He did not speak. He reached into the breast pocket of his work shirt, pulled out a clean white handkerchief that had been ironed flat that morning, and held it out. Ulisses took it. In the corner of the cloth, four letters were stitched in pale blue thread.
H. Walker, 1968. The man, Henry Walker, the courthouse janitor, a Marine who had come home from Vietnam and never quite stopped working, nodded once and pushed his cart out the door. Ulisses dabbed his sleeve.
The stain stayed. He kept the handkerchief. When he walked back to the defendant's table, Eleanor leaned over and whispered, “Baby, it's okay. We can find another house. You shouldn't have to carry this.” Ulisses did not answer. He laid the handkerchief flat on the table beside his briefing book like a small white flag that meant the opposite of surrender. That night on the front porch at 118 Maple Heights, Eleanor brought out a chipped enamel teapot and sat down beside her grandson. The street lamp buzzed.
Crickets sang. The wooden swing built by Elias Daniels in 1953, the year before he won his railroad case, creaked softly under their weight. Eleanor took a long breath. Then she told Ulisses a story he had heard parts of, but never all of.
“In 1952, your great-grandfather sat in that exact same courtroom, with the same wood paneling and the same kind of judge. They told him a Black man could not keep a parcel of land that large. They said the railroad needed it more than he did. He did not have a lawyer and could not afford one, so he walked in by himself. Three days he stood there. Three days.”
She unfolded the yellowed newspaper clipping from her Bible. The photograph showed a tall man in a frayed collar shirt with a crooked tie standing at a defendant's table that did not even have a microphone. “They said to him, ‘Mr. Daniels, you do not belong in this room.’” And you know what he said back?
“He said, ‘Your Honor, this land belongs to us. So today, this room belongs to me, too.’” Ulisses looked at the photograph for a long time. He looked at his great-grandfather's collar. He looked at the cuffs of his own jacket draped over the railing.
The coffee stain had dried into a dark crescent on the sleeve. The two men, three generations apart, were wearing the same suit. He did not say anything, but when Eleanor went inside to wash up, he stood, walked to his bedroom, and pulled out a blank notebook. On the first page, in pencil, he wrote, “They called me a Black kid in my uncle's suit. Tomorrow they will call me counselor, or they will wish they had.” Then he got on his bicycle and rode 40 minutes across town to the office of Margaret Whitfield. Margaret would not see him. The receptionist told him so three times. He sat on the curb outside her building for four hours, thumbming through a copy of the county civil code he had brought in his backpack.
At nearly seven in the evening, the lights in the office went off. The front door opened. Margaret stepped out, briefcase in hand, and stopped when she saw him. She looked at him for a long, painful moment.