The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter by Kia Corthron

Author:Kia Corthron
Language: ara
Format: epub
Tags: race, class, socioeconomic, novel, literary, history, NAACP, civil rights movement, Maryland, Baltimore, Alabama, family, brothers, coming of age, growing up
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2016-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

11

“Oh I made every mistake in the book first year out. Rape cases?” He whistles. “I remember this one. College girl trying to press charges against her professor. Her white professor, I gotta hand it to her, she had cojones! Clearly forced himself on her but this was some tenured guy, published about a hundred books, Reconstruction and Scottsboro and a crack at fiction, his own slave narrative, you get the idea. And the girl loves his class, obviously infatuated with the guy, now how the hell’m I supposed to prove it wasn’t consensual? That Professor Progressive is really a skunk? It didn’t help that the girl lived with a man, of the Caucasian persuasion no less, so in the first place she plainly wasn’t a virgin, and in the second I don’t care if we are ‘up North,’ those sorts of choices don’t exactly sit well with the general populace. So I enter into the voir dire. First error: I’m so thrilled to get a Negro on the jury, any Negro, I don’t stop to investigate where my only rep of the race is coming from. What do you think he thought of a promiscuous colored girl and her white boyfriend? That she’s willing to give it away to any Anglo-Saxon dick, that’s what! Another beginner’s misstep: selecting some sculptor beatnik. You’d think given who I was trying to prosecute I should have known better than to make any assumptions about white liberals or perceived liberals. Guy turned out to be the biggest cracker of all!”

Eliot, at his desk, wonders if Beau Greene plans to stand in his doorway the rest of the day, lest the junior attorney misconstrue the reasons for his legal team’s losing the children’s case as related to anything other than his own rookie naïveté. A redundant exercise: on the long drive back after Wednesday’s decision, Eliot had fluctuated between blaming himself for what he had or hadn’t said in court and blaming himself for failing to quit early on and finding a more experienced replacement. And of course his haughty, uncompromising drive toward the habeas, refusing to even entertain the notion of an appeal. Steven’s oral arguments were at least as effective as they had been in Diana’s basement, and with what appeared to be minimal deliberation on the part of the judge over his lunch hour, it had all gone exactly as Didi Wilcox had predicted. And now seeming worse than before. How long would it take for an appeal? Had they gone that route in the first place, they could have already been through it, with a panel of comparably impartial judges in Atlanta having no connection whatsoever to Red Bank. And her suggestion to come to the judge after a year to ask for a modification of the disposition orders. Had the clock started over on that? Five and a half months the boys had already moldered behind those walls, and Eliot feels a little ill now, remembering the look of

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