makin' room was too fictional in prose.
could be wrong, but im sure im right.
On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 8:32 AM, Madness <nayrrizdaed@gmail.com> wrote:
> On the Jury
> Had the young black been caught with a loaded revolver? Or was the gun
> planted by the white policeman who made the arrest? The judge asked jurors
> to reason from the evidence; no one counted on the implacable weight of
> racial hostility.
>
> by Vivian Gornick
> The case before the court was a criminal one: illegal possession of a loaded
> gun. The elements in the case were the testimony of two undercover
> policemen, the testimony of the accused, and the presence of a gun on the
> prosecutor's table. The policemen--both white, in their middle
> thirties--said the defendant had the gun in his hand when they arrested him.
> The defendant--black, eighteen--said it was all a lie, he'd never seen the
> gun until the moment the cops were pushing him up against a wall and
> handcuffing him. The gun--silver-plated, .32 caliber--lay there mute, an
> indifferent prop to be seized upon alternately by the prosecuting and the
> defending lawyers.
> It took a day and a half for all the principals in the case to say what they
> had to say. At the end of that time, the judge turned to the jury box. He
> reminded the jurors, twelve good and true, that the burden of proof lay with
> the People; that unless, in their judgment, the People had proved beyond a
> reasonable doubt the guilt of the accused, it was incumbent upon them to
> bring in a verdict of not guilty. He enjoined the jurors to reason out of
> the evidence. He further enjoined them to search and make up their own
> minds, but at the same time to be open to the thought and feeling of their
> fellows, as the essence of deliberation was the interaction of open minds.
> The judge spoke these profound words easily and carefully, yet mechanically
> and rhetorically: somewhat like a stewardess on a plane rehearsing her
> passengers in the lifesaving steps they were to take in case of an emergency
> whose potential reality no one believed in.
> The policemen (whom I will call Galella and Kowalski) told substantially the
> same story: At approximately 7:30 P.M. one night last July, while on a
> regular tour of duty (wearing street clothes, driving an unmarked car), they
> spotted two boys, one of whom was the defendant, sitting at the edge of an
> alley on West 37th Street, a few feet in from 10th Avenue. As this was a
> neighborhood that Galella and Kowalski knew well--densely commercial during
> the day, equally dense with prostitution after dark--they automatically
> registered the presence of strangers. They drove on by and continued their
> tour. An hour later they heard over their car radio a report that someone
> had been seen with a gun in or around those same streets. They drove back
> and found a marked patrol car parked at the corner of 10th and 37th. These
> uniformed police said they too had had the gun report and had seen two boys
> they thought suspicious, had questioned and searched them, found nothing,
> and sent them on their way. The uniformed police described the two boys
> Galella and Kowalski had seen earlier. The four policemen parted and went
> back to their respective cars.
> Galella and Kowalski drove up 10th Avenue, turning east on 38th Street.
> Halfway to 9th Avenue, they spotted the two boys in question walking back
> towards 10th Avenue. Why, they wondered, when the boys had been told to
> leave the neighborhood? They decided to swing through a bus lot in the
> middle of the block and return to 37th Street. They parked their car a third
> of the way up the block, beside a parking lot enclosed by a chainlink fence.
> In a few minutes they saw the boys standing on the corner, looking around.
> Then, the cops said, the boys walked into 37th Street, one of them ducked
> for a moment in and out of the alley, and they continued at a quick pace,
> half walking, half loping up the street toward Galella and Kowalski. When
> the two boys were within thirty feet or so of the unmarked car, both Galella
> and Kowalski said, they saw a gun in the left hand of one of the two. They
> leaped from their car, their own guns drawn, and said to the two: Don't
> move. Police." The boys froze in their tracks. Kowalski said, "Drop the
> gun." The boy with the gun stood motionless. A second time Kowalski said,
> "Drop the gun. Then, Kowalski said, in one swift motion the boy raised his
> arm and threw the gun back and up over the chain-link fence. The cops pushed
> the boys up against the building beside the fence, their faces turned toward
> the wall. Galella stood watch over them. Kowalski climbed the fence,
> retrieved the gun (with four bullets in it), and arrested the two. The one
> with the gun was the defendant.
