Bird in Hand

I watched The Practice when I was a kid—David E. Kelley’s not-as-watched, but more critically acclaimed hour-long lawyer show that mostly ran concurrent with Ally McBeal, and that starred Dylan McDermott as a gun-for-hire defense attorney who often had to bend his ethics, but nonetheless fought with an underdog’s grit and a pension for emotional closing arguments that ultimately made him a loveable character on his own terms.

I don’t remember many specific moments from this show that I watched in my middle and high school years, and wasn’t passionate enough to keep up with when I left home for college (truth be told, I didn’t realize it had run for eight seasons until looking it up on Wikipedia as I wrote this introduction). One of the few moments I do recall with any clarity was when aged lawyer, past his prime was teamed with McDermott and company for some reason, with a running theme that the old attorney was too old to still responsibly be practicing law. In his closing statement, he forgets what he was supposed to say or what the case at hand was about, but falls back an old trick, telling the jurors a generic fable about youngsters who try to fool and old wise man. They catch a bird in their hands and ask him if the bird is dead or alive, on the premise that they’ll prove him wrong either way—crushing the bird if he says it’s alive, letting it fly free if he says it’s dead. The wise man has the answer, though, telling the kids it’s in their hands. By extension, the attorney suggests that jurors now hold the fate of his client in their hands.

It was a fun bit of wisdom that hit me at just the right time. I’d go on to use the story myself, citing Kelley as inspiration, in a speech competition for a commencement speech when I finished college. I called on variations of it again for speeches to parents and students when I worked at CTY, always a suggestion of the responsibility in the hands of the youngsters in the audience, and that they were ready for it.

I came upon the speech again years later in a textbook reading I’d assigned for a humanities course at UNLV. This time, it came from Toni Morrison in a lecture she gave when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Morrison herself didn’t take credit for having invented the tale, but upon reading it in this context, I immediately recognized there was a fair chance Kelley, in his stream of writing two or more hours of television a week for much of the 1990s, likely poached it from her.

But more than Morrison suggesting wisdom in the fable, or that we should all stand in wonder of its rhetorical twists and turns, she bent it to her own will in likening the bird’s fragility to that of language, and in criticizing the supposedly wise elder for giving a non-answer that saved face rather than actually teaching the kids from the story something of substance.

So it is that a story changes with each interpretation, with each re-telling, with each access point. I haven’t told the story again since reading it from Morrison, though if I ever do, I suspect it won’t sound the same at all.