From a distance the Blackwell County Human Development Center looks like a college campus or some fancy prep school. Ancient brick the color of a four-day-old hematoma is stacked in institutional splendor in front of me as I drive under a silver arch onto the grounds. As I wind around a narrow asphalt street, I wonder how often the residents try to run away into the wooded area that surrounds the campus for miles. Trees give Arkansas its natural beauty, but here I wonder if they could be a hindrance to the security of the residents. Surely a severely retarded person would in some ways be safer lost in the city than in the country. But I suspect few residents, judging from the lack of activity outside on this unusually mild July day (it must be no more than eighty degrees and it is almost eleven), spend much time outside these musty old buildings I am passing.
I ease the Blazer between a Bronco and a Chevrolet pickup outside of what I take to be the central office. Andy has told me I must sign in first before I come to his office. What would institutions do without a sign-in book? Inside a small waiting room I look at the names and addresses before me:
Rogers, El Dorado, Helena. This place is not your neighborhood school. Relatives must travel hours for a visit, so I can assume that residents are grouped around the state by level of severity. As I write my name, a man of about forty taps me on the shoulder. He is, I hope, a resident: his eyes are crossed; he has a hump a camel would be proud to own, and from the sounds he is making he is without intelligible speech. He is holding out his hand, and though I have represented many mentally ill people who acted much stranger, I feel myself flinch.
“Homer,” the woman behind the glass says mildly, “what’re you doing down here? Does Mr. Trantham know you’re down here?”
Homer, who is dressed in jeans and a red, long-sleeved western shirt, makes more sounds I can’t understand; but there is no mistaking the friendly grin on his face.
To me the woman says, ““He wants to shake hands.”
There are food stains on Homer’s shirt, and I find that I am reluctant to touch this man who seems delighted by my presence. No telling where those hands have been, but with the woman watching me, I have no choice but to eKtend my hand. He pumps away, and I steel myself to really look at him closely and find that I am not as grossed out as I thought I would be. Of course, I have seen retarded people before, but not so close I could feel their breath on my face. I realize now that I think of them as freaks, some of whom are harmless and some who aren’t.
“How are you?” I ask loudly, self-conscious as a teenager meeting his first date’s father, knowing every word I say will be repeated by the beaming receptionist, a country woman whose brown hair is pulled tight in a bun behind her head. Homer grins sheepishly, as if he had been told an off-color joke in the presence of his mother.
I turn and look at the woman who orders, “Let go of his hand, silly!”
I think she is talking to me and pull my hand away just as he pulls his back, and he and I both giggle nervously. I’m beginning to feel like I’m the newest resident. Homer now studies me with unconcealed glee. He knows a soul mate when he sees one.
“Who’ve you out here to see?” the woman asks amiably, her voice crackling with humor as she files away the story. I thought he was his brother he acted so dumb!
“You didn’t write in who you’re visiting.”
I take a good look at my interrogator. She has a dimple on her left cheek as deep as a small well and her eyes are a sparkling green behind steel bifocals. She could be anywhere between forty and sixty.
“I’m here to see Dr. Chapman.”
Her dimple disappears instantly as her cheeks swell with disapproval.
“I saw you on TV.” Unvoiced is her unimpeachable indictment of me: You’re his lawyer.
I confess that she probably did and ask, “Can you tell me where his office is?”
“Homer,” she snaps, “take him upstairs to Dr. Chapman on your way back to your unit.”
I don’t know whether I am to take this as an insult or a high honor, but Homer, who seems to have permanently grasped the power of positive thinking, appears ecstatic. He nods eagerly, and without another word I follow him through an unmarked door. Once through the door we make a series of turns, and I realize immediately I am lost as we come upon two elevators. Happily, we take the stairs (though Homer appears entirely harmless, I’d just as soon not spend a couple of hours between floors with him). On the stairs we pass a little black male surely no older than twenty. He points at me and laughs hysterically. Homer frowns and says some thing that sounds unmistakably like “Fuck off.” It begins to dawn on me that if I stayed out here a week, I’d understand everything he is saying.
