Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(46)

We went back inside when it grew dark.

“Let’s play that game I was talking about,” I said.

I walked into the den and picked up a tennis ball that I kept on a shelf near the door. Rio immediately started whining, his tail banging into a coffee table.

“Sit,” I said, and the dog sat.

“Stay.”

I handed the ball to Kevin.

“Walk out onto the deck, close the door, and throw the ball in any direction you want,” I said. “Don’t throw it too hard toward the lake or it might roll over the bluff. After you throw it, open the door and let Rio out.”

Rio whined while Kevin went out, but he stayed where he was. I watched Kevin throw the ball with his left hand. He came back to the door and opened it. Rio looked at me.

“Go get it,” I said, and he shot through the door like a rocket.

“Less than five minutes, guaranteed,” I said.

About four minutes later, the dog was back with the ball in his mouth. He dropped it at Kevin’s feet.

“That means do it again,” I said, so Kevin repeated the whole process. He even gave Rio the “sit” and “stay” commands. I watched while they played the game for a half-hour or so.

“Okay,” I said after Kevin had thrown the ball and Rio had retrieved it seven or eight times, “that’s enough for tonight. Kevin, you’ve made a lifelong friend.”

We spent the rest of the evening watching the National League Division Series on television. The game ran pretty late. Jack and Charlie left around 10:00 p.m., and Caroline went to bed thirty minutes before. The ballgame was a blowout, and at some point I turned to Kevin and said, “Kevin, I played ball in high school with black guys and I served with black guys in the Army. I sweated and trained with them, drank beer with them, shared food with them, even fought in combat alongside them. I’ve represented dozens of black men and women over my career. But you know what? I never thought to ask one of them what it’s like to be black in the United States of America. So I’m going to ask you. What’s it like?”

He paused, considering his answer. That was something I’d noticed about Kevin. He was thoughtful in his approach to questions like the one I had just posed. He didn’t just blurt out the first thing that came to his mind.

“It’s hard for me to speak for so many,” he began, “because my life has been different than the lives of a lot of young blacks in this country. My father was always around. He was a steady influence, a good man. My mother was the same. Hard-working, conscientious, intelligent and loving. I always had clothes to wear and there was always food on the table. We ate as a family every evening, even if I was practicing and didn’t get home until late. Everyone would wait until we could all eat together. I wasn’t running the streets like so many others. I was in a safe, loving environment at home and at school, I worked hard in the classroom and in sports.

“But there have been things that happened—a lot of things—that made me uncomfortable, made me ashamed, made me angry. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I was stopped by the police three times my freshman year at Collierville, and all I was doing was walking to class. We had to walk outside from one building to another, and I would get stopped and questioned while my white classmates walked right past me. Why did they stop me and harass me? Because I was wearing red sweatbands. The school colors were red and white. A lot of white guys, especially athletes, wore red sweatbands, but on me, it was taken by the white cops as flashing gang colors. I finally just quit wearing them. After I got my license, I was stopped a half-a-dozen times by the Collierville police, for no other reason than I was a young black man driving around in a nice, predominantly white, neighborhood.

“My parents tried to prepare me, they warned me about some of the things I’d come up against, but it’s still hard to take when you’re walking down the street and a white woman that’s walking towards you crosses the street and clutches her purse. I remember playing spin the bottle at a party with a bunch of white kids from my neighborhood when I was in the sixth grade. I spun the bottle and it pointed at this girl named Susan Dell. I leaned over to kiss her and she got up and ran out of the room. A friend invited me over to swim in his pool when I was sixteen. When his father came home, it was immediately apparent that he was uncomfortable with me being in the pool. He asked my friend to ask me to leave. I know as I got older my mother was afraid every time I left the house because so many young black men were being shot by white police officers, people who were supposed to serve and protect us. You learn to cope with it, but you never really feel free. And you know why? It’s because you aren’t, not in the true sense of the word. Not in the white sense of the word.”

I didn’t know what to say. Everything he’d said had a ring of truth to it, and what was worse, here was a kid who had tried his entire life to do everything right, to walk that fine line, to advance and excel in a society where the deck was stacked against him, and now he’d fallen victim to the very things he’d just talked about. It was a perfect storm, and it would certainly devour this young man if I couldn’t do something to calm the winds. I decided right then and there I had to do something, and soon. I couldn’t let this case run its course through the normal channels. The risk was too great that we could wind up with a jury full of closet racists and that Kevin would go to the penitentiary for the rest of his life.