A Thousand Never Evers (20 page)

CHAPTER 29

October 21, 1963, Noon

When Mrs. Tate arrives at the front of the courtroom, she chats a few seconds with Miss Gold. Then Miss Gold talks to the judge. And before long, Mrs. Tate’s resting her palm on the Bible, swearing to tell the whole truth.

“I’m not one for speaking to the public and all,” Mrs. Tate says soon as she’s settled in the witness-box. “But my friend, Miss Springer, brought me here and my mother’s watching my son because I’ve got something to tell y’all.”

“Mrs. Tate, if you’ll forgive me,” says Mr. Hickock, “you appear on edge. Truly you don’t need to testify. We’ve already heard from your husband, which is good enough for the both of you so far as I’m concerned.”

Mrs. Tate closes her eyes like she’s trying to erase the ugly sight. But sorry for her, when she opens them back up, Mr. Hickock’s still there. So Mrs. Tate says, “Excuse me, Mr. Hickock, but I wouldn’t be here if I was just gonna repeat what my husband already said.”

It’s amazing how Mr. Hickock slinks away.

“Just talking from personal experience,” Mrs. Tate says, “I think a lot of you would be surprised to know I was actually quite a good student in school. I’ve got more going on than what you see. But folks don’t seem to want to believe two things—beauty and brains—can go together. What’s more—”

“For the love of the Lord!” Miss Springer cries out from the back of the courtroom. “Quit whistlin’ Dixie!”

“But I’m not whistlin’ Dixie!” says Mrs. Tate. “It’s a similar case here. Folks don’t want to believe that the person who disrespected you and me and everyone who worked so hard on this garden, the person who doesn’t care whether
we
eat or don’t eat as long as
he
eats, the person who has our respect but doesn’t deserve it, could actually be, well, one of us. Folks would rather believe what’s easy: a Negro committed this crime. But the truth is more complicated.”

With that, Mrs. Tate reaches into her purse, takes out a sheet of newspaper, and hands it to the judge. “This should help solve the puzzle.”

“Looks like a sheet from the
Delta Daily
to me,” the judge says. “And the date on it…” The judge lowers his glasses on his nose. “July 18, 1963.”

“Exactly, sir. If you turn that news sheet over, you’ll see that scrawled beside the crossword puzzle is the list of all the seeds that were left in Mr. Adams’s garden cabin at the time he died. Mr. Mudge wrote up this list at one of our Garden Club meetings. As you can see, Judge, according to Mr. Mudge, when Mr. Adams died, there weren’t any butter bean seeds left in his garden cabin. No butter bean seeds at all.”

“And so, Mrs. Tate?” asks the judge.

“And so the idea that someone broke into the shed and stole the butter bean seeds that ruined our garden doesn’t amount to a hill of beans,” Mrs. Tate says. “But this does!” she adds. Then she digs to the bottom of her purse and plucks out a long slip of yellow paper like it’s a quarrelsome buttercup wrecking her lawn. She hands it to the judge.

I crane my neck off my backbone trying to make out what that long strip of yellow paper could be. What a slip of paper could possibly have to do with mud, tears, and vines, I can’t imagine.

The judge smooths out the slip with his palm and checks it through his magnifying glass. Mrs. Tate has more to say. “It’s like this,” she begins. The second she opens her mouth, though, the judge holds up his hand like she should shut it back up.

But I reckon Mrs. Tate is sick of waiting for the judge to figure out what she already knows, because she plows ahead to tell her story. “Just yesterday I’m looking for the perfect outfit for this trial,” she says. “I pick out a yellow dress, a two-piece with satin trim. Of course, I wouldn’t think of wearing that darling dress without my lemon chiffon hat to match. So I search my closet. I open all my hatboxes, one by one, but no lemon chiffon. And I’m wringing my hands because I don’t know where else my hat could be. Not unless I stuck it in one of my husband’s hatboxes by accident.”

“Objection!” Mr. Hickock calls, and stands. “Irrelevant!”

“Overruled,” says the judge. “And don’t be rude to the lovely lady.”

“So I stand on my tippy-toes,” Mrs. Tate says, “and when I pull down one of my husband’s hatboxes, I hear a strange rustling sound inside. I remove the cover, and there, where his cowboy hat used to rest in peace, are all these long slips of yellow paper instead. I pull them out, one by one, then by handfuls.”

Mrs. Tate stares down the jurors. Then she tells the most exciting part. “I get a closer look at one of those slips and I’ll be!” she says. “What I see in my hand is…”

“What?” asks the judge. “What did you see in your hand?”

