Lincoln nods intently, as though trying to focus through the furnace glow of his anger on some wavering point beyond it.
“What about your mother’s will, Mr. Turner?”
After several seconds, Lincoln looks up, and this time it’s Quentin who rolls back about a foot in the face of his withering stare. “Mama made a new will, just like her letter said. And I burned it. I burned it as soon as I got to Natchez that morning.” Lincoln looks over Quentin at the spectators. “Who in this room wants to condemn me for that? All my life, Mama told me she was going to take care of me. She often talked about her will and said she was going to do all she could for Cora and me. And she meant to, right up until a couple of weeks before she died. Right up until that white reporter got her alone and filled her head with crazy dreams about Jimmy. My mama was sick, man. She was on drugs! She was dying, and that Henry Sexton took advantage of her just like Junius Jelks used to cheat them old folks in the nursing homes in Chicago. I deserved that money, people. Cora did, too. Mama wanted us to have it, and then a smooth-talking white man came along and cheated her out of her life savings on her deathbed. Do you think I should have stood by and let that crook walk away with my mama’s life savings? When my auntie can’t hardly pay her electric bill?” Lincoln looks down at Quentin. “Do you really believe that?”
Quentin sits silent in his wheelchair, seemingly cowed by the intensity of Lincoln’s indignation. This is exactly what I was afraid of, though I didn’t know Lincoln would go quite so far in expressing his righteous anger. But Jelks’s testimony so enraged him that he seems unconcerned by the prospect of being charged with fraud, or whatever the charge will be for destroying his mother’s valid will.
I want Quentin to put an end to this, but there’s really no way to do it. If he tries to shut Lincoln up, Shad can simply walk up on redirect and let him finish whatever he wants to say. Quentin knows this, of course. That’s why he let Lincoln get up in the first place. My mother has leaned across Annie to speak urgently to Mia, and I can guess what she’s telling her, but Annie’s having none of it. If Mom wants Annie out of this court, she’s going to have to miss the proceedings herself, which she’s unwilling to do.
Lincoln turns to the jury, his eyes glinting with tears. It’s unexpectedly moving to see such a large and muscular man reduced to this.
“Listen to me, folks,” he implores. “Please listen to this, if nothing else. What Tom Cage and his lawyer are doing is just what Junius Jelks taught me to do. What every good con man and magician does. They’re getting you to look at one thing—one hand—so you don’t see what the other hand is doing. But it’s that other hand that’s dipping into your pocket, or pulling the fifth ace from a sleeve. That other hand does the real business, see? Don’t let yourselves be taken in! Don’t be suckers.”
Lincoln blinks at the twelve bovine faces like a prophet trying to get through to a crowd of tired peasants. “People have been talking about Tom Cage like he’s some kind of saint. The patron saint of downtrodden black folks. Don’t you know why? Who’s going to convict a saint of murder? Nobody. But have you ever asked yourself why he’s spent his life doing things for black people? Did you ever wonder if what drives him might be guilt, and not Christian charity?”
Lincoln jabs his forefinger toward the audience. “I’ve talked to people in this town! Everybody from Natchez talks about the light in my mama’s eyes. They say she could light up a whole room. But by the time I knew her, that light was all but gone. She was just a husk of a woman sitting in front of the TV after work, drinking cheap wine and crying over stupid movies. I saw that light flicker up a few times, when I’d bring home a good report card or something. But that was all. Mama hardly left that apartment after I was ten years old, except to go to work or the liquor store. Always sent me out to get her cigarettes. I’ve seen pictures of her taken down here . . . she looked like a movie star. But by the time she was thirty-five, she looked fifty years old. Ten years after that, she looked like a bag lady. You think that’s easy for me to say?” Lincoln closes his big hand into a fist and hammers it against his heart. “It’s not. But I say it to let you know what Tom Cage did to her. He filled her full of hope for something she could never have, and then he snatched it away! He made her lie to protect his reputation, and his white family. He made her lie to keep me invisible. He stole the life out of her, the same way Jelks stole people’s last dollar!”
Hearing a shuffle to my right, I turn. Mom is actually holding her hands over Annie’s ears. For a moment I consider getting up and leading Annie out. But she’s already heard this much, and I’m not about to miss the remainder of Lincoln’s soliloquy. As he continues, though, my mind sticks on the things he said last, and I realize that I’m no longer picturing Viola Turner as the nurse I knew so long ago, but as Serenity Butler. What would it take to completely break down a woman with Serenity’s strength, beauty, and intelligence? By all accounts, Viola had possessed each of those gifts.
“Take the word of a man raised by a con man and educated to be a lawyer,” Lincoln goes on. “And what is a lawyer but a con man with a degree?”
Several jury members nod at this.
“Quentin Avery has spent all this time getting you focused on Mama’s will so that you won’t focus on the one thing that really matters—the crime that brought us here—my mama’s murder. And not one thing he’s said has disproved a single fact about what happened on the night Mama died.”
“It was you who brought us here,” Quentin says, just loud enough to be heard by the jury. “And I think we’re all beginning to understand why. You’re a very angry man. And while that may not be the main issue before the bar, perhaps it should be. The courts, Mr. Turner, do not exist to be used for personal revenge.”
“Objection,” says Shad. “Judge, we’ve gotten far afield of the central issue. Mr. Turner is right, his mother’s will is a matter for the chancery court, not this venue.”
“You may be wrong about that,” Judge Elder says ominously. “But this has gone far enough. Mr. Avery, bring this to a close.”
Quentin rolls his chair to within three feet of the witness box. I’m put in mind of a veteran lion tamer getting dangerously close to the beast he wants to manipulate.
“Are there any other lies you wish to confess, Mr. Turner? If so, now’s your chance.”
“I’ve said what I had to say.”
“All right, then. No further questions, Judge.”
“Mr. Johnson?” says Judge Elder.
“Nothing further, Your Honor.”