Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Forty-Nine

If they could have done so without risk of hearing her gavel bang and receiving a severe scolding from Judge Gwendolyn Fogg, the occupants of Branch Thirty-Two might have waved their hands and shouted like fervent churchgoers.

As things stood, they had listened raptly from the moment K'waisi Harambe began to speak.

Much to the gallery's irritation, there had been two initial objections by the lawyers representing Phillips' parents, but Fogg overruled them, agreeing that Harambe should be able to share as much of his past as necessary to give context to his present.

As only a classic gentleman would, Harambe turned slowly to Fogg, broke a slight smile, nodded, thanked her for her courtesy, and replied – though she hadn't solicited a reply – "I think, your honor, I'll start at the beginning."

And he did.

"I was born in nineteen forty-six in Phoenix, Arizona," he said, noticing the puzzled looks of those in front rows. "I know that the Southwest at that time may have seemed an unlikely place for African Americans to settle. Of course, back then we were called Negroes. But I digress. My family was what folks today call interracial. My father was a white German man, may he rest in peace. My mother was a Negro, and bless her soul, too. You may not be able to tell by my close-cropped hair, but I am biracial."

Knowing glances and a low murmur filled the courtroom.

"Ours was sometimes a tense household, as my father was plagued by nightmares. His entire life, to me and my younger brother, he dismissed those dreams as nothing. But we knew. I'd say by the time I was seven and my brother five, we had overheard enough snippets of conversation and the occasional loud argument between my parents to know that he suffered those dreams because he felt guilty. He felt guilty because he was alive and he had seen so many people die back home in Germany.

"You see, before the Great War, World War II, my father and his family operated a small clock shop outside of Wiesbaden. The way he described it, their life was perfect. They wanted for nothing and got along with everyone. But then came Hitler and the rise of Nazism. And folks just thought it was lots of talk and bluster. But before they knew it, it had slowly crept up on them and covered them like a blanket. By the time they recognized it for what it was, it was too late to wave it off and call it crazy. It was already at a point where they had to make choices and question everything they thought they knew about morality."

The whispers stopped. Harambe continued.

"My father's family made the mistake like a lot of Germans in that era of thinking they were above it all. But when it came down to it, when they thought it might mean the loss of their own lives and their way of life, they caved. Many justified it by arguing that if they hadn't aided the Nazi regime, their own families would have been murdered. My father and his brothers enlisted in the Army. He once told us that he enlisted and expressed enthusiasm for firearms and fighting because, though he really didn't like either, he thought that combat would be the only way to avoid being conscripted and assigned to a guard post at a death camp. And if he died on the battlefield it would be an honorable death versus being killed during a rescue effort or taken alive at a camp.

"Lucky for my father, he was right about volunteering to fight. Also lucky for him, he was a lousy fighter and strategist and wasn't in danger long. In nineteen forty-three, he was wounded in a skirmish in France and transported with other injured prisoners of war to a hospital in the British countryside. That was where he met my mother."

Harambe's mother, born Helen Whitlock in Atlanta, Georgia, in nineteen twenty, had moved to New York, after graduating from Spelman College with a nursing degree. Still unmarried at the ripe old age of twenty-two, she enlisted in the United States Army and, given her status as a college graduate, was immediately granted a commission as a first lieutenant, and promptly put on ice.

By the middle of nineteen forty-three, the War Department was reporting to Congress an astounding casualty rate – more than three hundred seventy-five thousand killed and more than a half-million wounded. It didn't help matters that the U.S. Armed Forces were perpetually short on nurses and other medical staff.

But the shortage was their own fault. They allowed the depth and pervasiveness of the racism of the day to impact military personnel decisions. Perhaps they should have seen it coming since Jim Crow had ensured that slavery by another name was still active in the southern United States.

In any case, white servicemen –the overwhelming majority of service members– threatened mutiny if they were treated by black nurses. It seemed many would rather die than let a black woman bathe their broken bodies, spoon-feed them, and dress their festering wounds.

Finally, in late nineteen forty-three, the Army figured out how to get their money's worth out of all the black nurses they had commissioned and then pushed to the sidelines: they could be assigned to treat German POWs hospitalized in Warrington, England, and to care for non-white allies in Algeria. What might those men complain about, anyway? And who would listen?

"My mother, that's who would listen," Harambe said, to empathetic laughter. "I think their early interactions were awkward due to their positions and my father's curiosity. He was a prisoner from a foreign land. She was a military officer and an authority figure from a foreign land – giving orders in this hospital in the UK at a time where most Brits didn't outwardly display racist tendencies. He didn't loathe her skin color either. He was curious about it. They talked. They became friends. She believed him when he said he carried no Nazi sympathies but had enlisted to fight because he thought it would keep his family stable and alive. Eventually, the war ended. It changed him. He had saved his family but didn't feel right going back to them. And like a lot of Germans deemed not to be a threat or determined to not have been involved directly in the murder of Jewish people and other minorities, he was allowed to immigrate to the United States. It's a good thing too because my mother was prepared to either remain in the UK or move to Germany to be with him."

The dapper dandy had enthralled the courtroom for more than forty-five minutes, describing his childhood outside of Phoenix, Arizona, how he and his younger brother had befriended Native American kids since the white children in their neighborhood weren't permitted to talk to or play with these strange, biracial children, and how he had left Arizona as soon as he thought he could safely escape without risk of being returned to his parents by authorities...or in a pine box.

"Those were strange days," Harambe explained. "For so many reasons you already know if you've ever read a relevant history book, but also because there was no legal precedent for a young person who wasn't quite an adult but no longer felt the need for parental supervision. We didn't divorce our parents. The notion of teenager going to a state court and asking a judge to approve emancipation was unheard of. We would have been laughed out of court if we'd even been able to get a hearing. So, if you were one of those independent-minded teenagers, you simply planned your escape, stored up your reserves of nerve, and then went through with it."

Harambe chuckled softly, as he recalled his plan. It wasn't complicated. While his father was knocking back whiskey stingers at his favorite saloon and his mother was at work in the hospice ward of a Phoenix-area hospital, he had greased the normally squeaky door that led from the tiny kitchen to the not-much-larger backyard.

On the fateful night, he waited till he was certain his parents were asleep, slipped a three-page note under his younger brother's pillow, and tiptoed in stocking feet to the door.

Safely in the yard, he carried his shoes to a loose plank in the privacy fence separating theirs and the neighbor's lawns, retrieved a short stick with a sandwich-stuffed bandana tied to the end and walked two blocks before sitting at a curb and lacing up.

"From there, I didn't look back," Harambe said. "I knew the freight schedules, so I walked to the train station, waited on the side of the little shack of a ticket house, so as to make myself inconspicuous, and when the two A.M. cargo locomotive stopped to load up on coal fuel, I hopped aboard."

The train arrived in Rancho Palos Verdes twenty-five hours later.

Phillips' lead attorney sensed more momentum than he'd felt in a courtroom in years. He gently interjected, hoping to move things along.