The Street Lawyer

John Grisham, “The Street Lawyer,” Doubleday, 1998, 348 pp.

Another of my book club’s selection, this one by the popular author John Grisham.  I especially appreciate Grisham’s thorough research of his topic, even though the novel is fiction.  His portrayal of the homeless is undoubtedly accurate—the good and the bad.  There is an emphasis on ‘street law’: it is all about Dignity (p. 88).

The story begins when a large homeless man comes into an upscale law firm, Drake & Sweeney, and immediately holds nine of the lawyer’s hostage in a conference room.  He tells the hostages to call him “Mister.”  It turns out that “Mister” is one of seventeen that had been illegally evicted from a warehouse they were living in.  His real name was DeVon Hardy, a name discovered after the Swat team puts a bullet in his head.

Michel Brock, one of the lawyers held hostage is so affected that he leaves the law firm and becomes a lawyer for the homeless.  His experiences and pursuit of justice for a woman and her children who died because of this same unlawful eviction of “Mister” propels the content of this book.

 My Notes:

Pg. 21:  Thoughts of the hostages as Mister holds them all in a conference room, thoughts I have personally had: “Only Rafter glared down the table, thinking the thoughts all of us had when we stepped over the Misters of D.C.: If I give you some change you’ll (1) run to the liquor store, (2) only beg more, (3) never leave the sidewalk.”

Pg. 90:  “Sometime around 11 P.M., D.C. police found a small car near Fort Totten Park, in northeast, in a war zone.  It was parked on the street, its bald tires stuck in the frozen slush.  Inside were a young mother and her four children, all dead from asphyxiation.  The police suspected the family lived in the car and was trying to stay warm.  The automobiles tailpipe was buried in a pile of snow plowed from the street.”  This woman, Lontae Burton and her children had been illegally evicted from the same building “Mister” had been evicted.

Pg. 161:  “The frightening part of homelessness is what you don’t see on the street.  About half of all poor people spend seventy percent of their income trying to keep the housing they have.  HUD says they should spend a third.  There are tens of thousands of people in this city (D.C.) who are clinging to their roofs; one missed paycheck, one unexpected hospital visit, one unseen emergency and they lose their housing.”

 Addenda:

Grisham has also written other crusading books such as big law (The Firm, etc.), big tobacco (The Runaway Jury), big insurance (The Rainmaker).

The day after being a hostage, Michael visits the shabby offices of Mister's attorney, Mordecai Green, who explains that Mister and others had been illegally evicted from makeshift housing on orders from a real-estate development company represented by Michael's firm. Inspired by Green and disturbed by his firm's complicity, Michael volunteers at a homeless shelter. When a family he meets there dies on the street and turns out to have been among the evictees, Michael quits his job, goes to work for Green and, using as evidence a file he steals from the firm, aims to sue his former employer on behalf of the evictees. In turn, the firm places Michael in its crosshairs, pressuring him to give up the file through legal maneuvers, having him arrested and hints of darker means. The cat-and-mouse between Michael and the firm is vintage Grisham, intricately plotted, but the emphasis in this smoothly told, baldly manipulative tale is less on action and suspense, which are moderate, than on Michael's change of heart and moving exploration of the world of the homeless.