Bailiff Tate walked across the marble floor of the cafeteria, between the tables of lawyers and jurors holding their plastic trays, to the large oil portrait that hung above the swinging door. He had passed it every morning for six years. He bent to the brass plate under the frame and read it with a mouth that had gone dry. “The Honorable Lucius T. Pryor. Circuit Judge of Pulaski County, nineteen seventy six to nineteen ninety eight. First Black circuit judge in the history of Arkansas.” He looked at the painted face, young and stern in the black robe. Then he looked at me. I am Lucius Pryor, eighty three years old, and I sat at the corner table in my brown suit with the little scales of justice pinned to my lapel.
In 1976, at thirty six, I was appointed to the bench by a governor who needed the votes. I was not welcome. The first morning I walked into the courtroom, the clerk handed me a mop. I ran that courtroom for twenty two years. I sentenced fairly, I read every brief, and I never once raised my voice. In 1998, when I stepped down, the county commissioned that portrait without telling me. The scales on my lapel were a gift from the Arkansas Bar, for my twenty second year, and I have worn them every day since.
The cafeteria had gone quiet. A white haired attorney near the window set down his fork and stood up. A court reporter put her hand over her heart. An old woman in a jury badge, who had been staring at her pudding, began slowly to clap, and then stopped when she saw that no one joined her. The cashier came around the counter and stood with her apron wrung in her hands. “Judge,” she said, in a little voice. “Judge Pryor. You sentenced my uncle in seventy nine. He said you were the fairest man he ever met.”
A tiny pin of justice on a brown lapel gave one retired judge the length of a lunch hour to bring a young bailiff back to the courthouse truth in Little Rock.
I gave my terms with the manner I once used from the bench. “Mr. Tate, you are young and you are tired and you are doing a job that no one thanks you for. I will not file a complaint. I will ask you to do three things. Read this plate aloud to the next class of jurors. Learn the names of the clerks, the janitors and the cooks who keep this building running. And attend the swearing in this afternoon, which I came here to watch, because my grandson is being admitted to the bar today and I would like you to sit beside me.”
Tate lowered himself onto the chair across from me. His hands trembled on the table. “Your Honor, I am so sorry,” he said, and for the first time he used the title. “My father served under you as a deputy. He used to say that when you walked into a room, the room stood up on its own.” He swallowed hard. “I stopped you at the metal detector. I told you that the cafeteria was for staff and jurors only. I told you to go sit in the hall.” He lowered his head. “I have no excuse.” I reached across the table and rested my hand on his.
But the shame was too heavy for the young man to sit with. In a sudden motion, Tate stood, reached across the table, unpinned the scales from my lapel, and strode for the double doors, announcing in a strangled voice that he was going to verify the pin with the clerk of court. He had gone ten paces when the white haired attorney stepped in front of him. The cashier planted herself at the end of the aisle with her serving spoon, and the old woman in the jury badge lifted her cane across the third row of chairs.
Tate halted in the middle of the marble floor, with the pin in his fist and the whole cafeteria watching. The white haired attorney spoke very gently. “Son,” he said, “I have practiced in front of that man for thirty years. I have never seen him lose his temper. Do not make this the first time.” Tate looked down at the scales in his hand. He turned, crossed the room, and laid the pin in my palm. Then he did something I did not expect. He bowed, from the waist, as men once bowed to the bench.
The consequences were quiet. Tate sat beside me that afternoon in the old courtroom, in the third row, when my grandson raised his right hand and took the oath. When the new lawyers turned to the gallery, I stood, and the entire courtroom rose with me. The county moved my portrait from above the cafeteria door to the lobby, with a lamp. Tate asked to be transferred to the juvenile docket, where he began a reading hour for young offenders, and he put my first book of opinions on the shelf.
In the name of my wife Eleanor, who passed in 2020, I started the Eleanor Pryor Fund. It pays for law school tuition and bar exam fees for first generation students and for a free legal clinic in rural courthouses, in Pulaski, Jefferson and Lonoke counties. In the first year we sent nineteen students to law school and handled four hundred clinic cases. One was a grandmother from Scott who had been fighting a land dispute for eleven years, and who left the clinic holding a signed order and weeping into her sleeve.
On a Tuesday in March, I sat again at the corner table of the cafeteria, with my coffee and my scales. Tate came in with a tray. He stopped at my table and asked, with a small smile, whether the chair was taken. I told him that it was reserved. “For whom, Your Honor?” he asked. I tapped the empty seat. “For a bailiff who reads the plate,” I said. He sat, and across the cafeteria, under the portrait with the lamp, a young clerk looked up at the face on the wall and then at mine, and gave a quiet nod.