Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  Uhuru’s cross-examinations were brief and to the point. He got the auditor to sheepishly admit that his laboriously explained auditing procedures had failed to detect $12,000 J. J. had—in Uhuru’s delicate phrase—“redeployed,” and that he had only discovered this additional missing money after J. J. had showed him where to find the records of each of the transactions.

  His questioning of the detective was equally succinct.

  “Detective, when you went to his rooming house to arrest Mr. Howe, did he resist?”

  “No.”

  “How would you describe his demeanour at that time?”

  “Well,” the detective said, “he was co-operative. He said he’d been waiting for us to catch him and that he’d be happy to have his day in court. A lot of what he said—about Africville and reparations—didn’t make much sense to me at the time and I don’t remember the details very well.” He paused, as if trying to conjure up those details. “Oh, yes, there was one other thing he said.” The detective paused again, a smile playing at the corner of his lips.

  “Yes, detective?” Uhuru encouraged him.

  “He asked for you.”

  The spectators laughed.

  Even though the Judge had already ruled that Uhuru could mount his justification defence, Gettings still popped up like a jack-in-the-box to challenge every single witness Uhuru tried to call.

  “Professor Wilmot may be an expert on local history and may have written articles on Africville, Your Honour, but I fail to see what relevant testimony he has to offer the court in this case . . .”

  “I’m sure I would find Dr. Robertson’s dissertation on the history of reparations most enlightening and, if Mr. Melesse would like to rent a hall for him to speak, I’d be the first in the door. But I don’t believe we should be spending taxpayers’ dollars and taking up precious courtroom time with such extraneous matters when the real question before this court is whether Mr. Howe stole more than $300,000 from the taxpayers of this city.”

  The judge overruled every single one of Gettings’s objections. “I think I’d . . . like to hear what . . . this witness has to say,” was all he ever said, but it was more than enough to give the CBC’s Talking Heads something to discuss. Which was also a good thing, since the expert testimony itself was as riveting as an academic essay. By the trial’s sixth day, Moira’s stories were being relegated to the inside of the paper and weren’t even promoted in a box on the front page.

  That’s not to say some of the information wasn’t interesting. Professor Wilmot quoted a 1954 report from the City Manager recommending the residents be relocated. “The area is not suited for residences,” it said, “but, properly developed, is ideal for industrial purposes.” So much, Moira thought, for the City’s later claim that it had moved the residents “for humanitarian reasons.”

  But much of the testimony consisted of obscure legal arguments that might have been critical in law but were mind-numbing in print. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Michelle fretted on the phone the morning after Wilmot’s testimony. “Morton says we’ll give it to the end of the week, but if there aren’t any fireworks by then, he wants me to reassign you back into general and let Anne work it in around her other court stuff, maybe with a brief or something.”

  Moira did her best to be reassuring. “I think we’re past the worst of it,” she said. “Robertson should be finished today, and then I hear the defence is going to call former residents. J.J.’s parents. That should be a good show.”

  “I hope so,” Michelle said.

  “Me too,” Moira added. She did not feel much more confident than her editor sounded.

  “No further questions,” Uhuru Melesse said. He turned away from Jeffrey Jack Howe—J. J. the Elder—and looked over at Henry Gettings. “Your witness,” he said.

  It had gone better than he’d hoped. Or had it? Uhuru Melesse was no longer sure whether he was winning or losing, or whether this—whatever “this” was—was the right strategy. He spent his days in the courtroom, his nights either reading transcripts of his days in the courtroom or prepping for the next day’s witnesses. When he wasn’t consumed by the case itself, he was trying to deal with its fallout. He worried about how he would pay this month’s rent. He worried about whether to accept Shondelle’s offer to pay last month’s rent. What would saying yes mean? No? After they made love, Uhuru would fall asleep, wake up, worry, fall asleep, have a dream about winning, a nightmare about losing, wake up again. Sweating. Between times, he and Shondelle would argue about trial tactics and whether the toilet seat should be up or down.

  Shondelle had urged him to begin J. J.’s defence case by calling one of the former residents to testify. “After Gettings finishes putting them to sleep,” she argued, “you’ve got to wake the jury up, show them there’s a human side.” Uhuru had resisted. The key, he said, was to build their case carefully and conventionally, laying out the context with historians and experts, then bringing in the former residents to show what their lives had been like before and after the relocation. Once that was done, they could parade representatives from the various organizations to which J. J. had given money, all of whom would testify to the good—and vital—works the City’s money had paid for. And then, finally, just before the jury began its deliberations, he would call J. J.’s parents to demonstrate, in the starkest terms possible, what ultimately drove J. J. to do what he did, what justified his otherwise illegal actions.

  “I agree with everything you’ve said, Mr. Melesse, except for ending your case with Mr. Howe’s parents,” Cecil Montague had offered softly, almost apologetically, at their first meeting. “It’s too risky.”

