Clarence sat down. “Son, you’re ten.”
“And they’re wrong, Dad. That’s all that matters.”
For a long moment, neither spoke. The refrigerator hummed. A bird sang outside the window.
Clarence looked at the motion his 10-year-old son had written by hand with citations he didn’t understand, but that were formatted perfectly, and his eyes filled with something he hadn’t felt in weeks — hope.
He didn’t say yes. Not yet. Instead, he drove Andre to Ruth’s house. He figured his mother would talk sense into the boy.
Tell him this was foolish. Tell him to be a child and leave the fighting to adults, even if the adults had given up.
Ruth listened. She sat on her porch in a rocking chair, hands folded in her lap, and she listened to every word Andre said.
When he finished, she didn’t speak for a long time. Then she stood up, went inside, and came back carrying something Andre had never seen before — a leather briefcase, old, cracked at the edges, but solid.
“This belonged to your grandfather,” Ruth said, holding it out with both hands. “Elliot Adams. He wanted to be a lawyer more than anything in this world. Applied to law school in 1961.”
They sent back a letter that said, “We regret to inform you that your application does not meet our current admissions criteria.” That was the polite version. The real reason was the color of his skin.
She opened the briefcase. Inside, tucked into the lining, was a handwritten note on yellowed paper.
“The law belongs to those who study it.”
“He carried this briefcase every single day of his life,” Ruth said, “to work, to church, to the grocery store. He never got to use it the way he wanted.”
She looked at Andre. Her eyes were steady and bright.
“You will.”
Andre held the briefcase with both hands. It was heavy — not because of what was inside, because of what it carried.
From that day, Andre had one week before the hearing, and he used every hour.
At the Hadley Public Library, he sat cross-legged on the floor between the shelves, surrounded by books on property law and land disputes. The librarian, a white woman named Mrs. Coleman, who had never once asked why a 10-year-old was reading court opinions, brought him printouts of case precedents.
She didn’t ask why he needed them. She just helped. Once she leaned down and whispered, “If you need anything else, you come find me.”
Andre looked up at her and said, “Thank you, ma’am.” It was the first time in two weeks anyone outside his family had offered to help.
He walked the boundary of his father’s property with a measuring tape and his notebook, marking every survey stake he could find in the ground. Some had been there for decades, rusted, leaning, half buried. Some looked newer, cleaner, straighter. He wrote down every measurement, every position, every difference.
He went to the Hadley County Records Office. A 10-year-old boy standing at the counter asking for the original deed and survey records for both the Lewis property and the Henderson property, the one Witmore had bought.
The clerk behind the counter, Tanya Moore, hesitated. She was a Black woman in her 30s who had worked in this office for eight years. She knew what those files contained. She knew who they involved.