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CHAPTER SIX

A New Person

Now I, too, carried my photograph of a 22-year-old black mother who had died for nothing in a car.

I was at the 14th Street Law Center. “How much would a funeral cost?” I asked Mordecai.

“I don’t know. Are you interested?”

“I want them to have a good funeral.”

“OK, then. Let’s arrange it now.”

We got into Mordecai’s old Ford Taurus. The Burton family’s bodies were in the morgue of the General Hospital. Mordecai entered like he owned the place.

“I’m Mordecai Green, lawyer for the Burton family,” he informed an anxious young man behind the desk.

A doctor from the hospital arrived and Mordecai pushed open the big metal door. Inside the white room were lines of bodies, covered in sheets. Their names were on little pieces of paper tied to their toes.

We stopped in a corner. “Lontae Burton,” said the doctor, and pulled the sheet down to her waist. It was Ontario’s mother all right, in a white dress. She looked the same as when I saw her alive a few days ago. She looked like she was sleeping. I couldn’t stop staring at her.

“That’s her,” said Mordecai in a confident and loud voice, like he’d known her for years.

Only one sheet covered the children. They were lying in a line with their hands by their sides like little soldiers. I wanted to touch Ontario. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. I wanted to wake him up, take him home, give him some food, give him everything he could ever want.

“That’s them,” said Mordecai.

I looked up to heaven and I heard a voice in my head say, “Don’t let it happen again.”

The doctor took us to an office. We helped the assistant make a list of everything that had been found with the family. My old blue jacket was the best thing they owned.

“Do you want it back?” Mordecai asked me.

“No.”

I waited outside in the car while Mordecai arranged the funeral in another office. He told me the price would go up if they saw my expensive clothes. In less than a week I had seen five dead street people. First Mister had changed my life, now Ontario had broken my heart.

There was a knock on the car window. I jumped. “It’s five thousand dollars, all four,” Mordecai shouted through the closed car window.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and he disappeared back into the hospital.

Soon he was back, driving fast. “The funeral will be Tuesday at the church here at the hospital. The newspapers will be there. And television. It’s a big story.”

“Thanks, Mordecai,” I said.

“After the funeral, there’s going to be a march, a march to the government buildings on Capitol Hill for the Burton family. Television is going to film it, the newspapers are going to write about it. Are you OK?”

“No.”

I called in sick Tuesday. At ten I left for the funeral. It was a very nice church. Beautiful. It didn’t open its doors to the homeless and I could understand why. I sat alone. I could see Mordecai with two people I didn’t know. The TV people were in one corner.

I could also see the coffins. The baby’s coffin was very small. Ontario’s coffin and his brother’s were bigger, but not much bigger. Lontae Burton’s parents were dead, but her grandmother was there. She put flowers on the coffins and for a terrible second I thought she was going to open them. I had never been to a black funeral before and I didn’t know what to expect. But I had seen old film of coffins open at funerals.

After the funeral, there was the march to Capitol Hill. There were big photos of Lontae Burton everywhere, and under her face the words “WHO KILLED LONTAE?”

On Capitol Hill Mordecai spoke to the people. He didn’t talk about the homeless. He talked about the last hours of the Burton family. He talked about the baby’s last meal, in the church. He talked about the cookies the boys had eaten.

He described how the little family left the church and went back onto the streets, into the snowstorm where Lontae and her children lived only a few more hours. Mordecai described things he didn’t actually know had happened, but i didn’t care and the crowd didn’t either. When he described the family trying to get warm before they died, I heard women crying around me. If this man, Mordecai Green, could make a crowd cry like this, he must be a great lawyer.

When Mordecai finished we marched to the Capitol, the government building, carrying the coffins. I had never been on a march like this before. Rich people don’t march; their world is safe and clean and there are laws to keep them happy. But now I, too, carried my photograph of a 22-year-old black mother who had died for nothing in a car. I wasn’t the same person as I had been before Mister and Ontario came into my life, and I could never be that person again.

So I accepted when Mordecai Green phoned me a few days later and invited me to a restaurant near Dupont Circle. And when he invited me to join the 14th Street Law Center, I accepted his offer of a job, too.

“We can pay you thirty thousand dollars a year,” smiled Mordecai. “You’ll be a partner. Let’s see Drake and Sweeney beat that.”

I smiled too. I nearly told him about the file I needed from Drake and Sweeney, the file that would give us the story of DeVon Hardy’s eviction. But I didn’t.

That night, I told Claire my news. It was almost ten and we were sitting in our favorite chairs with glasses of wine. After a few minutes I said, “We need to talk.”

“What is it?” she asked, unworried.

“I’m thinking of leaving Drake and Sweeney.”

“Oh, really.” She either expected this or wanted to seem calm. I had told her all about Lontae Burton and her family.

“Yes, I can’t go back there.”

“Why not?”

“The work’s boring and unimportant. I want to do something to help people. I told you about Mordecai Green. His Law Center has offered me a job. I’m starting Monday.”

“How much did he offer you?”

“Thirty thousand a year.”

“That’s ninety thousand dollars a year less than you earn now.”

“You don’t do work for the homeless for the money.”

As young law and medical students we had wanted to help people. We told ourselves then that money was not important. And now?

“I’m tired,” she said. She finished her wine and went to the bedroom.

The next day, she visited a divorce lawyer. I promised to leave the apartment by the weekend.