he reports on criminal justice, teaches at College for Creative Studies and works as assistant director of Shakespeare in Prison. He lives in Detroit, Michigan.
Van Meter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Deep Delta Justice: A Black Teen, His Lawyer, and Their Groundbreaking Battle for Civil Rights in the South, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Deep Delta Justice is the finale of a pivotal courtroom scene--Gary Duncan, the main character, a 19-year-old black shrimper, is on trial for touching a white boy on the shoulder in order to break up a fight. His lawyer, Richard Sobol, has rested his case, and the judge is about to render a verdict.Learn more about Deep Delta Justice.
Page 99 opens with Gary feeling hopeful. Richard, a brilliant lawyer who would go on to become one of the luminaries of his generation, has picked apart the prosecutor's arguments effectively. I write of Gary: "[The] tension that had built up inside him, taut and wound tighter by each new injustice from when he touched the Landry boy until this moment, began to slacken."
At first, the judge seems to go Gary's way. But suddenly he changes course and announces a guilty verdict. The page ends with Gary's sense of betrayal and the pain of maturing into his "place" in Jim Crow society: "Gary felt himself fall through the floor even as he mechanically stood tall to comply with [the judge's] request. He was short of breath, as if his body were constricted by thick lines or pressed under weights. His family was behind him, and he turned slightly to look back at his mother. She was weeping, and the sight of her face fractured something behind his ribs. 'I know what this is,' he thought. Gary saw how people could just take and do things to you, and he understood that his family had known that truth for a long time and protected him. He felt naive, and he felt foolish. 'I know what this is,' he repeated to himself as he turned back to the judge."
Page 99 is uncannily representative of the entirety of Deep Delta Justice to me in several specific ways.
First, in terms of technique, it is the culmination of a dramatic scene that was sourced using the tools of a journalist and historian, then recounted using the tools of a novelist: emphasis on character development, storytelling through dialogue and accumulation of details, and "interiority" (the inner lives of characters). I work hard to earn these scenes; page 99 reflects dozens of hours of reporting and research--all hopefully invisible to the reader!
Second, in terms of my process, page 99 showcases two of the things that bring me the most joy as a reporter and writer. I got my start in writing through theatre, and I love the process of taking hundreds (or thousands!) of pages of trial transcript and editing them down to a scene's worth of snappy, propulsive dialogue. And the interiority--Gary's emotional world--was acquired by allowing him to tell me about this incredibly painful experience over and over again over the course of several years. The deep truth of it--that this was the moment when Gary first understood the traumatic reality of being black in America--only became clear to me on the tenth or twentieth telling.
Third, and most importantly, page 99 is poignant for me in terms of my duty as a storyteller who lives in a society that values me and my words far more than it has ever valued Gary Duncan or his words. Both as a reporter and someone who works with incarcerated people, I am constantly reminded of how little I have done to earn my outsize megaphone. But I have that megaphone, and it is my responsibility to use it to use it well. Telling Gary's story from his perspective does not absolve me of my participation in the system that oppresses him, but it is what I know how to do, and failing to tell that story would be a waste of the power I have inherited. So, rereading page 99, I am struck by how many of these words are Gary's. I am reminded of how, when I first read that passage aloud to him, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, "Yes. That's just how it was." He could not have said anything that would make me feel better.
--Marshal Zeringue
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