Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I knew he was right, and not just about my relationship with him; always I feel an ambivalence that spurs me first in one direction and then another, a habit that has done much damage. I didn’t deny what he said, I even nodded in agreement, at which his mood only darkened. I’m not like that, he went on, I’m a man of my word, if I say that I’m through with you I’m through, I won’t change my mind, and if I see you again, if we pass each other in the street, at NDK, in Plovdiv, in Varna, it doesn’t matter where, I’ll pretend I don’t know you, he said, I won’t even say hello. Is that what you want, he said, and then, without pausing for me to respond, be careful. There wasn’t anything playful or warm about him now; though he sat naked in front of me he was entirely unavailable. Be sure you tell the truth, he said, be sure you say what you mean. But how could I say what I meant, I thought, when that meaning so entirely escaped me? I looked at him without speaking, at the length of him folded in the chair; it was a way of delaying an answer but it was also a valedictory look, I was taking him in with a sense already of regret. He saw me looking as he poured himself another drink, his third or fourth in a short time, the effects of it were beginning to show; and again I had the thought, more troubling now, that he was steeling himself for something to come. Well, he said, which is it, and though I hadn’t come any closer to a decision I felt pressed to meet his tone, a pressure I was grateful for, since it freed me from having to choose. Yes, I said then, yes, I think that’s best, but I didn’t stop there; I’m sorry, I said, I’m sorry, and then, this is sad for me, tuzhno mi e. He looked at me silently, then stood up and began pulling on his clothes, moving purposefully but also unsteadily. Think if I were someone else, he said, and there was tension in his voice, he was speaking more quickly and I had to strain to understand him, think if I were a different person, if I were like that guy who stole from you, have you thought about that? Did you think about that when you took me home with you? He looked different to me now as he stared at me again, he wore a face I hadn’t seen before, a face that grew stranger and unsettled me more as he went on. I could have been anyone, I could have robbed you, I could have taken your camera and your phone, your computer, I could have hurt you.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He picked up the yogurt then, a cheap flavored brand, and after carefully peeling back the aluminum cover halfway (centimeter by centimeter, again as if measuring the force it took) he brought the cup to his lips and took two large mouthfuls, not spooning it out but drinking it. He turned to the milk again, and holding it in one hand and the yogurt in the other, he began to pour the milk into the cup, slowly, as if he were determined to maintain the thinnest possible ribbon of liquid, a process made difficult by the fact that his hands were trembling, both of them, as they always did when he was drunk. Mite , I said, using my own name for him, his nighest name, I thought, or as nigh as I could come, shortened as if for a child, Mite , is there nothing they can do, is there no treatment? Without looking away from his task, as though any break in concentration would disrupt the delicate process, he brought his head up and then down, a decisive gesture, Ne , he said, nishto . I wondered why this was so, whether because of his condition or because of the expense of whatever was needed to treat it, even here where such things are so much cheaper, and I let myself imagine taking it on, the impossible task of saving him, for a single breath I imagined it, and then I let it go. He set down the milk and yogurt, and having peeled the foil top the rest of the way off he began stirring the mixture with a spoon. He was making some variant of airan , I realized, the watered yogurt that everyone loves in Bulgaria. Mite , I said again, I will help you, I will give you money to go back to Varna. Ne iskam pari , he said, I don’t want money, and he took my hand in his again, squeezing it, though not with the same force as before. I came because you are my friend, he said, many people say they’re your friend but they aren’t, they’re with you and then when you need them they’re gone. But you are a real friend, he said, istinski , you have helped me many times, and I thought but that isn’t what I’ve done, remembering those transactions that had nothing to do with help, I was claiming him the only way I could. But I didn’t say this, I said I’m glad for that, looking into his eyes that looked at me so earnestly and yet weren’t looking at me at all.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He was smoking a cigarette, that was why he was on the balcony, though as the night wore on this consideration would lapse, and the next morning I would wipe from the floor small piles of gray ash. Largely through gestures, he conveyed that he worked in construction, mimicking with his wounded hands the motions of his trade, going so far as to walk a few steps as he would on a high beam, balancing against the wind. It took me a moment to realize that these movements, which were oddly familiar, were the same as those with which my father, in my childhood, often made us laugh as he told stories about the single summer he spent working construction in Chicago, fresh from his farm in Kentucky, earning his tuition for law school and thus, among other things, purchasing my life. Mitko told me he was from Varna, a beautiful port city on the Black Sea coast and one of the centers of the astonishing economic boom Bulgaria briefly enjoyed, before, here as in so much of the world, it collapsed suddenly and seemingly without warning. There were some good years, Mitko said, he made good money, and with sudden urgency he dragged me from the balcony toward the table where I had laid my computer. When he opened it, he made a sound of dismay at the state in which I kept it, the screen mottled with dust; Mrusen , he said, dirty, with the same tone of voice he would use in response to the requests I made of him later, a tone of mockery and disapproval but also of indulgence, spotting a fault it