Trial, p.1
Trial, page 1
Advance Praise for
TRIAL
“A death in the dark, a young life on the line. From the backroads of rural Georgia to the halls of Congress, this riveting novel draws on Richard North Patterson’s years as a trial attorney as well as his insider knowledge of Washington DC. Intricate, compelling, and timely, it may be his best book yet.”
—Geraldine Brooks, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
and New York Times bestselling author of Horse
“It is no overstatement to say that To Kill a Mockingbird for the 21st century has arrived. Trial grapples with the biggest issues of race and justice and does so in a meaningful and engrossing way, page after page. You cannot help being moved by this story and it illuminates the biggest issues we face in our nation today.”
—James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO
and New York Times bestselling novelist
“For all its timely discussion, Trial is first and foremost a novel of irresistible suspense. This is a barnburner of a book whose huge drama, large characters, and elemental conflicts grab you from page one.”
—Scott Turow, #1 New York Times bestselling author
of Presumed Innocent and Suspect
“This is a portrait of the America I know. It is compelling, contemporary and thoughtfully researched truth telling. Trial might be fictional but it is real. Allie, Chase, Malcolm, Jabari, and Janie are real people. I know them. Their experiences are real. I’ve lived them.”
—Bruce Gordon, former CEO of the NAACP
“For many years, my law practice representing Black men and women struggling for justice in a Jim Crow environment took me into the courthouse and among the people of the area depicted in this novel. As a Black native of Southwest Georgia and based on my professional experience, Richard North Patterson has done a commendable job of capturing the spirit of the place and its people.”
—Judge Herbert E. Phipps, Georgia Court of Appeals (Ret.)
“Richard North Patterson has written another excellent novel which rings with authenticity. He captures virtually all the racial subtleties I would expect from a Black author, and knocks the politics out of the park.”
—Judge Thelton Henderson, US District Court (Ret.), former US Department of Justice attorney, Civil Rights Division, Voting Section
A POST HILL PRESS BOOK
Trial
© 2023 by Richard North Patterson
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-63758-806-2
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-805-5
Cover design by Richard Ljoenes
Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Post Hill Press
New York • Nashville
posthillpress.com
Published in the United States of America
Contents
Part 1: The Killing
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Part 2: Harvard
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Part 3: Cade County
22
23
24
25
Part 4: The Decision
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Part 5: The Disclosure
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
Part 6: The Offer
58
59
60
Part 7: The Trial
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
Part 8: Beginnings
83
84
85
86
Afterword & Acknowledgments
For David Cooke
and for the dedicated people
of the New Georgia Project
PART ONE
The Killing
1
In the pitch darkness of an unlit road in rural Georgia, Malcolm Hill drove with the windows cracked open, hoping that the humid crosscurrents would diminish the torpid semistupor of too many beers.
It was past midnight. At eighteen, Malcolm was three years short of the legal drinking age—a young Black man who, he dully realized, had rendered himself vulnerable to mischance. There were no streetlamps. Around him he felt, more than saw, the open fields stretching between dense stands of pines or oaks that blocked the thin silver light of a quarter moon.
As he oscillated between hyperattention and slackness, Malcolm lost the sensation of time passing, and the asphalt road in his headlights seemed to recede before reappearing in sharper focus. Abruptly recalling the pickup truck that, perhaps an hour before, had slowed as it passed the front porch where he sat drinking with his friends, he glanced in the rearview mirror, searching for the beam lights that—in reality or imagination—had appeared in the ghostly distance before vanishing again, conjuring from his subconscious the decades of bad history that had made Cade County, once a cradle of slavery, so dangerous for Blacks.
As he often did, he remembered his mother’s catechism: Don’t play loud music. Don’t violate the speed limit. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t give them any reason to stop you. As if in defiance, Killer Mike was rapping on his sound system, rapping an anthem to resisting the police.
In Malcolm’s mind, the words provoked both fresh anger at rogue cops and the odd sense of himself as a seriocomic figure, a recent honors graduate of Cade County High School living on the edge of criminality by edict of the Georgia state legislature. On the passenger seat beside him was the proof: piles of absentee voter applications that, Wednesday through Sunday, he passed out to the county’s Black electorate—his summer job before going off to college.
But though his ultimate boss was his formidable and demanding mother, the enterprise she ran was no family business. In 2020 the Blue Georgia Movement had persuaded unprecedented numbers of African Americans to vote absentee or by mail, helping to make Joe Biden president and elect two senators, one Black, who had given Democrats control of the United States Senate. Too many people despised her for it.
