There were other issues, too: the telephone records (which seemed to confirm the chat-line encounter), lingering unease about the thoroughness and reliability of the police investigations, the missing motive. But because we had mostly agreed to consider the case as we would one of alleged female date-rape, much of the evidence (for instance, the testimony asserting that Cuffee and Milcray were lovers) lost its significance. So what? Though we all agreed (except, possibly, Leah) that Milcray had lied a great deal, there seemed to be a straightforward and plausible way of accounting for all of his lies: accept that Milcray, more than anything else in the world, wanted to hide some experimentation with homosexual relationships (and this seemed quite likely), and then all the lies—the story of Veronique on the street, the unlikely timing of the events, the consensus of witnesses placing him on the scene—suddenly made sense, as did his initial reluctance to tell the police what had happened.
But none of this could help with the real question: Why did Milcray do what he did with that knife? Why did he stick it in the chest of Randolph Cuffee? Self-defense remained a very plausible explanation. Not, perhaps, the most probable, but it could hardly be ruled out, could hardly be placed beyond a reasonable doubt.
Rachel switched sides again. It could have been self-defense, she now said. We were ready for another poll, and it looked as if we were down to a single holdout.
A solid bang rang out on the door, followed by the perfunctory order to cease our deliberations. We were being called to assemble in the court.
When we had taken our places, the judge turned to us and read a statement: it had come to his attention that a juror was ill; he had decided to have her taken to the hospital; we would suspend deliberations until further notice, and were strictly prohibited from discussing the case any further until the full jury could reassemble. Dismissed.
It was shortly before 5 p.m. on Friday evening.
The hours that followed were the most painful of the whole trial. A new complement of court officers took charge, special-duty overtimers replacing the familiar faces of the last weeks, those kind guards who, in the long days of sequestration, had shuttled us to meals, brought aspirin to the jury room, and stood behind us at the urinals (we were never unattended).
These new paunchy weekend cops had oversized highway-patrol sunglasses and gonzo equipment belts. They exuded a palpable air of armed delight. On the judge’s orders they herded us into a cavernous empty courtroom down the hall, where, for almost three hours, we waited without any sense of what to expect. Could the deliberations be suspended indefinitely? Could we be kept in custody all weekend? What if Pat got worse? Would the judge ever let us go?
These anxieties had different effects on the different characters. Paige grew hysterical. She spun into a full-out screaming fit at one of the new officers, and wept for some time. Felipe had managed to procure a large cigar from someplace, and he planted himself in a vestibule, puffing deeply. Jim, Rachel, Vel, and Dean seemed most solid; they looked ready to wait out anything. All of us, however, felt the overwhelming frustration of having been interrupted at just that moment: so close to a verdict, seemingly minutes from consensus.
Although perhaps not. Walking (under guard) down the hall from the jury room to our new holding area in the empty courtroom, I had whispered with Leah, who had been looking particularly preoccupied since emerging from the ladies’ room. I asked if she was holding up. She made an ambiguous gesture.
“Do you have any sense of how things are looking?” I asked.
It was an elliptical question, intentionally. I didn’t want to ask her for a report on her conversation with Adelle in the ladies’ room, but I wanted it to be clear I was interested, if she felt willing to tell me how things had gone.
She did not look at me, keeping her bright-green eyes focused down the long institutional corridor. “I don’t know what I think anymore,” she said hollowly.
So here was a shock. The bathroom colloquy had apparently not gone as I expected. It looked as if Adelle might have won over the absolute vanguard of those seeking acquittal. Incredible.
I took a deep breath, and as we entered the waiting room I reminded myself of my position from the start: a hung jury would be fine with me, probably better than an acquittal. Objective for the foreseeable future? Inner exile. I found a comfortable chair in the corner, faced the wall, put earplugs deep into my ears, and took out my copy of Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems. For some weeks I had been making my way through “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” This would be an excellent time to shut out the world and do several cantos.
For many years this book had served me as a curious tool: I used it to be close to certain people (the small group of those with whom I read the poems regularly—mainly my wife, sometimes a colleague or friend), and to shield myself from many others. Whenever I put in earplugs and opened Stevens, I was both leaving the world around me and, to a degree, waving around a sign that I was leaving. With Stevens I expressed both affection and distance: to carry the book was to be armed to hold banality at bay, to reject the daily dibbling of unpoetic life; but also to be equipped to find kindred souls. The Collected Poems, in this sense, served me as a kind of Good Book.
In this way I carried the book through the initial phases of the trial, reading it alone, at a distance from collective moments as a jury, out of a desire to be apart, but also to find fellow believers and, where possible, to make converts. In the hall in the first weeks, Adelle and I talked briefly about a few of the poems when she asked me what I was reading. Why was “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” so often anthologized? we wondered. How representative of Stevens’s work was it?
In the back of the bus on the morning of the second day of deliberations, one of the guards—a short, stocky Puerto Rican named Ernie—asked me about the book. What was it?
“Poetry,” I said.
Did I read a lot of poetry?
A fair bit.
