Trial, page 17
Unable to listen, Chase muted the television.
For a while he sat lost in thought, heedless of time. At last he took his cell phone and hit the number he had entered only days before. “Can I see you?” he asked. “I think we need to talk about our son.”
28
An hour before dusk, Chase drove to the home Malcolm had shared with Allie.
Deliberately, he chose the route Malcolm had taken the night of George Bullock’s death. There were no streetlights, no houses close to the long stretch of road on which Bullock had stopped Chase’s son. Even now it was lightly trafficked; past midnight, it would have been dark and untraveled. Nearing the spot where he guessed the shooting had occurred, Chase pulled over to a stop and got out.
There were fields on both sides, nothing else. Looking around, Chase felt his son’s helplessness—then and now—and, once again, his own. The fatal moments were a black hole created by a dead man: only Malcolm knew what had happened.
Chase got back in the car.
A gravel road bisected acres of grassland, studded with oak trees; on that road rested Allie’s one-story house and, a hundred or so yards beyond it, the larger farmhouse where her mother still lived. For Chase, it was strange to enter this place: He remembered from college Allie’s descriptions of her life here, of sitting against a tree listening to the crickets and looking up with wonder at the stars and moon, yet envisioning the specter of the slaves who had once worked these fields. Whatever Chase had wanted for Allie and himself, this place and its history had possessed her.
But what unsettled him now was how isolated it was, yet how easily found. Allie was no longer safe here.
Getting out, Chase saw a basketball hoop on a cement rectangle beside the driveway, then a horseshoe pit near a tire swing still hanging on a frayed rope from the thick branch of an oak tree—Wilson Hill’s gifts to his grandson, he imagined. The still-humid air carried a faint perfume from a flower bed beside the screened porch.
Framed in the doorway, she awaited him. It was a trick of the mind, he knew, but in her blouse and blue jeans, she looked as she had that last morning at Harvard, before she turned and ran through the door of his bedroom knowing, as he had not, that she was bearing their child. For a moment, it felt as though the nineteen years since had vanished.
Approaching, Chase looked to Allie more like he sometimes had in college—vulnerable, a little uncertain about what to do with her—than the tempered man that time and ambition had made him, driven here by what he so keenly felt as her betrayal. But that somehow intensified her sense of the space she had created between them by bringing their son here to raise on her own.
She opened the door to let him inside.
Quiet, he slowly looked around the living room—nondescript, in Allie’s mind, except for its photographs of Black people, some family, some not, none known to him. To her his presence here felt impossible, and then sad. “You wanted to talk about Malcolm,” she said.
“I do. But first maybe you could show me his room.”
For a stray, poignant moment, Allie remembered lying with Chase in his bedroom on Martha’s Vineyard, divining clues to the boy he had been. “Of course.”
They stood in the doorway to Malcolm’s bedroom, Allie at his shoulder. He seemed reluctant to step inside, as though this were a place he did not belong. She wondered whether Chase was thinking, as she had since the shooting, that their son might never set foot here again.
Briefly touching his arm, she led him inside.
He stood there, hands in his pockets. Looking first at the photographs, he stopped to consider the picture of Malcolm with his grandfather outside the Atlanta stadium. “I guess that’s your dad.”
“Yes.” For a moment Allie considered whether it would be hurtful for Chase to hear about Malcolm’s grandfather as surrogate father, then decided not to censor the truth of their son’s life. “They were very close. They’d watch sports together, go fishing, play horseshoes or catch after dinner. My dad went to all his games, never missed a one.”
Chase’s voice was tinged with regret. “That must have been nice. For both of them.”
“It was.” But Allie could not bring herself to say that Wilson Hill was the man Malcolm sat next to every Sunday dinner, the man who pretended that Malcolm could outrun him until, soon enough, he could. Nor could she mention the moments when Malcolm was little and she had imagined that it was Chase, rather than her father, playing in the yard with their son.
Chase was looking at another picture, of three-year-old Malcolm on his grandfather’s shoulders. “Was it hard for him when your dad died?”
At once, Allie remembered the stricken look on Malcolm’s face when he’d run inside to find her. “More than hard. They were outside playing horseshoes, and Dad just dropped to his knees and was gone. By the time we got back to him, there were already tears streaming down Malcolm’s face.
“In his own way, Malcolm took it worse than my mom or me. At least Mom has her faith, and I still have some. But I think Malcolm is still trying to find a God he can entrust his grandfather to.”
For a moment, Chase was silent. Then he resumed contemplating the artifacts of Malcolm’s life—his certificate as class president, his trophy for Athlete of the Year. “I hear he was an incredible football player.”
You should have seen him, Allie almost said, and then stopped herself. “For me, it was always more about leadership and how he did in school. But hand that boy a football, and he was something to see.”
Quiet, Chase kept looking around for clues—Malcolm’s books, mostly concerning the present or past of Black Americans; his acceptance letter to Morehouse; the barbells he lifted; the full-length mirror in which Allie would find him studying the man he was swiftly becoming. Finally he turned to face her. “I guess you know how strange this is for me. I have a son who existed in a parallel universe, and I missed everything about him. Everything he ever did or thought or felt.”
