Lincoln jabs his forefinger toward the audience. “I’ve talked to people in this town! Everybody from Natchez talks about the light in my mama’s eyes. They say she could light up a whole room. But by the time I knew her, that light was all but gone. She was just a husk of a woman sitting in front of the TV after work, drinking cheap wine and crying over stupid movies. I saw that light flicker up a few times, when I’d bring home a good report card or something. But that was all. Mama hardly left that apartment after I was ten years old, except to go to work or the liquor store. Always sent me out to get her cigarettes. I’ve seen pictures of her taken down here . . . she looked like a movie star. But by the time she was thirty-five, she looked fifty years old. Ten years after that, she looked like a bag lady. You think that’s easy for me to say?” Lincoln closes his big hand into a fist and hammers it against his heart. “It’s not. But I say it to let you know what Tom Cage did to her. He filled her full of hope for something she could never have, and then he snatched it away! He made her lie to protect his reputation, and his white family. He made her lie to keep me invisible. He stole the life out of her, the same way Jelks stole people’s last dollar!”

Hearing a shuffle to my right, I turn. Mom is actually holding her hands over Annie’s ears. For a moment I consider getting up and leading Annie out. But she’s already heard this much, and I’m not about to miss the remainder of Lincoln’s soliloquy. As he continues, though, my mind sticks on the things he said last, and I realize that I’m no longer picturing Viola Turner as the nurse I knew so long ago, but as Serenity Butler. What would it take to completely break down a woman with Serenity’s strength, beauty, and intelligence? By all accounts, Viola had possessed each of those gifts.

“Take the word of a man raised by a con man and educated to be a lawyer,” Lincoln goes on. “And what is a lawyer but a con man with a degree?”

Several jury members nod at this.

“Quentin Avery has spent all this time getting you focused on Mama’s will so that you won’t focus on the one thing that really matters—the crime that brought us here—my mama’s murder. And not one thing he’s said has disproved a single fact about what happened on the night Mama died.”