Upstairs, we pass through a set of double doors, and to my left is a group of obviously retarded men sitting on sofas watching a soap opera. This strikes me as strange, but why should it? It’s not as if you have to be a rocket scientist to watch “All My Children.” In the same area further ahead we pass a card table around which three employees (two men and a woman) dressed in ordinary clothes are sitting. I assume they are staff (I realize I expected to see nurses in starched uniforms sweeping by me on their way to patients’ rooms). Yet the residents, as strange as they look, are not, for the most part, sick, though I assume some are on medication to control their behavior.
Before I can speak, the woman, who seems to be sorting some papers as the men look on, says, “Homer, where’re you taking him?”
Without breaking his shuffling gait, Homer makes a series of noises, the last part of which sounds to me like “Lapland.”
Chapman. The three give me a hard stare but say nothing. Everybody in America knows a lawyer when they see one.
Andy is reading what appears to be a textbook in a small, dingy office with the door open and looks up as Homer brings me into view. The green concrete walls are mostly bare except for a calendar and an empty metal shelf. It is as if Andy has already been packed up.
I explain, “Homer brought me.”
Andy smiles, his eyes crinkling with pleasure at the sight of Homer, who now looks relieved to have discharged his unpopular task.
“Thank you, Homer,” he says formally.
“You did a good job. Go on back to the dayroom.”
Homer nods and moves off, his peculiar old-man’s gait no longer as distracting to me as when I arrived.
Andy rises and gravely offers his hand.
“Have a seat. I’ve been transferred up here out of harm’s way,” be says, his voice sounding sarcastic and at the same time embarrassed.
Wearing a short-sleeved sky-blue knit shirt over a pair of comfortable-looking pleated khaki pants, he is dressed far more casually than I expected. But then, I suppose Homer doesn’t mind. I sit in a metal folding chair opposite him, already feeling closed in.
“What are you supposed to be doing all day?” I ask, trying unsuccessfully to read upside down the title of his book. “Right now I ‘m reviewing our training literature,” he says mock-importantly, and then mutters, “as if it matters.”
I pick up the book from his desk. It is entitled: Nonaversive Intervention for Behavior Problems: A Manual for Home and Community. I flip through the pages, realizing I know zero about what is expected of retarded people.
“Doesn’t it?
“I ask.
A bitter look crosses Andy’s face.
“It’s supposed to, but there’s so much turnover,” he says, looking past me into the hall, “Homer isn’t going to do anything the rest of his life except wander these halls.”
“What about that suit to shut down places like this?” I ask, feeling the waxy cover of the book beneath my thumb.
Andy gives me an indulgent smile and for the next ten minutes lectures me on the myths of what he calls the deinstitutionalization movement.
“You get all these Utopia training models like this,” he says, pointing at his book, “but it’s not the real world. What good does it do to put a nonverbal, severely retarded man in a group home? There’s no place for people like that in American society. Retarded people are, by definition, the losers, the bottom of the barrel, in a country that insists on competition from the moment a child is born. Sure, the mildly retarded can learn enough adaptive behavior to get by, but the Homers of the world don’t fit in anywhere. In a consumer society people like him won’t ever be accepted because they don’t have any value.”
I nod, more interested in the emotion in his voice than in what he is saying. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t want Homer moving in next to me. The price of real estate in my neighborhood is already low enough without having to worry about Homer coming over to peep in Sarah’s window. What I want a jury to hear, though, is that Andy cares about these people even if they don’t. And it won’t hurt if they agree with him.
All Andy was trying to do was stop this child from mutilating herself-he wasn’t trying to move her into the half-million-dollar homes overlooking the Arkansas River. To get him to talk more, I deliberately bait him.
“You don’t sound too liberal on this subject. I thought you’d tell me that retarded people were like blacks-just give ‘em a chance to show they’re regular folks.”
Andy gives me a look that reminds me of the first time I talked to him in my office: Is this white asshole educable?
“The people who write these books and lead these movements are basically ideologues, no matter how much they’ve worked with the develop mentally disabled. It doesn’t matter whether you call them liberals or conservatives. They have this grand vision of how things ought to be. Frankly, I think they’re dangerous as hell,” he says, softly slapping the table in front of him.
Feigning disapproval, I cross my arms in front of me, anxious to keep him going. A jury has got to be made to see the guy’s no Dr. Strangelove rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of Armageddon. Down deep, Andy is paternalistic He just wants to stay down on the farm and take care of his retarded folks. He is probably deeply conservative, like most Arkansans. If so, I want to exploit that identification at the trial.