He used to read a lot of it when he was younger. In fact, one time they had had a Puerto Rican poet on a jury, a great guy.
We talked a little about the island, my wife’s home, and I encouraged him to read more poetry, and to try doing it with another person, so he could talk about what he read. He asked if he could see the book. Taking it, he flipped through for a while, and settled on a shorter poem to try, “The Good Man Has No Shape,” a particularly difficult piece. A few minutes later, he handed the book back. It was about Jesus, he said, which was not wrong. I suggested a few other things, and he nodded, saying that what always struck him about poetry was that it meant something different to everyone, “like art,” he added.
He said it was soothing. I said sometimes, but not always.
On the next morning’s bus, Leah and I sat next to each other, and she asked if I wanted to do a poem together. I said yes, and I chose one of my favorites, “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” a poem that begins:
The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.
And it goes on to express the entanglements of geography and spirit:
There are men of a valley
Who are that valley.
We read our way through the poem together, first silently, and then several times quietly aloud, before going line by line. It was pleasing to do this. Later, at the end of the day, she walked over to me and said that she had figured something out. She alluded to the poem’s memorable last lines:
The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.
And she announced that this was why her business had failed. I looked puzzled. “I had an importing company for a while—jewelry, textiles, carvings. What he says, that is why it failed. . . .”
She was certainly right. I was moved by the insight. Objects taken from their places no longer had their power. The rings she bought in Peru were part of Peru; in the village they meant one thing, in the Village,
something else.
I wondered. Did this explain why we had been willing to ignore the exhibits stacked in the evidence dolly—the blankets, the robe, the wig itself? Were these “invisible elements” of the scene that had been made visible? Could they transport the place from which they came? The things they had seen? They could not.
Now, in suspended animation for hours, I read Stevens, circling around the seventh canto of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” with its remarkable invocation of the fragility and context-dependence of truth:
Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake . . .
These were powerful words to read as a juror, locked up in a grim room.
We had been assigned the task of figuring out a ver-dict—literally, a true-saying, a truth-to-be-spoken. But we were obliged to come up with that truth in a particular room: a closed room, with two windows and white walls, facing west, on the fifteenth floor, without carpeting, a room with two adjoining bathrooms. Did the truth depend on the bathrooms? On the windows? Maybe. What truth would we have found on a walk around a lake? Such a walk seemed infinitely far away from Manhattan in February.
A walk around the lake—take the jury on a walk around the lake, or on a walk through apartment one at 103 Corlears Street, or on a walk around that neighborhood, to inspect the holes ripped in the concrete to preserve spatters of blood. Take the jurors on a walk to Lhassa. They get to know one another. What do they come back and tell you? Perhaps the truth depends on the room, on the walk, on the snow, on the number of chairs with arms. All these things, I now saw, were part of the truth that we would speak. I was part of this truth. So was my khaki tie, my bag of oranges, my wife, the sound of Canal Street in the morning. Dean was a part of this truth, and so were the Hell’s Angels and the dirt in the aisles at Madison Square Garden. Vel was part of this truth, and so was her boss, the Mattress King of Miami. Stevens was a part of this truth, and so were his poems and their places—Hartford, Key West, the thirteen blackbirds. The verdict would come out of the whole of these things, out of us and our world. If there were gods, their justice might be beyond these streets, these people, these memories, but the ways of the gods were certainly not our ways.
I looked around the room behind me. Leah was sitting with Adelle in the back. Jessica and Paige were with them, and they were all talking in hushed voices. I suspected that I was seeing a new momentum building for a conviction. Jim was sitting alone, napping. Dean was talking to our guards, who had just caught Felipe trying, apparently, to escape out the back stairway.
The strong smell of cigar smoke had seeped around the room.
Paige approached me. She looked distraught to the point of collapse. Evidently she had made an effort to get a message to the judge directly, saying she wished to speak with him. He had declined, and she had begun to insist on contacting her lawyer, in order to discover her rights. I felt confident this was going to get her nowhere, and told her so.
When the judge had embarrassed me in front of the whole court, I had been so angry that I called a lawyer friend and asked him what would happen to me if I gave the judge a piece of my mind. He said I might well be held in contempt and tossed in jail for quite some time; the judge, he reminded me, had almost unlimited power over his courtroom. I now explained this to Paige, who asked me what I thought was going to happen next. Assuring her that I had no special information, I gave my opinion: “Chances are the judge leaves Pat in the hospital overnight, for observation, and he sends us all to the hotel again, with instructions to show up tomorrow at nine. By that point they have a diagnosis on Pat. If she is OK, then we continue; if not, we probably wait some more.”
She blanched. “I can’t do any more,” she said.
“Well, I’m not really sure there is any option.” I shrugged.
She asked me directly if there was anything, anything at all, that I could think of that would get her out of the whole mess. I thought for a moment and said, “If you attacked me, right now, or assaulted one of the other jurors, or possibly one of the guards, that would probably do it—provided it was a good, hard, sustained attack.”
She looked at me skeptically for a moment, then blankly. I thought it possible she would make a lunge, and I tensed slightly. The idea of going to the floor with her, in a fury of hair and nails, was not altogether unappealing—it had been several long and stiff days.
