My mother is squeezing my hand so hard that my fingernails are turning blue, but I don’t protest. Wearing a dove-gray dress and gloves—yes, gloves—she looks like a first lady facing a congressional hearing in which her husband could face evidence for impeachment. But Mom came from far humbler origins than Hillary Clinton. Born on a subsistence farm in Louisiana, she picked cotton from the time she was old enough to drag a sack until she left for college, the first person in her family to attend one. Educated in a two-room grade school, she read seventy-five novels the summer after her senior year and ultimately graduated first in her college class. After teaching in the slums of New Orleans to put my father through medical school, she served several years in Germany as a military wife, among women who spent more on their spring wardrobes than she’d spent on clothes since her wedding day. Yet despite her marital “success,” Mom never basked in the glow of being a doctor’s wife, which confers considerable status in a town like Natchez. Nor did she have patience with the ex-sorority girls who ran the garden clubs, though she joined one for a while and worked tirelessly at whatever projects she was assigned, so that her children would become part of the social fabric of the town.

How must it feel for her to sit here and watch a black judge, two black lawyers, and a predominantly black jury decide the fate of her husband, whose alleged crime is killing a black woman to whom he once turned for romantic comfort? Twelve citizens of Adams County, Mississippi, seven black people and five white. And no matter how noble their intentions might be, no matter how objective they’ve told themselves they can be, such detachment is not possible. The people on this jury represent a divided city, a fractured state, a wounded nation. Evidence will be presented to them, but they will not see that evidence the same way. Arguments will be made to them collectively, but they will not hear the same words. Those jurors will be like men and women in the middle of a divorce. The facts at issue may be as clear as glass to neutral observers, but the principals will see only reflections of their own fears, hear only echoes of their own prejudice, act only out of anger and wounded pride.

I’m surprised Mom can sit here without a toxic level of Xanax or Zoloft in her system. Though she may be seventy, Peggy Cage is still the farm girl whom her mother called to kill the copperheads and rattlesnakes that sometimes slithered up onto the porch while the men were away in the fields.