> The defendant (whom I will call David Moore) told an entirely different
> story. He said he and a friend of his neighborhood in Queens had decided to
> go that evening to a disco at 39th Street and 9th Avenue. They took the
> train into Manhattan, arriving at Times Square at 8:30 P.M. When they got to
> the disco, it was just opening for the evening. They decided to take a walk
> and return later, when their friends would have arrived. They walked down
> 9th Avenue, looking for a place to buy a beer. Couldn't find one. Walked
> over to 10th Avenue. Found a grocery store, bought the beers, and, returning
> along 10th, found the alley on 37th Street with steel drums in front of it.
> They sat down on the drums and began to drink their beers. Suddenly, a
> police car appeared at the corner. One of the cops came over and began
> questioning them: Who were they? What were they doing here? Did they have
> any weapons? They told them who they were, said no, they didn't have any
> weapons. The cop looked around, pushed his feet through the trash around the
> steel drums, frisked them, then told them to get going.
> The boys got up and began walking up 37th Street toward 9th. As they walked,
> David Moore's friend said to him: "Come on. They're gonna be back. They
> ain't gonna leave us alone." And they began to walk quickly. Halfway up the
> block, as they came alongside a chainlink fence, two men with guns in their
> hands appeared from out of nowhere. They said they were police, and they
> wanted to know where the gun was. "We know you got a gun," they said. "Where
> is it?" The boys said: "We got no gun." The police pushed them up against
> the wall, made them kneel facing the wall. David Moore said: "We asked them,
> 'Why you doin' this?' One of them began to climb the fence. The other one
> said, 'It's all right. If he don't find a gun, we'll let you go.' And then
> the other one, he came back with a gun."
> We were six women, six men, five blacks, seven whites on that jury. Our
> occupations were postal worker, nurse's aide, clerk-typists, school
> secretary, community center worker, engineer, actor, writer, carpenter,
> investment analyst, housewife. It was impossible, sitting in the jury box
> during the trial, to know much more about any one of us, so well concealed
> did the people behind these surface identifications remain during the voir
> dire (jury selection process).
> I had become irritated with the questions about possible police prejudice,
> and had said I thought these questions were designed to elicit stereotypic
> responses rather than to encourage thinking about individuals; after all, a
> policeman was only one human being, not the entire police force. Afterward,
> the postal worker (a bullnecked black man with steady eyes behind thick
> glasses, who had been chosen as a juror during the same round in which I was
> chosen) shook his head at me and said, "Didn't think you'd make it. Nosir.
> Not after all that lip you give 'em."
> I looked around at the ten people then occupying jurors' seats: Mary Davis,
> the clerk-typist; Loren Levine, the investment analyst; Todd Graham, the
> engineer; Shirley Silvers and Laura O'Connell, the housewives; Oscar
> Williams, the community center worker; Anna James, the nurse's aide; David
> Barnes, the postal worker; Claire Moran, the school secretary; Richard
> Garcia, the carpenter. I thought back to the moment when the judge and the
> lawyers had asked each of us to assure them that we could and would be
> impartial listeners, that we would reason out of the evidence given, that a
> policeman's testimony would "give us no trouble" (what a euphemism!). Each
> of us had without hesitation simply said yes or no, and I remember thinking
> then, We lie. Every last one of us.
> But we were all surprised when Gerald Anderson, the actor, was chosen as the
> last juror. The judge asked him if he was married and Anderson replied, "I
> live in sin, judge, but no children." All heads in the courtroom jerked in
> his direction, but Anderson's face bore an unflappable expression, and his
> smile of resignation said plainly: "I've seen it all; nothing you can say or
> do would unbalance me; being off balance is my natural condition." Then,
> when Anderson revealed that one of his many odd jobs as an often unemployed
> actor had been that of a worker in the New York courts, Richard Garcia
> laughed merrily and poked Claire Moran in an open, friendly manner, saying,
> "that's it."
> Suddenly, we all knew why Anderson was accepted as the twelfth juror: it was
> six o'clock in the evening; we had been jury-picking for a full day and a
> half; if Anderson was rejected, the court would have to call for a fresh
> batch of prospective jurors. Neither lawyer was willing to sustain such a
> delay on "a simple gun possession case."
