(16) Danielle Van Meter: An Education
The whole New England town had gotten so cruel that Deon couldn’t go out alone anymore.
“If they spit at me when I walk by, just think what they’d do to you.” He had said to his mother, every time that she insisted on doing his outside chores; going to the grocer, filing paperwork, or taking his clothes to the Laundromat. Laundry. Just saying that word in the house was like invoking a ghost- the Laundromat might as well have been the boneyard. Deon would sit with his shoulders hunched in, hands coiled close on the opposite elbow, making himself as small as he could while the washing machine spun. He was hostage to the disinterested cycle. Soak, wash, rinse, spin. Anything he did while he waited was wrong. If he read, the book would be knocked out of his hands by someone walking by.
“My my, what a professor. Deon Morten. Pity the community college doesn’t even want criminals.”
The last time he had tried to leave his laundry as it washed, he had come back to find his clothes slashed to rags. And if he looked straight ahead, sitting still, someone would squat in front of him, mocking loud.
And all of this while the machine soaked, washed, rinsed, watching Deon through its bored and singular eye.
His mom always said, “Chin up, son. It’ll get better”. It had been months since he had been released, and nothing had gotten any better. His college scholarship was gone. His friends had startled and left. Deon’s hearing had fallen on a Thursday, two days short of six months since the day he’d been falsely arrested.
“You’d better hope you don’t get stuck with those charges, Deon.” His cellmate was old enough to be his father and advised him as such. “If they send you upstate, you’ll never get out. If you do, you’ll be a different man from what you see there. It’s the seventh circle of hell.”
Deon knew the reference. His eleventh-grade teacher—“I’m Mr. Baldwin, like James”—had taken the class through Dante’s works even though it wasn’t required reading. Mr. Baldwin, now retired in Florida with his wife, had sent Deon a letter every week while he was incarcerated. Mr. Baldwin seemed never to have even considered that Deon might have committed the murders, and Mr. Baldwin railed against the system in every letter. He always ended with an instructive quote, something about not losing oneself, or remembering one’s humanity.
But if Deon had narrowly escaped hell, wasn’t this supposed to be heaven?
“Dismissed. Charges dropped.” The judge, large enough to make his black robe look ill-fitting, had banged the gavel without even looking Deon in the eye. Deon wanted him to, wanted to remind the judge that he was a human too.
Serial Lady-killer Arrested as Former Suspect, Deon Morten, is Exonerated.
Former suspect of a murder charge. Deon thought a lot about journalists in those days. They were doing their jobs, clocking in and out, writing titles at their desks that would hang around him for all his days in this town. Each word, a tightening of the noose. Mr. Baldwin had sent Deon a book about a man facing the death penalty for something he didn’t do, with an inscription.
Deon, keep on the path to goodness. In the end, you will find peace. He had escaped the death penalty, but there has been no peace.
Deon had written every pro bono lawyer in this town until he found someone who would sue the state for what they had done to him. He didn’t need much, just something that would make the justice system look him in the eye, admit “we made a mistake”; something that sounded like the truth. The state’s attorney and Deon’s attorney had whittled the number down to something they could both agree on-- $14,000 and a legal name change. There had been no relief when the lawyer handed Deon the check, a new passport, and a new driving license. The lawyer had patted him on the back in congratulations. Instead, it had jeered at Deon.
“This,” it seemed to say, “is how much your reputation is worth. And now we’re square.” There was no righteousness to that.
So Deon had made a plan. If he had escaped the inner circles of hell, maybe he could still climb his way to paradise. Maybe heaven was still out there, one concentric circle away.
Deon’s mother dropped him off at the bus stop and cried on his shoulder.
“My baby. I am so proud.” What she meant was that her heart was breaking, but like any good mother, she thrust plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches into his arms and patted his cheek. “You go on now, you don’t want to be late for orientation.”
Twenty hours later, Deon walked through the doors of Northwestern University and sat down in front of a man at the registrar’s office. They shot the breeze and talked about fall, then began the paperwork for classwork. “And do you have a down payment for tuition?”
Deon unfolded a piece of paper and the registrar did a double-take at the number on the check.
“Great. And what are you in under the system?” “Deon”. He replied. “Deon…Baldwin.”
He kept climbing.
Danielle Van Meter is a freelance proofreader by day and writer by night. Danielle, an American by birth, grew up in South Africa where she now lives with her husband. She has an English degree, a love of coffee, and an insatiable appetite for Romanticism. You can find her posting about literature at @engaginglit on Instagram.