“Oh,” Mrs. Tate says, “just the key to the butter bean fiasco.” She bats her blue eyes. “If you must know,” she says, “it wasn’t a Negro who planted the butter beans and ruined our harvest.”

The jurors sit still as the butter sculpture at Old Man Adams’s Christmas party.

“As you can see, I never did find my lemon chiffon hat, so last minute I had to switch my whole color scheme to this,” Mrs. Tate says, and touches the sleeve of her pink dress.

Halfway up the central aisle, I see Delilah. She’s sitting on the courthouse floor, shaking her head in sympathy with Mrs. Tate who tried to dress to match the day but failed.

“In any case,” Mrs. Tate says, “it pains me most of all to say this: my husband, Ralph, never sold the butter bean seeds to Mr. Adams. He sold them to…to…” Mrs. Tate looks down at her hands like she’s trying to see if she carried her courage here today. When she looks back up, I can tell by the flash of anger in her eyes that she did. “He sold those butter bean seeds to Mr. Mudge.”

The pictures in my mind slide into place like a television show.

“Fact is,” she says, “my husband did make this hefty sale, but, Judge, that paper in your hand proves he sold the seeds to Mr. Mudge, not Mr. Adams. That is a receipt of sale, Judge. Receipt of sale! If you look down there at the bottom, you’ll see Sam Mudge’s signature. Now, Judge, when I was a schoolgirl, I thought all that mathematics I studied was a bunch of hooey. How was all that multiplication and division gonna help me?” Mrs. Tate laughs. “Funny, it’s coming in rather handy today!”

“What do you mean?” the judge asks.

“Well, Judge, that there receipt in your hand shows my husband, Ralph, sold three hundred twenty-one thousand, two hundred four butter bean seeds to Mr. Mudge on July twenty-second this year. That was just a few days after the last Garden Club meeting when we’d finally decided what to plant. Now then, we all know that the vegetable garden is six acres, so if there are nine hundred twenty-three butter bean seeds per pound and it takes fifty-eight pounds to cover one acre with thick vines, then you can see that to cover six acres would require…well, three hundred forty-eight pounds or…” Mrs. Tate rolls her eyes up in her head. When they fall back down again, she says, “Exactly three hundred twenty-one thousand, two hundred four seeds. And if the seeds are sold in fifty-pound sacks, then to cover six acres you’d need…” Her eyeballs roll up and down again. “Seven sacks,” she says.

I reckon I’m proud Mrs. Tate can do butter bean math in her head too!

But now Mrs. Tate’s smile fades. “My husband, Ralph, may not be the cheeriest man in Kuckachoo,” she says, “but he is loyal to his friends. And that’s why I hope you’ll forgive him for standing up for his friend Sam Mudge, who started him out in seed sales in the first place. I know Ralph is so shocked by this butter bean crime he can’t come to see the truth yet himself. But we all have a little space in our hearts where the truth resides even if we don’t want to look there. And I know eventually my husband will look into that space and be proud of me. Proud I stood up for all of us who planned this garden. And so you might say I’m doing this favor for my husband, sparing him from getting into the awkward position of turning in a friend who has already turned on him.”

In the back of the courtroom, Miss Springer applauds. I see lots of hats bobbing up and down. Pink hats. Black hats. Blue hats. It seems all the ladies in the viewing gallery have turned to their neighbors to whisper.

Then a gravelly voice shouts, “Traitor!” and folks go crazy. Some holler at Mrs. Tate as she leaves the witness-box. The judge bangs his hammer.

And me? I’ve got to get to the stand. I’ve got to prove what Mrs. Tate says, it’s the no-doubt-about-it, one-hundred-percent, honest-to-goodness truth.

CHAPTER 30

October 21, 1963, Early Afternoon

At long last it’s quiet in the courtroom. Now’s my chance. I press past Mama’s knees, fly down the center aisle, and wave my hand like I’ve figured out the answer to the challenge problem in school. It all makes sense. My dream, I know it’s true. And I know I’ve got to tell Miss Gold what the night said.

But the judge sees me first. “What on earth is this spectacle?” he roars.

“Please, Your Honor,” says Miss Gold. “She’s Bump Dawson’s niece.”

“Get her outta here!” the judge shouts.

The next thing I know, two court officers lunge at me from both sides. They wrap their fat hands round my arms and lift me up in the air.

Then
thwack!
A loud thud vibrates from the back of the courtroom. I turn my head. There’s Mrs. Jacks slamming her walking stick into the courthouse floor. And dog my cats! I reckon even Mrs. Jacks misses school for real important things.

“Your Honor, if you would permit just one more unscheduled witness, I would like to call this girl, Addie Ann Pickett, to the stand,” Miss Gold says.