> The jury room was a gray-green, institutional rectangle: coat hooks on the
> wall, two small bathrooms off to one side, a long, scarred table surrounded
> by wooden armchairs, wastebaskets, and a floor superficially clean, deeply
> filthy. We entered this room on a Friday at noon, most of us expecting to be
> gone from it by four or five that same day. We did not see the last of it
> until a full twelve hours had elapsed, by which time the grimy
> oppressiveness of the place had become, for me at least, inextricably bound
> up with psychological defeat.
> We ate the sandwiches brought up from the coffee shop, drank the atrocious
> coffee, carefully put the wrappings and the remains of our lunches into a
> large paper carton, wiped off the table. Then the guard took out the
> garbage, locked us into the room, and we began with a vote around the table.
> It took exactly two minutes for each of those voices to be heard pronouncing
> the words guilty, not guilty. The vote was eight not guilty, four guilty. I
> was one of the four who voted guilty; the other three were Loren Levine,
> Gerald Anderson, and Shirley Silvers.
> A wave of surprise. Most of the jurors voting not guilty had seemed
> vigorously conservative as they sat in the box, the ones voting guilty,
> predictably liberal. Then--perhaps appropriately--the guiltys had been
> spoken in hesitant, musing, this-is-open-for-discussion voices, while the
> not guiltys had been announced in flat, closed, nothing-to-discuss voices.
> "Well," said I, the novice juror, to myself, "it's just like the movies. Now
> we begin. Now we will talk, we will listen to one another, we will see how
> we have arrived at these opinions. Because that, surely, is all they are
> now: opinions, not settled convictions."
> But I was wrong. The twelve hours that followed would in no essential alter
> the attitudes made clear during those first two minutes. What did happen,
> though, is that, one by one, all four guiltys were "persuaded" to change
> their votes to not guilty. That persuasion came about not through the
> irresistible uses of reason but through the disintegrating power of
> emotional cave-in.
> Nearly everyone seemed to speak at once: over, under, and through each
> other. No one heard anything anyone else said, and no one actually said
> anything new, just repeated, in ever louder tones, guilty, not guilty.
> Richard Garcia said: "I just feel he's innocent. Don't ask me why, I just
> feel it." Anna James--whose voice bore an uncanny resemblance to that of
> Butterfly McQueen--said, "I can't believe that boy ain't innocent." Claire
> Moran and Laura O'Connell stated flatly: "I don't believe the cops." Todd
> Graham, a solid man whose rimless glasses made his large afro look
> conservative, simply smiled and shook his head repeatedly, "No way, no way."
> Mary Davis, a large black woman endowed with a maternal appearance,
> compressed her lips, crossed her arms on her huge bosom, and shook her head,
> loudly. Shirley Silvers, middle-aged, well-dressed, brimming with nervous
> sweetness, turned agitatedly from one to another, chattering: "I don't know,
> maybe I'm wrong, I think he's guilty, I don't know."
> In the midst of all this, a sudden flare-up between Richard Garcia and Loren
> Levine: yelling, footstamping, slamming of bathroom doors, Garcia's voice
> shrill, crying, "Let me talk! Dammit, will you let me talk?" Levine
> retorting hotly, "That's all you've been doing. And not saying a single
> thing of substance. If we let you go on, we'll be here for a week!"
> What was this? Levine--thin, remote, with a voice trapped between nasal drip
> and lockjaw, always reading the Times when the others were talking, and
> polishing his glasses, thoughtfully--why was he standing there with a
> faceful of twitching irritation as though he were exploding inside? And
> Garcia--blackhaired, wide-faced, mustachioed, manner expansive, above all
> jolly--why was he on his feet, his voice screeching, his hands on his hips,
> as though to say, I can't take this another minute"? Were we going to have
> juror "revelations" so soon? We had only just begun.
> Order. Order. Let's have some order here. Now calmly--let each one of us
> tell the others exactly why we think guilty, not guilty.
> We went around the table again. Richard Garcia, Mary Davis, and Anna James
> repeated that they couldn't believe that boy wasn't innocent.
