Time's Witness (44 page)

Jack Molina, who had presumably written this speech, was the first to leap cheering out of his seat.

Martin Hall was expelled from Hillston High for insubordination to a history teacher. Officer John Emory offered to talk to the school; Martin told him to “get fucked.”

G.G. Walker was admitted to Haver University for the fall term; he was also offered, and accepted, the Dollard Scholarship, a full free ride granted each year since 1928 to six native male North Carolinians considered by the judges to be “mentally, morally, and athletically outstanding.” Justin's mother, Mrs. J.B. Savile IV (née Peggy Dollard) was one of the judges.

I found out I had aced my Ph.D. orals; I decided to put off the dissertation for a year, when presumably my “personal life” would have resolved itself one way or another.

I saw Debbie Molina (Jack's wife) outside civil court in the municipal building; she was deep in conversation with a lawyer I knew, who handled a lot of divorce work. I had an irrational spasm of hope that she was leaving Jack in order to marry Andy. The lawyer told me she was there to testify for a friend in a hospital negligence suit.

Justin had a small beach cottage on Okracoke Island in the Outer Banks, left to him by a man named Walter Stanhope, a friend of his father's and a former Hillston police chief. I asked him if I could use it to get away by myself for a weekend. Lee and I spent Valentine's Day there, walking along the gray beach huddled together under a blanket.

Bubba Percy told me he was “still working” on the Buddy Randolph–Cooper Hall connection. Maybe he was working on it when I saw him in the municipal building following Jordan West down the hall, grinning and jabbering at her. She side-stepped him
into the ladies’ room, where I was amazed he wasn’t gross enough to follow her.

Mrs. Marion (“Call me Eddie”) Sunderland invited me to two dinner-and-bridge parties; she invited Lee to neither one. Bubba showed up at the second of these in a tuxedo with a bow tie the color of his auburn hair. Eddie laughed her head off at his impersonations (mostly stolen from “Saturday Night Live” reruns) of politicians like Clinton, Nixon, and Reagan. He also did Senator Kip Dollard after that gentleman left the party.

A week later I saw Bubba and Eddie both laughing their heads off over a luncheon of stuffed crab at the Pine Hills Inn, where I’d taken Alice for her birthday. It was a shame that when Bubba had finally found a rich, available woman as smart and jaded as he was, she turned out to be seventy-two years old.

A week later, Bubba ran an article implying that in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Haver students in a secret club called the House of Lords had engaged in the ‘intimidation and harassment’ of local blacks and of fellow students sympathetic to the civil rights movement. This article (which gave no credit to the previous article by Cooper Hall in the largely unread
With Liberty and Justice
), claimed that members of that secret club at that time included former Hillston official Otis Newsome and Lieutenant Governor Julian D. Lewis.

Julian Lewis issued a denial.

Bubba was fired by the managing editor of the
Hillston Star.

The managing editor of the
Hillston Star
was fired by the editor- in-chief after the latter's private meeting with Mrs. Marion Sunderland.

The new managing editor was listed on the masthead as “Randolph P. Percy, Jr.,” which was the first anybody had ever heard of Bubba's real name, if in fact it was his real name and not something he’d quickly put together as soon as he’d listened to Edwina Sunderland's spiel on the Nowell-Randolphs of Palliser Farm. I told Eddie it looked like she’d thrown me over for Bubba's eyelashes after all. She told me her impression was that I was “already taken.”

I said, “Meaning what?”

She said, “Meaning, Cuthbert, I just hope you aren’t going to
waste your life—as you so bluntly implied I had wasted mine.”

I said, “I just hope you aren’t ever going to bid four notrump with a singleton again.”

On his new cable television show, Reverend Brodie Cheek endorsed Julian Lewis for governor. So did everybody in the Constitution Club, which meant nearly every business leader in the state did.

Mayor Carl Yarborough endorsed Andy Brookside. So did a whole covey of national figures, both white and black, including members of Congress, sports stars, rock stars, and movie stars.

Under its new management, the
Hillston Star
reversed itself and endorsed Andy Brookside.

Julian Lewis won his primary with 47 percent of the votes.

Andy Brookside won his primary with 89 percent of the votes, the largest plurality on the polling records.

Fuzz Five ended our basketball season with three wins and five losses.

