Y'all Ain't Gonna Believe This...
The greatest storyteller I've ever known has finally written the real story of the greatest case he ever had
His client had just been found guilty, and McCracken Poston Jr. couldn’t wait to tell me all about it. “Get this,” he said, and he was off, telling me about his client in North Georgia who shot her husband’s right testicle clean off. A jury found her guilty, but the judge let her off with probation. “Shows you what a testicle is worth in Murray County,” says Poston with a smile in his voice.
I have spent time in the company of best-selling authors able to build load-bearing narratives. I know all manner of hams who can command a stage in front of rapt audiences. I have even worked for a few politicians who could hold a room spellbound by making visions of the future dance in their heads. But I’ve never met a better storyteller than McCracken Poston Jr., author of the upcoming Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom, the greatest story he’s ever told.
I met Poston back in 1995. I was a baby opposition researcher working for a consultant who would send me all over the country to dig up dirt on politicians. First it was a mayor’s race in Dallas. After that came a county commissioner’s race in Los Angeles followed by a failson running against Storm Thurmond in South Carolina. Then they sent me to Ringgold, a tiny town in north Georgia just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Poston, a state representative and small-town lawyer, was running for Congress.
“That can hurt you?”
My first night on the ground he took me to a grungy bar in Chattanooga. I would end up working for literally hundreds of politicians in my career as a dirt digger, and almost all of them liked to pretend I didn’t exist. Not Poston.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever found on a politician?” he asked over the juke box.
“An Indonesian love child,” I said, pleased to have a ready answer.
“That can hurt you?” he asked, holding a straight face for long enough to worry me. Then his face broke into his wide, ain’t-this-fun smile, and we’ve been friends ever since.
We’ve been friends ever since.
The next three weeks set a high point in my years on the road that no candidate ever came close to touching. He took me and some others to see REM, whom he’d met while attending college in Athens. After the show, he got us into their afterparty celebrating the end of the Monster tour in their hotel suite. Another night he got us into Collective Soul because his legislative secretary grew up with them.
By day I’d pour over his legislative record — he’d fallen out of favor with leadership for pushing ethics reform — and his legal cases. I identified a pattern where he’d get DUI defendants their licenses back before trial, arguing that they needed to be able to drive to work.
“Wait a second,” I said one night over dinner. “A fella gets arrested for drunk driving, and you get him his license back without needing to prove him not guilty?”
“I’m a pretty good lawyer,” he said with a smile.
a better lawyer than a congressional candidate
He’s a better lawyer than he was a congressional candidate, or at least luckier. In a surprisingly good year for Democrats and in a state that Bill Clinton only lost by 1.2%, Poston lost 2-to-1 to a party-switcher. If his election were a fistfight, he’d have ended up in the hospital. To his credit, Poston let politics go, another thing that sets him apart from the hundreds of politicians I’ve worked for over the years. Most never learn to look in the mirror again and see anything other than a future president.
His law practice, long a handmaiden to his politics, quickly filled the vacuum. A year after politics sent him to the curb, providence sent him Alvin Ridley, an eccentric ex-TV repairman who was charged with killing his wife who many in town thought he had kept imprisoned for decades. Ridley was a deeply weird client, and the ensuing saga provided Poston top-shelf story-telling fodder for years.
Writing the story down, however, eluded him. He sat with Ridley for a StoryCorps conversation, and a documentary was made. Forensic Files took a turn, followed by A&E’s American Justice, but a book about his greatest case eluded him. In truth, I thought that making Poston write the story down would be like asking Mark Twain to dance; it’s not his highest and best use.
Turns out, I was wrong. After a couple decades, Poston realized that like telling a story, writing one out was a “way to work things out,” with, admittedly, one big difference. “Well, it’s longer. The bars do close, you know,” he said.
Poston realized what he was going through at the time — his father got sober just as he was becoming a father himself — was part of the larger story that he needed to tell. “It gave me peace to write it,” he said. From this came Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom, which reads more like John Grisham than true crime. (For one, there’s no crime.) Poston’s book is a neurodivergent To Kill a Mockingbird, and like all of his stories, this one is a lot of fun to spend time with. Strongly recommended
.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
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