Sycamore Row - John Grisham

awake and eager to witness this unexpected twist in the case. Many of the spectators
shifted to the far-right side of the courtroom for a better look at the screen. The lights
went low, the movements stopped, everyone seemed to take a deep breath, and then the
tape began to roll. After Jared Wolkowicz and Lucien gave their introductions, Ancil
appeared.
He said, “This is my story. But I really don’t know where to start. I’m living here in Juneau
but it’s not really my home. I have no home. The world is my home and I’ve seen most of it.
I’ve been in some trouble over the years but I’ve also had a lot of fun. Lots of good times. I
joined the Navy when I was seventeen, lied about my age, anything to get away from home,
and for fifteen years I was stationed all over the place. I fought in the Pacific on the USS Iowa.
After the Navy I lived in Japan, Sri Lanka, Trinidad, so many places I can’t recall them all right
now. I worked for shipping companies and lived on the oceans. When I wanted a break I
settled down somewhere, always in a different place.”
Off camera, Lucien said, “Tell us about Seth.”
“Seth was five years older, and it was just the two of us. He was my big brother and he
always took care of me, as best he could. We had a tough life because of our father, Cleon
Hubbard, a man we hated from the day we were born. He beat us, beat our mother, seemed
like he was always fighting with someone. We lived way out in the country, near Palmyra, on
the old family farm, in an old country house that my grandfather built. His name was Jonas
Hubbard, and his father was Robert Hall Hubbard. Most of our other relatives had moved to
Arkansas, so we didn’t have a lot of cousins and kinfolks around. Seth and I worked like dogs
around the farm, milking cows, chopping cotton, working in the garden, picking cotton. We
were expected to work like grown men. It was a tough life, what with the Depression and all,
but like they always said, the Depression didn’t bother us in the South because we’d already
been in one since the war.”
“How much land?” Lucien asked.
“We had eighty acres; it had been in the family for a long time. Most of it was in timber but
there was some farmland my grandfather had cleared. Cotton and beans.”
“And the Rinds family had the adjacent property?”
“That’s right. Sylvester Rinds. And there were some other Rindses there too. In fact, Seth
and I played with a bunch of the Rinds kids from time to time, but always when Cleon wasn’t
looking. Cleon hated Sylvester, hated all the Rindses. It was a feud that had been boiling for a
long time. You see, Sylvester owned eighty acres too, right next to our land, to the west of it,
and the Hubbards always felt as though that land belonged to them. According to Cleon, a
man named Jeremiah Rinds took title to the property in 1870 during Reconstruction. Jeremiah
had been a slave, then a freed slave, and somehow purchased the land. I was just a kid and
never really understood what happened back then, but the Hubbards always felt like it was
their rightful land. I think they even went to court over it, but at any rate, it remained in the
Rinds family. This infuriated Cleon because he had only eighty acres, but yet these black folks
had the same. I remember hearing many times that the Rindses were the only blacks in the