Once again, I am filled with admiration for what you can find on American television. The idiot box in the corner of your room is nothing less than an indicator of the state of the American nation.
While young black males continue to make up a disproportionate percentage of the prison population, and while it is generally accepted that racism has a lot to do with the high numbers of black males who watch the clock ticking away the hours as they await their unjust doom on death row, there is another side to the American racial equation that is quite
revealing, especially to a South African. This is the other side of the American system of justice, as represented by real-life judges who conduct their trials of domestic conflict in front of the television cameras.
Judge Hackett is one of these. This week I watched her listen to, get mad at, and finally pass judgement on a white couple whose relationship had broken down, and who were now airing their dirty linen in front of someone who a generation ago would have been regarded as no better than maid-material. Madam and Eve watch out.
From the looks of them, it was destined to be an uneven relationship from the start. Kevin is tall and broad-shouldered, with big, innocent eyes that betray his youthfulness, and a little peroxide Tintin quiff at the front of his head that betrays a certain kind of gay-club body language.
Tracy is small, with pinched lines around her mouth, and doing her best to hide the march of the years behind carefully perked hair and a lot of make-up. She is a middle-aged, middle-American mother who seems to have overlooked all the warning signs in Kevin in her search for a little love, and the kind of spice in her empty life that the Bible frowns upon.
Where Kevin’s eyes shine at the judge with a sense of personal injustice against his ex-lover Tracy, Tracy’s eyes droop with a kind of growing despair at the greater injustice of life.
Judge Hackett, a black woman with short, carefully straightened hair and immaculate lipstick, has to stare down from the bench, suppressing whatever thoughts she might have about the nature of their previous relationship, and listen impartially to the petty-sounding squabble that has brought them before her.
Kevin moved into the home that Tracy shared with her children for six months, then decided (in response to the judge’s questioning) that he would give it up “because we would make better friends than lovers”.
During that six months, Tracy took it upon herself to help him “get himself together” (they both agreed on this in front of the judge) and started paying all his bills, including his monthly repayments on the car he had splashed out on while he was living with her.
This became a dependency for Kevin, so that even after he moved out, Tracy continued to pay his monthly instalments. The deal was that he would give her money out of his wages each month, and she would pay them in for him. It had become a kind of mother/son thing.
The problem arose when Kevin got a letter from his bank asking why he hadn’t paid his instalments for six months.
Kevin was as mad as a rattlesnake. By this time, he calculated, he had handed over $3 000, and none of it had gone to the bank for the car. He was accusing his former lover of theft.
“Wait a minute,” yelled Judge Hackett, rewinding the whole situation for all of us anxious and voyeuristic TV viewers. “If you had moved out on her, how come you weren’t paying your own bills by this time?”
“I was still trying to get myself together,” responded Kevin with his big, blue, offended eyes. “She said she was going to take care of it.”
“And so why didn’t you pay those bills?” the judge demanded, turning to Tracy.
“Because he still owed me for bills he’d run up living in my house,” responded Tracy quietly. “He lived there for six months, and I paid for everything.”
“So did you tell him this when he was giving you money for his car every month?” asked the judge.
“No,” said Tracy evenly.
The judge was staring at this fellow-woman, looking back and forth between the complainant and the defendant, internally shaking her head at the ways of white folks. It was she, just as much as the litigants, who was having her day in court, making up for 400 years of slavery and abuse, and all on prime-time television. She wasn’t going to let either of them off lightly.
Kevin started to lose his case when he summoned a witness to speak on his side. This witness was a short, unprepossessing guy called Jerry. After he had blurted out his side of the story, Tracy, barely able to hide the bitterness on those narrow, unhappy lips, asked the judge to ask Jerry to explain his precise relationship with Kevin.
Jerry initially denied that this relationship was anything more than friendly, but pressed by Tracy and the judge to tell the truth, he finally spluttered “OK, for a time our relationship wasn’t purely plutonic [sic] but I know he wouldn’t have been able to confront Tracy about money if I hadn’t been around. I was just trying to help him out.”
Kevin was beginning to look like a young man who needed a lot of help simply working out who he was.
I could almost hear the judge muttering, “Hayi, abelungu,” as she banged her gavel and passed judgement – awarding Kevin just half of what he thought Tracy owed him, much to Kevin’s chagrin.
American-style equality had triumphed before the law.
It was time for the credits to roll.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza