It was the third and last day, and Smith, after going over all the evidence he had presented, was beginning his closing speech. He had assembled a stack of packages on the table in front of the jury. He had reasoned, and the court had agreed, that the jury was entitled to know what ten kilos of crack cocaine looked like. His show-and-tell display was probably as damaging as anything he could have done, and there was no objection from the defense. I find this unbelievable. The packages were not, nor had they ever been, Street's. They were not evidence; they were a prop.

        Prosecutor Smith stepped to the table and scanned the pile slowly before looking at the people sitting in the jury box. He carried himself with easy confidence, making eye contact with each member of the panel before he spoke. This would be his killing moment, the moment he excelled at. His style of delivery was perfected over years of prosecuting young offenders in front of an older generation of men and women trying to do the right thing but shackled by their hysterical fears, fears built skillfully by manipulation and coercion in this cloaked and official theater.

        "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," he began, "what you see before you on this table is what this proceeding is all about. This is what is destroying America." Walking over to the table, he touched the top of the stack. "This is what your children and grandchildren, your friends and neighbors, the people you work with and go to school with, this is what is killing them and destroying their lives. Take a careful look, ladies and gentlemen, this is Crack Cocaine." Smith reached up to adjust his collar. His voice, barely more than conversational at first, had begun to rise in agitation. The warmth of the courtroom showed on his face and his carefully coifed hair was beginning to relax. Clearing his throat, he spoke once more:

        "You see these packages - these little bales - and can't really comprehend, can't really believe what I'm telling you. You can't believe the power of this insidious drug. You can't understand how it can wipe out communities; how it can pit brother against brother and father against son; how it can strip people of their will to live, even; and how it can scour the minds of our young people." He lifted one of the packages and hefted it up and down as if he were checking its weight. "Not very big, is it?" he asked the assembled listeners. "Not much at all, really, like a wrapped up pound of coffee or a rolled up Sunday paper...How is it possible, you think, that something so small, so simple looking, can be so devastating?" He dropped the package back down with visible disgust. "Well, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, it is possible. It is the single most heinous tragedy to befall our generation. It is uprooting the moral fiber of this great country and flushing it down the toilet!" He paused to sip from a water glass that had been placed on the evidence table in front of him. Setting it back down carefully, looking into one, then another and another of the jurors' eyes, and as he did, he silently pleaded for understanding. He wanted them to know his pain and to see and feel his anguished, doomed appraisal of our modern times. He began speaking again - louder this time - and as Street listened, he heard something foreign, something sour, something beyond his scope of understanding. Smith began to challenge the jury, intoxicating them with the fears and paranoia of our shocked, media-drenched age and forcing them to think about our own private pasts when life seemed simpler, more honest, and in the seemingness of memory was purified into the clean colors and smells and shapes of long-ago innocence. Smith's voice sang out in the bright bays and dark corners of the people's minds and as Jerome listened, he felt the powerful heat of the rhetoric and realized that the man was ignoring any facts that might be relevant to the case and painting a picture of a larger reality. "What does this speech have to do with me?" Street thought. "What does it have to do with my case? Why is Smith blaming me for the downfall of America? What is he trying to prove?"

        As Smith raged on, Jerome realized fully what he was up against. He wasn't just a crack dealer on the street; he was the embodiment of all the sins of his people and of his generation. He was an example to a frightened, world-weary jury of older citizens who wouldn't judge the crime but the catastrophe of an OCEAN of crime. Slowly Jerome saw, and the roaring in his ears and the rasp of his exhalations signaled his awakening. His heart began to pound as this new reality came to fruition in his mind.

        "LOOK," screamed Smith, "at our city when you drive home tonight. What you will see is PLAGUE. It's in our homes and in our workplaces, in our schools and in our churches. Our hospitals are filled with it, and our babies are sick with it. It's plague, ladies and gentlemen, and it's as devastating as anything we've endured in history. THIS...STUFF...IS...KILLING...US!" Smith's voice broke as he raised his right arm and pointed at the shocked, immutable figure of the defendant. "AND THERE IS THE MAN RESPONSIBLE! THERE is the animal that is doing this to our children! That scum sitting there would not even blink at the thought of a baby's death or a mother's ruination. He would GLOAT. He would PREEN. He would enjoy the evil with his despicable drug."

        The power of evocation was unmistakable and catastrophic. As Smith spoke he lifted one, then another of the small bales and shook them over his head as his words rang out in the courtroom. "This garbage is what Mr. Street is all about! This garbage I hold in my hand is what he revels in! What he lusts for! This is what he laughs for, ladies and gentlemen, and he is laughing. He is laughing at all of us. He can't control himself. He can't stop the laughter."

