Authors: Joanna Connors
The second building to go up, the courthouse was intended to inspire awe among the citizens who entered it seeking justice. A hundred years later it still does a pretty good job of it. Life-size bronze statues of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton flank the wide stairs leading to the front entrance. Above them, on a ledge surrounding the building, stand statues of the great lawgivers of history, from Moses on. Inside, twin marble staircases curl up the three-story marble rotunda, where
a stained-glass window of Lady Justice looks down from a perch positioned to catch the rising sun.
Eventually the county outgrew the courthouse, and in 1976 most court operations moved to the ugly new Justice Center tower across the street. The graceful Old Courthouse remained open, though, home to the domestic relations and probate courts, where the people of Cuyahoga County go to get their marriage licenses and, later, their divorces, and where they go to deal with death.
The grand staircase led me down to the basement, a dim warren of offices and storage rooms. A canteen near the stairs sells tepid coffee and off-brand packaged snacks, and every time I went there I passed divorce lawyers huddled at the wobbly tables with their clients, most of them weeping.
In this basement, the county’s Clerk of Courts keeps all of its millions of pages of transcripts and criminal evidence. In 2006, when I first went there, none of the records were digital, and the archives of documents overwhelmed the space allotted.
In the hallways, towers of stacked file boxes along the walls formed a cardboard canyon of mortgage foreclosures, divorce actions, child-custody battles, competency hearings, property disputes, robbery trials, murder trials, rape trials. These were the records that would not fit in the overstuffed file rooms, where more boxes were stacked to the water-damaged ceilings.
As I walked through the canyon of files, I felt like a visitor to the Catacombs of Paris, wandering through tunnels lined with skulls and bones. I had entered an ancient repository of
grief, a place that held the memories of the collective pain, bitterness, fear, and sorrow of the people of Cuyahoga County. My small piece of it came in the file of Case Number CR-193108:
The State of Ohio v. David Francis
.
I filled out a printed form and handed it to a clerk in a crowded office at the end of the hall. He returned a few minutes later carrying two expandable dark red envelopes stuffed with files, each held together with a rubber band. He gestured toward a table in the hallway and said, “Don’t take these out of this area.” That warning was the extent of the court’s security system.
I opened the smaller envelope. Out tumbled the evidence from my trial: a gold cross on a chain, a dozen Polaroids, some mug shots, and two tiny glassine envelopes containing pubic hair samples, mine and the rapist’s. I had forgotten about the embarrassing collection of the hair. I put the envelopes back with my fingernails, as carefully as if they contained anthrax.
The Polaroids showed my body, most without my head. Two of them showed my back, an abstract design of red lacerations and bruises turning blue and purple. Others showed a small red gash on my neck and puncture wounds on my fingers. I studied them. The photos looked like porn for a scar fetishist. They were crude shots of a body without the woman inhabiting it, a portrait of everything the rape did to me. I slid them back into the envelope.
The second one, much thicker, held the trial transcript.
On the first page, I read:
Be it remembered, that at the September, 1984 term of said court, to-wit, commencing on Wednesday, the 17th day of October, this cause came on to be heard …
I trembled, surprising myself.
Be it remembered
.
I turned to my testimony. There, on the onionskin pages, I found the Joanna of twenty-two years before. She was trembling, too, I remembered, as she told the jury what happened that day.
Monday, July 9, 1984. Cleveland.
On the last day of the first part of my life, I’m running late. As usual.
Damn it, damn it, damn it
.
I’m driving up Euclid Avenue in my Toyota hatchback, fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, pushing it to twenty, headed east out of downtown Cleveland for a 5:00 p.m. interview at Case Western Reserve University.
It’s already 5:00. Rush hour starts at 4:30 here, and I’m trapped in the daily exodus of workers leaving their offices in the city for the suburbs, all of them stepping on the gas through the bad parts of town, speeding past the brick housing projects and the weedy vacant lots that mark the spots where riots burned through in the ‘60s.
At East 55th Street, the borderline between downtown and the inner city, you can almost hear the steady beat of car
locks clicking down, the percussive sound track to Cleveland’s deep racial divide.
I slalom from the left lane to the right lane and back, swearing and scolding myself the way I always do.
Why don’t you leave more time? Jesus. What’s wrong with you?
It’s high summer, and I’m worked up and jittery, hitting the steering wheel as I talk. The car has no air-conditioning. My open window lets in the heavy, hot fumes of summer, melting tar and truck diesel. All I want to do is get to Case, do a quick interview, and then head to my neighborhood pool for an evening swim before it closes. I’m thinking more about the pool than the interview, which I’m doing only because the guy who runs the little summer theater on the Case campus bugged me so much about it. I’ve agreed to watch a rehearsal of their next show, and then talk to the playwright, someone I’ve never heard of, who’s in from Peru. I’ve been so busy I haven’t read the play or anything about the playwright. I’ll wing it.
