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“Why didn’t you tell me that Leslie and Anne Randolph were murdered on Friday?”
“What?” exclaimed Frank.
“They’re the ones Jerome is accused of killing. You say you didn’t know?”
“No. Your momma and me took Lucy to that special doctor over in Richmond. Left Friday night after I got off work, and got back late Sunday night. Didn’t see the TV or read a paper. Murdered? The Randolphs?”
“Yes. The Randolphs.”
“So what do you think after meetin’ with him?”
“I think I have a better chance of becoming president of the United States than Jerome Washington has of ever walking out a free man from this.”
CHAPTER 10
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT AND Jack was still not in bed. He had just made the most critical decision in the thirty-three years he had been alive, and now deep uncertainty had crept in. And with that the desire for sleep had vanished.
He was in his office, which was also his home, with a bedroom and shower upstairs, and an office and a toilet downstairs, along with a small kitchen. It was located in a one-and-a-half-story clapboard dwelling in Carter City, the sovereign seat of Freeman County. It was within walking distance of the county courthouse where Jerome Washington would be tried for his alleged crimes, and, in all probability, imprisoned for life for those crimes, whether he had committed them or not.
The cavernous brick structure next to Jack’s had once been used as a tobacco warehouse, and his building was where the warehouse manager had once lived; like Jack’s setup, it had also served as the manager’s office. The residual smells of the curing leaves were still pungent all these decades later. He didn’t know how folks could have endured working there when the place actually contained the leafy plants, but tobacco growing was synonymous with Virginia. All the majestic plantations around here could trace their origins to that sole cash crop.
He stared out the open window onto the lighted street below.
Before the Supreme Court had recently changed the rules, most poor whites and all Blacks went through the legal system without the aid of counsel, which meant they represented themselves, or pro se. Jack knew that was a Latin term that basically meant, “You lose.”
He didn’t know any white lawyer who had ever represented a Black person in Freeman County for two simple reasons: You weren’t going to win, and you weren’t going to get paid much. He was actually stunned that George Connelly had stepped in to represent Jerome, even at his arraignment.
He continued to stare down onto the streets of Carter City hoping for a breeze that never came. The city was named after Robert “King” Carter, one of the wealthiest American colonists, mostly by virtue of being Englishman Lord Fairfax’s land agent. When Carter died he had left behind three hundred thousand acres, an immense fortune in British pounds, and over a thousand slaves. Carter had also been one of the most successful slave brokers in the Colonies, making several fortunes off buying and selling men, women, and children.
When Lord Fairfax read of this enormous wealth in Carter’s obituary, he had his cousin board a ship to Virginia to be his new colonial agent. Apparently, the exalted lord was shocked that his former representative had become so wealthy, and he didn’t want a repeat performance by another ambitious Virginian.
Jack lived in a world that had been sliced into halves that were termed separate but equal. However, even to an ignorant or a shameless eye, those halves never came within shouting distance of parity. Whether it was buses or bathrooms or water fountains or places of learning or praying or where you’d raise your knife and fork, there was “us” and there was “them” and the lines were drawn starkly, if not in any way purely.
The U.S. Supreme Court had started to break those walls down in the 1950s. But justice ran slow when it had to churn through people. Many of the major changes were still percolating, like water bubbling up to a desert floor. What you often got was nothing more than a mouthful of damp, gritty sand, if not an outright illusion of transformation.
Because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the WHITES and COLOREDS ONLY signs on water fountains, bathrooms, shops, and eateries had now come down for the most part as a result of federal decrees and the presence of armed U.S. marshals in Southern climes. It had occurred at the cost of the Southern states fleeing the LBJ-led Democratic Party and hitching their allegiances to the Republican Grand Old Party of Lincoln, which was irony beyond irony, thought Jack.
However, despite the law, on a bus when a Black sat down in the front, the whites moved to the rear. When a Black came into a store that used to be off-limits to his race, the whites gawked until he left.
Jack wasn’t speculating about this. He’d moved. He’d gawked. And he’d never once spoken out against others who had done so as well.
Yet his upbringing had been different, at least in some respects. His mother had taken her children to the library every Saturday, and he had read books that allowed him to see far beyond the stark boundaries of Freeman County. One day when he was thirteen and checking out his stack as usual, the librarian, a fussy old woman named Mrs. Gooch, had picked up one of the tomes and said, “What in the world are you doing reading this, Jack Lee? I didn’t even know we had this trash on the shelves. We ought to ban lies like this. Or better yet, burn ’em.”
The novel was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The thing was, Jack had not put it in his stack. He was about to tell her so when his mother had come up and said, “The more books read the better, right, Mrs. Gooch?”
And Jack had taken the book home, and read it. He hadn’t found it particularly well written and the main characters seemed exaggerated in many respects: all good, or all evil, without nuance. But what bothered Jack the most about the novel was the fact that the principal reason it seemed to have been written was to warn people of the dangers and cruelty of slavery. Jack, even as a young teenager, wondered why anyone needed to be told that enslavement of humans was wrong.
When he’d later asked his mother why she had placed it in his book pile, she’d said, “The world does not all look like we do, Robert. And if you want to live in that world you need to understand what all of it looks like. Not just our piece of the pie.”
Again, he had been mystified by the seeming incoherence in his mother’s wanting him to read books like that, despite her firm belief that the races should be kept separate. But as a boy he did not have the maturity or intellectual development to muddle through to any particular conclusion. And he dared not push his mother on it. Even as an adult, it continued to puzzle him. And it wasn’t just about books.
As a little boy he had gone with his mother and father to bring needed food and medicine to the families of the Black men that Frank Lee worked with at Old Dixie Transport. He had watched his mother dutifully nurse back to health men, women, and their children. She had done so with the skills and knowledge she had acquired surviving largely by herself on that remote mountain ridge in southwest Virginia, or so his father had told him. He would watch his mother concocting a strong smelling plaster to rub onto the chest of a wheezing baby, or spooning homemade soup into an ill mother’s mouth, or cleverly breaking the fever of a man who was not paid if he was too sick to work.
When he had asked his mother about this she had said it was just folks helping other folks that needed it. There was never mention of the race of the people being helped, although Jack remembered the stares of people in neighboring homes as his father pulled his pickup truck to a stop and they all clambered out with their bulky bags and pale skin.
His extracurricular reading also prompted him to think about things he apparently wasn’t to question during his formal schooling. American history had been taught a peculiar way in Virginia, Jack had found. They had reached the three-day battle of Gettysburg with the South mostly victorious up to that point, but the tide about to dramatically turn in favor of the Union, when the next thing Jack knew they were studying World War I. When he’d asked his teacher about the other years of the titanic American conflict, she had told him firmly that he had learned all he needed to about the War of Northern Aggression.
Later, in college, he read works that powerfully chronicled the struggles of nonwhites in a white-dominated society. Collectively, they had set Jack’s mind to thinking in different ways and directions. And yet despite that enlightenment he had never protested against Jim Crow, or used his legal skills to do so, or sought political office where he could address racism head-on. Apparently, books alone did not inspire bravery, although they could certainly be a catalyst to action. Yet he believed that one day the equal treatment of all would be both the law of the land and the strong preference of its population.
