The district attorney of Adams County waits at the prosecution table like an actor in his prime waiting backstage at a Broadway theater. In five minutes, Shad will deliver his opening statement in the most important trial of his life—up to now, anyway. Unusually, he sits alone at the table. His assistant DA, a young male lawyer in his midthirties, sits in one of the chairs behind his table, backed against the bar.

Twenty feet to Shad’s left, Quentin Avery sits behind the defense table in his motorized wheelchair, a crocheted comforter tastefully covering his legless lap, a gray Armani jacket on his shoulders. To Quentin’s right—directly in the sight line of the jury—sits my father, as close to ramrod straight as he can manage with his arthritis and his osteoporotic spine. After three months in jail, Dad has lost twenty pounds. He’d already lost a good bit after the October heart attack; now his suit hangs off him the way suits do on fading men who don’t want to waste their children’s money on new clothes.

Doris Avery sits in one of two chairs placed several feet behind the defense table, her back against the bar. Most spectators probably assume she is a secretary rather than an attorney in her own right. And though I’m nominally part of the defense team, I’m sitting in the first row of the gallery behind the bar, between my mother and Rusty Duncan. My sister, Jenny, is sitting at Mom’s other shoulder. A helpful circuit clerk saved us seats immediately behind the defense table, which provides good optics in terms of supporting Dad but also limits our view of him to the back of his head.

Three months of sensational pretrial publicity have ensured that the opening of the trial proper is a standing-room-only event. With Caitlin’s sister running the Natchez Examiner, local newspaper coverage has been evenhanded, but the Jackson and Baton Rouge papers have had a field day with the lurid aspects of the case, and even the national media have run stories on the “landmark” trial. TV cameras are generally forbidden in Mississippi courtrooms, but I’ve heard that Judge Elder has been flooded with requests to make an exception to that rule. All it takes is a whiff of 1960s-flavored racism to bring the network hounds running. Thankfully, Joe Elder has so far denied all such requests, and instead allowed a half dozen pool reporters to make digital audio recordings of each day’s proceedings for accuracy, so long as they do not broadcast them. I’ve worried constantly that the judge would cave under pressure to allow the cameras in, but I suspect that Judge Elder knows Shad Johnson well enough to know he would play to the cameras every chance he got, and as for Quentin Avery: any lawyer nicknamed “Preacher” would be bound to find a way to use TV cameras to his advantage.