Isaac tried to get me to “date” Nora Howard.

An estatic Alice told me she was pretty sure she was pregnant. I kept seeing Lee.

Miss Bee Turner, the clerk, sang each word like a loud bell. “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, the Superior Court of Haver County in the State of North Carolina is now in session. The Honorable Shirley Hilliardson presiding. All please rise!”

The State versus George Hall, Part II (as Bubba Percy called the trial) was taking place daily. According to the Hillston Historical Society, which had avidly involved itself in the restoration, our new Superior Court (1947) was “an enhanced replica” of our old Superior Court (burnt 1912), which, parenthetically, had never been called Superior Court, but simply Court, just as the wood building that had housed it had been called simply Courthouse. A second wood courthouse had caught fire, and a third was bulldozed by Progress when the civic-spirited Mr. Briggs Cadmean built Hillston its stone municipal building, which by now had expanded to a block-long complex of annexed structures that included the police department. From the rolled-up blueprints that Cadmean shook down at folks from his lobby portrait had come the enhanced design of our new courtroom. Opening by massive double doors off our new marble rotunda, it was his philanthropic showplace, a huge handsome room with a forty-foot ceiling, tiered seats, a viewers gallery, sixteen brass chandeliers, and sixteen ten-foot-high windows. The walls, the seats, the bar, and the oak wainscoting were painted authentic Federalist colors, and the seats were comfortably cushioned; the jury box, witness stand, and judge's
bench were gleaming cherrywood, handmade by Carolina craftsmen. The State and the defense both had rich leather chairs. The judge's chamber had on its wall an authentic oil painting of Robert E. Lee, said by Judge Tiggs (who hung it there) to have been drawn from life by his great-aunt, Miss Charlotte Victoria Tiggs. Above the bench, the Seal of the State of North Carolina was painted in gold leaf. The gavel had a silver handle. The big eagle-topped clock on the wall had been given personally to old Cadmean's father, Enos, by President McKinley, and had been presented to Enos right here in Hillston by Mark “Boss” Hanna himself, the man who had personally given McKinley to the country, and vice versa. The clock was still ticking.

Naturally, time had dulled the courtroom wood, tarnished the brass, and faded the paint; now the grand windows looked out at ten feet of air before running smack up against the concrete walls of later buildings; the visitors gallery (from which I had long ago listened to Isaac Rosethorn dazzle a jury) was now closed off as a safety hazard. Still, Superior Court looked, as the Historical Society's brochure told its readers, like a loving restoration of an architectural gem. The proportions were so fine, the space so rational, the props so solid in their symbolism, it was easy to sit in that room believing Justice was on her throne and blind as a bat to everything but the bright light of Truth.

Easy, but a big mistake. I’d seen enough examples in that room to know that Justice has got a real eye for color (she prefers white), and for class (she likes upper and middle); that, in fact, she always was, and still is, a bitch on the poor, and a pushover for power. If you’re connected to power, it's rare that Justice is going to tangle with you; it's rare you’re even going to show up in a superior court, and if you do, rarer still that you’re going to walk out of it into a jail; because by tradition in the game of law, the lower class gets to be the criminals, the middle class gets to be the jury, and the upper class gets to be the judge.

By tradition, crime is when you shoot up, take a knife to a spouse, write a bad check, bop someone on the head and snatch a purse, or steal $162.54 from a gas station. Crime is when you’re on the streets where we can catch you.
Un
organized crime, that's what
Justice is used to. She doesn’t mess as much with big-time corporate shenanigans and government slip-ups. CRIME DOES NOT PAY claims the sign over the Oklahoma electric chair, but of course that's usually dependent on the size of the profits.

Well, of course, times have changed a little in Haver County since Judge Tiggs sentenced an East Hillston maid to ten years in women's prison for allegedly stealing a few dollars off her employer's bureau (on the grounds that if the money was missing, she must have taken it), the same month that he sentenced a North Hillston lady to a fine and five years probation for slipping her husband a sleeping pill, lugging him to the garage, and leaving him there with his Buick's motor running until he died (on the grounds that she’d succumbed to “mental anguish” after hearing his plans to divorce her in order to marry his receptionist).

