“We hadda use the sticks. I hit him over the head once or twice, but not hard. I don’t remember. Then Tommy grabbed his arms and we hustled him over to the car before these other colored people with him tried to grab us.”

“Did he resist arrest?”

“Yeah. He kicked and fought us and called us lewd and lascivious names. We hadda handcuff him in the car. Then we took him down to the station and booked him for assault and battery.”

“Your witness,” said the black detective without turning around to face the other lawyer. He sat down at his own table and wiped his forehead and hands with a crumpled white handkerchief. He still looked very nervous but not as tough.

“May it please the Court,” the defendant’s black lawyer said slowly, standing and facing the pacing Judge. “I move . . .” And then he stopped because he saw that the Judge’s small eyes were looking over his head, toward the back of the courtroom. The lawyer turned around and looked, and saw that everyone else in the room had also turned their heads to the back of the room. Standing against the back walls and along the left side of the room were twenty-five or so stern-faced, cold-eyed black men, all in African dashikis, all wearing brightly colored hats, and all staring at the Judge and the black detective. Philomena Brown and Jimmy Mulligan, sitting on the first bench, turned to look too, and the whore smiled but the lawyer said, “Oh hell,” aloud. The men, all big, all bearded and tight-lipped, now locked hands and formed a solid wall of flesh around almost three-quarters of the courtroom. The Judge looked at the defendant and saw that he was smiling. Then he looked at the defendant’s lawyer, who still stood before the Judge’s bench, his head down, his shoulders pulled up toward his head. The Judge began to pace again. The courtroom was very quiet. The old men filling the second rows on both sides of the room leaned forward and exchanged glances with each other up and down the row. “Oh hell,” Jimmy Mulligan said again.

Then the Judge stopped walking. “Get on with it,” he told the defendant’s lawyer. “There’s justice to be done here.”

The lawyer, whose face was now very greasy and wet, looked up at the officer, still standing in the witness box, but with one hand now at his right side, next to his gun.

“Officer Bergin,” said the black lawyer. “I’m not clear about something. Did the defendant strike you before you asked him for the cane or after you attempted to take it from him?”

“Before. It was before. Yes sir.”

“You did ask him for the cane, then?”

“Yes sir. I asked him to turn it over.”

“And what did he do?”

“He hit me.”

“But if he hit you before you asked for the cane, then it must be true that you asked him for the cane after he had hit you. Is that right?”