She walked away.
It was after seven when we received word that the judge wished to see us. As we entered the court, I cast an eye around the room: the victim’s family was there as ever, still grouped in the back, wearing long faces; Milcray sat alertly beside his attorney, who surveyed us as we filed past the bench; the prosecutors looked tired and glum; the judge directed his most piercing gaze at each of us as we crossed the room—it was a studied stare, a honed and perfected eye, practiced for the purpose of discomfiture.
When we had taken our seats, he informed us that doctors had treated our missing juror and expected to release her shortly. He would have the court officers take us to dinner and then to a hotel, and we would be expected at nine the following morning.
Several distinct groans sounded behind me, and the judge looked up coldly.
“Juror number eight, you will look at me when I address this court.” He fixed Paige for an additional moment with the lance of his eye, and then returned to his memo.
He would also instruct the officers that, if we so desired, the bus was to take us all to our homes, where we would be allowed to pick up a change of clothes. We would be individually escorted into our apartments, and everyone else would have to wait in the bus as the rounds were made through Manhattan, since only a single vehicle was available; the jury was not to be broken up. We were dismissed.
Except for juror number eight, who would please remain.
Out we filed, and as we crossed the bench, I heard Jim speak behind me, loud enough for the whole court to hear: “We’re the prisoners now!”
I cringed. Both because the statement rang true, and because I feared how the judge would respond. But either he was not certain who had spoken or he decided to let the remark pass, already having one fractious juror to reprimand.
We were returned to the deliberation room to gather our belongings and await Pat’s return from the hospital. Once there, I raised the question of whether we wanted to spend the next five hours driving all over the city so everyone could have fresh socks. No one cared. We agreed that we would refuse to go anywhere but the hotel, and that we would insist on eating there, or being allowed to go directly to our rooms if we wished.
When Paige emerged, she looked shaken. Apparently the judge had threatened her with contempt, and the powerlessness of her situation—indeed, the powerlessness of our shared situation—had been made painfully clear. The court officers collected our telephone messages, and went out to dial them in.
On a torn piece of lined paper I wrote: “Graham will not be home tonight, and it is not clear when he will be. He sends his most sincere love, and requests your prayers.”
The scrap came back to me later, marked: “OK left message on recorder 7:33pm J.J.”
We piled into the bus, where Pat awaited us, looking much better. I sat next to Rachel. In the dark, lurching, the tenor of the murmuring conversations suggested that the end was within our grasp.
When we reached the hotel, I went straight to the room and stayed there. Most of the jurors went down to dinner in the lobby restaurant. A guard sat in a chair outside my door; I could see him, in a fish-eyed view, through the spy hole. I showered, ate my last orange, a fennel bulb, and a few almonds, and fell into a deep sleep.
9. The Final Day
I awoke suddenly, before the sun was up, and took my notebook off the night table. I had decided that I was going to make a push, first thing in the day’s deliberations, for a unanimous verdict of acquittal.
Why? I am still not sure.
For the first three days, I had tried to maintain some sembl
ance of balance, if not real neutrality. In part, this came out of concern for my role as foreman, as the person responsible for conducting the deliberations. If that person became too vehemently partisan, I thought, there would be a real danger that those holding opposing positions would turn against the process itself. Since my authority (such as it was) rested on nothing other than people’s good will, it seemed most important, whenever possible, to let others actually make the case on behalf of the defense.
At the same time, of course, my opposition to conviction had grown increasingly clear both to me and to others: I had hazarded a number of actual arguments for acquittal, and at several moments even tried to tip the format of our deliberations in favor of such an outcome. But through all this, I stopped short of pulling out the rhetorical stops in zealously demanding that we find Milcray not guilty.
Mostly this was because I never felt truly hungry for an acquittal. How could I, when nothing would shake my sense that reasonable people could disagree on this case? I was opposed to a guilty verdict, yes, but if, on the second day, everyone in the room had suddenly hummed in unison and called vigorously for acquittal on all counts, I can’t say for certain that I wouldn’t have flip-flopped and begun pointing at all the flaws in Milcray’s defense. The hung jury had been my first choice from the start.
Was there a logic to this ambivalent stance? Perhaps.
I realize now that for me—a humanist, an academic, a poetaster—the primary aim of sustained thinking and talking had always been, in a way, more thinking and talking. Cycles of reading, interpreting, and discussing were always exactly that: cycles. One never “solved” a poem, one read it, and then read it again—each reading emerging from earlier efforts and preparing the mind for future readings. The same went for understanding the past, for teaching history. Whereas scientists and mathematicians might get kudos for answering questions, for resolving problems, I had always felt that my work involved the exact opposite project: keeping the questions open. They were different sorts of questions, of course. For me, being a humanist meant committing my life to a somewhat absurd task: serving full-time as the custodian of unanswerable questions (how to live? what to do? how to know? why?); caring for them; nudging them to the fore in a crowded world; resurrecting others, now forgotten; keeping track of long-lost answers. Such questions cannot be answered, but they are not stupid.
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