  Why hadn’t he listened? Uhuru wondered now.

  A month before the trial was scheduled to begin, Uhuru’s old law school professor had called, seemingly out of the blue, to offer his services, pro bono, to the defence team. “I’d be pleased to do anything you feel would be helpful,” he’d explained on the phone.

  At first, Uhuru had been skeptical; it was Shondelle who had convinced him that Montague could be an asset. “Let’s face it,” she’d said, “neither of us has any experience with actual trials. Montague does.”

  “But—”

  “And the fact is,” she cut him off, “the man has won plenty of cases nobody thought he could—or should—win.”

  “But—”

  “I know. A long time ago he got some racist white boys off who should still be in jail. But isn’t that what we’re trying to do here, too? Free a black man who, according to a strict interpretation of the law, should be going to jail?”

  After he’d agreed to have Montague join the defence team, Uhuru discovered that Montague’s surprising call to him had come as no surprise to Shondelle. Even though he’d been retired for close to a decade, Montague still maintained an office and some influence at the law school. In fact, he’d been a key champion of Shondelle’s hiring, and was currently promoting her undeclared campaign to become the school’s first African-Canadian dean when the current one retired in two years.

  After he’d found out that Shondelle was involved in the Howe defence, Montague had begun sending her long, detailed memos full of legal theory—even suggesting at one point the possibility of a constitutional challenge—and courtroom strategies, many of which Shondelle had later presented to Uhuru as her own. At first, however, even she had dismissed outright Montague’s contrarian ideas about jury selection. When he did finally convince her of their logic, Shondelle allowed that she wasn’t sure she could get Uhuru to agree.

  “Why not let me try?” Montague had suggested over lunch one day. “I’ve got time on my hands and, who knows, maybe there are some other ways I could be useful to your case.” It was not lost on Shondelle that the presence of a distinguished-looking, white-haired white guy at the defence table might be reassuring to a jury, especially an all-white jury.

  And that
was the essence of Montague’s counterintuitive argument on jury selection. “Pick yourself a jury that’s white and middle class and new to Halifax,” he urged Uhuru when they met. “This isn’t the city it was when I was practising, or even when you graduated from law school, Mr. Melesse. It’s more cosmopolitan. Lots of new people. They’re better educated, more liberal, or at least want to be seen that way. They’ve probably never heard of Africville and they’ll be appalled when they find out what the City did. They’ll want to acquit Mr. Howe for that reason alone. You want folks like that on your jury.

  “What you don’t want are people who grew up here, ones like me. They’ll remember Africville as a slum and believe the City was trying to do the right thing by moving the people out. Even if they don’t remember much about Africville itself, they won’t want to see their hometown’s name dragged through the national press as some racist backwater. They’ve had enough of that over the years, and they’ll blame your client for embarrassing them again.

  “So what I’m suggesting, Mr. Melesse, is go for an all-white jury, but a middle-class white jury made up of folks who’ve lived in the city for no more than the last ten or fifteen years.”

  “Why all white?” Uhuru asked. Defensive now. Resentful, too. Was Montague really a racist? “Don’t you think black people would be sympathetic to our case?” How could a white guy know how blacks think?

  “Some would, of course,” Montague answered without rancour. “But you can’t assume all black people are going to think the way you want them to.” He paused, smiled to himself. He knew it was ludicrous for a white man to be telling a black man how black people thought. He continued anyway. “They’re just as different as white folks. So you have to be at least as careful about any blacks you select for your jury. Maybe more so. Your best prospects, it seems to me, will have characteristics opposite to your white jurors. You want poor, or at least working-class people who’ve lived in this community all their lives and who remember what it was like to be black in Halifax during the sixties and seventies. The problem is that, for whatever reason, those people aren’t usually well represented in jury pools. So you may not have anyone like that to choose from.

  “What you don’t want—at least in my view—are black jurors from the business and professional classes, or blacks who’ve moved here from somewhere else. They’re anxious to look forward, not backward. They’re living in the white suburbs trying to fit in, and they aren’t going to want to do anything that would make their colour an issue. The come-from-aways tend to look down on the locals anyway, and they’ll figure this isn’t their fight.”

  Montague stopped, allowed silence to weave its questions and doubts. Then he laughed. “What a crock!” he said. “Here I am sitting in a room with a black professional and a black come-from-away—both of whom I’d kill to get on my jury in a case like this!” Montague looked from one to the other; their expressions were puzzled now. “I apologize. It’s the old professor in me,” Montague explained. “I just wanted to make the point that you shouldn’t get caught up thinking of your jury in simple black and white terms. In too many cases, the easiest stereotypes don’t work. And even the more sophisticated stereotypes are stereotypes. Make no mistake: who you get on this jury is going to determine whether you win or lose. All I’m trying to do is get you to think outside the clichés, to know all you can about each potential juror before you say yea or nay.”

