Mississippi Blood

  “Oh, I’m so afraid. What if they arrest you for what you did last week? For driving Tom around while he was wanted?”

  “I don’t think they will. I’ve been helping the FBI and the Louisiana State Police with some important cases. They don’t want me in custody. The sheriff in Natchez could give me some hassle, but I don’t think he wants to get crossways with the feds over one dried-up old Texas Ranger.”

  The hiss of bad connection comes over the speakers. Then Carmelita says, “Walter, I’m so worried. You’ve risked so much for Tom already. I know he’s your friend, but . . .”

  “But what, darlin’? Spit it out.”

  “Are you sure Tom didn’t hurt that nurse? Not even as a—how you say, mercy?”

  “Mercy killing.”

  “Sí. Are you certain, in your heart?”

  This time the silence drags so long that my pulse begins pounding in my ears. Then Walt speaks words that I know he will regret for the rest of his life.

  “Carmelita . . . the truth is, I don’t know what happened in that house that night. And part of me doesn’t want to know. The truth is, even if he did kill her, I wouldn’t do anything different than I’ve done. I know you don’t understand it, but the man is my friend. And I owe him. From Korea, and for a lot more.”

  “I know,” Carmelita says. “I’m not trying to nag you. I just worry.”

  “I know. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Shad raises his hand, and his assistant stops the tape.

  Beside me, my mother has lowered her head, surely to mask tears. In the witness box, Walt looks out over the crowd with the same iron self-control he always displays. But inside he is dying.

  “Your Honor,” Shad says, “I have no further questions for this witness.”

  Walt starts to get up, but Judge Elder says, “You haven’t been released, Captain.”

  Judge Elder looks at the defense table. “Mr. Avery?”

  “No questions, Your Honor.”

  Walt just manages to hold himself in the chair until Judge Elder says, “You may step down.”

  Joe Elder watches Walt walk away like a weathered statue of a cowboy brought to life: his chin held high, his eyes scanning the crowd, zeroing in on anyone who stares at him. I suspect that, like most men in the room, Joe Elder is wondering just what he would have done had he found himself in that ambulance on that freezing night.

  At first I can only see the back of my father’s head, but then he turns to watch every step of Walt’s journey out of the courtroom. As Walt passes the bar, pain flickers in his face, but beyond him I see my father’s eyes, and they are filled with forgiveness.

  “Mr. Johnson,” prompts Judge Elder. “You may call your next witness.”

  Shad comes to his feet, his hands at his side.

  “Your Honor, the State rests.”

  My first reaction is relief—pure, unbounded relief that Dad is not going to be subjected to a parade of relatives of deceased patients claiming that he helped to kill their loved ones. But before I can think too much about this, Judge Elder looks down at Quentin and says, “Mr. Avery, are you ready to proceed with your opening statement?”

  “Your Honor, I am. But I have two issues. First, I’m having some medical issues, and I’d like to deal with those before my opening statement. Second, my first witness is flying in from out of state, and he only landed in Baton Rouge a half hour ago. He’s at least forty-five minutes away. Further, I only intend to make very brief remarks in my open. For those reasons, if the court is amenable, I would prefer to make my opening statement tomorrow morning, and then proceed directly with my first witness.”

  Many judges would agree to this, but Joe Elder says, “Is your medical problem acute, Mr. Avery?”

  Quentin seems surprised by the question. “It’s . . . well, more of a chronic issue, Judge.”

  “It’s not yet four o’clock, Mr. Avery. Unless you have an acute emergency, we can’t afford to waste the court’s valuable time due to inadequate travel arrangements for your witness.”

  Quentin appears so shocked by Elder’s response that he’s at a loss for words.

  In the resulting vacuum, the judge says, “I will grant a ten-minute recess if you need to take medication or deal with any physical needs. But after that, you will proceed with your opening statement.”

  To my surprise, Quentin actually turns and looks back at me, but I can’t read his eyes. Is he asking me to help him decide what to do?

  “No, thank you, Judge,” he says, turning back to the bench. “I’ll proceed with my statement now.”

