“Just two classes,” he said. “Freshman Spanish. Can you do just two? You’d have to start Monday.”
Maybe this was why I had come back—to teach in a school that was functional, where students were expected to achieve. The tidy row of KIPP students lined up at the bus downtown now warmed my memory; nearly every kid carried a book of some kind, Philip Pullman or Black Boy. Besides, a paycheck would be nice—I was living off savings and an IRS return. There was such a dire need for middle-class professionals in this town that within days of coming back, I could have a new job.
“I’m in,” I said, resolving to avoid Ms. Alvarado, lest she try to speak to me in Spanish.
—
I HAD ONLY a few days before my job at KIPP would start, and I still needed to meet Patrick’s lawyer. I’d promised Patrick that I would figure out when his court date was. This was all he had asked of me. He had been in county jail for over a year, and still there was no trial.
Knowing Helena, I half-expected Patrick’s public defender to be wearing sweatpants and chewing tobacco. But Rob looked respectable: sharp canary-yellow tie, tailored black suit. He was black and looked as if he was in his forties. A graduate of the University of Arkansas Law School, Rob had worked at McDonald’s to pay his tuition. He had become a public defender because he believed poor people needed access to legal services. But soon he discovered that he needed a private practice in order to stay afloat. There was only one other public defender in Helena, and both worked part-time, because the state of Arkansas declined to pay for anything more. In total, they each received a copy machine and 1,700 copies a year. Postage, long-distance calls, gas, transportation—all these came from their own pockets. They had zero funds for private investigation, including police-misconduct inquiries, psychiatrists, forensics experts. Investigations required money Rob didn’t have.
“Have you talked”—I paused, trying to word my question carefully—“gotten a chance to talk to Patrick yet?” I asked.
“I’ve got over a hundred clients,” he responded.
Then, as if conceding my point, he said ruefully, “It’s legalized malpractice.”
Rob explained that Helena had only four sessions of court in a year. (In contrast, in Massachusetts, criminal court took place every business day of the year.) Each session in Helena was little more than three weeks long. If a trial was held, all the other cases—and there were usually more than a hundred cases on the docket—were pushed to the next session. Cases such as Patrick’s were not “priority,” and so his case had gotten repeatedly delayed.
“Imperfect self-defense,” Rob continued, was probably Patrick’s best argument. It meant exactly what it sounded like: Patrick’s belief that he was defending himself—he thought Marcus had a weapon—was mistaken, imperfect. This could lower the charge of murder to manslaughter.
I said that in poor communities, where there was a lot of violence and a lot of death, wasn’t it safe to assume that most people had a belief about the dangerousness of others? Wasn’t this belief the very core of fear—a belief in the possibility of harm that could be based in reality but also could be mistaken? Even if Marcus had turned out not to carry a weapon, was it really such a mistake—an “imperfection”—for Patrick to feel afraid, to think he might be in danger?
Rob appeared amused, and his smile seemed to say, This is what a Harvard education is worth.
“That’s a good point,” he said. “But you can’t tell that to the prosecutor. The law’s the law.”
“What about plain old self-defense?” I laid out the case. “You’re eighteen; you’re just a kid. A drunk guy shows up on your porch. He’s bigger; he’s older than you; he’s aggressive. And he’s got your sister with him. She’s just sixteen and she’s a little slow, in special-ed classes. You tell him to get off the porch, and he won’t get off the porch. He’s really drunk and—”
“That really depends on the jury,” Rob interrupted. “But it’s a risk to take it to the jury.”
“If Patrick were white…” I tried finally. This was the elephant in the room. It seemed perfectly obvious that a white resident confronted with a drunk black aggressor on his property would not be charged with murder.
Rob’s eyes sparkled, bemused. I wondered if he thought I was very stupid. “I agree, I agree,” he said. “But there’s nothing we can do about that.”
—
I VISITED PATRICK twice more that week. Even in this short time, conversations had started to blend together. We would speak first of me. “How you be, Ms. Kuo?” he’d ask. (Sometimes, attempting formality, “How are you?”) Just about any trivial fact caught his attention—a movie, a meal, the weather. The conversation tended to the mundane. Did it rain? What you been eating? What kind of car you drive? He would lean forward, not wanting to miss a word. Almost any photo in my phone, no matter the content, captivated him; he studied the image as if it contained an encrypted message from the world. I answered questions, often logistical: What city was this in? How did I get there?
But if we spoke about him, we seemed to talk mostly about the jail and how dirty it was. The showers were the worst. Trusties dumped leftover liquids into the drains, and cockroaches crawled out. Patrick thought that the Kool-Aid was the culprit. “I flush my Kool-Aid in the toilet, but people be dumping it everywhere,” he said. When he showered, he kept his arms close to his body, afraid that his skin would touch the colorful fungus that grew on the walls.
Broken toilets went unfixed, and the jail smelled terrible no matter how far you got away from them. Trusties put black garbage bags over the ones that they couldn’t repair. “We end up using all the same toilet. At the other cell, they was just peeing all over the floor. Ain’t no telling, with these guys back here, what disease I be catching.”
The cells had no doors, so people wandered in and out of Patrick’s. One guy stalked into his cell, spat on the floor, and stalked out. An older guy walked around muttering that he was Martin Luther King, Jr. Patrick’s cousin with schizophrenia had been given the wrong meds—another inmate’s heart medicine—for two weeks. There was always chatter of who’s gonna jump who, who’s in for what, and constant fighting, yelling, beating on walls.
The details became repetitive, insistent, dull: The mold grows on the bathroom walls; the cockroach crawls out of the drain. Sometimes Patrick forgot details he had already told me. “I be in the best cell,” he said. “Because all the other cells got toilets that don’t work.”