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DUBOSE INSISTED ON SEEING TO his wounds using a small medical kit that she took from her satchel. When he asked her about it, DuBose said, “I never go anywhere without essentials, especially south of the Mason-Dixon.”
He eyed the deep, hook-shaped scar perilously close to her right eye.
She noted him staring and said, “One of several, Mr. Lee, though that is the only one that shows. And I have to say I’m proud of every single one.”
DuBose had him take off his shirt and undershirt, and she delicately probed his ribs with her fingers, causing him to flinch and gasp.
“Badly bruised, but not cracked or broken,” she concluded.
“You a doctor?”
“No, but I have a lot of experience with beatings.”
She cleaned his cuts, applied topical medicine to the abrasions, bandaged them, and then wound some tape around his bruised middle and secured it.
“Keep using the ice. Takes down the swelling.”
She put her kit away, and they sat on either side of his desk after he put his clothes back on.
“You said you were the answer to my prayers?”
She took a copy of Time magazine out of her satchel and handed it across.
On the cover was her.
He glanced up in surprise.
“Start on page fourteen. I’m not being vain. It’ll just save a lot of explaining.”
He dutifully read the four-page story on one Desiree Evelyn DuBose. She had gone to Howard University and then Yale Law School, where she had been an editor of the Law School Review. Remarkably she had entered Howard at age sixteen and finished college and law school in six years.
Jack looked up. “Impressive academic pedigree, Miss DuBose.”
“I wanted to go to Yale undergrad as well but they didn’t deign to admit women of any color until this year.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I graduated from law school the year the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education.”
“Did you clerk at the Court?”
She looked surprised. “There has never been a Black female law clerk on the Supreme Court, Mr. Lee. Bill Coleman was the first Black man to clerk there, under Justice Frankfurter in 1948. But I had a friend from Yale who clerked on the court for Justice Douglas when Brown was decided. Eisenhower later said picking Earl Warren as his chief justice was the biggest mistake he ever made. But if Chief Justice Vinson hadn’t suddenly died of a heart attack, Warren would never have been on the court and Plessy’s separate but equal doctrine would still be the law of the land. I’m not really speculating, because my friend told me that Justice Douglas had taken an informal count that had it five to four to uphold Plessy.”
“That would have changed a lot,” noted Jack.
“That would have changed everything.”
Jack read some more and said, “You were born and live in Chicago and you work for the Legal Defense Fund?”
“It originated with the NAACP’s legal department, but Thurgood Marshall founded the LDF as a separate entity in 1940.”
He kept reading and learned that DuBose had won a case before the Supreme Court the previous year. And then she had done legal business in his neck of the woods.
“You helped take on the Byrd machine here in Virginia?”
“The state closed all schools that desegrated, and provided public funding for private schools that promised never to admit a Black student.”
“But the Virginia Supreme Court ultimately ruled that was unconstitutional.”
