“That fiddle was my mama’s,” Thurston said. “It’s been in our family for a hundred years. It should’ve been ours, not Ray’s.”
Joyce said, “Mama didn’t really know what she had. We think she may have had dementia. If she’d known what it was, she would never have given it to him. And the Ray I knew and watched grow up would never have done this to us. He’s really changed in the last few years.”
Thurston, Joyce, and Larry sat uncomfortably on Joyce’s brown sectional couch. Ray’s mother, in a yellow minidress, was perched on a faded tan armchair next to them.
Anderson Cooper asked, “So you think all this new fame has gone to his head?”
“You damn right it has,” Larry said.
Thurston said, “Our mother would tell us stories of how her grandfather would play that fiddle and how one day it would be passed down to us. Ray knew that. All we want is for him to do what’s right.”
Cut to Anderson Cooper. “And so Ray’s family filed a lawsuit against him, claiming that the violin is rightfully theirs. They didn’t know, however, that another family also has a prior claim to the instrument: the Marks family.
“The Marks family are descendants of the slave owners who owned Ray’s great-great-grandfather. Ray’s family maintains that Thomas Marks gave the violin to their great-grandfather and that it has remained in their possession ever since.”
Cut back to Anderson, now onstage in the Symphony auditorium.
Dramatic pause.
“The Marks family, however, disagrees.”
A familiar man and woman filled the screen, walking down a garden path. “Andrea and Dante Marks maintain that the violin is theirs and that their ancestor never gave the violin away. They’re suing Ray to get the violin back.”
Ray found himself standing. He’d been holding Nicole’s hand, leaning forward, and now he clenched his fists, unable to breathe.
Andrea Marks—gray haired, gray eyed—said earnestly into the camera, “We feel for Mr. McMillian, we do.” The makeup and the lighting made her look hard and gleaming, like polished steel. “It’s just that this was our property.”
“The Markses have filed their own lawsuit claiming that the violin belongs to them, not to Ray or his family.
“The Marks family immigrated to America in the late eighteenth century,” Anderson went on, “where they built Summerland Manor outside Milledgeville, Georgia. They farmed three thousand acres. They grew cotton, corn, tobacco, and wheat. They owned many musical instruments, including a violin from Cremona, Italy. And they enslaved, at the height of their economic prosperity, one hundred seventy-two human beings—including Leon, who may have been the natural son of the plantation owner and who was Ray’s grandmother’s grandfather.”
“We thought the violin went missing during Sherman’s March to the Sea,” Dante said. “But when we heard about the violin that Mr. McMillian is playing, we realized it was our family’s.”
“Did you reach out to Ray?” Anderson Cooper asked.
The brother said, “We did, we surely did.”
“He wasn’t interested in talking to us,” the sister said.
Cut to Anderson Cooper. “So what are you going to do? Are you going to sue Ray for the instrument?”
“We don’t want to,” Dante said. He and Andrea were now sitting on a garden bench, dark green bushes massing behind them. The sky was a clear pearl gray.
“Seems to me that you didn’t even notice the violin was gone,” Anderson Cooper said, “and meanwhile it’s been a godsend to Ray McMillian. A gift from his beloved grandmother.”
“It’s not his!” said the sister. “His family somehow appropriated it during the war, during Sherman’s March, or afterward, during the Emancipation.”
“Does it feel a little awkward, asking the descendant of a man your family once owned to give back your property? After all, there are those who would say the violin is a means of compensating Black Americans for what they suffered as slaves. That even if Ray’s ancestor did take the violin, he and his family are actually owed much more by your family—that it’s from his family’s labor that your family was able to prosper. It’s even possible that Ray’s family actually built Summerland Manor to begin with.”
Again the shot of the brick mansion.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” the sister said. “It’s ours, and we’re glad to come to a settlement arrangement for it.”