“You’re going to play into the prosecutor’s hands,” I say, believing just the opposite.
“She’s going to try to paint you as a real Neanderthal, the kind of professional who’s keeping Arkansas in the Dark Ages. Shocking defenseless children, keeping them locked up in institutions.”
Andy stands up and looks out his window. I can’t see what he is looking at, but probably he is staring off into the woods.
He says, after a long pause, ” You really think desegregation, when you weigh the pluses and minuses, has benefited most blacks? Look at where a lot of blacks are in the average school. Special ed. The slow classes. Or out of school hanging out, getting stoned on drugs and killing each other. In the United States there can only be so many winners. For whatever reason blacks aren’t ever going to win in America.
Sure, there are exceptions. The liberals will trot out a black who’s made it to prove integration is working. But you don’t prove anything by how your best kids do; they would have made it anyway. It’s your average kid who proves whether the system is working or not, and for most black kids it’s going to be the bottom, and it’s not really getting any better
His voice trails off, as if I should be making a connection.
What is it? Is he conceding black inferiority, or what? Is he saying blacks are like retarded people too stupid to compete? I stare at his back, unable to try to read his face. I have lost the thread somewhere. “It’s too late to go back to Africa, Andy,” I say, wondering whether he will take this as a slur.
He turns around and gives me a wintry smile.
“All I’m talking about is a sense of identity. These reformers have decided retarded people should be a part of the American rat race as if that were a good thing. I’m not so sure the Homers of this world would be better off competing and losing in a society that values only winners.”
I look toward the door, wondering if I should get up and close it. We are at the end of the hall, so it hardly seems worth it. The fire has gone out of Andy’s voice as if he has gotten stuck. Perhaps he has. Somebody is always ahead of us, but that doesn’t mean we have to slit our wrists. Normal everyday life has compensations other than just winning.
Maybe, though, if you’re forced to compete and you usually come in dead last, it’s hard to see the virtue in lining up for the next race. I say carefully, “I want the jury to see you have a point of view, but I’m not sure a racial analogy is going to be appreciated, however sympathetic it is.”
Andy props one leg against the wall and leans back against the windowsill with both elbows resting on the edge. He says sarcastically, “You really belisve in this legal crap, don’t you?”
My right ear itches and I dig at it with my little finger, a pleasure so sublime I scratch until it hurts. Is that how a self-abusive child begins? How to explain I don’t “believe” in the law.
“A friend of mine,” I say, remembering Clan Bailey’s beatific expression after he won his first jury trial “once said the law is like toilet paper; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.” I study Andy’s puzzled expression and decide to spell it out for him.
“His point was that there’re more efficient ways to clean up a mess, but it’s what we’re used to in this country, and consequently a lot of people swear by it. I don’t swear by our legal system, but I ‘m getting used to it.”
Andy wrinkles his nose slightly at my remark. He is too proper to appreciate it. The truth is that I am surprised he was willing to get his hands dirty enough even to get close enough to Pam to touch her, much less shock her. I ask, “Can you get away with giving me a tour?”
“I think so,” he says.
“It’ll have to be a quick one, but you need to see this place to get a feel for what’s going on.”
In the next twenty minutes I see more than I want to. With me trailing Andy, we cover four of the six buildings on the grounds. It is the locked wards that give me the creeps.
Somewhat surprisingly, Andy still has a set of keys, and though all eyes are on us from the time we enter a ward until we leave it, Andy acts as if I am about to make an offer to buy the place. As we stride briskly through a ward in which some of the men are tied to their beds, I get a feel for the first time what Pam must have been like. Though none of them are in a position to abuse themselves, it is possible for me to picture some of them ramming their heads against their beds. One hideously deformed man (his eyes look turned inside out, and he has scar tissue for skin) rhythmically rubs his head against his sheets.
On this same ward several men, none with intelligible speech, gather around us. They seem starved for human touch, but, like Homer, they are hideous to me, and there are too many of them. The level of noise is astonishingly high, but I can’t understand a word. All I want to do is get out of here. Two male aides, one black and one white, walk over to us and greet Andy warmly. Andy acknowledges that he is showing his lawyer around, and we leave them shooing the men back toward a group of chairs and tables in the corner by a TV. Reading my mind, Andy says, “Homer’s ward is higher-functioning. You’d get used to it and see them as distinctive individuals. It’s the aides who don’t see them as individuals that give us the problems.”
