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superintendent and return to the perils of representing an admitted Negro rapist.
    Foster wasn’t sure if it was true that his family had done all that much for the colored, but he knew what she really meant and why she said it. He paused, watching three young boys—two white, one black—playing football. Then he said, “Bertha, I’m going to take it on. It’s about what the law requires of a lawyer, not about Daddy. For all I know, Daddy might not even want me to take it.”
    â€œYou’ll be very unpopular taking this case.”
    Foster almost said what he thought: a lawyer who had any self-respect would put popularity aside. But he suppressed that thought, convinced it would come out sounding pompous and self–righteous. Instead he said, “Maybe I’ll be unpopular, but there’s not much risk of that. Charles White signed a full confession, so there’s no need to have a public trial over whether he did it. But the state can’t use the confession and still ask for the electric chair, so the only question is whether he’s sentenced to life imprisonment or whether I can get him less time and a chance for parole. I’ll negotiate for that in private, in Judge Parks’s chambers. There won’t be any need for a public trial.”
    The boy playing quarterback overthrew his receiver, the ball bouncing into the dirt road. Foster picked up the ball and, as his sister Frances had taught him, threw a perfect spiral. The three boys,obviously surprised that the slight, bespectacled man could throw a spiral at all, much less accurately, acknowledged the feat with respectful “awwhh”s before resuming their game.
    â€œSo he really is guilty?” Bertha said. “He signed a confession.”
    Foster thought about how to reply to that. Charles White was a big man, but he had been arrested in a small Southern town, then rushed in a car full of white lawmen with guns to Montgomery before he could be lynched. Charles hadn’t admitted to being scared, but even with all his arrogance and size and being from the North, he had to have been one scared Negro when they offered to keep him safe in Kilby prison instead of taking him back to Troy that night and a likely lynching, then proposed giving him a life sentence instead of the electric chair. But only if he confessed—meaning the confession might be false, or partly false? When he’d asked Charles what had actually happened, all he’d said was, “It wasn’t like she said”—not exactly a denial. Maybe he took some kind of advantage of her and now was trying to blame her? It was not, after all, unusual for a criminal to recant, or at least try to mitigate, a confession.
    â€œLike most of the rest of us, my clients usually aren’t purely innocent or purely guilty, Bertha. Something improper may have gone on between them. I don’t know exactly what. The fact is, even if it wasn’t rape, it’s not something a Negro needs to be talking about to a white jury. And he won’t have to. It won’t be tried. I’ll negotiate the best plea deal I can for him and be done with it.”
    But for the first time, he was beginning to have some doubts. Charles White had sounded pretty strong when he told him there could be no plea deal; he wanted to go to trial. Foster was thinking that maybe Charles really was innocent, and had been forced by the threat of the lynch rope that night to admit to a crime he did not commit.

   Chapter 9
    S OUTHERNERS were like an ethnic group back when I was growing up, with our own version of history, our particular grievances, our preferred preparations of foods, our unique accents. Like other American ethnic groups, we had our rituals, especially in small towns and rural areas. At least as late as the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was, in parts of the South, an annual rite called Confederate Grave Decoration Day.
    I recall