The Street Lawyer

“There was lots of other income tucked away near the back of the return—rental properties, dividends, a small business—but I guessed that if Mister somehow grabbed the return he would struggle with the numbers.”

During the hostage scenario, Mister asks for all the lawyers’ tax returns from the previous year. In this quote, Michael makes assumptions about Mister’s background and level of intelligence, even though just pages before he surmised that Mister did not always live on the streets, and two pages after this quote, he admits that Mister is smarter than he appears. In this sequence, the reader sees Michael struggling between what he can empirically see and what he has been taught all his life. At this point in the novel, he is not yet liberated enough from his previous implicit bias to fully embrace the idea that Every Human Has Value, and that Mister is simply another human about whom he really knows nothing.

“I could see our friends and a squadron of cops flying across the city, through rush-hour traffic, and descending upon the quiet little mission where the ragged street people hunched over their bowls of broth and wondered what the hell was going on.”

Michael’s initial description of a shelter demonstrates the perspective of someone who has never set foot in one. Grisham’s use of the phrase “quiet little mission” indicates Michael’s simplistic, naive views of both the place itself and the lifestyle of the people who go there. The second image of the “ragged street people hunched over their bowls,” wondering what is happening, simultaneously offers a biased view of unhoused people as dirty or unkempt and a somewhat idyllic view of the mission community, like a scene one might see in a Dickens novel.