One of the men, wearing only a pair of jockey shorts, bends down like an animal searching for food, picks up a cigarette butt, and brings it toward his mouth. The black aide catches him by his wrist and forces the man, who is babbling angrily, to drop it into his hand.
“That’s called pica,” Andy says as I watch dumbfounded.
“Some of them will try to put anything in their mouths that’s not nailed down. Including their feces.”
Outside, I realize I have been holding my breath, and ex hale. As we walk toward a building on the western edge of the campus, Andy points to a similar structure directly across from us.
“Pam lived over in Pindley. I could take you in there, but some of the women, like the men, like to take off their clothes, and it would cause more of a ruckus. Since it’s about the same, we’ll go to the boys’ building.”
As we approach the brick building, I feel myself becoming claustrophobic again. “How do people keep working here?”
I ask, shaken by so much abnormality in one room.
“They don’t,” Andy says.
“As I’ve told you, the turnover among aides is ridiculous. They hardly get paid enough to live on, and yet, they are the people who provide the primary care.”
As we enter the boys’ ward, I realize mat Rogers Hall, the unit for the criminally insane that I used to visit as a public defender, was a piece of cake compared to what I’m seeing.
As blunted and spaced-out as the men at Rogers Hall were, at least they looked halfway normal. Too many of these people look as if they were drawn by the guy who comes up with “The Par Side.” I tell myself that I shouldn’t be so revolted by the way they look, but I can’t help the queasy feeling in my stomach. If there is a God, what divine purpose could be served by such genetic mistakes? Free will, the priests at Subiaco, the Catholic boarding school I attended, would say, I suppose. The boys’ ward is at the same time less and more depressing. It is smaller, but the sight of children obviously zombied out is hard to take. There must be no more than twenty boys in this room. We walk past showers and I see several boys (one of whom is old enough to have a sparse patch of pubic hair) being hosed down by a woman. A male aide is with her trying to help them wash themselves. It seems like a good way to give them a bath, but Andy whispers, “They sometimes wash the men and women the same way.
It can seem pretty degrading, but they don’t have the staff to make sure everyone has privacy.”
“Together?” I ask, titillated by the thought. One of the boys laughs with glee as the nurse sprays him in the face.
Andy gives me his professional frown.
“Of course not,” he says, holding out his arms as one of the boys gets away from the aide and comes running to us. The child is naked and wet, but Andy lets him jump into his arms as if this strange-looking child were his own son.
“Toddy,” Andy says, smiling, “you’re all wet!”
For a response. Toddy, who somewhat resembles a gremlin from a Steven Spielberg movie, burrows his head against Andy’s chest like a small animal. If we could have Andy’s trial out here on the grounds of the Blackwell County HDC, I think Andy would be acquitted in about five minutes. It is easy to paint a sinister picture of an institutional world in a courtroom, but not quite so simple if you’re out here.
The female aide puts down her hose and takes Toddy from Andy’s arms.
“Dr. Chapman,” she apologizes, “he just loves you to death.”
Andy pats the child’s back before returning him to the woman, who obviously is a friend. “There are worse crimes, I suppose,” he says, a deadpan expression his face.
Back in his office, we talk in detail about the upcoming trial, which is two months away, in September. I have waited a week to come to see him. I have wanted us both to digest the probable cause hearing and the publicity surrounding it.
In the interval, fortunately, we have gone from the worst judge possible in Blackwell County to the best-Harriet Tarnower, a female appointee whose intelligence and fairness is already becoming a model in Blackwell County. If we care anything about competence, we will elect her to a judicial slot.
Andy tells me he has run down the names of three possible experts who will at least be willing to talk to us. He tears a sheet of paper from a fat notebook and gives it to me. The names mean nothing to me only the states: Mississippi (we used to say, “Thank God for Mississippi,” until it pulled ahead of us in spending for education), Texas, and Pennsylvania My bias toward Southern-accented expert witnesses is generally appeased.
