Witness

Leonora learns of the Leopold and Loeb murder case, a national media sensation: Two wealthy Jewish university students in Chicago murdered a 14-year-old boy, Bobby Franks, just to see if they could get away with it and prove their cleverness. Leonora is amazed that the young Franks boy was white and rich yet still a victim of senseless violence (though Franks, like his murderers, was ethnically Jewish). While Constable Johnson is excited about how the detectives traced the murder to the killers by their spectacles that they dropped, Merlin’s response is to brag that he could kill someone all by himself and get the ransom as well, and he wonders about how the killers were unconcerned about “jail, / or being haunted by a ghost, / didn’t even matter about going to hell” (38). The murder case begins to stir the town’s antisemitic sentiments.

Mirroring the Franks boy’s manner of death (he was bludgeoned with a chisel), Esther falls and hit her head on a rock while playing with a friend. She says that her sight and normal good feelings disappear in the darkness but that Lewis, her dead classmate, takes her by the hand and leads her home to her bed.