was in his power either to exploit or to repair. He rose and stepped to the kitchen counter, opening two cupboards and then a third before I understood what he was looking for and fetched the bottle of cleaner from beneath the sink. He put his drink (the large glass almost empty) on the table beside him and placed the computer in his lap, almost cradling it, and with a dampened tissue he began cleaning the screen, not in a desultory hurried way, as I might when finally I bothered, but taking his time, working at it with a thoroughness I would never think it needed. He turned to the keyboard, almost as dirty as the screen, and then he closed the machine and with his fifth or sixth tissue wiped down the aluminum case. Sega , he said with satisfaction, now, and set the computer back on its perch, pleased to have done me a service. He opened it again and navigated to a Bulgarian website, an adult social networking site that I knew was popular among gay men. He wanted me to see the pictures from his profile, which he enlarged until they filled the screen.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I met Herbert’s bride and her family and spent the next forty-five minutes with one eye on the clock, knowing that at 10:00 P.M. the guards would take Herbert to the back, and we would never see him alive again. Herbert tried to keep things light. He told his family how he had persuaded me to take his case and bragged that I only represented people who were smart and charming. “He’s too young to have represented me at trial, but if he had been there I wouldn’t be on death row now.” He said it with a smile, but I was starting to feel shaken. I was really struck at how hard he was working to make everyone around him feel better in the face of his own death. I had never seen him so energetic and gracious. His family and I smiled and laughed, but all of us felt the strain of the moment. His wife became more and more tearful as the minutes ticked away. Shortly before 10 P.M., the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, the warden, and several other men wearing suits gestured to the visitation officer. She came into the room meekly and regretfully said, “It’s time, folks. We’ve got to end the visit. Say your goodbyes.” I watched the men in the hallway; they had clearly been expecting the officer to do something more decisive and effective. They wanted things to proceed on schedule and were clearly ready to move to the next stage to prepare for the execution. One of the state officials walked over to the guard when she left the room and pointed at his watch. Inside the room, Herbert’s wife began to sob. She put her arms around his neck and refused to let him go. After a couple of minutes, her crying turned into groaning, distressed and desperate. The officials in the lobby were growing more impatient and gestured at the visitation officer, who came back into the room. “I’m sorry,” she said as firmly as she could muster, “but you have to leave now.” She looked at me, and I looked away. Herbert’s wife began sobbing again. Her sister and other family members began to cry, too. Herbert’s wife grabbed him even more tightly. I hadn’t thought about how difficult this moment would be. It was surreal in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In an instant a flood of sadness and tragedy had overtaken everyone, and I began to worry that it would be impossible for this family to leave Herbert.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We filed two cases in Alabama. Ashley Jones was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been convicted of killing two family members when her older boyfriend tried to help her escape her family. Ashley suffered from a horrific history of abuse and neglect. When she was still a teenager serving her sentence at the Tutwiler Prison for Women, she started writing to me to ask about various legal decisions she’d read about in the newspaper. She never asked for legal assistance; she simply asked about what she’d read and expressed interest in the law and our work. She started sending notes congratulating me and EJI whenever we won a death penalty appeal. When we decided to challenge death-in-prison sentences imposed on children, I told her we might be able to finally challenge her sentence. She was thrilled. Evan Miller was another fourteen-year-old condemned to die in prison in Alabama. Evan is from a poor white family in North Alabama. His difficult life was punctuated by suicide attempts that started at age seven when he was in elementary school. His parents were abusive and had drug addiction problems, so he was in and out of foster care, but he was living with his mother at the time of the crime. A middle-aged neighbor, Cole Cannon, had come over one night seeking to buy drugs from Evan’s mother. The fourteen-year-old Evan and his sixteen-year-old friend went to the man’s house with him to play cards. Cannon gave the teens drugs and played drinking games with them. At one point, he sent the boys out to buy more drugs. The boys returned and stayed over as it got later and later. Eventually the boys thought Cannon had passed out and tried to steal his wallet. Cannon was startled awake and jumped on Evan. The older boy responded by hitting the man in the head with a bat. Both boys started beating him and then set his trailer on fire. Cole Cannon died, and Evan and his friend were charged with capital murder. The older boy made a deal with prosecutors and got a parole-eligible life sentence, while Evan was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. I got involved in Evan’s case right after his trial and filed a motion to reduce his sentence, even though it was the mandatory punishment for someone convicted of capital murder who was too young to be executed. At a hearing, I asked the judge to reconsider Evan’s sentence in light of his age. The prosecutor argued, “I think he should be executed. He deserves the death penalty.” He then lamented that the law no longer authorized the execution of children because he just couldn’t wait to put this fourteen-year-old boy in the electric chair and kill him. The judge denied our motion.