“I must have called ten who as soon as they heard the word, ‘litigation,” practically hung up on me,” Andy says ruefully.
Surely this shouldn’t surprise him. Who wants to say he’s an expert with a cattle prod? I take the paper and slip it into my briefcase, knowing this way I’ll get back to my office with it, I may not be able to find it because of all the other junk I’m carrying around, but at least I will have it there, and that’s getting to be a major accomplishment as I pick up clients. I’ve acquired five more in the past week, thanks to the publicity. Since we hardly put on a defense, I felt I must have looked pretty much like an idiot at the probable cause hearing, but I guess it hasn’t hurt me. I ask, “What’d they say?”
“Nothing much,” Andy sighs.
“I doubt if we’re going to be able to get anyone to testify who currently uses shock. As soon I mention that I am facing a criminal charge, they start sounding real busy.”
I play with the zipper on my briefcase and warn him, “Whoever we get won’t come cheap.”
As usual, the subject of money does not faze him.
“I know.”
Though it is none of my business, I blurt, “Do you have a rich uncle or what?” Though I have no proof, I have the overwhelming suspicion that Olivia is bankrolling his defense and, if this is true, it could mean all kinds of trouble.
Andy stiffens, his back arching slightly.
“You could say that.”
Once I start, I have a hard time stopping.
“Olivia?”
His eyes flash angrily.
“No.”
I believe his body language over his words. I think he is lying, but I do not say so. The blacks I know don’t have the kind of money it takes to defend this case.
“If that were so,” I warn him, “it could hurt you if it came out.”
Without a doubt I have touched a sore spot. His voice is ugly and guttural.
“Do you ask your white clients where they get their money?”
I feel my own anger rising. I don’t like being taken for a fool.
“I didn’t have to at the Public Defender’s Office,” I say, conveniently ignoring the fact that I have been gone quite a while.
“I didn’t think I had hired a racist to defend me,” Andy says, shoving his chair back and scraping the concrete floor with a sound that sets my teeth on edge.
I nearly swallow my tongue to keep from telling him that I was married to a woman more nearly his color than mine, but after so many years I would sound like those racists who assure everyone that some of their best friends are black. I ‘m not the man I was when Rosa was alive, and for some reason I can’t pinpoint, I’d rather choke on my own spit than try to reassure him how wonderful I am. Maybe I am racist, but I suspect there is racism in everybody if you scratch hard enough. I do know that I don’t want to risk losing him as a client.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “but it’s my job to know as much about your case as possible. What would be wrong if she did loan you some money? I think it would be the least she could do,” I add disingenuously.
Andy shakes his head as if I still don’t get it and lectures, “You make the assumption that all blacks, including me, come from poverty. That’s racist.”
Big deal, I think, and lean back in my chair, relaxed by his tone which now has more of a scolding quality than the scorching anger of a moment ago. “If that’s my worst sin,” I defend myself, “I’m way ahead of most people.”
Andy gives me a wry smile, breaking the tension. “I doubt if that’s your worst sin.”
I laugh, glad this is behind us and suddenly think I under stand. Andy doesn’t consider himself particularly black. He probably thinks he is superior not only to blacks but whites as well.
“You’re right,” I acknowledge.
“It was racist. I’m sorry.”
My apology seems to mollify him, and we spend some time talking about the people the state will call who didn’t testify at the probable cause hearing. Andy seems convinced that neither David Spam, the administrator of the Blackwell County Human Development Center, nor Yettie Lindsey, the social worker who was to chart the number of shocks administered to Pam, will be of much help to us. I leave Andy’s office to talk to both persons, hoping that just possibly Spath may have known what Andy was going to try. Granted, as Andy points out, Spath is a state bureaucrat, not a psychologist, but his testimony that Andy wasn’t too far out of line could mean the difference between a manslaughter conviction and a Class A misdemeanor charge of negligent homicide, which carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail.
Andy’s dismissal of Yettie Lindsey seems more reasonable:
according to her statement to the prosecutor, as a witness to the accident, she has nothing to add to what is already known.
Yet surely, if she is willing, she, now that Olivia has apparently begun to backtrack, could testify how desperate the situation was and how shock, even with a cattle prod, was the only alternative.
