“Mr. Avery?” prompts Judge Elder.
“‘Half the truth,’” Quentin ruminates, “‘is a whole lie.’ These past two days, I’ve been noticing that some people didn’t have the benefit of my daddy’s instruction.”
Shad starts to object, but there’s a long-standing tradition that lawyers do not interrupt each other’s opening statements.
Quentin rolls closer to the jury. “You folks may not know it, but we have a mess of lawyers sitting in this courtroom with us. Yesterday, too. This is a historic trial. And I’ll tell you right now, a lot of those lawyers think I’m crazy. That I’m going senile. Why? Because I’ve let the DA get away with murder for a day and a half. He’s bent the rules every which way, and I’ve done nothing to stop him. I haven’t even tried to slow him down. I’ve let Mr. Johnson present patently inadmissible testimony without objecting to it . . .”
Shad’s face is rapidly darkening, but Quentin pushes on, as though oblivious to the effect of his words on opposing counsel. As outrageous as they sound, they are also true.
“I’ve listened to hearsay, irrelevant evidence, testimony about prior acts that can’t legally be held against my client in the present, and I didn’t object to any of it. I’ll tell you something else. By not objecting, I lost my ability to appeal a guilty verdict based on that testimony. That’s right. If you convict Dr. Cage of murder, I cannot appeal your verdict based on any of the legal flimflam that Mr. Johnson has pulled, because I didn’t object to it when he did it. If I didn’t have the long experience that I do, I believe Judge Elder himself would have dragged me back to his chambers to ask me if I ever graduated from law school.”
As I scan the faces in the jury box, it seems to me that they are grasping Quentin’s point. Whatever his strategy might be, it’s an all-in bet.
“So why, you must be wondering, would I do that? Why would I give Shadrach Johnson an inch and watch him take a mile? I’ll tell you. In the Book of Matthew, Jesus said, ‘If a man asks you to walk a mile with him, walk with him twain.’ ‘Twain,’ for those of you who don’t read your Samuel Clemens, means ‘two.’ Well, while Mr. Johnson put on his case, I tried to follow Jesus’s exhortation. It’s been difficult, but early on, Dr. Cage and I decided that, since he has nothing to hide, we would not attempt to stop anybody from saying anything they wanted to on that witness stand. We’re not going to try to ‘game the system,’ as the young folks say, or manipulate it to our benefit. We want the same thing you good people do. We want the truth to come out. The whole truth, and nothing but.
“That’s a novel strategy, believe me. Even Dr. Cage’s son, our distinguished mayor, is worried that I’m getting old-timer’s disease. But I told the mayor what I tell you now: my faith in his father’s integrity is such that I have no fear about letting any man say what he will in this court.”
Quentin lets the silence stretch out, so that his words will sink into the collective mind of the jury.
“Half the truth is a whole lie,” Quentin repeats, as though for his own benefit. “The Good Book says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’ Well, I promise you that, before my case is done, you will see that the Ninth Commandment has been broken by more than one witness for the State. And I’d like to remind some of the people in this room that in our modern age, that biblical proscription has been codified into law. The offense is called perjury, and the sentence is grave: not less than ten years.”
The jury seems appropriately impressed, and Shad looks downright worried by the turn Quentin’s open has taken. The DA must be wondering which of his witnesses lied, and if they did, whether Quentin has evidence to prove it.
Taking a small piece of paper from the crocheted comforter on his lap, Quentin says, “During his opening remarks, the district attorney said an interesting thing. To paraphrase, he said, ‘Were it not for the fact of race, Viola Turner would not have been murdered.’ That’s provocative, isn’t it?” Quentin rolls back to the defense table and puts his hand on my father’s shoulder. “Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you about this man and race.
“Tom Cage was the first doctor in this town to integrate his waiting room. He did that against the wishes of his boss, Dr. Wendell Lucas. Tom Cage made house calls at night on the north side of town when it was still called the colored section—or Niggertown—and other white doctors thought he was a fool.”
The courtroom feels as though its barometric pressure has suddenly dropped three points, into the storm zone. Quentin Avery is about as predictable as a tornado, and there’s no telling what might come out of his mouth.
“For forty years,” Quentin continues, his hand still on Dad’s shoulder, “this man treated black folks as he would his own family. In an era when white children called black men of seventy by their first names only, Tom Cage called his black patients mister and missus. Back then, any white male might say to a black stranger walking down the road, ‘Hey, Mose, get over here and fix my flat tire.’ And old Mose went.” Quentin lets his hand fall from my father’s shoulder, then shakes his head like he remembers fixing the tires of more than one white man in his youth. “But in Dr. Cage’s office, it was, ‘How are you feeling today, Mister Jackson? Let me palpate that liver for you, Mrs. Ransom.’ I’m talking about respect, folks—plain good manners. And if a man couldn’t pay his bill from Dr. Cage, he knew he could drop by the Cage house with a mess of collards or a bucket of catfish, and that would stand as good as cash money.”
This is the unadorned truth. I remember countless visits like that, and the shy expressions on the faces of the men who brought the buckets and boxes.
“And if you couldn’t manage that,” Quentin says, “you knew no debt collector would be coming to your door to embarrass you in front of your wife and children. Because in those cases, more often than not, Dr. Cage just let it go. Why? Because he knew how it was for black folk in Mississippi. Tom Cage knew how it was for poor folks, because he’d grown up poor himself. He knew what it was to do without. And he didn’t want to be the cause of anybody else’s children suffering.”