The judge asked me the question again, slowly, in his chambers, with the old bank envelope of Leroy between us on the desk. How long had my nephew Ronnie been the deputy who drove me to church every Sunday? I am Doris Whitlow, seventy four years old, a retired school bus driver from Hoover, and I looked at the soft yellow paper and felt a cold slide through my chest. “Ronnie has driven me to Sixth Avenue Baptist for eleven years,” I said. “He is the son of the brother of Leroy. I held him at his christening.” The judge folded his hands.
He told me what Mrs. Bell had said in her statement. On the night of March 7, 1985, Calvin Bell, her son, then nineteen, had gone into the market of Leroy with a friend, a boy of eighteen named Ronald Whitlow, who had stood at the door with a gun that did not belong to him. Calvin had struck my husband. Ronnie, who was frightened and crying, had fled. Mrs. Bell had taken the six hundred and forty dollars from the pocket of her son that night, and kept it in a bank envelope in her Bible, and not spent a cent in forty years.
I understood in an instant why Leroy had rubbed his scar in the dark kitchen and said nothing for the rest of his life. He had recognized the boy at the door. He had heard the boy call him Mr. Leroy, the way family never does, and had known that voice from a hundred Christmas dinners. He had chosen to carry it to the end of his days rather than see the son of his brother go to prison. I put my head in my hands, and I wept for my husband, who had been silent out of love.
A character witness in a robbery trial gave one retired bus driver the length of a recess to bring her nephew back to the truth in Birmingham.
I gave my terms in the hallway of the courthouse that afternoon, to my nephew, who had been called in from his patrol shift and stood with his hat in his hands. “Ronnie, I am not going to scream. I am going to tell you what I know, and you are going to listen, and then you are going to do the right thing. You will go to the district attorney this week. You will speak for Marcus Bell, who has done nothing of the kind. And you will say aloud to Mrs. Bell, in front of me, how sorry you are.”
Ronnie sagged against the marble wall, a big man in a deputy uniform, suddenly small. “Aunt Doris, I was eighteen,” he said, hoarsely. “Calvin had a gun and he said we were only going to scare Uncle Leroy a little. I never touched the money. I ran. I have been waiting for forty years for somebody to knock on my door. I became a deputy because I thought if I wore the badge, it would wash away.” He lifted his wet eyes. “Every Sunday, when I drove you to church, I wanted to tell you. I could not bear to.”
But even now, the old fear rose in him. Ronnie suddenly snatched the yellowed envelope from the bench where the bailiff had set it, spun around, and ran for the stairwell at the end of the corridor, meaning to reach his cruiser and burn the thing. His boots pounded on the marble. The bailiff, a stout man named Mr. Pettus, put out an arm. Mrs. Odessa Bell, on her cane, stepped out from a doorway in her purple hat. And Marcus Bell, in a borrowed suit, stood at the head of the stairs.
Ronnie stopped at the top of the stairs, with the envelope in his big hand and the young man he had never met standing directly in front of him, twenty two years old and trembling. Marcus spoke quietly. “Sir, I do not know you. But my grandmother has told me the story. I would like you to give her that envelope.” Ronnie looked at the old woman in the purple hat. He crossed the landing, knelt in front of her, and laid the envelope in her hands, and the old woman wept.
The consequences were solemn and just. The statute of limitations had long expired, and no charges could be filed against Calvin Bell or Ronnie for the robbery of 1985, but the judge ordered a new trial for Marcus, and the district attorney, after hearing the whole story, dismissed the case for lack of evidence. Ronnie resigned from the sheriff office and gave a public statement. Mrs. Bell and I sat on a bench together in the courthouse hall, two old women, holding the envelope of Leroy between our four hands.
In the name of my husband Leroy, who passed in 2012, I started the Leroy Whitlow Fund. It pays for grocery vouchers for neighborhood families in need and for legal defense and mentoring for young people facing their first charge, in Jefferson, Shelby and St. Clair counties. In the first year we gave out two thousand grocery vouchers and defended sixty three young people. One was a nineteen year old from Ensley who stood in a courtroom in a borrowed suit, heard the word dismissed, and sank onto the bench with his hand over his face.
On a bright Sunday in November, I sat in the third pew at Sixth Avenue Baptist beside Mrs. Odessa Bell, in my best blue hat, while the choir rose for the closing hymn. Marcus Bell stood in the second row of tenors, singing with his whole heart, and Ronnie sat at the back in a plain suit, no uniform. When the hymn ended, Mrs. Bell reached across and squeezed my hand. “Doris,” she said, “thank you for staying.” I told her that Leroy would have wanted exactly this, and the choir swelled to the rafters, and the afternoon sun came through the tall windows in long bars of gold.