In response, the legislature had barred election officials and organizations like Blue Georgia from mailing out absentee ballot applications, making it harder for Blacks who worked long hours or were burdened with childcare to vote. Now the election of November 2022 was only five months away. Until September, Malcolm’s job was to knock on doors or go to fairs, churches, concerts, and barbecues—anywhere Black people gathered—to pass out applications.
This, too, might be illegal in the minds of Allie Hill’s enemies. There was just no telling—since the election of 2020, there was so much hatred that she had stopped counting death threats. Instead she had stepped up her warnings to Malcolm: If somebody hassles you for canvassing, don’t get mad; just try to defuse the situation and get out of there. We’re not in the business of creating martyrs—our movement had too many of those long ago.
Once again, Malcolm looked in the rearview mirror.
Nothing but darkness.
In fifteen minutes or so, he would be home in bed, the only consequence of his carelessness her sharply worded disapproval for driving too late at night on a lonely road. Bed would feel good. He was not only borderline drunk but stone tired.
The neighborhood he had worked today was deep in poverty—shotgun houses maybe eight hundred square feet, with aluminum shades outside the windows and, too often, tarpaulins or garbage bags or cardboard covering leaks in the roof that spawned mildew and mold. Most of the postage-stamp yards were dirt or untended grass; the people who lived in these hovels often did not own them—the owners of record, his mom had explained, were parents or grandparents or other dead relations who had passed away without wills or any notion of probate. One wizened old woman had asked Malcolm to check the overhead light in her kitchen; when he unscrewed the bulb, cockroaches fell on his head. The house was clean enough; she simply could not afford to maintain it.
His mother knew everyone in these houses. Sometimes she went there in her old flatbed truck, the one she kept for carrying packets of food to the people she knew needed them most. You don’t just ask folks to vote, she had told Malcolm, unless you care about their lives. Still, she always added, changing lives is impossible unless enough people cast ballots.
Deep down, Malcolm knew his mother had not wanted him to do this work. But he had insisted and, rare for her, Allie Hill had relented. What followed were still more warnings: Once it gets dark, try to have company. You don’t want to be alone if you can help it, at least not anywhere no one can see you. There are still a lot of people in Georgia who hate Black folks, and too many have guns. A few wouldn’t think twice about killing you because you’re my son, or just because you’re a Black man.
Glancing behind him, Malcolm thought again of that truck slowing down, as if to mark the group of young Blacks and whites chilling out after a long day spent putting the power to vote in the hands of their neighbors. In the distance behind him, new headlights slowed and then disappeared as he entered the last stretch of solitude. In ten minutes or so, he would reach the long driveway running through the parcel of land where his mother and grandmother kept up old family farmhouses, the place his grandfather had lived until that heart attack took him so fast that he was dead before he hit the grass where he had been pitching horseshoes with Malcolm in the dusk after supper. The memory felt like lead in Malcolm’s heart.
In the rearview mirror, Malcolm realized with a start, a blue flashing light had appeared.
He felt the dampness of sweat on his T-shirt and forehead. As the light came closer, the shriek of a police siren pierced the night.
Reflexively, Malcolm remembered his mother’s instructions for dealing with cops who could snuff out a life in a moment of fury or fear. Be respectful; don’t move quickly; make sure they can see your hands.
Malcolm had not told her about the gun.
The used Glock 19 was concealed in his glove compartment. He had bought it two weeks ago after starting this work, remembering all the videos of Blacks killed by police. He had imagined a moment like this, but the reality of this moment jolted him fully awake. The squad car loomed behind him, filling his rearview mirror, sirens screeching.
Heart pounding, Malcolm pulled over to the side of the road, wheels skidding on gravel before he jammed on the brakes. The old Honda jolted to a stop, its headlights streaks of white-yellow that evanesced in the infinite black of featureless grassland.
The car stopped behind him. The siren stilled; the blue beacon ceased flashing; the headlights disappeared. Everything around the car became silent and dark.
Malcolm’s stomach knotted. In a panicky reflex, he took out the gun and hid it beneath the papers beside him, the tools of democracy.
2
Pacing the living room of the weathered farmhouse she shared with her son, Allie Hill paused to check her cell phone for texts.
Nothing.