I walk downstairs to the first floor to be told that David Spath is not in and won’t be back the rest of the day. But Yettie Lindsey is in, and I walk two doors past Spath’s office to find a young, pretty black woman sitting in her office behind her desk with the door open. Yettie (her real name?
Whites are too afraid of ridicule to be so creative with names), I would guess is in her middle twenties and is short and busty with bangs and a kind of pony tail. She is wearing a maize turtleneck cotton dress that accentuates her figure. Her nose is characteristically wide; she has a lovely mouth and enormous eyes that are more green and yellow than brown. Her skin has a copper tone, and the old phrase embedded in my eastern Arkansas upbringing, “a nigger in the woodpile,” pops into my head. Although she is too dark to be what was called a “high yellow,” somewhere along the line, as with most African-Americans, she must have had a white ancestor or two. I tell her who I am and more or less invite myself in to visit. After preliminaries about my role, I say, “I thought that perhaps you might be able to help Andy show a jury there is another side to all of this that, at least, his heart was in the right place when nobody else wanted to get involved
Her elbows on the desk in front of her, Yettie Linsey leans forward and cups her chin in her hands as if she is considering her response. Thus far, her comments have been, if not unfriendly, monosyllabic. Finally, she says, her diction more elegant and refined than I expected, “I really don’t think you want me to testify for you.”
Surprised, I ask more sharply than I intend, “Why not?”
“In the first place, I don’t agree with what Andy did. Pam was a human being whose life wasn’t as horrible to her as it was to her mother and Andy. Being in arm restraints all the time isn’t particularly fun, but there’re lots of people who can’t use their bodies the rest of their life, and nobody says they’re better off dead, which is what I’ve heard Olivia say on more than one occasion.”
I am drawn to Yettie’s left hand as she tugs down at her skirt. It seems as small and delicate as a butter knife. No ring. What is her motive in spilling out this warning to me?
Am I to be some kind of messenger to my client? If she gets on the witness stand with any of this, an Arkansas jury will listen as carefully to her as they would to a scientist predicting the next earthquake. Her voice has an earnest quality that is compelling, and if the men on the jury get tired of that, they can stare at her face and her chest. “Isn’t that a fairly typical comment from a parent who’s frustrated by the system inability to help her child?”
Yettie’s face now has a smug expression, as if finally she is about to bring me up to speed.
“Olivia works the system pretty good. She’s got Andy wrapped around her little finger so tight he has trouble taking a deep breath.”
As if she is prompting me, I reply, “So you think they’re having an affair, huh?”
She raises her eyebrows as if there is no other conclusion that could possibly be drawn.
“You know where he lives?”
Before I can even nod, she says, “You think they’re any black women there?”
I resist the urge to doodle for fear she will think I am taking notes and force myself to hold my hands in my lap, as if we were discussing what the residents are having for lunch.
Knowing the area, I say, “I’d be surprised if they even have a black janitor.”
It is her turn to nod.
“You don’t have to be a genius to figure out your client has a thing for white women.”
Her face is angry now, and I can see rejection written all over it. A lot of things make me nervous about this case, but until now black racism wasn’t one of them.
“That’s not a crime anymore,” I add, feeling I had better get what I can out of her before she clams up.
“Do you have any hard evidence Andy’s involvement with Pam’s mother was more than just professional?”
A fake smile plays on Yettie’s lips, perhaps at my poor choice of an adjective.
“All you have to do is watch them,” she says contemptuously.
Since the same thought had crossed my mind, it is difficult for me to protest her vagueness. I risk asking, “Would it be fair to say that at one point you might have appreciated it if Andy had shown a little interest in you?”
Yettie brings her hands to her face as if the indignity of this question is too much for her to bear. Finally, she answers, her voice trembling a bit, “How many black professional men do you think I know?”
Her honesty is stunning. She probably doesn’t know personally twenty black men close to her age with even a master’s degree.
“Not many, I guess,” I say stupidly, feeling I should say something.
“Look,” she says, her voice suddenly weary, “I know I sound like a black bitch from hell. All I’m telling you is that you don’t want me as a witness, because I’ll tell everything I’masked.”
I sit for a few more moments, but there is nothing else to say.
“Pair enough,” I mutter and stand.
“Thanks for your time.”
She doesn’t reply.