MARIN ARTS & CULTURE 29
Your father would have gotten the killer,
Schoon was the man’s name, acquitted I’m sure.
If not my father would have pardoned him.
Adela Rogers St. Johns, fifty years after
you wrote your father’s life, and death,
is fifty years after my father’s death.
Re-reading your Final Verdict I remember
stories my father told me of yours,
of your father’s defense of Darrow
when Darrow was charged with jury bribery
as he defended the McNamara brothers
in the Los Angeles Times bombing case,
of his ringing defenses in the graft trials
in San Francisco in the years after
the 1906 earthquake and fire,
of his courtroom legerdemain, and fire,
his skullduggery.
Your father must have been among
the best of men. Mine might have been as well,
as near as I could tell. Like your father
mine was full of passionate intensity. Yours—
is it true?— never lost a murder case
until his flamed life flickered. Mine did,
though when asked about a verdict
often as not would respond with old
gallows humor—
— I won.
—The jury acquitted your client?
—No, they gave him life in prison.
My father became an early public defender,
taking no fee for defending poor men charged
with murdering with dull knives and rusted pistols
or hands, to see they at least had a lawyer
if not justice, that a dark-skinned man
improbably wearing a starched white shirt,
charcoal suit and tie, counterfeit raiment
of respectability, would take their frantic
early-morning telephone calls, ride out
for jailhouse visits, post gifts to children,
wire money and telegrams to wives
in Montgomery, Brownsville, Hermosillo
and Manila, strive, strain in the courtroom
with the fervor of your father for acquittal,
plead, when the jury had convicted
that they spare his client’s life, pray
when they declined, in the viewing room
in San Quentin, at the hour of execution.
His grail was the abolition
of that other American barbarism,
punishment by death.
It is fifty years since my father died
for some same reasons your father died
the same age. Nations take up arms still,
brandish torches of weaponry, march inexorable
bewildered pilgrims bound for Armageddon.
Your father was indeed worthy of greater causes.
My father too perhaps, but he
would have been humbled just to be able
to carry your father’s valises and briefcases
to some courtroom of those causes, a
peace conference, or better a final
disarmament table.
John Briscoe
John Briscoe’s Crush: Wine and California from the Padres to Paris was one of four finalists for the 2016 California Historical Society
Book Award, and, dedicated to Kevin Starr, will be published by the University of Nevada Press this fall. His essay “The Judgment of Paris,” lavishly praised by California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia, ran in Catamaran Literary Reader last year and is a nominee for both the Pushcart and Best American Essay awards. Briscoe’s The Lost Poems of Cangjie, published by Risk Press and just released, are translations of recently discovered poems of the Chinese historical figure Cangjie, storied inventor of the Chinese system of writing during the reign of The Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, in the 27th century BCE, approximately 4700 years ago.
Briscoe has published several other books, on history, law, and of poetry. His Tadich Grill, a history of San Francisco’s culinary scene (Ten Speed Press, 2002), remains a popular history of a colorful and historically remarkable aspect of San Francisco. His poetry and legal, literary and historical essays have been widely published in literary and scholarly journals. He has practiced law in San Francisco for 45 years, tried and argued cases in the United States Supreme Court and the Permanent Court of International Arbitration in The Hague, was Special Adviser to the United Nations for the environmental aftermath of the Gulf War, and is a Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.