It was less that he was blaming her, Allie realized, than that she was the only person to whom he could say this. In that moment she felt the full weight of his disorientation, caught between the life he had made for himself and the son he had never known existed, and whose plight he had done nothing to create.
Chase turned back to the photograph of Malcolm as a child. “What was he like growing up?”
To Allie, the inquiry felt unspeakably poignant. But despite her terrible fears for his future, Allie found that remembering Malcolm’s childhood still gave her pleasure. “He was like lots of things,” she told his father. “He was curious. He was active and liked to do new activities. He loved anything you could do with a ball of any shape or size. But he was also a reader.” She hesitated, then smiled a little. “When he was small, he used to daydream a lot. I don’t think he got that from me.”
“Did he ever ask about me?”
Where to start? Allie wondered. “Quite a lot, until he just stopped. More than once, he asked if you were white. I never said. But he’s lighter skinned than my parents or me, a reminder of the great unanswered question running through his life.” She paused, remembering her misgivings about the path she had chosen. “Sometimes I’d catch him just staring into that mirror, and imagine that he was trying to see through the glass to find you. Maybe it was actually me, looking into the mirror of my own guilt. Because I could see you clearly enough.”
“Would he, I wonder?”
“If he met you?” She crossed her arms, pondering the question. “I don’t know. He’s a Hill from Cade County, for sure. But then there’s that smile, the way he moves, and certain angles when his face looks kind of, I don’t know, maybe European, and suddenly I remember that his other grandfather was French.” She looked up again. “So maybe he would, if he wanted to. But that’s something else I need to explain.
“He grew up in a world where his family is Black, our friends are Black, our causes are Black. Maybe most important, his friends and classmates are Black. That’s who he wanted to be, maybe needed to be to claim his own place in a society that would always treat him as Black.” For a moment Allie stopped to reabsorb her own anger. “He grew up hearing about one Black person after another being shot dead by cops or self-appointed vigilantes—starting with Trayvon Martin. There are whole studies about what that does to the psychology of young Black men—to grow up in a world that threatens them just for existing.
“When that tape of George Floyd came out, Malcolm couldn’t sleep. He never said it, but I knew in my soul that the last thing he wanted to be was half white.”
Chase fell quiet again. Watching him, Allie imagined him absorbing that the son he had never met harbored these fears and resentments, and then pondering the implications of that—for Malcolm and for him. “Did that change how Malcolm acted toward white people, or what he said about cops?”
She looked at him directly. “I know Malcolm consumed a lot of social media about police misconduct toward Blacks, and he got much more vocal in class. Getting hassled by that cop driving to his grandfather’s grave was very personal to him.” Her voice held a note of resistance. “I told you about punching the cop’s kid. But that’s a long way from deliberately killing a deputy.”
Once more, she could follow Chase’s thoughts, because she lived with them hour upon sleepless hour—that the bullet in George Bullock’s brain came from the gun Malcolm had purchased a mere two weeks before. Finally, he said, “I need to see him, Allie.”
She inhaled, quelling her own emotions. “You can visit tomorrow,” she finally said. “If Malcolm’s OK with it. Just do me one favor and let me tell him you’re a friend. Anything more would be too much for him, and you haven’t sorted out what you want.”
She watched Chase consider this and then shrug. “All right,” he said with the barest trace of irony. “Given everything, after eighteen years I suppose there’s no rush. Father’s Day was only three weeks ago, after all, and I neglected to call my own.”
29
The Cade County jail was a grim-looking rectangle, surrounded by a high fence and then an open field that would afford escapees no cover, conveniently located across the road from a bail bondsman in a converted ranch house whose sign advertised that he took credit cards. For Chase, realizing that this facility housed his son was another landmark in his stations of disbelief.
Within moments, a female deputy had taken him to Sheriff Garrett’s office. As Garrett greeted him, his manner was pleasant but phlegmatic, as if the advent of a congressman from Massachusetts was entirely unremarkable—the product of a considerable discipline, Chase suspected, that the Sheriff had cultivated over time to conceal his thoughts at will. In their first moment of acquaintanceship, Garrett struck him as a formidable man.
“Allie Hill tells me you’re a friend from college,” the sheriff said. “Guess you’ve never met her son.”
“No. I’m hoping to see how he’s doing, and if there’s any way I can help him.”
Garrett ignored the tacit question. “How he’s doing is about how you’d expect. He’s an active young man of eighteen with a big future ahead, who suddenly found himself living in an eight-by-ten box. Now he’s realizing that his life will be some version of that until he goes free or dies—whatever year that is. He’s accused of murdering a sheriff’s deputy, and he’s got no more chance of bail than if he’d shot the president. Maybe less. What he’s got is an abundance of time to think about all that. So visitors are welcome.”
Beneath the sheriff’s flat baritone, Chase caught a hint of deep frustration, perhaps because Garrett had become a cog in the justice system of Cade County who, having been supplanted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and subordinated to the district attorney’s prosecutorial authority, had no formal discretion to act beyond keeping Malcolm safe. The other instinct Chase felt was that Garret had a profound disinclination to utter niceties about the late George Bullock.