White folks howl with laughter. The judge bangs his hammer again and again, but the shrieking giggles roll on. I shuffle my legs in the air like I’m riding an imaginary bicycle, which is the only kind I’ve ever had, so I know just how to do it. And the news reporter takes pictures of me with his Polaroid instant camera.

One thing’s clear: the judge is good and scared this mess in his courtroom will be tomorrow’s front-page news, because at long last he gives in. “Fine!” he yells over the hubbub. “Bring her up!”

When the officers drop me into the witness box, I look out at all the people laughing at me. And the strange thing is I know just what to do. This time I don’t need my brother’s instructions. I stand up. But I don’t look down the way Mama always says I should. Instead I raise my eyes to stare—no, glare—at the members of the Kuckachoo Garden Club. I see blue eyes sinking in pity, hazel eyes tickling with gossip, and brown eyes burning with hate. And I see other eyes, like Honey Worth’s, quivering with questions.

The next minute stretches like a forty-nine-car railroad train. My silent protest swallows up the laughter one guffaw at a time.

I fix my eyes on Mrs. Worth’s.

Right away, she sits up straight and fiddles with the hat on her head.

At long last there’s more order in the court than there’s been all day.

The court clerk holds the Bible in front of me. I swear to tell the whole truth, so help me God. When I hear those words, I think how much the whole truth can hurt. Lickety-split, it flashes through my mind: a morning not long ago. We were in the middle of a math test. Mrs. Jacks stepped into the hall to talk to the principal. I could feel Jeremiah Taylor’s eyes bore a hole into my paper from behind me. When Mrs. Jacks hobbled back in the room, she said, “I presume we’ve all kept our eyes on our own papers, have we not?” And right then I said, “Yes, ma’am” along with all the others. I reckon you could say I didn’t tell the whole truth, because Jeremiah was cheating and I didn’t let on. And I wondered if I was a bad person after that. But then, what good would it have done me to tell on Jeremiah?

Now I sit down in the witness-box.

“Is there something you’d like to say?” Miss Gold asks.

Here I am, sworn to tell the whole truth and everything, so I imagine I’m not in a courtroom but in a classroom—Mrs. Jacks’s room. I picture myself in school, but after school, talking to the teacher who cares what I’ve got to say. I open my mouth, and what do you know? For once in my life, a bushel of ripe words falls at my feet. “The evidence,” I say. “It’s in the woods next to Mr. Mudge’s farm.”

“Blasphemy!” cries Mr. Hickock.

A breeze blows through the open window. I describe what I saw when Flapjack and me dashed through the forest the day Honey Worth warned me to run.

The judge twirls the hammer in his hand. I’ll bet he’s afraid the news reporter will follow my clues even if he doesn’t. And then how will he look if the evidence turns up? So at long last he bangs the hammer down and says, “The lawyers, the witnesses for the defense, the jurors, and me—we’re going to get to the bottom of this nonsense once and for all. Officers, see to it no one else moves from this court!” He points to the news reporter. “Jott James, you come along too. I know you’d prefer to photograph the Miss Sweetheart competition, but today we’ll need your camera to document the evidence and check the veracity of what this young lady says.” Then the judge looks straight at me and says, “Young lady, if what you say is not verifiable, be warned. I can try you for perjury!”

Thanks to Mrs. Jacks and her Latin roots, I crack the judge’s secret code. By using the words “
ver
ifiable” and “per
jury,”
the judge is telling me that if I don’t prove what I say is a fact, the law will come after me and I’ll face a jury all my own!

A court officer unhooks the latch on the witness-box and opens the gate. Then he grabs me by the arm again, right in the spot where it burns. He pulls me out of the seat. But I shake off his grip. I can walk my own self! I’m not under arrest!

When I look back at Mama, she puts her hand to her lips and blows me a kiss. But it’s not a kiss with a smile. It’s a kiss with a prayer.

Miss Gold walks with me across the court. We follow the judge through his private room. The shelves brim with more books than I’ve ever seen in my life. I only wish I could stay here to read them. I wish I could forget my uncle’s freedom depends on whether I can find the evidence in the forest.

When we leave the judge’s private room and walk out the courthouse into the parking lot, I shield my eyes from the bright sun.

“Do you know exactly where the evidence is?” Miss Gold asks me.

I nod, but truth be told, I don’t. Well, not down to a gnat’s eyebrow. Here I’ve left half the county sweating inside the courthouse on account of the fact I’m supposed to turn up evidence to clear my uncle’s name. I reckon I might as well make a run for it now, because if I can’t make good on my word, Uncle Bump might never come home to our family again. Heck, I might get locked in the jailhouse too!