> Loren Levine, under tight control again, said quietly that he felt the
> police story hung together; it was logical in all its parts and it made
> sense to him.
> Laura O'Connell--born, raised, married, and still living in the same
> working-class neighborhood--said an uninflected, tenement-pitched voice: "I
> don't believe the cops. I know cops. Some of my best friends are cops. I
> know what they do. I just don't believe em."
> Claire Moran, a small, thin, birdlike woman in her forties, nodded her head
> and said, "That's right. I can't help feeling the same. I just don't believe
> that police story."
> It was my turn. I said, "In order for me to vote not guilty, I would have to
> believe that these two policemen deliberately framed this boy. I would have
> to believe they planted that gun on him. I find that almost possible to
> believe."
> "Oh, for God's sake," said Mary Davis.
> "They do it all the time," protested Todd Graham. "Everybody knows that,"
> cried Laura O'Connell. "That's true, you know," said Claire Moran.
> "Yes," said Gerald Anderson, speaking for the first one, "they do do it all
> the time. But only for a reason. This case there was no reason." Everyone
> turned to Gerald, the street-smart actor who proved to be the best juror in
> the room, the man who most loved reason, and the only one to return again
> and again to the question of the evidence before us.
> "I probably know more about cops than anyone else this room," Gerald said,
> "and I certainly know they are capable of planting a weapon on somebody.
> But, in experience, it's almost always because they know or they think they
> know a person they're after is guilty of a crime they can't prove. Usually
> it's narcotics. Sometimes it's some hard-nosed kid in a neighborhood they've
> worked in who's given them trouble, they hate the kid, they want to put him
> away. But to plant a gun on a perfectly strange kid? Just to bring a charge
> of gun possession? When there are a thousand such arrests a day in New York,
> all perfectly legit? That doesn't make any sense to me at all."
> "Besides, where would the gun have come from?" asked Shirley Silvers.
> "Oh, cops have two guns on them quite often," said add Graham. "The one you
> see, and the one you don't."
> "Oh, for Chrissake," said Gerald Anderson. "Do you realize what you're
> saying? You know if a cop walks out of the station house with a gun secreted
> on his person, and he's discovered, it's his job? Right then and there. He's
> finished. You think a cop does a thing like that so lightly?"
> Todd Graham shrugged his shoulders, closed his mouth, and looked down at the
> table. Clearly, Gerald's words had only silenced him.
> "Well, that may be true, Mr. Anderson," said David Barnes softly, his voice
> all self-conscious dignity, "although we only have your word for it, you'll
> pardon my pointing out, and some of us here may have had experiences that
> contradict that statement, but I don't believe the police story either. I
> can't exactly say why. It just don't sit right with me. And if it don't sit
> right, I gotta vote not guilty."
> Six people turned to the right and to the left and mouthed, "That's right.
> That's the way I see it, too. If you don't believe the cops..."
> Oscar Williams, the community center worker--tall, thin, middle-aged, very
> black-skinned, a face and manner suffused with a quiet that passed for
> calm--had not said one word during this entire time. I turned to him: "Mr.
> Williams, what do you think?" He looked at me for a long moment before he
> spoke. There was silence in the room. And then, in a low, steady voice,
> making extraordinary use of the rhetorical device of dividing a sentence
> into its phrases, Oscar Williams said: "I cannot believe. That boy raised
> his arm. With a gun in it. When a policeman had told him to freeze. And that
> boy ain't a dead boy. I simply cannot believe that."
> One instant of utter stillness, and then a jam of voices in the already
> thickening air: "Amen!" "That's right, that's right." "I'm with him." "I
> can't believe that either." "Nosir. I don't believe that either."
> Gerald Anderson and I stared at each other. We were shaken by Williams's
> eloquence and its effect on the room. "But still," I could almost see me and
> Gerald thinking at the same moment.
> "Mr. Williams, does that mean you think the cops framed the boy?" I asked.
> "I didn't say that." He closed his eyes and spread the fingers of his thin,
> fine hand in the air. "I don't know whether they framed the boy or not. And
> I'm not sayin' they did. I'm only sayin' I cannot see that thing happening.