  “Very well.” Elder gives Quentin a suspicious look. “You may begin.”

  And with that, “Preacher” Quentin Avery whirs around the defense table, stops beside the podium, and faces a jury that, like me, must wonder just what this unpredictable attorney’s idea of an opening statement might be.

  Chapter 42

  “Lord, our district attorney likes to talk, doesn’t he?”

  Quentin has stationed his wheelchair beside the podium, but I’m sure this is only his initial position. He will almost certainly move around the courtroom during his statement, seizing and releasing the territory between judge, jury, and the spectators like a wily field general, pressing home every advantage that his handicap gives him. “I guess when you graduate from a high-dollar law school like Harvard, you just can’t resist exercising all those fine, big words they teach up there.”

  “Mr. Avery,” Judge Elder breaks in, “you know better than that.”

  “My apologies, Judge. In my younger days I used to pride myself on my own verbal facility, but I’ve gotten so old now that I have to get straight to the point. When you’re liable to have to run to the restroom any minute, like me, you can’t take time to gild the lily.”

  Quentin rolls his chair out into the open space before the jury box and smiles at them like a kindly patriarch about to address his relations at a family reunion.

  “Where do I begin, ladies and gentlemen? To tell you the truth, my head is spinning. As best I can remember, we started out yesterday morning in Natchez, Mississippi, in 2005, and we ended up this afternoon by the side of a road in North Korea in 1950. I can hardly get my bearings. So while I try, I’m going to tell you a story about my daddy.

  “Yesterday and today, while the district attorney’s witnesses paraded in and out of that box, I kept thinking back to my childhood. World War Two was going on, and I was nine or ten years old. This was a frightening time in the world, with nobody quite sure what was true and what wasn’t. Well, I got into trouble at school with some other boys, and then I managed to get out of it. I did that by using my quick wits and quicker tongue. I was pretty proud of myself, yes sir. Downright smug, probably. But you couldn’t keep nothing from my daddy. By four thirty that evening, Daddy knew everything that had happened. And he sat me down on our old porch and said something I never forgot. He said, ‘Son, half the truth is a whole lie.’”

  Quentin falls silent, seemingly lost in a reverie about his father.

  “Mr. Avery?” prompts Judge Elder.

  “‘Half the truth,’” Quentin ruminates, “‘is a whole lie.’ These past two days, I’ve been noticing that some people didn’t have the benefit of my daddy’s instruction.”

  Shad starts to object, but there’s a long-standing tradition that lawyers do not interrupt each other’s opening statements.

  Quentin rolls closer to the jury. “You folks may not know it, but we have a mess of lawyers sitting in this courtroom with us. Yesterday, too. This is a historic trial. And I’ll tell you right now, a lot of those lawyers think I’m crazy. That I’m going senile. Why? Because I’ve let the DA get away with murder for a day and a half. He’s bent the rules every which way, and I’ve done nothing to stop him. I haven’t even tried to slow him down. I’ve let Mr. Johnson present patently inadmissible testimony without objecting to it . . .”

  Shad’s face is rapidly darkening, but Quentin pushes on, as t
hough oblivious to the effect of his words on opposing counsel. As outrageous as they sound, they are also true.

  “I’ve listened to hearsay, irrelevant evidence, testimony about prior acts that can’t legally be held against my client in the present, and I didn’t object to any of it. I’ll tell you something else. By not objecting, I lost my ability to appeal a guilty verdict based on that testimony. That’s right. If you convict Dr. Cage of murder, I cannot appeal your verdict based on any of the legal flimflam that Mr. Johnson has pulled, because I didn’t object to it when he did it. If I didn’t have the long experience that I do, I believe Judge Elder himself would have dragged me back to his chambers to ask me if I ever graduated from law school.”

  As I scan the faces in the jury box, it seems to me that they are grasping Quentin’s point. Whatever his strategy might be, it’s an all-in bet.