At this point, I’ve lived in Cleveland only ten months. I still get lost, still don’t know all the shortcuts. I keep up the yelling at myself and other drivers as I head into the rush-hour snarl of University Circle, a hub of culture, education, and verdant parks at the eastern edge of the city. The Circle is the rose on the lapel of Cleveland’s threadbare jacket, financed by the likes of John D. Rockefeller and the city’s other titans of the Gilded Age as the home to the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, two history museums, a botanical garden, art and music schools, and Case Western Reserve University.
On the many occasions when our civic dignity is wounded, Clevelanders always invoke University Circle to restore our pride.
It’s no easy task. Magazines continually put us on soul-crushing lists, naming us the fattest city in America, or the poorest, or the least sexy, or—the latest—the most miserable city in America. I like to imagine teams of statisticians with clipboards going door to door, measuring the misery of an entire city, offering tissues and hugs as they listen.
I forget how this one determined misery. The choices are many, topped by dreary winter weather, high unemployment, and the sorry history of our teams. Cleveland still has three major-league teams, but they all lose so often, and so spectacularly, that my newspaper calls it a “streak” if any of them win two games in a row. The nickname for the stadium where the Cleveland Browns play is “The Factory of Sadness.” After LeBron James took his talents to South Beach, ESPN found few reasons to even mention Cleveland, and resumed paying attention only when he came back in 2014. Before the first home game after LeBron returned, Clevelanders filled the streets downtown, the mass celebration reaching a level of joy and mayhem that other cities might reserve for a World Series or Super Bowl win.
The Cavaliers lost the game.
After delivering that familiar disappointment, the team then astonished everyone in Cleveland by starting to win, making it to the playoffs, winning again, and continuing to the NBA Championship Finals. Which they lost.
Clevelanders, their hopes crushed yet again, immediately started talking about next year.
On one border of University Circle you have the massive Cleveland Clinic, a Legoland where new buildings appear
almost overnight, usually followed by squat bodyguards outfitted with Secret Service–style earpieces, there to protect the Middle Eastern shahs and princesses who jet into Cleveland for luxe treatment on private hospital floors. A few years back, a rumor circulated that one shah arrived with his own “volunteer” kidney donor in tow. Some said it was because he did not want to wait on an official donor list; others said it was simply a matter of not trusting the quality of our kidneys.
A couple of blocks from the clinic is Hough, the poor, predominantly black neighborhood where a six-day riot, sparked by racial tensions between black residents and the police and white business owners, broke out in 1966, the middle of the decade of urban riots in America. Four people died. Two years later, in Glenville, another neighborhood that borders University Circle, a shoot-out between black nationalists and Cleveland police sparked a three-day riot that left seven people dead.
When we moved to Cleveland from Minneapolis in the summer of 1983, we knew little of this. Most of what my husband and I knew of the city fit on the invitation to our going-away party, which featured a picture of that burning Cuyahoga River and a woman from a ‘50s horror movie running away in terror. “Cleveland, City of Light, City of Magic,” it said, adopting Randy Newman’s ironic ode to our new home.
None of our friends could imagine why we would move to a city that was a punch line for late-night comedians:
First prize: A week in Cleveland! Second prize: Two weeks in Cleveland! Ba-da-bum
. The city offered so much material for mockery.
The burning river. The stinky steel mills. The mayor who set his hair on fire with a blowtorch when he cut a ceremonial metal ribbon to open a convention. The wife of that same mayor, who declined an invitation to the Nixon White House because it was her bowling night. (It was, in her defense, the league championship.)
Our reason was simple and embarrassing: We moved to Cleveland because we had quit our jobs at the
Minneapolis Star
on impulse, in a buyout, and
The Plain Dealer
was the first paper to offer us both employment. We were twenty-nine. We decided we would stay five years, then move on.
That summer of 1983 was the summer of
Return of the Jedi
, which supposedly completed the Star Wars trilogy but did not. Madonna released her first album. Michael Jackson introduced the Moonwalk. WMMS was the hot radio station in Cleveland, playing “Every Breath You Take” and “Beat It” in constant rotation. That summer,
Scientific American
reported that crack cocaine, which in 1983 was just beginning to creep onto the streets of big cities like Cleveland, was “as addictive as potato chips.”
In Cleveland, it was also the summer of the smash-and-grab. That was the first thing everyone warned me about when they discovered I was new to town. “Don’t leave your windows open or your purse on the passenger seat,” they said, over and over again, those first months. “At stoplights, they smash the window and grab it before you even know what’s happening.”
“They,” while never overtly identified, implied the black men and boys in the designated danger zones of the city—Hough,
Central, Fairfax, Glenville: neighborhoods that still showed the scars of the riots in 1966 and 1968. Block after block was pocked with weedy vacant lots and houses with windows covered in plywood and graffiti, where people slipped in and out of the back doors like shadows. Many of them came from the suburbs. In 1990, the celebrated, and winning, and white, coach of the Cleveland State University basketball team was one of those shadows, caught leaving a crack house with a prostitute on his arm.
Hough, once a fashionable neighborhood of three-story houses with wide front porches, changed in the space of a single decade, going from 95 percent white in 1950 to 74 percent black in 1960. Urban renewal and the last gasp of the great migration from the South pushed black people out of the central city and into Hough. Realtors lit the flame of panic selling and white flight to the suburbs up the hill, Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights.