Pacing from room to room, Allie recommenced her restless pursuit of nothing save to kill time. She was slight and intense, gifted with a kinetic energy that fueled a swiftness of thought, speech, and movement so marked that—so her mother said—she seemed to burn calories just by being herself. Waiting for Malcolm, she gazed at the photographs that they had hung on the walls: her parents and grandparents at her kitchen table; a Hill family gathering on the green farmland outside; Malcolm watching his grandfather slip his ballot into a drop box; the faces of ordinary Black people from hard times past. It’s good to remember, she had told her son.
Aimless, she went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Opening the refrigerator, she realized they were down to a loaf of bread, cold cuts, English muffins, and a quart of milk. I’ve neglected my shopping, Allie reproved herself. Malcolm inhaled food, and she didn’t want him eating junk. Tomorrow she would squeeze an hour from her schedule to buy groceries.
She stopped, pensive. Through the window screen she could hear the sounds of a spring night in Southwest Georgia—crickets, wind rustling the leaves of trees—but not the one she awaited, the hum of a motor coming up the drive. Gazing into the darkness, she inhaled the scent of the crape myrtle trees she fitfully tended; felt the moist, lingering heat of a spring day that augured another sweltering summer that would breed mosquitoes as big as dive bombers; sensed the coming of a thunderstorm, perhaps bearing the jagged, shimmering bolts of lightning that, when Allie was small, had split the night sky and announced the awesome nearness of God. All that was missing from the remembered sensations of her childhood was the drone from a television as Wilson Hill watched his favorite team, the Atlanta Braves—Hank Aaron’s team, he had later explained to seven-year-old Malcolm, and then Dusty Baker’s, a Black man with a baseball mind so keen that he was still managing in the big leagues. Sometimes Allie would leave off helping her mother clean dishes after supper to peer into the living room and watch Malcolm sitting in her father’s lap, the boy’s head on the man’s broad shoulder, her father’s masculine warmth serving Malcolm’s need for a father of his own.
But now his grandfather was gone. Across the darkened fields where she, then Malcolm, had played as children, Allie saw the porch light of her mother’s home—as if she, too, would wait until Malcolm returned. Janie Hill’s heritage of worry had long ago become her daughter’s.
But she was far from Janie’s equal as a mother, Allie knew. During election season, Allie worked ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, supervising over one hundred employees in eight offices across the state—many of them canvassers not much older than Malcolm. In three months he would be off at college, and she felt her time with him slipping away.
Through sheer will, she stopped herself from calling him. He was touchy and proud, too aware that the major force in his life was a woman others viewed with something akin to awe. He was on the cusp of adulthood, searching for an identity all his own, and he felt her anxieties and desires for him as a burden. But she would have suffered them in better times than these: He was an eighteen-year-old Black man in Georgia who was sometimes too quick to anger, and one moment of misjudgment could change his life in ways he could not yet imagine.
Tonight, as often, she felt alone. This is how things are, she reminded herself, and much of that is my doing. But no matter the air of certitude she adopted for Malcolm, as a mother she had made her share of mistakes. Tonight she worried yet again that allowing Malcolm to share in her work was another. But in the end, she could not diminish her son out of fear. To stand up was what her family had always done, even back when it could have meant a casual death at the hands of racists that would likely go unpunished and, except by their community, unmourned. Standing up was what she knew, the only way forward. She could not separate Malcolm from three generations of Hills.
Perhaps more than any single person, a columnist for the New York Times had written, Allie Hill had shifted the balance of power in American politics. The price was raising ever more money to buy security for the offices where her people worked insanely long hours for too little money. But Georgia, its northern counties especially, was crawling with militia and white nationalists who carried assault weapons or knew how to build bombs, and hated anyone who had “stolen” the White House from the one “rightful” president.
Now her work meant living with all the hatred welling up from the fever swamp of fanatics who believed she was bent on replacing white Christians with brown and Black people who would destroy their primal America. The fact that Allie, too, was a Christian meant nothing. After the 2020 election, armed white militia had massed in front of her offices in Freedom, right-wing extremists had posted her picture, and then, more ominously, photographs of her home on the internet.
Waking up that morning, she had discovered another voice message from an unknown caller. His ungrammatical threats of sexual violence and asphyxiation would have been almost comical if not for the venom seeping through the honey-dipped inflections. She had given up wondering how these people got her cell number; though she had always loathed firearms except for the rifle her father used for hunting, lately she had considered buying a handgun.
