Lorraine Tillis was sitting on my front steps when I came up the walk, in her good blue suit and her county badge, with a banker box in her lap and the afternoon sun turning her glasses to coins. She had been my student in 1987, in the third row by the window, a girl who argued about the Fourteenth Amendment with a pencil behind each ear. She stood when she saw me. “Mrs. Battle,” she said, “I debated all night. I decided that if I was ever going to be of use to you, this was the day.” She held out the box with both hands.
The name on the donation form was Roy Wesley Pettis. It had been written in blue ink on a campaign finance report, beside forty thousand dollars in cash, dated the third of August, from an address that was mine. I had never written a check to a Pettis. But I had seen the name once before, on the cover of a thin brown folder that my husband Otis kept on the top shelf of our closet, behind his Pullman porter cap. Case number 79 114. State versus Otis Battle. Sealed by order of the court. Roy Pettis had been the arresting deputy.
Lorraine told me what she had found. That in 1979, Deputy Pettis of Rankin County had pulled Otis over on the Pearl River bridge, searched his car, and said he found a pistol. Otis did not own a pistol. He spent one night in jail, and was released with all charges dropped when the deputy wife swore he had planted the weapon. The record was sealed at the request of Pettis, who was ashamed. “Mrs. Battle,” Lorraine said, “the man is ninety one. His son brought the cash to your son campaign in August. In your name. Marcus knew.”
A banker box and a name on a donation form gave one retired civics teacher the length of a single evening to bring her son back to the truth in Jackson.
I gave my terms to Lorraine on the steps. I would read the file, every page of it, before I said a word. Then I would telephone my son, and ask him to come to his mother house, and bring his wife. Nobody would shout. A mother who barred from a swearing in is still a mother, and a woman who taught the Constitution for thirty seven years does not go to war with her own child on a porch. Lorraine nodded. I took the box inside. I sat at the kitchen table with Otis cap in front of me. I read the file from the first page to the last.
They came at six, in the black campaign SUV, Marcus in his judicial blue and Monique in her church heels. He did not hide. He sat at my table and said that Pettis had come to him in July. That the old man wanted to atone. That he had asked to give his gift anonymously, and then insisted on using the name of my address, so I would know where it came from. “Mama,” Marcus said, “I did not know how to tell you. I knew Daddy never wanted that file open. And I knew we needed the money. You gave eleven thousand, and it was not enough, and I was ashamed.”
I asked him why he had barred me from the swearing in. He lowered his head. He said that Roy Pettis was to be seated on the platform in the front row, in a wheelchair, and that the old man had asked to say a word to me. “I thought you would be hurt,” Marcus said. “I thought you would see his face and see Daddy in the jail.” I said I had seen a great many faces. I said I would have liked to choose which. Then Marcus saw the file on my table. He snatched it, meaning to bolt out the front door and drive away with it before anyone could read another line.
He was fast for a man of forty eight, and he made the porch before Monique had even put down her purse. He pounded down the steps, hit the unlock button, wrenched open the door of the SUV, and found himself looking at the empty ignition. The keys were not there. They were in the hand of Monique, who had followed him out onto the lawn with the calm stride of a woman who had been married to a lawyer for twenty years. “Marcus,” she said, “sit down. I took them in the kitchen when you were not looking.”
He sat. Not in the SUV. In the grass, on the front lawn of the house where he was raised, with the file in his lap, and his judicial blue wrinkling at the knees. Monique crossed the lawn and sat beside him. Otis would have laughed. I could hear him laughing on the other side of the screen door. I came out onto the porch with a pitcher of lemonade. I poured four glasses. And I read aloud, from the back of the file, the last page, in which Roy Pettis, in 1979, in a shaking hand, confessed that he had lied.
Marcus corrected the finance report the next morning, listing the gift and its source, and the Board of Elections, which had looked at the case for eleven minutes, called it a clerical matter. He won the seat in November by a margin of eight hundred votes. At the swearing in, in a courtroom full of friends, Roy Pettis was rolled to the front in his wheelchair and asked leave to speak. He stood on his own two shaking legs. He turned to me, in the front row, and said, “Mrs. Battle, I wronged your husband. I have prayed for forty years to say it aloud.”
In the name of Otis, who passed in 2013, I started the Otis Battle Fund. It pays for expungement fees, court costs and legal help for people with old, unjust or mistaken records, in Hinds, Madison and Rankin counties. In the first year we cleared sixty seven records. A man of fifty eight, a deacon, who had carried a charge from 1984 on his back every day of his life, held the order of the court in both hands outside the courthouse, and he read it, slowly, three times, moving his lips like a child.