  “So why, you must be wondering, would I do that? Why would I give Shadrach Johnson an inch and watch him take a mile? I’ll tell you. In the Book of Matthew, Jesus said, ‘If a man asks you to walk a mile with him, walk with him twain.’ ‘Twain,’ for those of you who don’t read your Samuel Clemens, means ‘two.’ Well, while Mr. Johnson put on his case, I tried to follow Jesus’s exhortation. It’s been difficult, but early on, Dr. Cage and I decided that, since he has nothing to hide, we would not attempt to stop anybody from saying anything they wanted to on that witness stand. We’re not going to try to ‘game the system,’ as the young folks say, or manipulate it to our benefit. We want the same thing you good people do. We want the truth to come out. The whole truth, and nothing but.

  “That’s a novel strategy, believe me. Even Dr. Cage’s son, our distinguished mayor, is worried that I’m getting old-timer’s disease. But I told the mayor what I tell you now: my faith in his father’s integrity is such that I have no fear about letting any man say what he will in this court.”

  Quentin lets the silence stretch out, so that his words will sink into the collective mind of the jury.

  “Half the truth is a whole lie,” Quentin repeats, as though for his own benefit. “The Good Book says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’ Well, I promise you that, before my case is done, you will see that the Ninth Commandment has been broken by more than one witness for the State. And I’d like to remind some of the people in this room that in our modern age, that biblical proscription has been codified into law. The offense is called perjury, and the sentence is grave: not less than ten years.”

  The jury seems appropriately impressed, and Shad looks downright worried by the turn Quentin’s open has taken. The DA must be wondering which of his witnesses lied, and if they did, whether Quentin has evidence to prove it.

  Taking a small piece of paper from the crocheted comforter on his lap, Quentin says, “During his opening remarks, the district attorney said an interesting thing. To paraphrase, he said, ‘Were it not for the fact of race, Viola Turner would not have been murdered.’ That’s provocative, isn’t it?” Quentin rolls back to the defense table and puts his hand on my father’s shoulder. “Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you about this man and race.

  “Tom Cage was the first doctor in this town to integrate his waiting room. He did that against the wishes of his boss, Dr. Wendell Lucas. Tom Cage made house calls at night on the north side of town when it was still called the colored section—or Niggertown—and other white doctors thought he was a fool.”

  The courtroom feels as though its barometric pressure has suddenly dropped three points, into the storm zone. Quentin Avery is about as predictable as a tornado, and there’s no telling what might come out of his mouth.

  “For forty years,” Quentin continues, his hand still on Dad’s shoulder, “this man treated black folks as he would his own family. In an era when white children called black men of seventy by their first names only, Tom Cage called his black patients mister and missus. Back then, any white male might say to a black stranger walking down the road, ‘Hey, Mose, get over here and fix my flat tire.’ And old Mose went.” Quentin lets his hand fall from my father’s shoulder, then shakes his head like he remembers fixing the tires of more than one white man in his youth. “But in Dr. Cage’s office, it was, ‘How are you feeling today, Mister Jackson? Let me palpate that liver for you, Mrs. Ransom.’ I’m talking about respect, folks—plain good manners. And if a man couldn’t pay his bill from Dr. Cage, he knew he could drop by the Cage house with a mess of collards or a bucket of catfish, and that would stand as good as cash money.”

  This is the unadorned truth. I remember countless visits like that, and the shy expressions on the faces of the men who brought the buckets and boxes.

  “And if you couldn’t manage that,” Quentin says, “you knew no debt collector would be coming to your door to embarrass you in front of your wife and children. Because in those cases, more often than not, Dr. Cage just let it go. Why? Because he knew how it was for black folk in Mississippi. Tom Cage knew how it was for poor folks, because he’d grown up poor himself. He knew what it was to do without. And he didn’t want to be the cause of anybody else’s children suffering.”

  Rusty Duncan nudges my knee and nods toward the prosecution table.

  To my amazement, Shad Johnson is actually pretending to play a violin, which tells me that he’s grossly misjudged his jury. But Quentin has not. In less than five minutes, the old fox has turned aside the juggernaut of momentum that Shad painstakingly built up over the past two days and convinced at least half the jury that they’d be lucky to have an uncle or a father as honest and fair and understanding as Quentin Avery. A closer look at Shad tells me that he’s making his satirical gesture to conceal the rage threatening to boil out of him at Quentin’s folksy performance. For a performance is what it is. No one knows better than Shadrach Johnson that the man in the wheelchair talking like a cross between Will Rogers and Martin Luther King Jr. has argued landmark cases before the Supreme Court, and on those occasions Quentin did not speak like a man who’d just walked out of a Delta cotton field. But galling though it might be, Shad is bound by custom to silence.