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Today, dozens of legal organizations hand out awards in the fictional lawyer’s name to celebrate the model of advocacy described in Lee’s novel. What is often overlooked is that the black man falsely accused in the story was not successfully defended by Atticus. Tom Robinson, the wrongly accused black defendant, is found guilty. Later he dies when, full of despair, he makes a desperate attempt to escape from prison. He is shot seventeen times in the back by his captors, dying ingloriously but not unlawfully. Walter McMillian, like Tom Robinson, grew up in one of several poor black settlements outside of Monroeville, where he worked the fields with his family before he was old enough to attend school. The children of sharecroppers in southern Alabama were introduced to “plowin’, plantin’, and pickin’ ” as soon as they were old enough to be useful in the fields. Educational opportunities for black children in the 1950s were limited, but Walter’s mother got him to the dilapidated “colored school” for a couple of years when he was young. By the time Walter was eight or nine, he became too valuable for picking cotton to justify the remote advantages of going to school. By the age of eleven, Walter could run a plow as well as any of his older siblings. Times were changing—for better and for worse. Monroe County had been developed by plantation owners in the nineteenth century for the production of cotton. Situated in the coastal plain of southwest Alabama, the fertile, rich black soil of the area attracted white settlers from the Carolinas who amassed very successful plantations and a huge slave population. For decades after the Civil War, the large African American population toiled in the fields of the “Black Belt” as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, dependent on white landowners for survival. In the 1940s, thousands of African Americans left the region as part of the Great Migration and headed mostly to the Midwest and West Coast for jobs. Those who remained continued to work the land, but the out-migration of African Americans combined with other factors to make traditional agriculture less sustainable as the economic base of the region. By the 1950s, small cotton farming was becoming increasingly less profitable, even with the low-wage labor provided by black sharecroppers and tenants. The State of Alabama agreed to help white landowners in the region transition to timber farming and forest products by providing extraordinary tax incentives for pulp and paper mills. Thirteen of the state’s sixteen pulp and paper mills were opened during this period. Across the Black Belt, more and more acres were converted to growing pine trees for paper mills and industrial uses. African Americans, largely excluded from this new industry, found themselves confronting new economic challenges even as they won basic civil rights. The brutal era of sharecropping and Jim Crow was ending, but what followed was persistent unemployment and worsening poverty. The region’s counties remained some of the poorest in America.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I had had a brief talk with Bill after the boxing. The contest itself went on and on and through much of it I sat around in the changing-room while Bill exhorted or solaced his team and a succession of teenaged boys got dressed in front of me. Sometimes fathers, who fancied themselves as boxing pundits, came in with brothers or friends, and lectured, berated or praised their bruised progeny. Bill’s behaviour with the fathers was torn: longing to be smoothly accepted as a mentor and character, he also resented the parental intrusions into the bond of trainer and pupil. Then Limehouse lost the cup, and Alastair was not the man of the match (to whom a specially tinny trophy, redolent of prep-school sports, was presented). In an overlong speech, the sadistic-looking head of the judges, a thin-lipped man with oiled, old-fashioned hair, said how close it had been, and praised the generosity of Lord Nantwich, ‘who not only gave this magnificent cup, but ’elped the Boys’ Club movement in so many and varied ways.’ It was regretted he was not well enough to be there himself. The audience showed appreciation in a hearty fashion, and the Cup, a kind of baroque tureen with handles in the form of upward-reaching youths, was presented amid generous applause to the ferocious, broken-nosed little tyke who captained the St Albans gang. Bill could not contain the mood of futility which overcame him. I imagined he would be taken for a consolatory drink by friends, fellow trainers, even, illicitly, the older of the boys. But they were all frightfully busy. The place drained and grew quiet. I took him for a beer at the nearest pub, a cavernous saloon where a few men gazed stunned at a television above the bar. ‘Never mind, Bill,’ I said, bringing back two pints to a corner table he had chosen. ‘Oh, thanks, Will. Thanks a lot. Cheers.’ He picked up the glass and sucked off the frothy head of the beer—then set it aside with an apprehensive look. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had one of those,’ he said. ‘Really? Would you like something different?’ He was shocked at having seemed ungrateful. ‘No, no, no. It’s great. It’s just I don’t drink much these days. Used to, though; if you know what I mean.’ There were more sadnesses in him this evening than I’d known about before. He took a tentative sip. ‘Still, even I need cheering up sometimes,’ he said, as though he were widely known as a figure of high spirits. ‘There’s always another time,’ I condoled feebly. ‘The sport’s the thing.’ He shook his head in self-denying acceptance of what I said. ‘To tell you the truth, I was quite surprised to find you here. I didn’t realise that was your name. I had this idea you were called … Hawkins,’ I added, laughing at my own absurdity.