“Pondering the parable I’ve told today, I realized that perhaps the learned physician himself did not realize how much closer in spirit he was to the ignorant soldiers than to the woman he seduced and cast into the street. It is not for me to judge him, though. That burden—that duty—lies with you. When you go back into that jury room, think not of Tom Cage and his years of small kindnesses, but rather of the young black girl who met the brutal soldiers on the road, and who came to the learned physician for help. Consider what she received from his hands, both then and on that final night forty years later, when she died. The facts of what happened in that house have not been challenged. The law is clear. And the judgment of the learned physician’s character . . . I leave to you.

“Thank you.”

As Shad Johnson walks to his seat, the sheer brilliance of his closing argument takes my breath away. What has this trial been but a battle of competing narratives? A Rashomon-like drama in which different characters have recounted different versions of the same event and its attendant history? Faulkner did the same thing in Absalom, Absalom, demonstrating that no two people ever experience the same event, and that history is doomed to be only a version of events. In his radically unorthodox closing argument, Shad seized control of the narrative. By stripping away all the distracting particulars of the relationship between Viola and my father, he lifted the story into the realm of the mythic and made it universal. And in that symbolic realm, the tragic truth that underlay their relationship was laid bare.

My father, however pure his motives might have seemed to him while living out that episode of his life, was part of the dominant, oppressive class. Viola was only a few generations out of slavery. The power differential between them was almost incalculable, a gulf that could not be bridged in the context of the era in which they lived. As Viola knew—probably long before my father—no positive outcome for them had ever been possible.

As I feared he would all along, Quentin underestimated Shadrach Johnson. Shad did not make the same mistake. Tactically outmaneuvered by his legendary foe, Shad adapted accordingly. By creating a parable with biblical resonance, and tailoring it to the case before the bar, he beat “Preacher” Avery at his own game. Were my father’s freedom not at stake, I would be filled with admiration for Shad’s accomplishment. But right now my throat burns with the caustic taste of ashes. The cases have been presented, the last argument has been made, and the reality of the present cannot be denied: Quentin Avery miscalculated badly.