But by and large, Justice remains faithful to her old favorites. As the late great Woodrow Clenny told Judge Tiggs to his face, “Money talks. And Money walks. Rich folks never do no time.”

At his first trial, George Hall wasn’t rich. This time around, he still wasn’t rich, but he knew some people who were; or rather, they knew him, or rather, they knew
about
him, and that's enough to make a difference. And when I say “rich,” I don’t mean ready cash; I mean what they used to call Society, Government, Church, and the Fourth Estate. I mean power. At his first trial, George was 100 percent lacking in that desirable commodity. So before that first trial began, while still unconvicted and (presumably) innocent until proven otherwise, he’d sat for fourteen months in Haver County Jail in a cell he sometimes had to share with as many as five other men. The jail, unequipped for “long-term prisoners”—fourteen months was (presumably) not in that category—had no facilities for counseling, medical treatment, or even exercise, other than the endless scrubbing of its floors and walls.

At his first trial, George never laid eyes on his lawyer, an assistant public defender, until he stepped into the courtroom. George's lawyer never saw George's file until it was handed to him that morning by another public defender, who’d interviewed George months earlier, and who’d lost patience with the defendant after he’d turned down the great deal this P.D. had worked out with
Mitchell Bazemore in one of their games of flesh-peddle swap: Mitch would let Hall go for ten-to-twenty on guilty to second-degree murder, if the P.D. would give him a guilty plea on all three counts of rape by another client—a young thug I was pretty sure
had
committed at least two of the rapes. George's stubborn refusal to accept this deal loused up the court's busy schedule, and exasperated those who’d “only wanted to help” him. He couldn’t have annoyed them more unless he’d had the arrogance to act as his own lawyer and presume to tell them their own business in their own courtroom.

So George's first visit to Superior Court had been a brief one; there were no pretrial motions, there were no challenges, there was no striking of jurors, there were no requests for directed verdicts against the state for not proving its case, no exceptions to over rulings, there was no wasting time on behalf of a stubborn man without friends or money. The whole trial took two days; the jury took fifteen minutes, and as we now knew, one of the jurors couldn’t hear anyhow, and another had passed the time addressing Christmas cards.

But,
now
, on George's second visit to court, we were nine days into the trial, and hadn’t even gotten to the opening arguments. Defense was still fighting over every single seat in that cherrywood jury box. Isaac Rosethorn was dragging out the voir dire (questioning the panel of possible jurors) so long, I asked him if he wasn’t stalling for time—maybe until Billy Gilchrist came back or we found Winston Russell.

“Absolutely not. Verdicts,” said Isaac, with his wagging finger, “are close to decided as soon as you pick those twelve jurors. Decided before that, the minute all the possible names are drawn. You’ve chosen your best juror bets before you ever get into that courtroom, because you’ve hired investigators to snoop out everything they can dig up about every damn one of them. If
I’d
been defending George's first trial, I’d have challenged the whole damn panel. Claimed box stuffing. Claimed intentional
and
systematic exclusion of blacks. That's the first thing I would have done.” But, of course, if Isaac had been an overworked, underpaid public defender, he wouldn’t have had the funds to hire his private investigators, or the leisure to analyze their investigations, or Nora
Howard to help him do it. He wouldn’t have had time to care. Or to get anybody else to care.

So George Hall's second trial was a different affair altogether. After passing through metal detectors, spectators rushed to grab every handsome cushioned seat in Superior Court. Now George was the brother of a famous martyr (who even had a song about him on the rock charts). He had the undivided services of a famous lawyer. He had the attention of Society, Government, Church, the Fourth Estate, and the People.
Hall vs N.C., II
, was a standing-room-only show. Or it would have been if Judge Shirley Hilliardson—his long thin black-robed arm rising steady as a wing to strike the gavel— hadn’t announced right off that the unseated would not be allowed, nor would television cameras, nor snacking, nor whispering, nor the unmannerly, the unruly, or the unkempt.

“We are here,” Hilliardson announced with a contemptuous glare, “to serve justice to the best of our puny abilities. We are
not
here to serve the prurient curiosity of the idle, or the circulation goals of the so-called media. I will not hesitate to clear this court-room whenever I see fit.” Nobody doubted it. Those precisely clipped words were sharp as the long beaked nose, and cold as the hawkish eyes.