  All of which seemed intended as a backdrop and lead-up to Montague’s offer to put together a dossier on each potential juror. Using his own money, Montague hired two law students to assist him in tracking down information.

  That was how they’d discovered that jury pool member sixty-five—a black software engineer, originally from Uganda, who was married to a white woman and lived in an expensive south-end condo overlooking the Northwest Arm—was also a frequent contributor to an American online discussion group for black professionals opposed to affirmative action.

  If it hadn’t been for Montague, Uhuru knew, jury pool member sixty-five would almost certainly have been sitting in judgment of his client today. Still, Uhuru wasn’t comfortable that they’d ended up with an all-white jury in a case that so clearly turned on race. Just as he wasn’t sure any more that he should have insisted, against Montague’s advice, on calling J. J.’s father as the final witness for the defence. When Uhuru had finally got the chance to interview him in jail, Howe had repeatedly answered his questions by asking him what he wanted him to say. “I’ll say what you want,” he’d said. “Just tell me what it is.” (Uhuru had planned to put J. J.’s mother, Jaina, on the stand too, but no one had been able to find her to serve the subpoena.)

  J. J. the Elder’s sorry track record with the law, coupled with whatever all those drugs had done to his brain, would have made him a chancy witness under the best of circumstances. But Uhuru’s bull-headedness in insisting on calling him as the final witness meant that his testimony—and worse, his cross-examination at the hands of Gettings—was what jurors would remember going into the jury room.

  Gettings was smarter than Uhuru had given him credit for. And better prepared. In the beginning, Gettings had done little more than raise objections to Uhuru’s witnesses. For the record. For the appeal, in case it ever came to that. He hadn’t cross-examined any of Uhuru’s expert witnesses, creating the impression for the jury that what they had to say wasn’t all that significant.

  Although he still bounced to his feet like a schoolboy to object every time Uhuru called a new witness, those interjections had now become perfunctory. Once Gettings had belatedly realized that Ward Justice, for whatever reason, was willing to give the defence latitude to present its case, he began to focus on subtly undermining each defence witness instead. His cross-examinations were delivered as little more than gentle pokings and proddings, but Uhuru could feel the bruises they were inflicting.

  After Uhuru had led Calvin Johnstone through his examination-in-chief, for example—getting Calvin to paint a more idyllic than realistic picture of growing up in Africville, followed by an apocalyptic vision of the relocation (“When they came and bulldozed my Aunt Mame’s house, they gave her just ten minutes to get out. She was crying. Everyone was upset . . .”), followed by a chronology of his own years of unsuccessful lobbying and negotiations to convince the City to compensate the former residents—Gettings got his chance on cross to do some damage.

  “You told my friend that you are the president of the Africville Descendants’ Association. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now that association has filed a civil suit against the City in connection with these matters. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have a direct interest in the outcome of this case. Is that correct?”

  “Uh—”

  “Objection.” Uhuru wasn’t sure what he was objecting to, but it didn’t matter.

  “Withdrawn,” Gettings said. He would let the question do its insidious work. “Is yours the only organization that purports to represent a cross-section of the former residents, Mr. Johnstone?”

  “Yes. We’re the only one.”

  “Now, as president of this organization, Mr. Johnstone, would you be aware of the names of most of your members?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you know whether the defendant was ever a member of your organization?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Has Mr. Howe ever held an executive position with the organization?”

  “No.”

  “So I take it then that Mr. Howe was never authorized to speak—or act—on behalf of the organization, or negotiate with the City in the name of former Africville residents, or . . . decide how much the former residents should get in compensation, or how it should be paid out and to whom. Correct?”

  Calvin looked at Uhuru, his eyes pleading for rescue. But there was nothing Uhuru
could do. “Y-y-yes,” he said finally.

  “Okay, let’s leave that for now and let me ask you . . . have you ever been convicted of a criminal offence, Mr. Johnstone?”

  Calvin looked suitably surprised, then indignant. “No.”

  “You’re a teacher?”

  “Retired. “

  “After forty years, I believe.”

  “Forty-one. “

  “Right, forty-one years. A long and, from what I have been told, distinguished career. For which you are to be congratulated. Now, Mr. Johnstone, you testified, in what I can only describe as pretty compelling terms, about the bad things that happened to young people from Africville after the relocation.” He paused long enough for the spectators to connect the dots of his questions. “Luckily,” he continued, “those bad things didn’t seem to happen to you. Do you have any statistics to show that former residents of Africville are more likely to commit crimes or be dope addicts or end up involved in street prostitution than other members of the black community?”

  “No, I don’t.” Gettings had phrased his question perfectly to elicit the instinctively huffy response he got from Calvin.

  “Well, then, would you agree with me that, in this courtroom, we have at least two concrete examples—yourself and my friend, Mr. Melesse—of individuals who grew up in Africville, were part of this ‘forced relocation’ and became fine, upstanding, productive members of our community?”