was colored she had to go back to the smoking car. She refused, which resulted in a little altercation, which resulted in her biting the conductor’s hand! Another time. Women’s suffrage parade in Washington, she was asked not to march with the others in the Chicago contingent, the white ladies, for fear it would offend the Southern onlookers in our nation’s capital. The Negro women were slated to bring up the rear. So there stood Miss Wells on the sidelines with the spectators, and weren’t they all surprised when the Chicago squad marched by and she jumped right in with em! Nothin they could do.”
“Hmm.” Eliot hears his boss’s laughter while seeing himself in a car next to Beau, the latter driving the automobile as well as the conversation, no doubt a lecture related to the elder’s vast experience and the younger’s analogous deficiency.
“Of course Miss Wells, Mrs. Wells-Barnett, was most known for her tireless efforts toward the criminalization of lynching. I was fresh out of law school when she came to town to speak, The Avenue, the way it was,” and Winston gets that look of lament he always does when referring to Indiana Avenue, the once bustling cultural and business center of the black community with Madame C. J. Walker’s Theatre at its nucleus, now declined to urban blight. “I was in awe, and I introduced myself. Over the next few months I stayed in touch, came to know her a bit, or, more importantly, she came to know me, enough that when a certain lynching transpired in Montana, two teenage boys tied to a railroad track and burnt to a crisp, I received a letter from her.
“Oh I was eager! Hot-footed out there to meet my man, Mr. Freddy McDonnell. Negro attorney, quarter-century my senior. A local colored family put us up, and in the kitchen we were left alone after supper, at which point he reiterated the particulars. The murdered boys had worked for a logging company, and one had allegedly smart-mouthed their despotic white supervisor who in turn allegedly broke the boy’s jaw, then had the teen arrested as well as another of his workhorses, innocent bystander, the boss claiming both colored youths assaulted him. The young men were subsequently seized from their jail cells and the mob match lit. We were there for a potential civil lawsuit, a claim from the victims’ families that their sons’ civil rights had been violated by their murders, though we had little faith it would lead to anything. In truth, we were all yearning for something more substantial in the way of justice: someone going to prison. After the shoddy, indifferent work of the police, it was left to Freddy to undertake a thorough examination—to serve as detective as well as legal representative—grounded in the hope that he would be able to identify viable suspects, then pressure the police to arrest and the district attorney to prosecute. Given that lynching itself was not illegal, the culprits might be tried for the crime of kidnapping.
“That encompassed the first forty-five minutes of our introductory meeting. The subsequent hours were filled with Freddy’s long-winded tales about his esteemed law career, his chutzpah: a thousand times more obstacles for Negro barristers in his day compared with the easy walk for my generation. Then, apropos of nothing, he began to recount the various sexual exploits of his lifetime, the sheer number of which would have been arithmetically impossible. This was a grandfather married to the same woman for decades, mind you.
“In the morning we went to question the local frightened Negroes who not surprisingly had little to contribute, and in the afternoon we spoke with the police captain and lieutenant. The authorities barely went through the motions of replying to our questions, and then. Then swaggering Freddy suddenly transformed. His shoulders drooping, yes suh, no suh, nodding like a dog. I was aghast! And said something that caused the white men’s eyes to narrow onto me. Fortunately Freddy caught this before it escalated and put me outside fuming, pacing. Then Miss Hannah Casey, an elderly washerwoman, walks up to me. ‘Looky what I found in Mr. Aubrey’s basement,’ and there it was: photograph of four white men grinning in front of the just-slaughtered Negroes. At that moment Freddy comes out of the police station, seeming tired. I held up the picture. He looked at it, looked at me, snatched the photograph, muttering, ‘Stay out here,’ and ran back inside. For a moment I was stupefied. Then ready to spit nails, I stormed in! And stopped short. There’s Freddy all humble. And there’s the captain and lieutenant looking at the photo. Really looking at the photo. Then they looked up at me, and this distaste crossed their faces, and Freddy mortified to see me standing there. As if a moment before they were seriously entertaining the possibility of acting upon the evidence, but my presence brought them back to their senses, now ready to discard the absurd idea, prosecuting lynchers. ‘Sorry,’ I stammered. ‘Sorry,’ and I backed out the door. Twenty minutes later Freddy walked out with the two officers, him in meek tow. The cops disappeared, and after an hour they returned—with two of the white brutes in handcuffs! They were convicted on kidnapping charges: two years for the ringleader, fourteen months for his sidekick. Outrageously lenient, and yet a victory, miracle it happened at all.”
