Alex sensed the full import of these words. If Claymore was found guilty and imprisoned, he wouldn’t be kept in solitary any longer. He might be transferred to an open prison, but he’d have to join the general population. Alex realized in that moment that this wasn’t just about his client’s freedom. If he didn’t secure an acquittal, Elias Claymore’s life wouldn’t be worth two bits.
Thursday, 16 July 2009 — 16:20
When he opened his eyes, he didn’t know where he was. All he could see was that the walls were white. He tried to gather his wits. The last thing he remembered, he had been thinking about his early life and the crimes he had committed. Was that where he was now? In prison? Had it all been a dream? Had he never really been released? Or escaped?
He struggled to remember.
He had joined several black power groups as they struggled to liberate themselves — and some of them had used rather clever tactics. For example, they availed themselves of the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.” But when the White Establishment decided that the second amendment wasn’t quite so sacred — now that the Brothers were asserting their rights under it — the movement split. Most of them didn’t want to risk their newfound support among the white liberals by falling afoul of the new gun laws. But Elias Claymore held out for continued bearing of arms, arguing that self-defense still required possession of guns and that in any case the White Establishment had no right to change the rules in the middle of the game.
After serving a one-year stint in prison for firearms offences, he came out angrier than ever and over the next two and a half years he raped five white women, after “practicing” his technique first on three black ones.
By this time, the Brothers regarded him as more of an embarrassment than an ally and it was widely rumored that it was one of his own who betrayed his hiding place to the FBI. He still remembered the day the Feds came for him. It was anger, not fear, that he felt as he saw the flickering lights in the distance and knew that he had nowhere to run from the vast convoy of lawmen that it had taken to bring him down.
He considered fighting to the death and taking down as many of the “pigs” with him as he could. It was not vainglorious courage. If he went to prison, he fully expected to be killed there. So he saw no reason not to make his last stand here and now. But he realized that if he could at least have his day in court, he would have the one thing that the White’s Man “free press” had denied him until now: a platform from which to speak and from which his message would surely be heard.
He was arrested and charged with six counts of rape, based on the testimony of those who came forward. Sentenced to nine years, he escaped after one, under the cover of a prison riot, with the aid of another group — this one basing its ideas on racially separatist version of Islam rather than secular revolution.
But three years in Libya and Sudan had shattered the illusion. He had seen corruption and double standards in Libya. Then when rumors of a US government plot to kidnap him started floating around, he moved on to Sudan. It was there that he saw how the blacks in the south of that country were treated as second class citizens. No amount of excuse-making and weasel talk could change that.
Yes, many of those blacks were Christians and their persecution was partially religious rather than racial. But so what? If that was their belief system, were they not entitled to it? Did it make any difference if their oppressors claimed that it was religion rather than race that reduced the Blacks of southern Sudan to the status of second- class citizens? Oppression was oppression and if he wasn’t prepared to make excuses for oppression in America then why should he make excuse for it here in the Third World?
And the more he spoke to the Christian blacks in the south of Sudan, the more he learned about their culture and ideas and the more he realized that he had fallen for some one else’s illusion. He had been led to believe that Christianity was the religion of the oppressors and that Islam was the natural religion of the black man. But it was here that he saw the other side of the coin. And America too was changing. Whatever its faults, America was growing and learning from its past mistakes. At least the American way had a future.
He had once said that indifference was impossible: if you’re not part of the cure you’re part of the disease. But as he looked toward his homeland — his real homeland, America — he saw that more and more people were becoming part of the cure. He had seen the first glimpse of it back in the sixties — in the freedom riders of all races. He saw it now in the newly enfranchised young who were asserting themselves politically as well as in more trivial ways. The same wind of change that had once swept colonialism out of Africa had blown “Jim Crow” out of America.
Yes, there was still injustice in America. But there was also resistance to that injustice. Yes, there was still suffering. But there was also hope. Yes there were the lingering after-effects of past injustice. But those lingering after effects would be swept away too, as long as good people kept trying and never gave up working together.
And it came to this: after seeking the truth in a foreign desert — a truth that almost eluded him — Elias Claymore saw the light of day and found happiness where he had started out, in his own backyard.
So at the end of three lonely years in exile, the prophet of conflict and bitterness finally returned home.
AUGUST
Monday, 17 August 2009 — 10:00
“Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! The Superior Court of the State of California, Alameda County, is now in session, the Honorable Justice Wagner presiding. All persons having business before the Court come forward and give your attendance and you shall be heard. God save this Honorable Court and the United States of America.”
Justice Ellen Wagner — a senior judge of the California Superior Court — took her seat in Court Number 7 of the Rene C. Davidson Courthouse in Oakland and the others followed suit. In her sixties, she was a striking, bespectacled African-American woman who projected dignity and gravitas from every pore. A veteran of the civil rights struggle, she had, in her youth, endured threats and even beatings as a freedom rider in the nineteen sixties. Along with a quarter of a million others, she had stood on the National Mall when Martin Luther King made his immortal “I have a dream” speech.
She had always claimed that her education began with the 1954 decision in the case of
Thirteen years later, Marshall was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to serve as the first African- American justice on the highest Court in the land. One year after that, Ellen Wagner fulfilled her own childhood dream by winning a coveted place to clerk for Marshall at the Supreme Court.
A panel of 150 veniremen was assembled in about twelve rows, sitting there looking nervous. This was quite a large panel, even for a felony case. But the judge was mindful of the fact that this was a high-profile case involving a popular and controversial public figure, and it was necessary to ensure that there was a large enough panel to allow for the many challenges for cause that were expected.
The veniremen had been shown a video explaining to them all about their duties as jurors and now after a day and a half of waiting around they had finally been brought into a courtroom. The question they had all been wondering about was whether they would be selected for the Claymore case. Not all of them wanted to. They knew that it was going to be a long case and they had jobs to do and lives to lead.
But some of them did want to be on the jury, for various reasons. Serving on a jury in a high profile case could be a passport to easy money. It was not unusual these days for jurors in high-profile cases to sell their stories
