“For forty years,” Quentin continues, his hand still on Dad’s shoulder, “this man treated black folks as he would his own family. In an era when white children called black men of seventy by their first names only, Tom Cage called his black patients mister and missus. Back then, any white male might say to a black stranger walking down the road, ‘Hey, Mose, get over here and fix my flat tire.’ And old Mose went.” Quentin lets his hand fall from my father’s shoulder, then shakes his head like he remembers fixing the tires of more than one white man in his youth. “But in Dr. Cage’s office, it was, ‘How are you feeling today, Mister Jackson? Let me palpate that liver for you, Mrs. Ransom.’ I’m talking about respect, folks—plain good manners. And if a man couldn’t pay his bill from Dr. Cage, he knew he could drop by the Cage house with a mess of collards or a bucket of catfish, and that would stand as good as cash money.”

This is the unadorned truth. I remember countless visits like that, and the shy expressions on the faces of the men who brought the buckets and boxes.

“And if you couldn’t manage that,” Quentin says, “you knew no debt collector would be coming to your door to embarrass you in front of your wife and children. Because in those cases, more often than not, Dr. Cage just let it go. Why? Because he knew how it was for black folk in Mississippi. Tom Cage knew how it was for poor folks, because he’d grown up poor himself. He knew what it was to do without. And he didn’t want to be the cause of anybody else’s children suffering.”

Rusty Duncan nudges my knee and nods toward the prosecution table.

To my amazement, Shad Johnson is actually pretending to play a violin, which tells me that he’s grossly misjudged his jury. But Quentin has not. In less than five minutes, the old fox has turned aside the juggernaut of momentum that Shad painstakingly built up over the past two days and convinced at least half the jury that they’d be lucky to have an uncle or a father as honest and fair and understanding as Quentin Avery. A closer look at Shad tells me that he’s making his satirical gesture to conceal the rage threatening to boil out of him at Quentin’s folksy performance. For a performance is what it is. No one knows better than Shadrach Johnson that the man in the wheelchair talking like a cross between Will Rogers and Martin Luther King Jr. has argued landmark cases before the Supreme Court, and on those occasions Quentin did not speak like a man who’d just walked out of a Delta cotton field. But galling though it might be, Shad is bound by custom to silence.