I asked, “How do you think he relates to the other slaves?”
Patrick shook his head, as if I had already answered the question by asking it. “What Frederick mean here,” he said, “is that slaves be like beasts or dogs who got nothing to worry about. And he jealous of them ’cause they ain’t know any better. They be in pain but not the mental kind, you know. They ain’t worried the way he be worried. Like my jail mates. They be spitting and cursing all day. They make all that noise, everybody moaning and groaning, a thousand noises; I hate that sound. So Frederick, he don’t got nobody to relate to. He be a little smarter now, he know about the past and the present,” he said, with an emphasis that made me recall the way he had said cause and effect. “For him to know how to read—that change everything.”
We kept going. We read how, over the holidays, the masters gave slaves gin, knowing the slaves would get very drunk. This was a way to disgust slaves with their freedom. Slaves would return to the fields sick and staggering and so conclude that freedom did not suit them, that they could not handle freedom.
Reading this, Patrick moaned out loud.
And quickly he swallowed his sounds, then kept reading. He didn’t look up; he didn’t stop. He did not wish to undo or unlearn the feeling most painful to him. To keep reading was urgent—in fact, not a choice at all.
—
IF WHAT PATRICK felt in reading Douglass was recognition and aching clarification, I felt something different.
I had imagined that reading Douglass would bring Patrick and me together, in shared contempt for slavery, but now I felt more separate from Patrick than when we had first started to read it. When I was growing up, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass had been synonymous with aspiration—literacy was a means to freedom; literacy had freed him. That is the trope of the slave narrative: Reading and writing ignite self-awareness, creating both the practical and spiritual conditions for escape.
But I did not anticipate the visceral psychic feelings that Douglass seemed to trigger in Patrick—the panic and dread and shock. And depression. Kafka wrote that we must read books that wound, that affect us like disaster, that act as an ax for the frozen sea inside us. For Patrick, Frederick Douglass was that ax, and it broke him apart.
Douglass had written from the standpoint of having made it. Douglass had taught himself, even after Mrs. Auld repudiated him. If books were a source of illumination for Douglass, they reminded Patrick of his failure. He looked up words. He wasn’t sure if he understood their meaning. He was goaded to do his homework with cigarettes. He had duped his teacher into smuggling in pot. He was in jail.
Patrick could not know—or would not accept—how much he seemed like Douglass to me. How he read in county jail, without table or light, how he wrenched self-discipline out of himself among inmates who were waiting for him to crack.
9
* * *
I Have Read Everything on This Paper
(The Guilty Plea)
“I think speaking Latin is a betrayal of the poor because in lawsuits the poor do not know what is being said and are crushed; and if they want to say four words they need a lawyer.”
—MENOCCHIO, a sixteenth-century miller,
from Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms
DRESS CODE FOR COURT
NO SHORT PANTS
NO SAGGING PANTS
NO HATS OR CAPS ON MEN
NO VULGAR T-SHIRTS
NO HALTER TOPS
NO MUSCLE SHIRTS
NO FLIP-FLOPS
NO HOUSE SHOES
AS I PUSHED OPEN THE door to the courtroom, I noticed, with surprise, that every word on the sign was spelled correctly.
Inside, a pair of American flags flanked a balding white judge. His head was bent over his papers. To his left sat a row of young black inmates, dressed in either fat-zebra-stripe or garish-orange jumpsuits. To his right was an empty jury box, that hypothetical congregation of the community.
I had gotten a phone call from Rob. “It’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“Court!” he barked.
“Okay,” I said, as if it were perfectly normal for a state court system, after nearly a year and a half of delay, to administer a case with less than a day’s notice. Rob said that Patrick had to show up today but he was near the bottom of the list, so the judge might not get to him.
Sitting in the back, I searched for Patrick and we found each other at the same time. Then he looked down and started to fidget with his sandal straps, self-conscious in his oversize jumpsuit, its black and white stripes now on public display.
Rob’s counterpart, the other Phillips County public defender, approached an inmate. In a millisecond that young man’s posture utterly transformed: Taut, alert, he leaned forward, trying to catch the lawyer’s every word. I realized it was likely the first time the lawyer had seen his client. Even from where I was sitting, halfway across the courtroom, I could discern his desperate attentiveness.
The judge called the courtroom to order.
He read the first inmate’s name.
A man shuffled to the center.
The judge asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
And then: “How far did you make it in school?”
“Ninth grade.”
These were not questions judges typically asked defendants, and this judge didn’t appear surprised by the man’s answer or even interested in it. Perhaps, I speculated, the judge had once asked these questions to humanize the defendant, but over time they’d become perfunctory.
The prosecutor stated the charges: residential burglary. “A plea bargain has been made, Your Honor.”
And then, the judge: “Do you understand that you have a constitutional right to a trial by jury? Do you understand that by entering a plea of guilty to the charges you are waiving your constitutional right to appeal of issues in the charges against you? Have you discussed all possible defenses with your lawyer?”
The judge spoke in a flat, efficient monotone. The man’s answers were barely audible, recognizable only by their percussive rhythm: Yes. Yes. Yes.
The judge said, “The record will show that the defendant knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily understood the charges against him.”
Thus commenced the tedium.
The defendants’ ages ranged from sixteen to sixty, they were all black, and their education generally fell somewhere between the fifth and tenth grades. No one spoke to what we all saw happen; no one said, No, I just met my lawyer five minutes ago. To me, the procedure was farcical, but nobody around me laughed or looked aggrieved.
It would have been pleasing to witness a crisis, anything to shake up the malaise of bored power and powerlessness. But the judge and bailiff seemed sleepy. The court was not efficient enough to be called machinery, not organized enough to be called bureaucracy, not malicious enough to be called dehumanizing. Sitting there, waiting for something interesting to happen, I felt within me the absence of rage, an inarticulable nothingness in the spacious courtroom, which Patrick later described as “full of fresh air.”