        The jury simmered with anger. Some of them, their intentions unrestrained, were glaring at Jerome in dark loathing and their judging eyes chronicled their every emotion. They were lost in the poetry of hate, perfectly dressed in the accents of hate and dancing its unfamiliar dance. The unassailable logic of their hatred could never be surmounted or mollified or pleaded with or reasoned with. Street - the killer, robber, rapist, druglord. The pornographer, laugher, destroyer of God's laws, dealer, filthy killer nigger Black scum who dares come before this body of honest people and expect something, anything but revenge and retribution...

        As he witnessed his own crucifixion, tears began to well up in Jerome's eyes and he was blinded. "That's not me," he thought. "No...that's not fair, that's not me..." But the court did not hear his thoughts or see through his eyes. The court was in the hands of the prosecutor and his resourceful presentation was capturing the day.

        "You saw him laugh, ladies and gentlemen. He laughed at everything you've worked for and prayed for in your lives, and he thinks he has a right to those things by destroying, by tearing down, by hurting and killing what we hold so dear, things like hard work and honesty and compassion and love. Well, I'm here to say that he does not have that right! He does not have the right to take our neighborhoods and our workplaces and our streets and parks and shops and TWIST and TWIST and BURN and DEFILE and DECIMATE our lives with his filthy greed. He has no right! He must be stopped! He will be stopped. You are going to stop him!"

        Looking down into his lap, Jerome could only see blurred images through a lens of tears. In the center of his focus, the edgeless form of his constantly moving fists worried powerfully and kneaded into themselves like the tired hands of an old woman. His long nails had driven deep into the palms, cutting the skin, and sticky ribbons of thin, colorless blood lined the folds of his wrists and the crook of his thumb. An intolerable pain crushed his heart. "No," he thought, "this is not right. Please...this can't be right..."

        Ignoring Street's tears, the prosecutor whispered his last entreaties into each emotion-charged face on the panel. He was slow and deliberate, and his voice was theatrically edged with the tympani timbre of despair: "When that man laughed in this courtroom, what did you see? Did you see something vile? Did you see an ugliness, a corruptness? That's what I saw. Did you see a monster who would dare gloat at your hopelessness and that even now feels nothing but hate and contempt for you? Did you, ladies and gentlemen, see what I saw? What I know? What every good law-abiding, God-fearing person has got to know? Look at him! Look at that monster! HE IS WHY THIS COUNTRY HAS BECOME WHAT IT HAS!"

        By the end, Jerome was openly crying in the courtroom. His mask of bravado had been stripped away, and he was sobbing uncontrollably. "It's not true," he thought. "That's not me. How can he say that? It's not true; it's not fair. Please listen...would you listen? Just don't look at me like that but listen to me and help me with this." His breath came in heaving gasps. Tears poured down from his eyes, and his cheeks shined like boot-tips in the fluorescent glare of the courtroom. Sounds of the trial fell away. Thoughts battered him. Hopeless, terrifying, like hail on tin in violent dreams, the panicked noise from within that can only be heard inside and seen from the backs of the eyes; the ageless sound of abandonment. "Please help me...please...That's not the real me. I'm here, in here, not out there. Listen, don't look for a minute but just listen to me. Please, please, oh please...God in heaven, they think I'm not human. I want to say I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything I've done, but I'm not what he says. I'm not what you think. I'm a real person, not a cut-out figure or a doll or a tar-baby or some f___ show on television. I'm so sorry for doing what I did and being what I am and looking like this. I'm sorry for the color of my skin and I'm sorry I can't speak right and I'm sorry that I scare people and that I can't look them in the eye without fear. Please God, I'll cry and I'll beg and I'll be the sorriest mother____ you ever saw, God. Please God, I'm so sorry, God, please let them realize that I'm a man and that I bleed just like they do. Please listen to me. Please..."

        Jerome's mind was adrift in an impossible fantasy of forgiveness, and he couldn't stop it. He couldn't look up. He couldn't look away. They had said things they had no right to say, thought things they had no right to think. What right had they to assume, to presume to know these things, to blame him, to castigate him and pin the world's afflictions on his shoulders? He was just a man. He wasn't what they were saying. He wasn't...

        However, Jerome felt that day didn't matter. It didn't matter that he was singled out or that the prosecutor took liberties at trial or that the judge didn't see fit to stop the harangue. It didn't matter that the evidence was a lie or that the extra charges were bogus or that the rules of law had gone unobserved. In three years, no appeal has been filed, and none will be forthcoming. Not for Street. No way. The best he can hope for is an opportunity to witness another man's destruction and to profit from it by swearing to something that may or may not be true. This is the Federal system. Whatever Street might have wanted to say on appeal would be useless. He couldn't talk for himself anyway. Nobody would understand the words. They couldn't understand the words of an under-educated, uncommunicative ugly Black man. Not a chance.