Winston takes out his pipe and lights it. Eliot glances at the clock. He needs to leave for court in four minutes.
“I kept Miss Wells apprised of the details, and later, when it was all over, I cautiously relayed to her the difficulties I had had with my partner. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Freddy can be a jackass. But I thought the two of you would make a good combination.’ She knew there was value in our amalgamated talents, and that we could rise above our petty differences. In the end I came to respect Freddy McDonnell, have regretted we never had occasion to work together since.” He puffs. “Do you understand?”
“Yes sir, I understand.”
“Good.” He indicates for Eliot to rise to his feet, then pats him on the back. “I hear things have been going acceptably in court this week. Think you’ll rest soon?”
Eliot isn’t sure what “acceptably” means so sticks to the question. “At this rate probably Thursday or Friday.”
“Well then. You and Beau will have all next week to start strategizing. I know you’ll take good care of each other down in ole Dixie.”
Eliot rushes back to his office to grab his briefcase. Standing in wait for the decrepit elevator, he remembers Didi’s smile as she told him she wished she’d written her will before getting on “The Lift of Terror.” He glimpses Will coming out of the conference room with coffee and stopping by Andi’s desk. “Got one for ya. A priest, a rabbi, and a cracker judge are all sent to meet St. Peter.” Will’s voice then lowers to an animated whisper. The cage finally arrives and Eliot steps in, closing the gate, and just before the corridor outside Winston Douglas and Associates disappears from his view, he hears Andi’s raucous laughter, and Will joining in.
14
“As this is the last chance I have to speak with you before you’re excused to deliberate, first and foremost I want to express my sincere gratitude to each and every one of you for your time and attention over the last nine days.
“On the surface your task appears to be simple. Given the evidence, you are asked to decide if you believe Mr. Daughtery is or is not guilty of the crimes with which he has been charged, which are resisting arrest, possession of a concealed weapon, and racketeering. If you decide that he is guilty of one or two or all three of these, you are bound to have reached that conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt.
“And if you find Mr. Daughtery not guilty of any or all charges. What makes this determination so complicated is that you would in essence be implying your uncertainty regarding the honesty of the police. There is no concrete proof that any crime took place. All the evidence is circumstantial based upon the testimony of the officers: their word against Mr. Daughtery’s.
“With respect to the charge of resisting arrest. That Mr. Daughtery suffered critical injuries on the day of his ap
prehension by Officers Crawley, Pfeiffer, Sheradon, and Wooley is not in question. The policemen claim that Mr. Daughtery’s resistance to his arrest was to such a threatening degree that they were obliged to restrain him with extraordinary force. There is, as we all know, disagreement over whether that force continued after Mr. Daughtery was handcuffed and in custody at the stationhouse, but I’ll get to that in a moment. For now we have Mr. Daughtery, whom each of the four officers has described in his testimony as, quote, ‘big and menacing,’ unquote. He has not seemed so big in this courtroom but, in fairness, a man in a wheelchair does appear small. He is able to stand for intervals of a few seconds, at which point his height can be determined to be five feet eleven, though I did have to curve the tape measure since his body seems to be in a fixed stooping position and before Mr. Ingram puts forth the objection that he has just stood to raise I will remind you that Mr. Daughtery’s physical condition should not affect your judgment regarding his guilt or innocence, that if the four officers inadvertently caused injury, permanent or otherwise in the necessary course of their duties, then the damage to Mr. Daughtery’s person would be considered an unfortunate but inescapable consequence of the policemen’s engagement.
“Where I become confused is in the officers’ claim that all four of them, and they are certainly not small men themselves, but all of them were required to exercise such force to restrain Mr. Daughtery, that the defendant physically overwhelmed them. By contrast, Mr. Daughtery has stated that his only resistance to the police were his verbal assertions that he wanted a lawyer, that he has rights, and words alone do not warrant physical restraint, let alone the fact that Mr. Daughtery was completely within his rights to utter those words. Of the nine civilian eyewitnesses to the arrest who have testified before you, not one saw Mr. Daughtery assault any of the policemen in any way, but, as you’ll recall, the officers have stated that all of those witnesses are either lying or, as Officer Pfeiffer put it, ‘blind.’