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He had been in the legal profession long enough to know that human behavior was complicated and unpredictable and that justice always had to be tempered with mercy.
How could he prevent some part of his heart from reacting with joy, from believing that, in denying justice to Anton’s mother, a greater justice had been done?
Carine had posed the wrong question when she’d asked Pappy if he’d known King. The correct question would’ve been whether he’d known Malcolm.
It was Thoreau who had introduced Anton to the idea that living a principled life was as much about what you didn’t do as what you did. That what you rejected defined you as much as what you embraced.
His reasons for being with Carine were elemental, primal, beyond articulation. His reasons for wanting to break up with her were intellectual. And every day, the tug-of-war between head and heart was tearing him down just a bit more.
“What I’m saying is, you can’t let everything be about politics. If you do, you end up soulless, not knowing who you are. Some things have to belong only to you.
“What I’m trying to tell you is—what I’m trying to teach you—is you gotta be guided by your own lights.
“Down here, you know exactly where you stand. White man is king here, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. But up north, they talk sweet to your face. And then cut your throat when you ain’t looking.”
He was everybody’s son, but he belonged to no one. The three parents in his life had each betrayed him in his or her own way, and he had no idea how to weigh one betrayal against the other. Who had the better claim on him? Did he belong to any of these damaged people? He had no idea.
For the first time, he was no longer the protagonist in his life’s story.
He had been a serious boy and now he was a serious man. But he missed what he had been with her for that brief while.
But now he knew the truth—there were no adults. There were just tall children stumbling around the world, walking pools of unfinished hopes, unmet needs, and seething desires.
His analytical mind was an asset when it came to figuring out the constitutional questions that came before him, but the easy questions about love and commitment rendered him mute.
Wasn’t it high time to really figure out how much of his life was his choosing?
He was about to jump off a cliff. He couldn’t really see the way after that, but it didn’t matter.
“Love is not love without trust.”
He is unaccustomed to waiting, unaccustomed to being idle, unaccustomed to being undistracted by cell phones or computers or events and people competing for his time.