> "
> Williams took off his glasses; the skin just below his eyes and on the
> bridge of his nose glistened. He wiped his face with a soft white
> handkerchief. He carefully lifted one pressed pants leg over the other. Then
> he said: "I'm no social worker. I'm no bleeding heart. I know how rotten
> kids are. They stink. And there is absolutely nothing worse than a teenager
> with a gun in his hand. Don't you think I know that? But," his voice dropped
> one husky octave, "I cannot see that thing happening. And I keep thinking:
> If I blow this, if I give that kid a record...well, I just wouldn't be able
> to live with myself."
> Mary Davis removed her arms from across her capacious chest and said, "Well,
> as far as I'm concerned, the man just said it all. Now we either all vote
> not guilty or we go in and tell the judge we are stuck." She was sitting
> directly opposite me. She leaned across the table toward me and said,
> "Sweetheart, cops, they shoot first, ask questions later. All of 'em."
> "You said in the courtroom you weren't prejudiced against the police," I
> said faintly.
> "I ain't prejudiced!" she replied angrily. "I'm just telling you what they
> do."
> "It doesn't matter what they do," I said. "You've got to look at what these
> two did. Or what you think they did. And why you think they did it."
> "Oh, there's no talking to this girl," Mary Davis said, twisting her face
> and body into a tortured profile position. (She really was a very large
> woman.)
> "Yes," said Gerald Anderson dryly. "Well, I do think the question of whether
> we think the police framed the boy is the crucial one, and it isn't enough
> to say you can't or won't think about that one. Now, no one's experience
> here is sacred. It carries no more authority than anyone else's. Our
> experience is all supposed to be in the service of the evidence before us.
> Not the other way around."
> Everyone nodded, but Gerald's words meant nothing. On and on it went. For
> hours. It was not merely that the same words and phrases were repeated
> endlessly; it was that our "positions" seemed to have become congealed;
> minds and eyes glazed over; we didn't even hear ourselves speaking after a
> while.
> Two curiosities emerged during these hours. One was that Anna James--the
> nurse's aide who just couldn't believe that boy wasn't innocent--proved to
> be a near mental incompetent. She could not keep in her mind the details of
> the story told by the police and the one told by the boy. At one point she
> mused out loud, "How that boy get over from Lexington Avenue so quick? They
> must be crazy to think we swallow that." We all stared at her. Lexington
> Avenue? What on earth was she talking about? Worse yet, what had been
> transpiring in her mind all this time?
> I discovered afterward that Anna James was the most professional juror among
> us. She had over the years been chosen to serve in innumerable criminal and
> civil cases; and before my own term as juror was over, I saw her chosen to
> serve on a complex case of embezzlement. I knew why, too. Her manner was one
> of middleclass reserve, indicating (to one who asked no vital questions) a
> quiet but firm capacity to think, slowly but responsibly. During the twelve
> hours I was locked up with her, I discovered that that manner masked a
> slowwitted stubbornness functioning in the service of two profound
> disabilities: she was at all times oblivious to evidence, and she hated the
> cops. Hated them.
> The second curiosity was that each of the others who had voted not guilty
> also hated the police. Hated distrusted, disbelieved, did not want to think
> about anything said or done by anyone who was a policeman "Cops shoot first,
> ask questions later." Young, old, black, white, blue-collar, white-collar:
> they all drew a pugnacious blank on police testimony.
> At six o'clock, Gerald Anderson, who had been staring morosely at a
> diagrammatic chart of the streets in which "the incident" had taken place,
> said, "Hey, wait a minute. I just realized something." Everyone perked up.
> Anything to break this deadly boring tension. "The kid may or may not be
> innocent," Gerald went on, "but one thing is certain. He lied on that stand.
> Look, everyone agrees that four policemen questioned him. I mean, the cops
> said that, and he said that, too. There's no argument there. Now, he says he
> was questioned at the corner by the uniformed police. And then questioned
> again halfway down the block by the undercover cops. If that's true, then
> the undercover cops must have been sitting in their car when he was
> questioned by the uniformed police. Because it only takes half a minute to
> get down the block. They'd have seen it. Why would they have grabbed the
> kids a minute later if they'd just seen them questioned and searched? That
> certainly doesn't make sense. He must be lying about that."
