A Fiction Prose Reflection, Book XI of XI

byChrisWhite – 2025

On the Series:
This series weaves together the eleven cardinal virtues: Hope, Charity, Prudence, Kindness, Faith, Love, Temperance, Fortitude, Wisdom, Patience, and Justice, through a synthesis of literary prose and poetry. Each reflection reaches into the marrow of human experience, drawing on both original verse and timeless lines from poets who gave voice to the sacred. The eleventh and final installment turns to Justice. Justice as a virtue, asks for writing that can hold its weight. It unfolds slowly with balance and solemnity, grounded in reason, fairness, and moral deliberation.

His name is Jesse Ray Corley, and he rose from the kind of hurt most men don’t crawl out of. Born into a red-clay ruin just off Skinner Flat in Manchester, in a brick box that could hold heat but not hope, Jesse came up the way rust creeps through iron—quiet, corroding, cruel.

His childhood was the sound of spoons scraping Pyrex not for soup but for survival. Sirens sang him to sleep, and the only light in the house flickered from the cop car outside. His daddy once robbed a man with a laugh so mean it stuck to the boy’s ribs, and his mama wore her lies like perfume—sickly sweet, always evaporating. She stole a winter coat from the church lost-and-found and told herself God understood.

By thirteen, Jesse’s hands knew the feel of a switchblade better than a book. By sixteen, he could pick a lock in the dark and vanish like a prayer gone unanswered. By eighteen he had a record long enough to fold in three sections. And by twenty, they locked him up in a place where names weren’t said so much as stamped—loud, hard, permanent.

It was there, behind the steel and silence, that something slow and strange took hold. Not grace. Not yet. But maybe the whisper of it.

Books found him first. The cheap ones. Then the harder ones. Scripture. Plato. Morrison. Baldwin. Voices too sharp to be forgotten, voices that carved light through the cement of his thinking. He read until the words were a rhythm, a prayer, a cry. And in the cold mornings, before the noise came back, he would kneel on the cement and speak into the stillness:

“Whoever You are—

Whatever made me—

Thank You for staying.”

“O Justice—

daughter of silence and flame, you ascend not

on the wings of thunder

but with the unhurried gait of consequence.”

— Chris White, “Ode to the Virtue of Justice”

They let him out at thirty-eight. No parade. No mama waiting with a clean shirt. Just the wind off the plateau and a voucher for work boots. He took a job sweeping the courthouse steps in Tullahoma. He swept like a man keeping vigil. Every day, the same motion, the same grit. And still, he nodded to every man in a suit who didn’t see him.

Until one day he did more than nod. He listened.

To the bailiff with anger tucked behind his grin.

To the clerk who trembled at slamming doors.

To the children in handcuffs, blinking at fluorescent light.

He remembered that look. Not rage. Not shame. Just the stunned emptiness of a child who’s never once seen fairness play out in front of them.

So Jesse started to speak. Just a few words at a time. Not to fix them. Not to save.

To name what hadn’t yet been named.

“You ain’t the worst thing you ever did.”

“Don’t let how they look at you become how you look at yourself.”

“Justice don’t start with law. It starts with someone staying after you tell them the truth.”

Some kids listened. Most didn’t. Jesse stayed anyway.

One morning, a judge arrived early and caught him talking to two boys on skateboards, their boards stacked between them like firewood. The Judge didn’t interrupt. He listened. And Jesse told a story: about a cell, about a mother’s lie that became his own truth, about how silence can break a man—but sometimes, it can build one too.

He handed those boys copies of Letters from a Birmingham Jail, and years later, one of them would stand at a city council meeting, facing down a law meant to keep people quiet, and say:

A man on the courthouse steps taught me that real justice waits and speaks. Even when nobody listens.

“They built altars to you

but forgot your face—

carved you blind and naked and robed in stone,

as if symmetry alone could suffice.”

— Chris White

Jesse walks now. He walks everywhere. From courthouse to classroom, from shelter to sanctuary. Even to the church that once locked its doors on him—now asking him to speak from the pulpit, like resurrection had always been part of the plan.

He’s not a pastor. He’s not a politician. He’s a man who made peace with his shadow. Who knows that justice isn’t the robe or the gavel—it’s the trembling boy you don’t walk past. The truth you speak even if your voice cracks. The hand you don’t pull away when they reach for it, even after all they’ve done.

You won’t find him in headlines. But when sirens scream through the night and cops roll hot into the wrong neighborhood, Jesse’s already there—standing between the badge and the child. He doesn’t yell. He just stands.

He’s the one who tells the preacher to sit down and listen for once. The one who tells the teacher that a failing grade isn’t a verdict, it’s a flare for help. The one who tells the mayor over burned coffee:

“Don’t talk about justice unless you’ve sat with the ones who never got it.”

“Justice, you are no storm god,

no angel of vengeance—

but the still pivot

upon which history turns…”

— Chris White

He wears no cross. No collar. Just old jeans and a worn-out coat, and the long quiet history of a man who hurt too many and chose to live for healing.

This is the Virtue of Justice.

Not thunder.

Not vengeance.

But the still pivot the world turns on, if we let it.

The slow, hard work of righting what we broke.

And every time Jesse Ray Corley kneels beside some boy who’s sure he’s past saving and doesn’t flinch when the boy spits back—

The world tilts.

Not much. Just enough.

Enough for hope to get in.

Enough to believe again.