Judge Not...

Judge Not... is a family saga about the Crapper family, most specifically focused on Judge Bat Crapper’s life and two important cases he has had to deal with in his career. Beginning with his mother, Ophelia, in 1895, the story unfolds with the circumstances that brought the judge’s parents together, the four children their union produced, and her death in 1960, when she is eighty. Wyatt Crapper, Bat’s father, is born in 1865 and dies in 1960 from a broken heart after having lost Ophelia. His death is bookended in the final and ninth chapter, although there is an epilogue that ties up unresolved issues concerning Bat’s wife and his housekeeper’s separate lives.

Bat is the baby brother to three older sisters. Having been born in 1896, Sugar is the oldest. Because she wants to become a doctor she volunteers to go to France as a nurse in 1915, where she is raped by five men. Instead of being cowed by the violence, it only increases her determination to succeed. With Ophelia and her grandfather’s help she finally is accepted into medical school. Years later, she meets Agnes Anchovy, another victim of male violence, and they become a life-long couple.

Honey is Bat’s second sister. With Bat off to Boston and law school, she will assume the responsibility of her father’s orange farm. Although she escapes sexual violence in her life, she and a male classmate are instrumental in saving Bat from being molested by the local priest.

The third sister is Candy. Early on she wants to become an artist and with grandiose intentions she decides to paint a mural on her father’s barn. The other growers in the valley notice, and ask that she paint their barns, too. One hires her with evil intentions and it is only through Wyatt’s efforts that she is saved. Although he saved his daughter, Wyatt is haunted by the memory of Velma, a woman whom he was unable to save in the years before he met Ophelia. Candy’s craft leads her to Paris, where she becomes a successful advertising designer. She will bear two sons, the results of rape. The first is with a Frenchman in the 1930s, and the second occurs in the 1940s with a German officer.

Daisy Ohara becomes Bat’s wife in the 1950s. Although he had forgotten her, she remembers that he tried the rape case she brought against an influential film producer in 1945. Merely by accident, they later meet in the fishing town of Burano, on an island in the Venetian lagoon.

Tina Tonsil’s story revolves around the second trial which Bat conducts. A famous black comedian is accused of rape, and finds his career destroyed because he was not careful when he should have been.