Between Black and White by Robert Bailey

when Bo was an all-state football player at Giles County High. I remember when Bear Bryant came to Pulaski to watch him play. You woulda thought the president was in town. Police escort to the stadium with sirens blaring. State troopers everywhere. It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen.”
    Tom smiled, thinking of a similar scene from his own past. “The Man knew how to make an entrance.”
    “The Man,” Helen mocked. “I think I’ve heard Bo call him that too. The Man. Is that an inside thing?”
    Tom shrugged. “I guess. If you played for Coach Bryant or spent any time around him, he was . . . the Man. It’s a hard thing to describe.”
    “Whatever,” Helen said, waving a hand in the air. She returned to her seat in the back row of the jury and crossed her legs. Again, Tom was taken back by the familiarity with which she treated the courtroom. “Anyway, everyone in Pulaski followed Bo’s college career. It was hard not to. The local newspaper always mentioned how many tackles he had made in a game, stuff like that. The articles stopped after he blew his knee out.” She paused, squinting up at him. “The rest I learned from doing a little digging. Law School at Alabama, where he was on your national championship trial team. Clerked a summer at Jones & Butler, the law factory in Birmingham. Then back here after law school. Hung a shingle on First Street a block north of First National Bank, and he’s been in that same office for the past twenty-five years.” She paused, chuckling with what sounded to Tom like admiration. “Starting out as a black lawyer in this town in the mid-’80s was not much different than being a female prosecutor. Not many of us around. In Bo’s case, none. He cut his teeth on criminal defense and workers’ comp cases and then started attracting the lucrative personal injury plaintiff cases by the mid-’90s.”
    “I always thought it was strange that he came back here,” Tom said, purposely testing Helen’s knowledge, as he had learned the answer to that riddle himself last year.
    “Not to me,” Helen said. “Or to anyone else in Pulaski.” She cocked her head at Tom. “And I think you might be playing possum with me, Tom. I think you know the reason too.”
    Tom kept a poker face, giving away nothing. Helen Lewis was a different animal. Unlike almost every other lawyer he’d been around for the past several decades, male and female alike, Helen paid Tom no deference for being a longtime law professor. She didn’t address him as Professor, as so many of his colleagues did, and she didn’t seem awed in the least by his association with Coach Bryant.
    “Why don’t you remind me?” Tom asked.
    Keeping her head cocked to the side, Helen glared up at Tom. “Because ever since he was five years old, Bocephus Haynes has claimed that Andy Walton and twenty members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered his father. Bo came back to Pulaski for revenge.” She paused, crossing her arms across her chest. “And early last Friday morning he got it.”
    “Sounds like an opening statement,” Tom said, forcing a smile. Tom knew he had just heard the theme of the state’s case against Bocephus Haynes.
    This time Helen returned the smile. “I thought you were a law professor, Tom.”
    “I was. For forty years. But now I’m practicing again.”
    “And you and your partner hit Willistone Trucking Company last year for ninety million dollars in Henshaw County, Alabama.”
    Tom was impressed. He figured most lawyers in Alabama had heard of the verdict, but Helen was a Tennessee prosecutor. “How did you hear about that?”
    “Because it was in the goddamn USA Today . Legendary law professor hits big verdict in Alabama. Yada, yada, yada. Aren’t they making a movie about it?”
    Tom shrugged, his face turning red. “I hadn’t heard anything about that.”
    “Well, they should.” She chuckled. “The best part of that verdict is that you beat that arrogant, overrated prick Jameson