“You should not be here, kid.”
“Ma'am, I just need to know one thing off the record. Did Hollister threaten you?” Margaret looked up and down the empty sidewalk.
Her face went tight. “They did not threaten me. They threatened my firm, which is the same thing. I have two children to put through college. I am sorry. I am genuinely, deeply sorry.” She started to walk past him. Then she stopped, reached into her purse, and pulled out a small piece of paper. She pressed it into his hand. “That name. He retired six years ago and used to run the county records archive. If anyone in this county can tell you whether that contract is real, it is him. They tried to break me, kid. Do not let them break you.” The paper said Walter Ashbury, 412 Sycamore. That night, Ulisses began the hardest 48 hours of his short life. At two in the morning, he bent over the notary commission database in the university law library, a stack of certified records growing on the desk beside him. Cup after cup of cold coffee accumulated while a photocopier hummed in the dark.
He typed the name Cornelius Patterson into the database and felt his pulse quicken. His grandmother packed a paper bag lunch and tucked a note inside. The note was written in green chalk, the same chalk she had used to teach first grade for 41 years. It said, “Stand tall. Speak true.” He recorded mock cross-examinations on his phone. He played them back. He cringed at the way his voice cracked. He recorded again 38 times.
He learned to drop his voice half an octave. He learned to pause at the start of every question so that nobody could tell whether the boy or the man was about to speak. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror for an hour practicing posture. Square the shoulders, lift the chin, hands flat on the table, never clenched.
At dawn the next day, he rode his bicycle to 412 Sycamore and knocked on a peeling green door. Walter Ashbury opened it. He was in his late seventies, with a gray beard and eyes like those of a man who had read too many old documents and trusted very few of them. “They sent a child to my door.” Ulisses stood very straight. “Sir, my name is Ulisses Daniels. I am thirteen years old. I hold a Juris Doctor from Harrington Law School and a limited special practice waiver from the Supreme Court of this state. I am defending my grandmother in Hollister v. Daniels. I am here because Margaret Whitfield said you might be the only honest man in this county who could help me.” Walter Ashbury stared at him for five seconds. Then his shoulders dropped half an inch. “Well, son, I'll be damned. Come in.” The walls of his small front room were covered with black and white photographs. Walter, very young in marine dress blues, standing beside another young Marine, a black man with the same kind of straight back stillness Ulisses carried.
“Korea,” Walter said, watching the boy notice. “He saved my life. I owed him my career. I owe him still.” Walter agreed to pull every record he could find on the Daniels parcel.
That night, alone in his bedroom, Ulisses tied the cufflinks of his uncle's suit. They were too big and slid down his wrists. He did not adjust them. He folded Henry Walker's handkerchief into a small triangle and slipped it into his breast pocket.
He turned out the light. On the desk beside his bed, the note he had written remained in pencil, face up. “They called me a Black kid in my uncle's suit. Tomorrow they will call me counselor, or they will wish they had.”