  “I could parade five hundred people through this courtroom to verify my assertions,” Quentin continues, “but I don’t need to do that. Because most everybody in this room already knows they’re true. The black folk here know there ought to be a monument in front of the old house on High Street where Dr. Cage had his clinic. Where other whites saw a Negro, a nigra, a nigger, a buck, a boy—Tom Cage saw a human being. When most everybody else treated you like a servant, Dr. Cage treated you as an equal. Black folk knew they could go to his clinic and get help, no matter how much trouble they were in.” Quentin raises his forefinger and tilts it just enough that it’s pointing at a pair of black women sitting in the jury box. “How can I put a price on what that meant to people in this town? I don’t know a number that high. And yet”—he sighs as though he can hardly bear to go on—“here sits Tom Cage, accused of premeditated murder of a patient under his care. Here he sits, stoic and silent, while low men and women lie under oath and slander his name.” Quentin hangs his head, as though he can barely endure the injustice of the situation. “Do you know what I say to that, ladies and gentlemen?”

  The jury collectively leans forward.

  The white shock of hair comes up. “Do you know what I say to the State of Mississippi? To the high-and-mighty district attorney?”

  Several jury members actually cock their ears toward Quentin to be sure they don’t miss his answer.

  Quentin turns to Shad, his eyes burning with what looks like contempt. “Have you no shame, brother?”

  Shad finally explodes, which is exactly what Quentin wanted. “Judge, this is outrageous! Opposing counsel isn’t making an opening statement. He’s delivering an oral hagiography of his client and slandering the district attorney!”

  “Oral hagiography?” Quentin echoes, as though mystified. “Isn’t that illegal in Mississippi?”

  Half the lawyers in the room burst into laughter, prom
pting Judge Elder to come down hard on Quentin.

  “Mr. Avery, attorneys are permitted considerable leeway in their opening remarks, but you’re not only exceeding the agreed-upon speed limit, you’re driving on the wrong side of the yellow line. Confine yourself to the facts of the case, or move on to your case in chief.”

  Shad is livid, but he can do nothing more to slow Quentin’s flow.

  “Members of the jury,” Judge Elder continues, “please disregard the defense attorney’s last comments.”

  “Thank you for putting me back on course, Judge,” Quentin says, all amicability again. “Let’s get down to the facts that Mr. Johnson has been making such a fuss about. We all know by now that a romantic relationship existed between Dr. Cage and Viola Turner in February and March of 1968. The district attorney has done his best to make that relationship sound sleazy, as though Tom Cage were the kind of slavering, lecherous white man who liked a little dark meat on the side when he could get it.”

  The crowd gasps, and the judge steps in again. “Watch your language, Counselor.”

  But Quentin refuses to back off. “Judge, can we not be frank in this forum? We’re all adults here. Can we not use the language that accurately portrays the situation?”

  The jury clearly agrees with Quentin, but Joe Elder says, “Mr. Avery, you’ll remain within the bounds of propriety or suffer the consequences.”

  “All right, Judge. Well . . . we all know the kind of man I was talking about. But Tom Cage ain’t that kind of man. In forty-five years of practicing medicine, not one sexual harassment claim has ever been made against him. And during all those years, he’s had several black female employees, all of whom are willing to come forward and testify to his good character.

  “So. What caused this illicit relationship? Do we need Sherlock Holmes or Sigmund Freud to figure it out? No. I doubt anyone knew Tom Cage better than Viola Turner, the exceptional nurse who worked at his side during the troubled 1960s. Now, I don’t know what problems might have existed in Dr. Cage’s marriage.” At this point, Quentin looks pointedly at my mother, who stares straight ahead like a graven image of the long-suffering but loyal wife.