“I’m sure it’s hard,” he ventured. “Especially with what Malcolm says happened that night.”
Garrett gave him a penetrant look. “I guess you know that’s out of my hands.”
“I do. But I can’t help wondering whether Malcolm’s story sounds plausible to you. From what little else I know, it feels like Bullock may have become his own law.”
Crossing his arms, Garrett said in brisk reproof, “The only conversations I can have about this case are with the DA and GBI. I’m sure you understand that, Congressman.” He paused, then added in a more even tone, “Let’s just say that I understand your concerns.”
Chase tried to think of how to keep the conversation alive. “If I crossed the line, Sheriff, I apologize. But after the problem with crowd control we had on Capitol Hill, I’ve taken an interest in white nationalism invading law enforcement. Malcolm’s description of what Bullock said and did that night is pretty striking.”
“Like I say,” Garrett responded firmly, “I can’t talk about that. Even if I could, I don’t know what happened out there any more than you do. But I can tell you this much. If I knew George Bullock had the problem you’re implying, he’d still be alive. Because I’d have taken this badge and gun and told him to find another line of work.”
Swiftly, Chase took inventory of what Garrett was not quite saying. That he didn’t know for sure if Bullock was dirty or a practicing racist. That the thought was not a novelty. And that, perhaps, he felt some measure of personal responsibility for what had happened that night.
“Let’s get you to Malcolm,” Garrett said. “He’s waiting for you.”
Opening the door, Garrett ushered Chase into the visiting room and closed the door behind him.
Malcolm Hill sat at a laminated table, looking up at him with mild curiosity. But though Chase had prepared himself for this moment, it jarred him beyond expectations.
It was not simply that this stranger was his son. It was how he looked. Unlike his mother, Malcolm was tall—standing, he stood eye to eye with Chase, and seemed to move with the same ease. He was as handsome and appealing as his yearbook picture, with Allie’s large, expressive eyes and, most startling, the ridged nose and high cheekbones of Jean Marc Brevard. To Chase, it was as though in some curious transmigration, his father had become part of the stream of humanity that America called Black.
The young man’s handshake was firm, Chase discovered. But there were hollows beneath his eyes inapposite with youth, and his face showed a closeness of skin to bone that suggested a loss of appetite. With a calm that surprised him, Chase said, “I’m Chase Brevard. I guess your mom told you about me.”
Malcolm nodded, seeming to regard him more closely. “She says you’re a friend of hers from Harvard, who turned out to be a congressman.”
Chase had another moment of foolish surprise: Though he should have anticipated this, his son spoke, as did Allie, in the soft intonations of a Black from the rural South. “I was also a lawyer,” Chase responded. “But you’ve got the basics. Anyhow, I was hoping we could visit for a while.”
Like the host in an anteroom to purgatory, Malcolm gestured at a chair across the table. As they sat, he said, “I was asking Mom why I hadn’t heard of you before.”
What to say, Chase wondered, when all he wanted to do was wordlessly absorb his son’s reality. Casually, he answered, “The last time I saw her was before you were born. But you know your mother. For a small person, she makes a big impression.”
Despite his circumstances, Malcolm flashed a fleeting grin—rueful, but Chase’s own. “Every day of my life, for the last eighteen years.” Then the smile vanished, and Chase sensed Malcolm falling back into the chasm that separated past from future.
There was something familiar about this man, Malcolm thought, that he could not place. Despite the aura of comfort that Malcolm had seen in other powerful men and women who gravitated to his mother, on first meeting this one had seemed momentarily rattled. Then he had a harsh reflection—congressmen probably didn’t spend much time visiting Black men accused of killing white police.
“I was thinking I’d met you somewhere,” Malcolm told him.
“Believe me,” the man responded, his manner easy now, “I’d remember. For one thing, you’d be one of two friends I had in Cade County, Georgia. I guess you’re wondering why I flew down.”
“Actually, I kind of was. Except I figured it was for my mom.”
“Not just for her,” the congressman said firmly. “I came because I believe you. Not kind of believe you, or want to believe you. I absolutely believe that what you’ve told your mom and your lawyer is the truth. And that you’re no more a murderer than I am.”
Suddenly, Malcolm found himself torn between disbelief and a surge of gratitude born of fear and desperation. “You don’t even know me.”
“That’s not quite right. I know how your mom describes you. I know about your grandfather, your grandmother, and your life until now. I know you were class president and Athlete of the Year. I know about Woody Palmer hassling you, and poor Billy’s blighted baseball career.” The congressman leaned across the table. “Before I entered politics, I used to be a prosecutor. Like your mother and Jabari Ford, I’ve seen people like George Bullock before. I had the privilege of putting one in jail for killing a Black man. To me, the way you describe Bullock makes perfect sense.
“You didn’t buy a gun because you wanted to ambush somebody—you bought one because racists posted your and your mom’s pictures on the internet. You weren’t drinking beer with friends hoping some random cop would stop you. You weren’t out on that road trolling for trouble. You were driving home hoping your mom wouldn’t be too pissed off to keep you from crawling in bed. Does that about cover it?”