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The black people around me were strong and determined but marginalized and excluded. The poultry plant bus came each day to pick up adults and take them to the factory where they would daily pluck, hack, and process thousands of chickens. My father left the area as a teenager because there was no local high school for black children. He returned with my mother and found work in a food factory; on weekends he did domestic work at beach cottages and rentals. My mother had a civilian job at an Air Force base. It seemed that we were all cloaked in an unwelcome garment of racial difference that constrained, confined, and restricted us. My relatives worked hard all the time but never seemed to prosper. My grandfather was murdered when I was a teenager, but it didn’t seem to matter much to the world outside our family. My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia. She was born in the 1880s, her parents in the 1840s. Her father talked to her all the time about growing up in slavery and how he learned to read and write but kept it a secret. He hid the things he knew—until Emancipation. The legacy of slavery very much shaped my grandmother and the way she raised her nine children. It influenced the way she talked to me, the way she constantly told me to “Keep close.” When I visited her, she would hug me so tightly I could barely breathe. After a little while, she would ask me, “Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?” If I said yes, she’d let me be; if I said no, she would assault me again. I said no a lot because it made me happy to be wrapped in her formidable arms. She never tired of pulling me to her. “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,” she told me all the time. The distance I experienced in my first year of law school made me feel lost. Proximity to the condemned, to people unfairly judged; that was what guided me back to something that felt like home. — This book is about getting closer to mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America. It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us. It’s also about a dramatic period in our recent history, a period that indelibly marked the lives of millions of Americans—of all races, ages, and sexes—and the American psyche as a whole.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois included in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a brilliant but haunting short story. I thought about “Of the Coming of John” on the drive home. In Du Bois’s story, a young black man in coastal Georgia is sent off hundreds of miles to a school that trains black teachers. The entire black community where he was born had raised the money for his tuition. The community invests in John so that he can one day return and teach African American children who are barred from attending the public school. Casual and fun-loving, John almost flunks out of his new school until he considers the trust he’s been given and the shame he would face if he returned without graduating. Newly focused, sober, and intensely committed to succeed, he graduates with honors and returns to his community intent on changing things. John convinces the white judge who controls the town to allow him to open a school for black children. His education has empowered him, and he has strong opinions about racial freedom and equality that land him and the black community in trouble. The judge shuts down the school when he hears what John’s been teaching. John walks home after the school’s closing frustrated and distraught. On the trip home he sees his sister being groped by the judge’s adult son and he reacts violently, striking the man in the head with a piece of wood. John continues home to say goodbye to his mother. Du Bois ends the tragic story when the furious judge catches up to John with the lynch mob he has assembled. I read the story several times in college because I identified with John as the hope of an entire community. None of my aunts or uncles had graduated from college; many hadn’t graduated from high school. The people in my church always encouraged me and never asked me for anything back, but I felt a debt accumulating. Du Bois understood this dynamic deeply and brought it to life in a way that absolutely fascinated me. (I just hoped that my parallel with John wouldn’t extend to the getting lynched part.) Driving home that night from meeting Walter’s family, I thought of the story in a whole new way. I had never before considered how devastated John’s community must have felt after his lynching. Things would become so much harder for the people who had given everything to help make John a teacher. For the surviving black community, there would be more obstacles to opportunity and progress and much heartache. John’s education had led not to liberation and progress but to violence and tragedy. There would be more distrust, more animosity, and more injustice.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “Well, yes, I’m on twelve-hour shifts at the plant. Them people don’t want to hear nothing about your business, your sickness, your nerves, your out-of-town guests, and definitely nothing about your family problems.” She didn’t sound angry or bitter, just sad. She walked over to me, gently looped her arm with mine, and slowly led me into the house. We sat down on a sofa in the crowded living room. Chairs that didn’t match were piled with papers and clothes; her grandchildren’s toys were scattered on the floor. Minnie sat close to me, almost leaning on me as she continued speaking softly. “Work people tell you to be there, and so you got to go. I’m trying to get her through school and it ain’t easy.” She nodded to her daughter, Jackie, who looked back at her mother sympathetically. Jackie walked across the room and sat near us. Walter and Minnie had mentioned their children—Jackie, Johnny, and “Boot”—to me several times. Jackie’s name was always followed by “She’s in college.” I had begun to think of her as Jackie “She’s in College” McMillian. All of the kids were in their twenties but still very close and protective of their mother. I told them about my visit with Walter. Minnie hadn’t been to the prison in several months and seemed grateful that I had spent some time there. I went over the appeals process with them and talked about the next steps in the case. They confirmed Walter’s alibi and updated me on all the rumors in town currently circulating about the case. “I believe it was that old man Miles Jackson who done it,” Minnie said emphatically. “I think it’s the new owner, Rick Blair,” Jackie said. “Everybody knows they found a white man’s skin under that girl’s fingernails where she had fought whoever killed her.” “Well, we’re going to get to the truth,” I said. I tried to sound confident, but given what I’d read in the trial transcript, I thought it very unlikely that the police would turn over their evidence to me or let me see the files and the materials collected from the crime scene. Even in the transcript, the law enforcement officers who had investigated Walter seemed lawless. These police put Walter on death row while he was a pretrial detainee; I feared that they would not scrupulously follow the legal requirement to turn over all exculpatory evidence that could help him prove his innocence. We talked for well over an hour—or they talked while I listened. You could tell how traumatizing the last eighteen months since Walter’s arrest had been. “The trial was the worst,” Minnie said. “They just ignored what we told them about Johnny D being home. Nobody has explained to me why they did that. Why did they do that?” She looked at me as if she honestly hoped I could provide an answer.