By the summer of 1983, Hough was a place I was told you did not go if you were white. Of course, black people had danger zones, too. They were warned not to go to Little Italy, where the aging vestiges of the Cleveland Mafia passed the day drinking espresso at sidewalk cafés and young white men attacked black people who dared cross into their territory.
You drove through Hough, along Chester or Superior Avenue, to get from the suburbs to downtown. But you didn’t turn onto the side streets. Or so I was told. My husband, working the police beat that first year, told me not to stop at red lights if I ever came home late at night.
Sometimes that first year I felt like a child listening to fairy tales about the dangers lurking in the woods. Go straight
to work, Little Red Riding Hood, and don’t stop or the wolf might get you.
What did I know? I had lived in Minneapolis–St. Paul for a decade, where the black population appeared to consist of Prince and about a dozen other people. A black reporter who had recently arrived from Texas came into the newsroom one day and said she’d spotted some black people on the street and followed them in her car, hoping to find out where all the black folks lived. She left after a year. “This place is just too white,” she said as she departed.
In Cleveland, smash-and-grabs turned out to be the least of the dire warnings. When I went to look at an apartment in Cleveland Heights, the landlord warned me of an epidemic of carjackings. As we stood in the living room, the sun slanting on the polished wood floors, he told me that one of the women in the building had just bought a BMW, and I should think about it, too.
“She used to have a Mercedes,” he said, “but that’s one of the cars they like to take. A little dangerous for a woman to drive. BMWs are just as good a car, but they’re not as flashy.”
He clearly had no idea where newspaper reporters lined up on the pay scale.
Monday, July 9, 1984.
It’s 5:15 p.m. when I pull into the parking lot at Case. I run to Eldred Theater, stumbling a little in the heels and linen skirt I put on that morning to look professional. The
doors into the building are open when I get there.
Maybe they’re still rehearsing and haven’t even noticed I’m late
. I run up the stairs to the small lobby area on the second floor and look into the theater.
Empty. The whole place is empty.
Damn it! They’re gone
.
I must have said it out loud, because a voice comes out of the shadows across the landing. “They said to wait a few minutes. They’ll be back.”
The guy who said it is leaning against the wall, smoking. He’s wiry, not much bigger than me, with an Afro and plastic-framed glasses the size of salad plates, just like mine. It’s the ‘80s, the decade of the Giant Glasses.
“They did?” I say. “Oh.”
I wait, sticking to my side of the little lobby. I feel awkward, like I should say something else, but he’s not saying anything, either. I think about asking him for a cigarette, even though I don’t really smoke. I used to, starting when I was a freshman in high school, and hid my cigarettes in a metal Band-Aid box, right up until I was twenty-two and my chain-smoking father died of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven. The day after his funeral I quit, though I still bummed cigarettes when I was in a bar or around other people smoking.
I’m about to ask the guy for one when I smell menthol in the smoke curling across the lobby. Forget it. I hate menthol.
A couple of minutes pass. He stubs out his cigarette on the floor, shakes another from his pack. Kools.
As he lights it, I decide I’m done waiting and turn to go back down the stairs.
“I’m working on the lights,” he says to my back, his voice mild. “Do you want to see what I’ve been doing?”
A yellow light flashes briefly in my head:
Caution. You don’t know this guy
.
I ignore it. It’s just a flash, and I speed through it the same way I’d sped through every yellow light on Euclid Avenue driving here.
“OK,” I say.
The door to the theater is closed.
I open it and walk through, into the dark theater and the second part of my life.
I make my way down the narrow right aisle and climb the two steps to the stage, the guy right behind me.
I turn and look up at the stage lights. They’re off. Only the house lights are on. He says, “I should turn them on.” He doesn’t move.
Animal alarm flashes through my body, followed by a flood of adrenaline. The surge makes me dizzy.
This is not right,
I think.
In fact, this is bad. Really bad. Get out of here. Now
.
“I think I’ll wait outside,” I say. Still polite. Still the good girl.
I know it’s too late in the second before he grabs me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides.
I try to scream. I want to scream. It should be natural: Danger leads to fear leads to scream.
But my body has other ideas. Panic overtakes me and closes my throat into a tight, burning knot, muting me. All I can manage is a strangled, small, “No,” just above a whisper.
“Be quiet,” he says.
I feel metal on my neck, moving slowly under my jawline. A sharp point presses into the skin.
I stop moving, stop trying to scream. My attention focuses on that one small point of cool metal against my throbbing vein.
He has a knife. He has a knife
. The thought pulses with my blood, a hundred beats a second.
“Please don’t do this,” I say. “Do you want money? Do you want my purse? Take anything you want, but please don’t hurt me.”
“Now, just be quiet,” he says, his voice calm, soothing, as though I’m a child who just woke up from a nightmare.
He pushes me behind the scrim, a translucent screen at the very back of the stage, then backs me hard against the concrete wall, his hand to my mouth. He shows me the knife. It isn’t a knife, though: It’s half a pair of long utility scissors, the kind with black handles and a sharp point. A makeshift dagger.