Sycamore Row - John Grisham

him personally?” Two hands were timidly lifted. A man stood and said he had grown up
in the Palmyra area of the county and had known Seth when they were quite a bit
younger.
“How old are you, sir?” Judge Atlee asked.
“Sixty-nine.”
“You know you can claim an exemption from service if you’re above the age of sixtyfive,
right?”
“Yes sir, but I don’t have to, do I?”
“Oh no. If you want to serve, that’s admirable. Thank you.”
A woman stood and said she had once worked at a lumber yard owned by Seth
Hubbard, but it would not be a problem. Judge Atlee gave the names of Seth’s two wives
and asked if anyone knew them. A woman said her older sister had been friends with
the first wife, but that had been a long time ago. Herschel Hubbard and Ramona
Hubbard Dafoe were asked to stand. They smiled awkwardly at the judge and the jurors,
then sat down. Methodically, Judge Atlee asked the panel if anyone knew them. A few
hands went up, all belonging to old classmates from Clanton High. Judge Atlee asked
each one a series of questions. All claimed to know little about the case and to be
unaffected by what little knowledge they possessed.
Tedium set in as Judge Atlee went through page after page of questions. By noon,
twelve of the fifty had been dismissed, all of them white. Of the thirty-eight remaining,
eleven were black, not a single one of whom had lifted a hand.
During the lunch recess, the lawyers met in tense groups and debated who was
acceptable and who had to be cut. They ignored their cold sandwiches while they argued
over body language and facial expressions. In Jake’s office, the mood was lighter
because the panel was darker. In the main conference room over at the Sullivan firm,
the mood was heavier because the blacks were sandbagging. Of the eleven remaining,
not one admitted to knowing Lettie Lang. Impossible in such a small county! There was
obviously a conspiracy of some nature at work. Their expert consultant, Myron Pankey,
had watched several of them closely during the questioning and had no doubt that they
were trying their best to get on the jury. But Myron was from Cleveland and knew little
about southern blacks.
Wade Lanier, though, was unimpressed. He’d tried more cases in Mississippi than the
rest of the lawyers combined, and he was not concerned about the remaining thirtyeight
members of the pool. In almost every trial, he hired consultants to dig into the
backgrounds of the jurors, but once he saw them in the flesh he knew he could read
them. And though he did not say so, he liked what he had seen that morning.
Lanier still had two great secrets up his sleeve—the handwritten will of Irene
Pickering, and the testimony of Julina Kidd. To his knowledge, Jake had no idea what
was coming. If Lanier managed to successfully detonate these two bombs in open court,
he might just walk away with a unanimous verdict. After considerable negotiating, Fritz
Pickering had agreed to testify for $7,500. Julina Kidd had jumped at the offer of only
$5,000. Neither Fritz nor Julina had spoken to anyone on the other side, so Lanier was
confident his ambushes would work.