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  The woman pulled out more food for him then, and the rest of us returned to our reading, though I was hardly reading at all, I was watching the boy with a fascination I didn’t understand. There was something electric about him, as he sat chewing his sandwich, looking out the window, a charm beyond mere loveliness. He was still for a while, lulled by food and by the heat, which had grown more intense as the afternoon wore on, but soon he was restless again, climbing up on the bench, then onto the narrow ledge of the armrest, grabbing with both of his hands one of the metal bars of the luggage rack. Get down, his grandmother said sharply, I’ve already told you, and the boy dropped his hands, not in surrender but to have them free for bargaining. But you don’t know what I’m going to do, he protested, his voice full of the injustice of it, I haven’t even tried yet. Just wait, just let me try, then see if it’s bad, and he made a particular gesture with his hands, curling his fingers slightly and holding them both palm up before him, a pleading gesture, and all at once and with a physical force I understood the source of my fascination with the boy, the reason I had been unable to look away. It was one of Mitko’s gestures, I realized, all of the boy’s gestures were ones I had seen Mitko use; the boy himself, his long limbs, his slenderness, the peculiar cast of his skin, might have been a small copy of the man, so that I felt I was watching Mitko as a boy, before he had become what he was now. Where had they learned it, I wondered, this repertoire of gestures that made a way of being a man, the talent for friendliness and charm that had always astonished me, with its certainty both of welcome and of the right to whatever it could grasp. The boy did pull himself up then, showing off his strength, and as his legs flailed in the air the woman grabbed one of them and pulled, which made the boy giggle at first, thinking it was a game. He dropped back down to the little ledge, leaning back against the wall, still smiling, and again brought his hands together in front of him, not pleading now but as if to say see, it was nothing so terrible, how silly you were to worry. But this time the woman snatched one of his hands and yanked it hard, pulling him forcibly into the seat. I said to get down, she said, and it was clear now that she was angry, really angry for the first time in the trip, and it was as much in response to this anger as to any pain she had caused, I thought, that the boy began to weep.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  My father never mentioned Louis Armstrong, except to forbid us to play his records; but there was a picture of him on our wall for a long time. One of my father's strong-willed female relatives had placed it there and forbade my father to take it down. He never did, but he eventually maneuvered her out of the house and when, some years later, she was in trouble and near death, he refused to do anything to help her. He was, I think, very handsome. I gather this from pho tographs and from my own memories of him, dressed in his Sunday best and on his way to preach a sermon somewhere, when I was little. Handsome, proud, and ingrown, "like a toe nail," somebody said. But he looked to me, as I grew older, like pictures I had seen of Mrican tribal chieftains: he really should have been naked, with war-paint on and barbaric me mentos, standing among spears. He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably crud in his personal lif e and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness, I think-he was very black -with his blackness and his beauty, and with the tact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful. He claimed to be proud of his blackness but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed bleak boundaries to his lite. He was not a young man when we were growing up and he had already sutlc red many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protecti\'e way he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced, lik e him; and all these things sometimes showed in his fu.ce when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us. When he took one of his children on his knee to play, the child always be- NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON came fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one of us with our homework the absolutely unabating tension which emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, flew into a rage and the child, not knowing why, was punished.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “I’m sorry, I know you’ll do everything you can to help me,” he said, his voice quieter. My instinct was to comfort him; his pain seemed so sincere. But there wasn’t much I could do, and after several hours on the row talking to so many people, I could muster only enough energy to reassure him that I would look at everything carefully. — I had several transcripts piled up in my small Atlanta office ready to move to Tuscaloosa once the office opened. With Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s peculiar comments still running through my head, I went through the mound of records until I found the transcripts from Walter McMillian’s trial. There were only four volumes of trial proceedings, which meant that the trial had been short. The judge’s dramatic warnings now made Mr. McMillian’s emotional claim of innocence too intriguing to put off any longer. I started reading. — Even though he had lived in Monroe County his whole life, Walter McMillian had never heard of Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird. Monroeville, Alabama, celebrated its native daughter Lee shamelessly after her award-winning book became a national bestseller in the 1960s. She returned to Monroe County but secluded herself and was rarely seen in public. Her reclusiveness proved no barrier to the county’s continued efforts to market her literary classic—or to market itself by using the book’s celebrity. Production of the film adaptation brought Gregory Peck to town for the infamous courtroom scenes; his performance won him an Academy Award. Local leaders later turned the old courthouse into a “Mockingbird” museum. A group of locals formed “The Mockingbird Players of Monroeville” to present a stage version of the story. The production was so popular that national and international tours were organized to provide an authentic presentation of the fictional story to audiences everywhere. Sentimentality about Lee’s story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root. The story of an innocent black man bravely defended by a white lawyer in the 1930s fascinated millions of readers, despite its uncomfortable exploration of false accusations of rape involving a white woman. Lee’s endearing characters, Atticus Finch and his precocious daughter, Scout, captivated readers while confronting them with some of the realities of race and justice in the South. A generation of future lawyers grew up hoping to become the courageous Atticus, who at one point arms himself to protect the defenseless black suspect from an angry mob of white men looking to lynch him.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We were sitting at a wooden table that was probably four by six feet. Charlie was on one side of the table, and I was on the other. It had been three days since his arrest. “Charlie, my name is Bryan. Your grandmother called me and asked me if I would come and see you. I’m a lawyer, and I help people who get in trouble or who are accused of crimes, and I’d like to help you.” The boy wouldn’t make eye contact with me. He was tiny, but he had big, beautiful eyes. He had a close haircut that was common for little boys because it required no maintenance. It made him look even younger than he was. I thought I saw tattoos or symbols on his neck, but when I looked more closely, I realized that they were bruises. “Charlie, are you okay?” He was staring intensely to my left, looking at the wall as if he saw something there. His distant look was so alarming that I actually turned to see if there was something of interest behind me, but it was just a blank wall. The disconnected look, the sadness in his face, and his complete lack of engagement—qualities he shared with a lot of the other teenagers I’d worked with—were the only things that made me believe he was fourteen. I sat and waited for a very long time in the hope that he would give me some kind of response, but the room remained silent. He stared at the wall and then looked down at his own wrists. He wrapped his right hand around his left wrist where the handcuffs had been and rubbed the spot where the metal had pinched him. “Charlie, I want to make sure you’re doing okay, so I just need you to answer a few questions for me, okay?” I knew he could hear me; whenever I spoke, he would lift his head and return his gaze to the spot on the wall. “Charlie, if I were you, I’d be pretty scared and really worried right now, but I’d also want someone to help me. I’d like to help, okay?” I waited for a response, but none was forthcoming. “Charlie, can you speak? Are you okay?” He stared at the wall when I spoke and then back at his wrists when I was finished, but he didn’t say a word. “We don’t have to talk about George. We don’t have to talk about what happened; we can talk about whatever you want. Is there something you want to talk about?” I was waiting for longer and longer stretches after each question, desperately hoping that he would say something, but he didn’t. “Do you want to talk about your mom? She’s going to be fine. I’ve checked, and even though she can’t visit you, she’s going to be fine. She’s worried about you.”

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  This was two years ago, he said as I looked at the young man in the image, who stood on Vitosha Boulevard with a bag from one of the expensive stores there, smiling radiantly at whoever held the camera, showing his unbroken teeth. I was shocked by the difference between their faces, the man in the image and the man beside me; not only was his tooth unbroken, but also his head was unshaved, his hair full and light brown, conventionally cut. There was nothing rough or threatening about him at all; he looked like a nice kid, a kid I might have had in class at the prestigious school where I teach. It was hardly possible they could be the same person, this prosperous teenager and the man beside me, or that so short a time could have made such a difference, and I found myself looking repeatedly at the screen and then at Mitko, wondering which face was the truer face, and how it had been lost or gained. Look, Mitko said, pointing as he rattled off the brands of what seemed to me fairly nondescript items of clothing: jeans, a jacket, a button-down shirt; also a belt; also a pair of sunglasses. He even remembered the shoes he was wearing that day, though they weren’t visible on the screen; maybe they were special shoes, or maybe it was a special day. Hubavi , he said, a word that means lovely or nice, and then, fingering his collar, mrusen , and he pulled the offensive shirt off and turned back bare-chested to the screen. I leaned forward (I had sat down next to him) and kissed his shoulder, a chaste kiss, an expression of the sadness I felt for him, perhaps, though it wasn’t only sadness that I felt, with his torso now exposed beside me. He looked at me, smiling broadly, the same smile as in the photograph or almost the same, though they looked nothing alike, one transformed—it was astonishing how thoroughly—by the broken tooth, its evidence of something undergone. He bent his head toward mine, but not to engage in the kiss I expected; instead, in a quick surprise, playfully and without any hint of seduction he licked the tip of my nose, then turned back to his task. There were many more photographs, the young man featured in shifting scenes: here at the seaside, here in the mountains, always in the casual clothes of which he was so proud, the generic uniform of affluent young Americans, the stuff of endless racks in endless suburban malls. Then there were photographs in which he wore nothing at all, angling himself in postures of erotic display that were difficult to reconcile with the sweetly innocent gesture he had just made.