“He said it was a kind of tribalism. The defendant was a person from their tribe, so whatever mistakes she made, she’s still a good person to them. Luis was from another tribe, so it will always be his fault somehow, because that’s just how those other people are. And the more I think about it, the more I remember your saying something like that to me.”
“Did I?” she asked dreamily. As if far away. “I don’t recall.”
“Back when I first met you. I stopped to talk to you. You said most people don’t stop, because you’re a ‘them’ and not an ‘us.’ I don’t think you were talking about race, though. Just the way people stick with those they know.”
“There are many kinds of tribes, Raymond. But I don’t claim to remember having said it. It sounds like something I would say, though.”
He leaned in silence for a minute or two, staring through the filmy curtain at nothing. Just a muted view of the building across the street. Then he checked the broth and found it was ready. She liked her drinks warm rather than hot.
“If I just hand this to you and go . . . do you promise to drink it?”
“I promise.”
He set it on the coffee table in front of her.
“You sure there’s nothing else I can do?”
“Oh, Raymond. You have done so much. Do for others, but don’t do only for others. Take care of yourself as well. You must be upset by this outcome, too. So tell me. What do you think about it?”
“I told you,” he said.
“Let me start again. You haven’t told me how you feel about it.”
“I don’t have a right to feel anything about it. How can I? I didn’t know him. You and Isabel have a right to those feelings.” He started to say more on the subject, but the words didn’t come. “I’m just going to go back to my dad’s and work on that report. I want to have it done by Monday morning. I have some more homework to get done over the weekend, too. I got behind, you know . . . with Isabel having her baby and all.”
“Okay, good. You go work.”
“I’ll come visit you over the weekend,” he said.
“All the way from your father’s? You don’t need to.”
“But you know I will.”
“Raymond,” she said, before he could hurry out the door. “You have a right. You always have a right to feel.”
Raymond handed in the report to his social studies teacher, as he’d been instructed, first thing Monday morning before homeroom. He was proud of it, and anxious to hear what she thought.
“Oh,” Miss Evans said. “You’re back. That was fast.”
She flipped the pages on the report faster than she could read or even skim them. She was a sixtysomething woman with porcelain skin, a fiercely fair complexion. Aging had left her skin papery and nearly translucent. She wore big floppy hats from the front door of school to her car, even on overcast days.
“Seven single-spaced pages,” she said, sounding impressed. “Quite ambitious.”
“I guess I had a lot to say.”
“I’ll try to get it read at lunch,” she said. “So that when you come into class this afternoon, I can have a grade for you.”
He sat down at his regular desk in her class and waited. It was early. Six minutes to 1:00. There were no other students in the room.
“I’m just finishing it,” she said without looking up.
“Okay. I’ll wait.”
Less than a minute later she flipped back to its cover page and scribbled something on it with her red pen. She stood, walked down the aisle to him. Dropped it on the desk in front of him.
He looked down at his grade.
C-.
“C minus?”
“Did you think it deserved more?”
“Yeah. Much more.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but that’s my honest opinion. You took very good notes, and I gave you credit for that. But I didn’t like the conclusions you came to. I thought you went way off the beam with that. First of all, I’m not even sure why you thought you were supposed to draw your own conclusions about why the jury decided the way it did. Those people were there to do their civic duty. They listened to the facts in front of them and did what they thought best. You’re seventeen years old, and you weren’t in the jury room, and here you are going on about how people see facts differently based on a theory of us and them. It just sounded like a teenager thinking he knows better than our tried-and-true system of justice.”