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DuBose glanced at him with a troubled look. “And there always comes a time when it exacts a heavy price.”
CHAPTER 41
DURING DINNER AT JACK’S PLACE, DuBose put her fork down. “Did you always know you wanted to be a lawyer?”
He smiled. “No. At first I wanted to be a mechanic like my daddy, then a pilot and then an astronaut. But growing up I had a neighbor named Ashby. He was a lawyer. Now, he was not the sort of lawyer I wanted to be, but he talked to me some about the profession. And I read all the Perry Mason books. I had just started law school when the TV show with Raymond Burr came on. It got me thinking.”
“So you wanted to be Perry Mason then?” she said, looking amused.
“I wanted to be something, I guess,” he said contemplatively. “At least more than what I was. But I believed I could help people who needed it. Criminal defense work is pretty much all I’ve ever done. Most of my clients aren’t bad. They’ve just had bad things happen to them and then they made poor decisions because of that. My daddy always said don’t judge anybody unless you’ve lived in their skin. And I don’t. At least I try not to.” He peered at her. “How about you? What were your dreams?”
DuBose sat back and looked off for a moment, gathering her thoughts. “I originally wanted to be a teacher. You know, exposing young minds to all the things they needed to know. And showing them how to be kind and tolerant. There’s far too much hate and anger in folks.”
“But you didn’t end up teaching?”
“I had just finished my first year of college when a relative was killed in Louisiana by a local sheriff.”
“What happened?”
“My cousin was trying to travel to the North for work, and the sheriff had been paid a bounty to stop any Black person trying to do that. They wanted to scare others from leaving because Black folks were needed to do the physical labor down there, or else the Southern economy would collapse. He waited at the bus station, said my cousin attacked him, and then shot him. In the back.”
“Was he arrested?”
She looked at him funny. “This was the late 1940s in Louisiana, Jack. There was no earthly chance of a white lawman ever being charged for killing a Black person.”
“And that made you want to be a lawyer?”
“That and the fact that when we went to the funeral, the man who shot him was at the church. And as we were walking out after the service, he tapped his gun and laughed.”
“You must have wanted to kill the bastard.”
“What I wanted to do was make sure his kind could never wear a badge or carry a gun. And I believed I could change this country one lawsuit at a time. And all these years later I feel both enormously hopeful and terribly depressed, often at the same time.”
“If this isn’t a fight worth having, I don’t know what is, Desiree.”
“How do you manage to live here if that’s how you feel?’ she said bluntly.
He picked at his food and then put down his fork. “This is my home, for better or worse. But if you want the truth, I’ve been wrestling with all these issues since I was little. Only I never did anything about it but think on things, get frustrated at how the country was divided up. I never looked for the chance to do something different, either. I guess I was just... I don’t know.”
“Since it didn’t really affect you, Jack, you probably just went along leading your life. I’m not saying that was right, I’m just saying it was convenient. And why bring trouble on yourself if you didn’t have to, especially when all you’ve been taught is that Blacks and whites should not mix?”
“Which makes me even more ashamed the way you just laid it out. Anyway, then Miss Jessup and Jerome came along, and I suddenly had this opportunity to do something... something risky, but important. But even with that, I had decided not to get involved when I got a phone call that said I was a—well it just called me a real bad name. And it was obvious that Jerome needed to be defended just like any other man because that’s what he is, a man. But to be totally honest, I’ve had second thoughts, I’ve had doubts. I’ve been scared. I’ve never been involved in something like this. You go from one of these situations to another all the time. But this is my first. It makes a man think a lot about what he’s done with his life, or what he hasn’t done with it. And what he could do with it... if he had enough courage.”
“You’ve shown courage,” she said, eyeing the still-visible injuries on his face.
“Not like you. And you’re doing it without my skin color, which at least gives me some protection.” He paused and added, “Look, clearly I’m no Atticus Finch. I’m nobody’s hero, or savior. Fact is, I can barely save myself most days.”
“Despite what Harper Lee wrote in that book, I’ve never once met an Atticus Finch in the South. Quite the opposite.” She gave him a look. “But maybe I will, as this case goes along.”
He glanced up from his plate as her meaning broke over him and shook his head. “I’m not sure I have that sort of fortitude in me, Desiree.”
“You never know until the opportunity arises.”
“How do you keep doing what you’re doing? With all the crap thrown at you?”
“After hundreds of years of slavery and then another century of Jim Crow, which is slavery as well, just without the shackles showing, white people ask why Blacks can’t get their act together. As though white society is the victim and not the culprit. We live with the fact that many white people in this country will do everything in their power to break us. Every minute of every day, both by their actions and their inactions. The sheer wrongness of that is what keeps me going, Jack. And all that hell, all that misery, for everybody, is simply because of this.”
She placed her hand next to his.
