On the judge’s desk lay a pile of cedar sticks; seated, Truman Futch pulled a knife from a drawer and demonstrated, as he would throughout the trial, how he’d gotten nicknamed “the Whittlin’ Judge.” Oppressive heat, old Southern lawyers in red suspenders, whittling judges, a fearsome sheriff, and a crowd of racist, tobacco-stained crackers on the benches behind him—“it was,” Williams observed, “almost to me like a story that I was living through and these were caricatures that I was being exposed to.”