> Excitement generated quickly. Confused, disturbed, everyone was glad to have
> something new to think about. Eager attention was turned to Gerald's
> "discovery." None but one thought of where this attention could lead. Oscar
> Williams sat still and silent, hands folded on knobby knees, glasses
> glistening in the dull yellow light. He looked up into the noise and very
> softly said, "Just because he's lyin' don't mean he's guilty as charged." It
> was as though a schoolmaster had rapped the children for rowdiness. Todd
> Graham said very soberly, "Yeah, that's right." So did Mart Davis. So did
> Claire Moran. So did Richard Garcia.
> Shortly after this we were taken to dinner, herded together at two or three
> tables in a chop house, given a selective menu that did not permit so much
> as a glass of beer, watched over by the guards. It was a depressed and
> depressing meal.
> No sooner had we returned to the jury room, hung up our coats, and taken our
> seats, than David Barnes stood up, approached the diagram, cleared his
> throat and said, "I've been thinking." We all looked at him, supposing him
> about to carry Gerald's point further. Barnes then, after a fashion,
> repeated the original point as though he were introducing it for the first
> time, and then proceeded to garble the details so that the point was utterly
> lost and the exercise at the diagram without meaning.
> It seemed impossible that everyone in the room would not instantly see that
> Barnes had just caricatured not only the point but the point of the point.
> But no. Garcia said, "Now there's an idea." Claire Moran said, "Would you
> mind going over that again, Mr. Barnes?" Laura O'Connell, straining
> nearsightedly at the diagram, said, "I kinda see what you're getting at."
> Todd Graham looked down at the sheet of doodle drawings under his right
> hand. Oscar Williams inspected his fingernails. Loren Levine nearly took out
> the Times.
> I swung in my seat to look at Gerald. He was staring into space. I thought I
> saw something close over his eyes, some invisible shutter come down, and I
> think in that moment his switched vote was being born. As I looked at his
> face I knew we were lost. I remembered a moment a few hours earlier when
> Williams had said something, and Gerald had replied curtly: "You know you're
> putting pressure on us," and Williams had demurred, and I had thought: "No,
> the pressure is being applied from within."
> I did not know if my conviction that the police did not frame David Moore
> constituted evidence any more than Oscar Williams's conviction that the boy
> could not have raised his arm with a gun in it and not be shot dead
> constituted a reasonable doubt. And I did not really care if the boy was
> guilty or not guilty, if he was punished or set free, if the police were
> supported or attacked. But the abdication of thought frightened me. That did
> matter. In fact it seemed to be the only thing that mattered, and it
> mattered that it was we--Gerald and I and all the rest--who wouldn't do the
> thinking. I realized that I had become strangely attached to the people in
> the room. In these hours together, unwilling and most peculiar bonds had
> been forged. It was not that we had revealed ourselves to each other, though
> to some extent we had. It was certainly not that we were sealed by shared
> understandings of the mind or heart. No, it was rather, I began to see, that
> we had been locked up here randomly, thrown together willy-nilly like a
> family, and like a family had inflicted our emotional prejudices on each
> other. This act cast long shadows. Certainly it touched something in me,
> made me responsive to mysterious claims I could not at that moment identify.
> The situation began to seem metaphoric. Civilization seemed to hang on the
> willingness here in this room to think. In the emotional grandiosity of that
> moment was born my switched vote.
> For an instant I saw things clearly. "Hang the jury," I said to myself,
> "there is no way out of this." But the last moment I said to myself, "No.
> They must see. I must make them see." And from that moment on I was,
> essentially, pleading with everyone "to see" what was happening here. I knew
> I should hang the jury but I simply could not do what I knew should be done.
> It was then a given that I would let myself be overcome. Clearly, I needed
> them more than they needed me.
> At nine o'clock Shirley Silvers cried out, "I change my vote! I vote not
> guilty." Half an hour later, Gerald Anderson, still staring into space,
> looking absolutely bleak, said, "I vote not guilty." Directly afterward,
> Loren Levine, who had retreated into near total silence since his
> altercation with Richard Garcia, said crisply, "Me, too. Not guilty." Why
> had none of them hung the jury? What personal mystery struggled up in each
> of them? To what were they "attached" that they had caved in, one by one?
