Chapter 5

CARTER AMES PUSHED his silver flask of bourbon toward my face. “Have a swig, Ben. You deserve it, son. Well done.”

What a sight for the funny pages we must have made- Ames barely five feet tall, me at six-four-standing side by side in the marble hallway outside the courtroom.

“No, thanks, Carter. I’d rather be sober when the verdict comes in.”

“I wouldn’t, if I was you.” His voice was a curdled mixture of phlegm and whiskey. As he lifted the flask to his mouth, I was surprised to see half-moons of sweat under his arms. In the courtroom he’d looked cool as a block of pond ice.

“Your summation was damn good,” he observed. “I think you had ’em going for a while there. But then you went and threw in that colored stuff. Why’d you have to remind them? You think they didn’t notice she’s black as the ace of spades?”

“I thought I saw one or two who weren’t buying your motive,” I said. “Only takes one to hang ’em up.”

“And twelve to hang her, don’t I know it.”

He took another swig from his flask and eased himself down to a bench. “Sit down, Ben. I want to talk to you, not your rear end.”

I sat.

“Son, you’re a fine young lawyer, Harvard trained and all, gonna make a finer lawyer one of these days,” he said. “But you still need to learn that Washington is a southern town. We’re every bit as southern as wherever you’re from down in Podunk, Mississippi.”

I grimaced and shook my head. “I just do what I think is right, Carter.”

“I know you do. And that’s what makes everybody think you’re nothing but a goddamned bleeding-heart fool and nigger-lover.”

Before I could defend-well, just about everything I believe in-a police officer poked his head out of the courtroom. “Jury’s coming back.”

Chapter 6

THE CUMBERSOME IRON SHACKLES around Gracie Johnson’s ankles clanked noisily as I helped her to her feet at the defense table.

“Thank you, Mr. Corbett,” she whispered.

Judge Warren gazed down on her as if he were God. “Mr. Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict in this case?” he asked.

“Yes, we have, Your Honor.”

Like every lawyer since the Romans invented the Code of Justinian, I had tried to learn something from the jurors’ faces as they filed into the courtroom-the haberdasher, the retired schoolteacher, the pale young man who was engaged to Congressman Chapman’s daughter and had cracked a tentative smile during my summation.

Several of them were looking directly at Gracie, which was supposed to be a good sign for a defendant. I decided to take it that way and said a hopeful little prayer.

The judge intoned, “How find you in the matter of murder against Grace Johnson?”

The foreman rose in a deliberate manner, then in a strong, clear voice he said, “We the jury find the defendant guilty as charged.”

The courtroom erupted with exclamations, some sobs, even an ugly smattering of applause.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

“I will have order in my court,” said the judge. Damned if I didn’t see a smile flash across Judge Warren’s face before he managed to swallow it.

I slid my arms around Gracie. One of us was trembling, and I realized it was me. My eyes, not hers, were brimming with hot tears.

“It be all right, Mr. Corbett,” she said quietly.

“It isn’t all right, Gracie. It’s a disgrace.”

Two D.C. blueboys were heading our way, coming to take her back to jail. I motioned for them to give us a moment.

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Corbett,” Gracie said. “Jesus works in mysterious ways.”

“God bless you, Gracie. We’ll file an appeal.”

“Thank you, Mr. Corbett. But now I got to tell you something.”

“What’s that?”

She leaned close to me, dropping her voice to a whisper. “I done the crime.”

“What?”

“I done the crime.”

“Gracie!”

“I got five chillun, Mr. Corbett. That old lady, she don’t pay me hardly nothing. I needed money. So I meant to take the silver.”

“And… what happened?”

“I was coming through the dining room with the silver chest in my hands. Miz Davenport walk in. She ’posed to be having a nap. Well, she screamed at me like she the devil. Then she come a-running at me.”

Gracie was composed, very calm, almost in a trance as she spoke to me.

“I had the bone-handle carving knife in my hand. Not for her-I don’t know, just in case of something. When she run at me, I turned. She run straight up on that knife, sir. I swear I never meant to do it.”

The policemen apparently felt they’d been patient long enough. They came up alongside us and, taking hold of Gracie’s arms, began to lead her away.

“But I tell you, Mr. Corbett…”

“What, Gracie?”

“I would do it again.”

Chapter 7

AS I WALKED all the way home from the courthouse on that hot June day, I still had no idea what life-changing things were in store for me and my family. Not a hint, not a clue.

Our house was quiet and dark that afternoon when I arrived. I walked through the front parlor. No sign of Meg, Amelia, or Alice.

In the kitchen a peach pie was cooling on a table. Through the window I saw our cook, Mazie, sitting on the back stoop, shelling butter beans into a white enamelware pan.

“Has Meg gone out, Mazie?” I called.

“Yes, suh, Mr. Ben. And she took the littl’uns with her. Don’t know where. Miz Corbett, she was in some bad mood when she went. Her face all red like, you know how she gets.”

How she gets. My Meg, my sweet New England wife. So red in the face. You know how she gets. The gentlest girl at Radcliffe, the prettiest girl ever to come from Warwick, Rhode Island. Burning red in the face.

And she gets that way because of me, I couldn’t help thinking. Because of my failure, because of my repeated failure. Because of the shame I bring on our house with my endless “charity cases” for the poor and disenfranchised.

I walked to the parlor and lifted my banjo from its shelf. I’d been trying to learn to play ragtime tunes since I first heard the new music that had come sweeping up from the South late in the old century. It was music as noisy and fast as one of the new motorcars that were unsettling horses all over the country.

I sat on the piano bench and tried to force my clumsy fingers to find the first offbeat notes of that skittering melody. The music seemed to be in such a hurry, but something about it took me back to a place and a time much slower, and maybe better, than any in Washington, D.C. The bumpy syncopation reminded me of the sound I used to hear coming from tiny Negro churches out in the country, in the woods outside Eudora, Mississippi, where I was born and raised.

As a boy I’d walked past those churches a thousand times. I’d heard the clapping and the fervent amens. Now that had all gotten blended in with a fast-march tempo and the syncopated melody of the old work songs. Mix it all together, speed it up, and somehow, from that corner of the South, down around where Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas meet up, the music came out ragtime.

Whenever I heard that sound, whether issuing from a saloon on the wrong side of Capitol Hill or a shiny new phonograph in Dupont Circle, it sent me out of my Washington life and down the memory road to Mississippi.

And whenever I thought of Mississippi, I couldn’t help seeing my mother’s face.