American history is punctuated by watershed moments, fulcrum points that separate one sense of ourselves (as a nation) from another. We study the classic ones in school, the American canon, mostly those from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: America’s declaration of independence from England; the Gettysburg Address, and John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of the president who gave it; the Scopes trial. For some reason, these transformations of the prevailing zeitgeist tend to involve wars, crimes, or trials of some kind. All too rarely, they involve signal human achievements, like the discovery of a polio cure, or the moon landing in 1969.
Because of the proliferation of mass media, the twentieth century seems filled with such cultural dividing lines: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; Woodstock and Altamont; Nixon’s resignation; the L.A. riots; the O.J. verdict. Such historic markers might be fundamentally different from one another, but they share one trait: they unite millions of people by revealing some hidden truth about the nation. Woodstock crystallized a powerful urge toward love and peace within American youth culture. Only a few months later, Altamont and the Manson murders shattered that dream with chaotic violence.
Nations are not alone in experiencing such revelatory moments. Cities do, too. Only the scale is different. For Natchez, Mississippi, the trial of Dr. Tom Cage has become such a moment. Though it’s now the twenty-first century, Natchez has always seemed to me a city in search of its century. The trial of Tom Cage might finally place Natchez in time. During Quentin Avery’s opening statement, he promised the jury that before the trial concluded, Dr. Cage would take the stand and tell the whole truth behind the crime of which he has been accused. Mr. Avery also promised that when that happened, men in the courtroom would tremble.
Over the past four days, Judge Elder’s courtroom has been standing room only, with hundreds of would-be spectators turned away every morning. I suspect that today, likely the final day of the trial, throngs will surround the courthouse as Natchezians await Dr. Cage’s testimony and the verdict that will follow.
But why does such an air of expectation pervade the city? Is it only the lurid aspects of the case that have made Natchez ground zero for the entire state this week? I think not. I have come to believe that something far deeper is at work among the people. Natchez is a divided city, as Mississippi is a divided state and America a divided nation. And despite the protests of those who would deny this tragic truth, the root of that division is race—the unfinished business of chattel slavery.
When Tom Cage and Viola Turner reached for each other in 1968, they crossed an invisible boundary, a gulf between two races. They were not the first to do so. The children of such relationships walk the streets of Natchez every day. Their names are written in the pages of dusty Bibles kept out of sight, but kept all the same. In the silent shadows of this town, deep ties exist between black and white, and have for three hundred years. They are ties not only of friendship and love, but of blood. Rarely acknowledged, they’re like roots that spread beneath the soil, out of sight but as strong as any plant growing in the light of the sun. And in this racially fraught era of American history, it may be those roots that offer the best and only chance of bridging the gulf that divides us.
If Tom Cage takes the stand today, he will do so not only as himself, but as a symbol of the secret life of his hometown. And whatever his testimony reveals, Dr. Cage will be telling the city something about itself, perhaps something profound, certainly something necessary. Did Tom Cage kill Viola Turner? If so, did he do it out of fear, to silence her and to protect himself? Or did he do it out of love, to spare her an agonizing death? And if Dr. Cage did not kill Viola Turner, then who did? A violent splinter cell of the Ku Klux Klan? Or could it have been the tortured son born from the illicit relationship between Dr. Cage and his nurse?
Any of those answers, once made real, will become a lens through which the city will view itself, and through which it will be viewed by those outside. My hope is that the truth that emerges from this trial will inspire hope rather than bitterness.
I set down the paper and stare into my coffee, wondering how in hell Serenity managed to get an editorial into the paper from her hospital bed in Jackson. But a deeper question troubles me more. How did Serenity, an outsider, spend only a couple of days in Natchez with my family and perceive truths that I’d not seen myself? Was it precisely because she is an outsider? Whatever the case, Tee has answered the question I posed to Quentin last night at the jail: Why must Dad, after telling me nothing for months, now enter the witness box and tell the town everything?
“Penn, are you all right?”
My mother is standing in the kitchen doorway, worry etched in every line of her face.
“Have you gotten bad news?” she asks. “Has Serenity’s condition worsened?”
“I don’t think so. I . . . was just reading the paper. You should probably skip it.”
“I read it an hour ago.”
“Serenity’s editorial, too?”
Mom gives me a taut smile. “I never said she wasn’t sharp.”
“Everybody decent?” calls Joe Russell, now the leader of our security detail. “We need to leave in ten minutes.”
I hear his footsteps coming up the hall. Reaching out, I take hold of my mother’s cold hand.
“Can you stand one more day of trial?”
Her smile gets a little tighter. “I can stand anything, darling.”
It takes us forty minutes to travel the few blocks from my front door to the courtroom. After yesterday’s gun battle, the streets have become nearly impassable, from both vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Uniformed cops are conspicuous on the sidewalks, and I’m certain that John Kaiser has plainclothes FBI agents moving through the crowds. During our crawl to the courthouse, I receive a text from Kaiser informing me that the FBI forensic team in Washington has succeeded in restoring “Tape S-15”—the tape Viola made for Henry—to a “readable” condition. The only remaining obstacle to using it in the trial is authorization, which will be granted or denied after a conference between the FBI director, the U.S. attorney general, the director of Homeland Security, and (Kaiser suspects) the White House. If such use is authorized, a digitally encrypted video file will be transmitted to the FBI field office in Jackson—where Kaiser is waiting—and a hard copy will be driven to Natchez or flown here via helicopter.
While I try to hide my growing anxiety from my mother, Kaiser sends a more encouraging message. “Tape S-16”—the one discovered in the St. Catherine’s Hospital Dumpster—is apparently giving the Bureau’s digital wizards more trouble. However, they are still working on it. My heart tells me that Kaiser hopes his colleagues fail in their task, but I was a trial lawyer for too many years to put much faith in miracles.