Cook Convention Center, 2nd floor, East Hall

Large, involuntary gatherings are rare in adult life, but we were summoned and we have come.

The exhibition hall is football field-huge and utterly charmless: dingy beige walls and gray floors, most everything made of concrete, old and tacky.  Large letters above doors announce RESTROOMS and EXIT.  It’s the sort of room you can imagine being used as a cafeteria in a prison -- the definitive large, involuntary adult gathering. 

The ceiling is the same neutral color as the walls.  Here and there a ceiling tile is missing or partially out of place like a door left ajar by someone expecting to return through it.  Two fire alarms are stuck on the wall in the front.  The doors look too tiny and few to allow a quick, mass exit from the enormous room but there doesn’t appear to be anything flammable here except what people are wearing and what they carry, including the white slips of paper which summoned each to this gathering.  

Hard plastic chairs, 4200 of them we are later told, are arranged in neat lines all the way to the back, row after row like cornstalks in a vast field.  At noon, still half an hour early, people are steadily filing in.   Around the room there is pleasant chatting between strangers.  Most seem in good spirits, like school children gathered in some rarely-used basement for a storm drill.  Here and there an impromptu reunion is taking place. One couple enters hand in hand, a few are accompanied by an acquaintance, but the vast majority arrive alone.  Some have a book or newspaper with them to pass the time, others interact with personal devices or just sit and look around.  

A few choose a seat right next to another person, but most leave an empty chair in between – the comfortable social distance for such occasions when seating is open and plentiful.  At 12:25, there are still uninterrupted lines of people entering.  As the room fills, the etiquette of personal space shifts and new arrivals start sitting in the first unoccupied seat they find.  

Inside it is chilly, the feel of a seldom-used room usually closed off this time of year so it doesn’t have to be heated.  There are no windows, no plants, no suggestion of a natural world outside the heavy walls.  The crowd is demographically diverse, with more women than men, more older than younger, more African-American than white, more fat than thin, a fair cross-section of the city with one exception: there doesn’t appear to be a single child in the entire crowd: no babies in tow, no restless toddlers or bored  teenagers. 

Stragglers are still arriving at 12:40, ten minutes past the scheduled start time, but the event begins with a deputy sheriff quickly reading the required but pointless introduction, “Hear ye, hear ye..  All persons having business before this Court draw near, give attention, and you shall be heard.”  

What’s being exhibited today in this exhibition hall is civic duty.  The purpose of this gathering of some 3800 is jury qualification and scheduling.  Approximately 65,000 citizens of Shelby County, Tennessee are summoned each year, about half of whom will find themselves in jury pools.  A city with a lot of crime needs a lot of jurists, though not all will serve in criminal cases.  

The process is surprisingly efficient and a fast moving line is soon exiting the room.  Not even a fire emergency, I thought, could empty the room so quickly.