> I was the last holdout. All around me pressed voices, faces, shadows, that
> said, "Explain yourself. Justify yourself. We know who we are. Can you say
> as much? What is all this nonsense about? Never mind the others. What are
> you doing here?"
> I looked at Oscar Williams now sitting silent, watching me. I begged him
> with my eyes to understand and support me. He looked at me. His face said.
> "I do understand, but you're in this alone." The memory of his voice saying,
> "That boy would be a dead boy" entered into me, made me quail somewhere
> inside myself. Conveniently, I lost my nerve against that haughty pain of
> his; conveniently, couldn't hold on to what I knew, began to get fogged up,
> didn't quite know anymore what was evidence, what a reasonable doubt...
> "For God's sake," I cried as though I were going under. "What reason would
> these two cops have had for framing this kid? Cynically, recklessly,
> cold-bloodedly, framing a boy they'd never seen before? Now you know goddamn
> well it's not these two people whose testimony you've been listening to.
> It's cops. All cops. So what have we got here? Where does that leave us?
> With two stereotypes: on the one hand" (I raised my left arm at the elbow,
> hand palm out), "we have 'the cops.' On the other hand" (I raised my right
> arm), "we have 'a young black boy'..."
> The word black was a match struck to a can of gasoline: conflagration blazed
> in less than thirty seconds.
> "Color, color, who said anything about color?" David Barnes thundered. "What
> chu bringing in color for? I don't like that. Nosiree, I don't like that one
> bit."
> "I knew she had that in her mind all the time!" Anna James shrieked, "I knew
> it."
> "I don't wanna hear a word about black or white," Mary Davis boomed. "Now
> you hear me? That boy's mama raised him up just like everybody else's.
> Didn't do it no different from yours."
> Shirley Silvers got hysterical and began to scream: "She didn't mean it. She
> didn't mean it."
> Todd Graham smiled mockingly at me and said, "I know. You're not
> prejudiced."
> Oscar Williams's eyes met mine in amazement for a single second. Then he
> buried his face in his hands.
> Gerald Anderson and Loren Levine stared, openmouthed, but remained silent.
> It was just easier for everyone to let happen what was happening.
> As for me, I felt relief. The charge of racism--painful and frightening at
> first--was, in fact, a smokescreen behind which everyone, myself included,
> was only too glad to hide. "You win," I said. "Not guilty." Everyone looked
> down, or away.
> At midnight the verdict was announced in the courtroom. The jurors fell all
> over themselves fleeing the building. Claire Moran turned in the doorway and
> said, "Please don't misunderstand this, but I hope I never see any of you
> again!"
> Only Gerald Anderson and I stayed behind. Ours was the sick feeling of
> cowards that compels hanging around. The lawyers, both of whom were young
> and eager for details as to what had happened in the jury room, also hung
> around. We talked a long while together.
> We told them many things, and then we told them how persuasive had been
> Oscar Williams's assertion that he couldn't imagine the boy making a motion
> with a gun in his hand while facing a cop and not being shot, and how
> Williams had agonized that this was the boy's first arrest and Williams
> would be ruining his life with a conviction. The young assistant district
> attorney listened silently, nodding his head forlornly at every word I spoke
> as though he knew this litany by heart. I looked at him, puzzled.
> "It was Moore's first arrest, wasn't it?" I asked.
> "No," he shook his head. "He was arrested in 1974 at the age of fourteen."
> "What was the charge?" asked Gerald.
> "Pointing a loaded .22 caliber gun at a policeman."
> On Monday morning I returned, as directed, to the large jurors' room in the
> Criminal Courts Building. Almost everyone from the jury was there. Mary
> Davis, Richard Garcia, and Anna James sat together, but everyone else sat
> alone in widely separated seats. I walked directly over to Oscar Williams.
> He rose as I approached him. We looked at each other. I told him what the
> district attorney had told me about David Moore's previous arrest.
> Williams's black skin turned the color of cigarette ash. It exactly matched
> the taste in my mouth.
>
>
>
> --
> Posted By Madness to Madness Writers at 8/10/2011 05:32:00 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment