A moment of time in an ethnic group.
Southern courtroom dramas are very rich and I would expect many more of them than there are. They combine courtly gentlemen who have known one another for years engaged in verbal combat in a courtroom to find out the truth and are accompanied by salacious claims, exotic characters, unruly mobs and a degree of fear and violence, all to tell far more about the those characters and situations than the people involved mean to leave on. Examples are “To Kill A Mockingbird”, which pulls its punches about how dastardly was a lynch mob in that it would not be deterred, as the story tells it, by the presence of a child, as is also the case in “My Cousin Vinnie” where everyone is nice, but also includes the rancid characters in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, which describes sex hustlers and a murder and trials in Georgia, and the real life story of the Scottsboro Boys when a New York Jewish lawyer goes South to get justice from Black hobos accused of having raped a white prostitute and has to contend with both Communists and Southertn bigots. Not to mention “In Cold Blood” and “Anatomy of a Murder” who are both placed in the Midwest.
A very recent addition to this library is the appearance of Fani Willis, a district attorney in Georgia who is accusing Trump of having tried to fix the 2020 election and who has to handle an accusation that her improprieties should bar her from pursuing her case. Willis dramatically entered the courtroom so as to testify and to circumvent her own attorney’s claim she need not testify presumably because Willis understood that the real court was the one of public opinion and that she had to vindicate herself fully when she tangled with Trump in a nation wide and unprecedented courtroom conflict despite the fact as she often claimed that she was a private person and that she might and did reveal more about herself than she thought appropriate for a district attorney might need to do. What she and, the next day by her father, provided rich portrayals of the persons involved as well as the high stakes of the eventual case.
The two charges made against Willis was that she had hidden her affair with Nathan Wade that began before he was hired on the Trump case so as to get kickback from him and so extend the Trump matter for her own personal gain and so should be removed from the case though that seems to me a stretch in that padding expenses does not go to the substance of the case or mistakes in the actual law case, and second whether Willis had reimbursed expenses to Wade on their joint trips, and that she hand reimbursed him in cash, and so if he had lied on either count it would have shot her credibility and made her resign as district attorney.
Her first defense was to say she was a private rather than secretive person, meaning she had nothing to hide about the affair, just an unwillingness to advertise it to and what work colleagues even though her father knew about it, as did the d.j. who was her previous boyfriend and who cluttered up the house she shared with her father’s house with sound equipment, and Mr. Wade’s mother, who went with them on a cruise. People were not able to show the two were having an affair before the time they said it began except for hugs and kisses, though the judge of this hearing refused to penetrate client lawyer secrecy to ask when Mr. Wade’s divorce lawyer knew about when it began. So the claim by Willis and Wade as to when the affair begin was not shaken, though I think it disturbing for the court to go into the couple’s privacy, and that is the price to be paid for opposing Trump
Willis gave a lengthy explanation of why giving Wade cash was acceptable for her and revealed a good deal about being black and what a relationship for her was like. She said her father, “an old black man”, insisted on everyone keeping a lot of cash on hand. Her father boughnther a lock box when she was young and havehad cash on hand ever since, though not as much as he would have advised, and added it to her coffers on occasion, and used that money to reimburse Wade. She also thought, as she put it, that “a man is not a plan, but a companion” and so should be financially independent of any man, especially of Wade, who said of women that they were good to make a sandwich. Willis has stuck by Wade now as a friend but thought the two of them would differ when their affair ended because a man would say when the sexual relationship ended but a woman would consider the matter as terminated when she later on had with him “a hard talk” about their relationship.
She made other observations that showed both courtesy and racial awareness and naivete about some matters. She did not want to dwell on them not having an affair with him that was during the period in question because he was recovering from cancer and, as she put it, ”I do not want to emasculate a black man”, as if being a cancer victim and undergoing chemotherapy would shame him. She was impressed that Wade had the number of a travel agent to call and to place their trips, but anyone can call a travel agent. She did not know which continent she was in when she traveled with him to Belize, something any Ivy League law graduate would presumably know, however able she may be at organizing and pursuing the Georgia case against Trump. A feisty and articulate and outspoken woman, what Frank Sinatra, as a great compliment, would call “a strong broad”. Don’t mess with her.
That “old black man”, her father, John Clifford Floyd III, showed up the next day to testify. He had no knowledge of Wade because her father had stayed in the house he and his daughter had previously shared because she had to leave because of death threats against her but where he remained because of fear of catching covid. The father was a distinguished man. He had been a civil rights lawyer in the Seventies and then an international jurist who supported Nelson Mandela and in fact expected to live out his life in South Africa but came back to the United States because of political intrigues in South Africa, an\d was now sidelined because of his deteriorating eyesight. He had indeed advised his daughter to keep considerable money in cash because he remembered a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts when a restaurant did not honor his credit cards or travelers checks and used his last dollar to pay the tab. But he did not tel;l; her what boyfriend to choose, I assume because she was a divorced middle aged woman who could decide on her own.
Take a longer view. There have been three generations, inclusive, of black people who helped fashion the civil rights acts of the Sixties that led to the dismantling of legal segregation. The first generation included Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young of the Urban League, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, James Foreman of CORE, and Ralph Abernathy, King’s associate at the SSLC, never mind the previous generation that included Jackie Robinson and the Tuskegee Airmen and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.. The next generation included Colin Powell, Thurgood Marshall, and Barack Obama, who lifted themselves to the highest of powers, Fani Willis’ father a minor light in this firmament. And then there is the third generation, where the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Vice President are Black people and there are any number of subsidiary political figures, such as Fani Willis herself, who have significant political elected offices. They do not have disdain for their predecessors but only partly embrace their ethnicity, just as is the case with people of Jewish or Hispanic or Scotch heritage.
Let’s assume that Willis and Wade and Willis’ father had concocted their scheme of faking when they started their relationship and she had never reimbursed money to Wade for the overall goal of making some money out of a national and historical court case. That would not have meant that the facts and texture of Black history had been used to create their cover story and also meant that she was very naive to think that Trump interests would not try to undermine her official voice as district attorney. What it would have clearly shown is that ethnicity is both deeply held and unevenly conveyed across the generations. It was deep in that she showed herself inflected by the black experience of black misogyny and, at the same time, fierce independence, however lofty the office to which she was raised. Ethnicity is so deep that my granddaughter still thinks of herself as ethnically Jewish even though my own unbelief and that of my daughter’s children have been unbelievers and so am I since my early teenage years. Wed all maintain the mark of ethnicity anyway. And ethnicity unequally marks its movement to American assimilation, whereby, supposedly, the immigrant generation accommodates to workplace mores, while the second generation assimilates in both work and family, and the third generation recovers some of its ethnic and religious heritage. In the case of Willis, she had been raised by a sophisticated father, got a legal education, prospered in her line of work, but had never become polished or fully cosmopolitan, relying on old black man shibboleths. But that doesn’t mean unsuited, when called upon, to take on an ex President of the United States.