Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins (read any book .TXT) 📕

at the front gate, Hallow examined the spearheads with their fresh paint job and ran her fingers along their smooth surfaces. She rubbed once or twice and could smell the chemicals. She dug her sharpest fingernail into a spearhead, and a side of the paint cracked off and fell onto the pavement. There was a deep red mark that rusted the wrought iron. She chipped away at another spearhead to find another red mark, more jagged and less symmetrical. Every last spearhead she chipped and there were more red marks that stained the fleur-de-lis design—some were long vertical lines dragging down, others looked like fingers, as though someone had grabbed the gate and held on for dear life. Whatever it was elicited chills throughout Hallow’s body as frightening possibilities of what kind of story lay underneath the paint sprang up in her mind.

She looked up at the brownstone and cocked her head to the side. From a certain angle, it looked as if it were sinking, but when Hallow blinked again, the structure stood upright. Then, a few moments later, at the left corner of the first floor, the curtains rippled and a person emerged. There was Iris standing and watching her. Then she vanished.

13

Amara had done everything she was supposed to do to get ahead. She worked tirelessly day and night at the Lillian Goldman Law Library while she was studying at Yale Law. She completed the most prestigious internships and clerkships, mingled and hobnobbed with Connecticut blue bloods, and sublimated her vengeance toward the Melancon family to extreme discipline that put her on the fast track to becoming one of the biggest rising stars in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. She blew through all the low-level crimes, such as disorderly conduct and marijuana possession, as an assistant: a fine here, a month spent in Rikers there, 720 hours of community service, so on and so forth. The goal was not to release but to confine those who dared to test the law. Finally, as she gained seniority, she moved over to the Major Crimes Unit, where she worked on Class A and B felonies: insurance and health care fraud, money laundering, criminal sale of a controlled substance, predatory sexual assault, murder. She prosecuted more people in her first year in the Major Crimes Unit than any other of her cohorts. She reveled in this accomplishment. But it was the Asali Givens case that she thought would make her a shoo-in for the next Manhattan district attorney. The current DA, Virgil Clarence Jr., was planning on shifting his career to academia, and speculation as to who would replace him was already buzzing.

Virgil was the one who gave her an overview of the case before dropping a large stack of papers on the desk in her corner office in a Chinatown building. Later that evening, as Amara pored over the documents detailing where Asali lived and went to school, her parents, her dead child, and even the interior of the Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, her chest burned with the knowledge of what she was going to do. The Raise the Age law, which stipulated that no child under the age of eighteen would be prosecuted as an adult, was put into effect a few weeks after the alleged murder of Asali’s newborn happened. Since the law had no retroactive clause, Amara could either charge Asali as an adult and garner fanfare from law enforcement, or charge her as a child and maintain the support of Black women everywhere—especially in Harlem.

When the New York Times story came out, the police union gifted Amara with a bouquet of roses thanking her for upholding the law. But no sooner than they did, days later, she received a barrage of letters and emails from Black women who either pleaded for her to reverse the decision or mocked her as an “Uncle Tom” and a “bed wench.” This was the first time that she received nationwide attention for a case, and she wasn’t sure if she could handle the pressure. She had been in the local news plenty of times, but this new level of exposure was overwhelming.

Though Asali’s story was devastating, she was just one girl, Amara thought. But there, in a bathroom, where Amara huddled over the toilet to parse her logic, she felt ashamed. Asali wasn’t just one girl, just like none of the people Amara had sent to jail were just one person wandering aimlessly through the world. Each had a family. Each was loved. She stuck her head in the toilet bowl and dry heaved, but nothing from her stomach would come up. And then she realized that she hadn’t eaten all day. She patted the sides of her sweating face with crumpled pieces of toilet paper and breathed slowly until her nausea subsided.

When Amara opened the bathroom stall, one of her colleagues, Amanda, a brunette who always wore her hair in a sideswept bun, beamed at her and said, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the famous Amara Danville. Congratulations, champ.”

“Congratulations?” Amara asked while washing her hands.

“Yeah.” Amanda rubbed her upper back. “You did good. We all knew you could do it.”

“Thanks,” Amara said dryly.

Amanda leaned in closer and added, “It’s okay to own it, you know. You lowball yourself when you’re that self-deprecating, and you better get used to the big leagues.”

As soon as Amara exited the bathroom and walked down the hallway, she was ambushed with the clapping and congratulatory remarks of other coworkers until all their voices clashed together and the cacophony worsened her mood. Not a single person even called Asali by name. She was “that girl” or “the case,” whereas Amara was the “exemplar” and “titan” of the District Attorney’s Office. By the time she made it back to her office, she looked at the stacks of paper and notes that took up real estate on her desk and chairs with disgust. If only, Amara thought, her colleagues knew the truth