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When I looked across from my menu I saw that his Lordship was staring at, or rather through, the reddening and nervous boy. ‘Derek, isn’t it?’ he said at last. ‘No, sir, I’m Raymond. Derek’s left, sir, in fact.’ ‘Raymond! Of course—forgive me, won’t you?’ begged Lord Nantwich, as if pleading with a society woman. ‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the boy, smoothing down his order pad, and Nantwich turned his attention briefly to the card. More silence followed, and Raymond felt moved to add: ‘I saw Derek this week, as a matter of fact, sir. He seems all right again now …’ but he trailed off as Nantwich was evidently not hearing him. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he added inconsequently. ‘Now what’s Abdul got for us today?’ Nantwich ruminated. ‘Pork’d be very nice, sir,’ said Raymond dispassionately. ‘I will have the pork, Raymond—with carrots, have you got? And the boiled potatoes—and I want a whole estuary of applesauce.’ ‘See what I can do, sir. And for your guest, sir. Any starter at all, sir?’ My mind recoiled from Brown Windsor soup to prawn cocktail to melon. ‘No, I think I’ll just have the trout—with peas and potatoes.’ ‘Bring a bottle of hock, too, Raymond,’ my host requested; ‘cheapest you’ve got.’ And the moment the boy turned away, added, ‘Delightful child, isn’t he. Quite a little Masaccio, wouldn’t you say? Nothing compared to Derek, mind you, but I like to see a nice little bumba when I’m eating.’ I smiled and felt oddly bashful; and the boy was pretty ordinary. I also felt a guest’s obligation to charm, and was aware that I was giving nothing. How loaded dirty talk is between strangers, seeming to imply some sexual rapport between them, removing barriers which in this case I was interested in preserving. ‘Do you live in London all the time?’ I asked him partyishly. He thought about this: ‘I do, though I’m often elsewhere—in my thoughts. At my age it doesn’t matter where you live. Passent les jours, passent les semaines, as the Frenchman said. I blank a lot, you know. Do you blank?’ ‘You mean, just let your mind go blank? Yes, I suppose I do. Or at least, I like letting my mind wander.’ ‘There you are. You see, I’ve had such an interesting life and now it’s so bloody dull and everyone’s dead and I can’t remember what I’m saying and all that sort of thing.’ He seemed to lose his thread. ‘What is it you think about mostly?’ ‘Ooh, you know …’ he muttered broodily. I crudely assumed he meant sex. ‘I’m eighty-three,’ he said, as if I had asked him. ‘And how old are you?’ ‘Twenty-five,’ I said with a laugh, but he looked sad.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  And so it is, I thought then, as the man and his child released each other and moved away from the water, so it is that at the very moment we come into full consciousness of ourselves what we experience is leave-taking and a loss we seek the rest of our lives to restore. The man and his child returned to their table, the girl running ahead to a woman who bent to lift her into her lap, tickling her a little so that I heard her laugh over the sound of the water. For a moment at least it seemed plausible, the story I told about the sense of dislocation I so often feel, which was eased for the few hours I slept embraced by Mitko, the embrace I returned to in my thoughts as I watched the child and her father by the river in Blagoevgrad. That morning I spent grading papers was almost two months after my final meeting with Mitko in Varna, a meeting that was itself preceded by three months of silence. In the days and weeks that followed the night we spent together in Mladost, one of only two nights, as it turned out, we would spend together in all the months we knew each other, Mitko appeared at my apartment every few days, always friendly and eager, and always with some request. Whenever I heard the ringing of the bell linked to the street entrance, which no one else ever rang, I felt torn between a desire on the one hand for the routines of solitude (my writing and my books); and, on the other, for the thrill of Mitko’s presence and its disruption of all routine. But after weeks of these visits I’d had enough disruption, and I came to resent the requests he made, which were never exorbitant (money for cigarettes or credit for his phone, once forty leva for a pair of shoes), but which it seemed would never end. Still, on the very evening I put a stop to these visits, my heart leapt up as it always did at the buzzer’s announcement of his presence.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The trial court allowed almost all of these jurors to remain on the jury panel despite defense objections. Ultimately, a jury who brought many presumptions and biases to the trial of Marsha Colbey was selected to decide her fate. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on one count of capital murder. Prior to rendering a verdict, jurors expressed concerns about Mrs. Colbey being subject to the death penalty, so the State agreed not to pursue an execution if she was found guilty. This concession yielded an immediate conviction. The trial court sentenced Mrs. Colbey to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and a short while later she found herself shackled in a prison van heading to the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women. Built in the 1940s, Tutwiler Prison is situated in Wetumpka, Alabama. Named after a woman who promoted the education of prisoners and championed humane conditions of confinement, Tutwiler has become an overcrowded, dangerous nightmare for the women trapped there. Courts have repeatedly found the prison unconstitutionally overcrowded, with almost twice the number of women incarcerated as it was designed to hold. In the United States, the number of women sent to prison increased 646 percent between 1980 and 2010, a rate of increase 1.5 times higher than the rate for men. With close to two hundred thousand women in jails and prisons in America and over a million women under the supervision or control of the criminal justice system, the incarceration of women has reached record levels. At Tutwiler, women are crammed into dormitories and improvised living spaces. Marsha was shocked by the overcrowding. As the only state prison for women, Tutwiler has no way to meaningfully classify and assign women to appropriate dorms. Women battling serious mental illness or severe emotional problems are thrown in with other women, making dorm life chaotic and stressful for everyone. Marsha could never quite get used to hearing women screaming and hollering inexplicably throughout the night in a crowded dorm.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Could he really believe the fight story? ‘It’s all pretty much a mystery to you, isn’t it?’ I said, both proud and pained at the unplanned and inexplicable way things stood. There was nothing I could adduce in evidence of Arthur’s charm. ‘Sometimes I just put my arms round his shoulder and burst into tears.’ ‘I’m not surprised,’ was James’s comment. At the Corry the mood was perverse. A few bull-necked mutants were hogging the weights, the room was crowded, and crossness was given voice to. Bradley was training for a contest the following week, and did so many presses that he lost count and, red-faced and shuddering, insisted on starting again. Others, who worked out for more trivial reasons, forced to stand around, lapsed from their normally passing and formal chat into extended conversations, like housewives with shopping waiting for a bus. ‘I know —well, that’s what she said.’ ‘But have you seen her since?’ ‘Only briefly, and then I couldn’t say anything, because of course you-know-who was in attendance.’ ‘I really like her actually; from what I’ve seen of her, that is.’ It was the typical transsexual talk of the place, which had been confusing to me at first and which had thrown poor James into deep dejection when he innocently overheard a boy he had a crush on talking of his girlfriend. It was all a game, any man in the least attractive being dubbed a ‘she’ and only males too dire for such a conceit being left an unadorned ‘he’ or, occasionally, sinisterly, ‘mister’—as in the poisonous declaration ‘I trust you won’t be seeing Mister Elizabeth Arden again.’ ‘You know that new girl behind the bar?’ one square-jawed athlete enquired of his bearded companion. ‘What, the blonde, you mean—no, she’s been there a while.’ ‘ No , not her, no, the dark one with big tits.’ ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen her. Nice, is she?’ It was conversation thrown out with a complex bravado, its artifice defiant as it was transparent. I half listened to it as I waited, and looked around at the dozens of bodies, squatting, lying, straining, muscles sliding to the surface in thick-veined upper arms, shoulders bending and pumping, the sturdiness of legs under pressure, the dark stains on singlets that adhered to the sweating channel of the back, the barely perceptible swing of cocks and balls in shorts and track-suits, with, permeating it all, the clank and thud of weights and the rank underarm essence of effort.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I tried to comfort him. “Mr. Richardson, we’ve covered this. The expert isn’t allowed to speak to your mental state. He’s testified that the bomb was designed to be detonated, but he can’t really explain your motivations—the Court won’t permit that, and he really can’t speak to that.” “They’re not even paying attention to what he’s saying,” he said sadly, rubbing his temples. “I know, but remember, this is just the first step. We didn’t expect much from this judge, but this will help us on appeal. I know this is frustrating for you.” He looked at me worriedly before sighing in resignation. He sat glumly through the rest of the hearing, holding his head, which I found even more disheartening than when he was argumentative and distraught. Because I hadn’t hired any lawyers yet, I didn’t have co-counsel to sit with me and help manage documents or help with the defendant during the hearing. At the end of the proceeding, Herbert was shackled and sent back to death row, vexed, disappointed, and unhappy. I wasn’t feeling much better as I packed up my things and headed out of the courtroom. It would have been nice to debrief with someone, to evaluate whether what was presented might provide a basis for a stay. I had no expectation that the local judge would grant a stay, but I was hopeful that maybe a reviewing court would recognize that this wasn’t an intentional killing and that a stay should be granted. So much was going on that I couldn’t objectively evaluate if we had presented enough evidence to change the picture of the case. I mostly felt bad that I’d left Herbert in such a distraught state. On my way out, I saw a group of black women and children huddled together in the back of the courtroom. Seven or eight of them were watching me intensely. The hearing had been set in the late afternoon when there were no other proceedings scheduled. I was curious about who these people might be, but honestly, I was too tired to really care. I smiled and nodded a weary greeting to the three women who seemed most focused on me, which they took as a cue to approach me as I was about to walk out the door. The woman who spoke seemed nervous and somewhat fearful. She spoke hesitantly: “I’m Rena Mae’s mother—the victim’s mother. They said they would help us, but they never did. MaryLynn can’t hear right, her hearing ain’t never been right since that bomb, and her sister has nerve problems. I got ’em, too. We were hoping you would help us.” The stunned look on my face prompted her to say more. “I know you’re busy. It’s just that we could use the help.” I realized that she’d cautiously offered her hand to me as she spoke, and I held it in mine.