How Beautiful We Were(106)
A few weeks later, she received a phone call from Carlos saying that he had decided to take the case on a contingency-fee basis. First, though, Kosawa would have to drop the case brought on by the Restoration Movement; Thula would need to talk to the Restoration Movement and inform them of the village’s decision to hire Carlos and start a new lawsuit. Once the old suit was dropped, Carlos would file a new one, accusing Pexton of conspiracy under something called the Alien Tort Statute. His argument would be that Pexton knew, going into a partnership with His Excellency’s government, that it was a government that cared nothing for the welfare of its people. Pexton took advantage of this and violated international laws, causing untold damages to property and lives in Kosawa.
Pexton was certainly going to ask the judge to dismiss a case they’d label frivolous, Carlos said, but he would request that the judge subpoena their internal documents related to Kosawa as far back as when its workers first appeared in the valley. At trial, Carlos would ask the court to impose substantial compensatory and punitive damages. None of this was to suggest that the battle was going to be easy or pretty, the lawyer cautioned—it’d likely take years, suits against powerful corporations were nearly impossible, Kosawa’s chance of victory in an American court was infinitesimal. He didn’t want the village to rest all their hope on it, though he was going to fight hard for them.
* * *
—
My sister had never been someone who jumped for joy at many things, but as she updated me in my living room, she couldn’t stop skipping around and saying, I can’t believe it’s happening, it’s finally happening. She’d lived in America, she knew what its courts were like, yet she put Kosawa’s fate entirely in its hands, because where else could she put it?
When she gathered the village in the square to tell them about their new lawyer, they cheered, and hugged each other, some even shedding jubilant tears, amazed that a mere four years after her return from America, Thula was already on the verge of saving Kosawa. She did not attempt to curb their celebration—their joy was her strength—but she nonetheless told them that the odds were against them, Pexton had armies of lawyers, but Carlos was fearsome too; he’d never lost a big case, and he was in this to win. One of the Five stood up and gave a stirring speech about how Pexton had been cornered at last, by the time this was over they would wish they had never stepped foot on our land.
After the village meeting, Thula informed the elders in a closed-door meeting in Sonni’s hut that, though Carlos would be working on a contingency-fee basis, he’d still need money for expenses, including payment for the experts who would be coming for a reconnaissance trip. Carlos couldn’t file any papers without a large amount of money up-front, so he had referred Thula to someone who could lend the village the money, someone at a place called a hedge fund. The hedge fund would give Carlos the money he needed, and if Kosawa won the lawsuit, they would give the hedge-fund people a percentage of what they got from Pexton. After giving Carlos and the hedge-fund people their percentages, Kosawa would get to keep less than a third of the awarded damages.
“How much money will we get, then?” one of the elders asked.
“I don’t know,” Thula said. “Carlos says there’s no way of knowing. But if these hedge-fund people are open to lending us money, it’s because they believe we have a strong case and they’re confident their percentage will be many times what they lent us.”
Everyone was silent for several seconds. “Do these people in America understand that money is really not what we’re after?” another elder asked.
“Money is the only thing the courts in America can force Pexton to give us,” I said before Thula had a chance to speak. She never seemed to feel it was a burden to explain everything to everyone, but I longed to relieve her of this task whenever I could.
“Juba is right,” she said. “The American courts can only make Pexton give us money, and then we can decide whether to use the money to clean the village. If we get a big enough sum, we can pay for people in America who know about cleaning lands and waters and air to come and look at the village and tell us what our options are.”
“But why can’t the courts just make Pexton leave?” the first elder said. “I know you said it doesn’t work that way, but there has to be some law in the American books that says that people have the right to live peacefully on their lands. Can’t this man Carlos look for this law in his books and ask the judge to apply it to our situation?”
“I’ll ask him, Big Papa,” Thula replied. “Carlos understands that restoring the village is what we’re most after, and I trust him to do his best to see that that happens.”
“If you trust him,” Sonni said, “give him our permission to do what he must.”
The day that Carlos filed the new lawsuit passed with less fanfare. I picked Thula up from a classroom after her lecture, and she showed me the fax from Carlos telling her to buckle up for the ride. I hugged her; we drove to see our parents, who hugged her and told her to get some rest—who knew how long it would take for the lawsuit to drag itself from court to court? They asked her to try not to think about the lawsuit, or the country.
She couldn’t. There was too much to do.
After Liberation Day (which she spent every spare minute preparing for, and spoke about nonstop, in the three years after Carlos filed the lawsuit), she formed a political party to pressure His Excellency into holding an election, the first presidential election in our country’s history. She named her party the United Democratic Party, though her devotees called it the Fire Party, for how often she shouted “Fire” with her clenched fist raised high. Her hope was that she would find enough supporters across the country to form local chapters of the party, ultimately resulting in a strong national presence. From within the ranks of the party, someone would arise who would stand up against His Excellency and defeat him in a democratic election. Elections in the country were still a fantasy—His Excellency retained the right to have the only political party—but my sister believed it crucial to declare her movement a party, albeit an illegal one; it was imperative that her party be ready to go against His Excellency when he finally called for an election.