The Twelfth Juror
Every night, after finishing her job cleaning offices in the towers of the financial district, Erica would walk all the way up University Avenue to the twenty-four hour Tims by St. Patrick station. Along the way, she would pass the courthouse at 361 University. Outside the courthouse there is a monument titled ‘Pillars of Justice’. Eleven paper cutout-shaped male and figures stand facing each other, six on the north side, and five on the south side. The plaque in front says that the twelfth empty place among them is reserved for Erica, to symbolize her participation in the legal system as a person of the community. Though her body would be sweaty and grimy from cleaning so many offices and her stomach hungry for her Tims breakfast of double sugar steeped tea and apple fritter, Erica would always stop at this monument and climb the three steps to stand for a few moments in her reserved place. If she timed it right, she could catch what few rays of sunrise filtered to her through the gaps between City Hall and the Eaton Centre and the Marriott and Ryerson University to the east. She would stand there for a few minutes, before the hunger became too much, ruminating on an imagined case and the imagined guilt or innocence of the accused.
But she had a problem. The role of juror never felt right to her. Erica (see, such a good Western name that your eyes are already sliding right over it) had always assumed that if she were to end up in a courtroom one day – at an actual trial, that is; she doesn’t count her Immigration Canada asylum hearing– she would be in there either as the accused or as a witness for the defense, in that order. Never as the jury and never, not in her wildest dreams, as the judge or justice of the peace; never as the Madam clerk or court officer; never as court artist or bailiff or reporter or family or member of the public, and definitely not as Crown or defense counsel. She’d known this about herself ever since she was a little girl in Ethiopia.
Erica wished there was someone to take a picture of her standing in for her community as the twelfth juror in the Pillars of Justice. Her brothers and cousins, all of them still back home, would roll on the floor laughing if she sent them such a photo. In the early 90s, when the communist dictatorship in Ethiopia fell, suddenly it was all trials and mass-grave exhumations. At that time, Erica and her two brothers Brad and James (not their real names) and eight cousins (oh just choose eight white boy and girl names yourself why don’t you, it’ll make no difference, she will never reveal any of their real names) had gotten into a long phase of playing courtroom. The housemaids were very glad about this, since otherwise the kids would have occupied themselves with their other favorite game: prank-the-maids.
The kids could have played dig-up-the bodies, also as seen on television, but that scenario didn’t offer as many characters. You had one of three options: the anonymous dead and massly buried, the alive and digging, or the alive and finally mourning, whereas the courtroom allowed them to make better use of the garden and the house. There were so many locations and parts. The dog’s house was the prison, their parents’ cars were the prisoner transport and police escort vehicles, the porch was the witness stand and the ledge of the window that opened onto it was the judge’s perch. Two enormous hibiscus bushes at the corners the lawn were the prosecution and defense tables, and all that expanse of grass behind them was the public seating area. The jury sat in one row on the low wall adjacent to the lawn. Clearly, there were plenty of parts to go around, but from the start Erica had laid claim to accused or witness for the defense and never let go, only alternating between the two depending on how much she was in the mood for play-acting that day.
From the kitchen window, Mams and Erica’s Aunties would catch sight of the kids sooner or later, and come out and break up their game. With a few harsh words for the girls, and shoves and slaps to the back of the head for the boys, they would put an end to all the calling to order and shuffling and striding and pointing and declaiming and testifying and rising and falling. The adults could not see what fun there was to be had in mocking the nation’s healing process in this time of transition from dictatorship to democracy. In their turn, the kids, especially Brad, did not see the fun in the adults’ contempt of the court – a favorite phrase of his that he took every opportunity to use, even when it rained so hard that everyone had no choice but to break up the game and go inside. However, all the kids understood that it was just paranoia making the adults act this way; old habits die hard.
Today is a special day for Erica. Sitting in a room in the Superior Court of Justice at 361 University, being actually inside the building for the first time, means that she has finally arrived at the real thing, even if it is only a preliminary hearing. She wears her one good outfit – a blue Calvin Klein dress bought for twenty dollars at Winnerz at the end of the summer season, so many sizes too big that it could be a maternity dress. But she does not sit among the twelve today, and she is not at either of the hibiscus bushes either. Today, she is on the grass, alone. She is playing victim. In Canada, victims sit behind everyone, on the grass, along with the general public and media, who may or may not drop in.
