Baltimore's new top prosecutor speaks in a lilting drawl, with inflections as light as the cotton her family raised in the Mississippi Delta. To hear Pat Jessamy's voice is to think of Southern charm and an easygoing manner.
"Don't let that fool you," says Haven H. Kodeck, head of the economic crimes unit of the Baltimore state's attorney's office. "It may be a veneer, but underneath she can be a bulldog. You don't push her around."
Indeed, Mr. Kodeck and others who work with 46-year-old Patricia C. Jessamy say she's decisive and tough, with a low tolerance for cop-outs or disarray. These are traits that come from growing up poor and black in 1960s Mississippi, from going to court as a teen-ager after being refused service at the hometown lunch counter.
Traits that come from seeing black students gunned down by the state highway patrol during her senior year at Jackson State University.
"It's painful to remember," Mrs. Jessamy said yesterday, after Baltimore's Circuit Court judges voted unanimously to make her Baltimore's first female state's attorney. "But we should be strengthened by negative things, and not demeaned."
Mrs. Jessamy was the early favorite and, in the end, the overwhelming choice to replace her boss, Baltimore State's Attorney Stuart O. Simms, who is resigning at the end of today to become secretary of the state Department of Juvenile Justice. The job is hers until the 1998 election.
"No one could say anything negative about her," said Joseph H.H. Kaplan, administrative judge for the city Circuit Court. "She's extremely qualified. She has done a very fine job over the past seven years in running the office and she's been very cooperative with the bench."
Mrs. Jessamy won the position over Martin O'Malley, a city councilman who has made public safety his cause, and William A. Swisher, who touted his experience as state's attorney from 1974 to 1982.
Her selection surprised virtually no one; traditionally, when a city state's attorney has resigned, the job has been filled by the chief deputy. What's more, her candidacy was endorsed by Mr. Simms, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and a bevy of influential politicians and community leaders.
She was born Patricia Coats, the seventh of eight children raised on a "small" farm of a couple hundred acres in Hollandale, Miss., a town of little more than 3,000. Her family raised cotton, soybeans and vegetables. In the 11th grade, she was refused service at a cafe and a lunch counter frequented by whites, leading her parents and four other families to file a suit that forced the businesses to comply with public accommodations laws.
In the spring of 1970, as the nation was torn by civil rights and anti-war protests, she heard shots ring outside a Jackson State women's dormitory. She ran to the dorm, but was cut off by a police line -- two students were dead and nine wounded after a confrontation with shotgun-wielding police.
"It was a very devastating experience, very demoralizing for the entire Jackson State community," she said. "The kinds of things that were happening in Mississippi in that time made you want to do something about changing the condition for African-Americans. When the state militia thinks they can just shoot innocent people when there was no real threat to them, that says a lot about the mentality of state government at that time."
She'd already decided to go to law school, and after getting her law degree from the University of Mississippi in 1974 she handled employment discrimination and voting rights cases.
She left Mississippi when her husband, Howard Jessamy, took a job as a hospital administrator in Michigan. She got her first taste of prosecuting crime, joining the Genesee County prosecutor's office in Flint, Mich. After a year there, she moved to Kansas City, Mo., where she was a staff attorney in the Social Security Administration's local appeals office.
When her husband got a job as president of the District of Columbia Hospital Association, she went job hunting in Maryland and back to prosecuting crime. The job appealed to her because it was a good way for a lawyer to contribute to society -- by protecting the community from criminals.
In Baltimore, she spent two and a half years in the economic crimes unit, including 16 months as head of the unit, and earned a reputation as one of the office's more talented trial lawyers.
In 1987, Mr. Schmoke, then the state's attorney, was elected mayor. Mr. Simms was appointed state's attorney, and he named Mrs. Jessamy as one of his two deputies.
Mr. Simms said he chose her because he was determined to conduct himself in a "no-nonsense fashion," and he knew she fit that mold.
As deputy, Mrs. Jessamy was in charge of the office's budget and personnel matters affecting 146 lawyers and 109 support workers. She supervised the divisions that specialize in investigating and prosecuting sexual offenses, narcotics cases and economic crimes.
When she contemplates her new role as the city's top law enforcement official, and of the social conditions that allow crime to flourish, she thinks back to her youth.
"I consider myself a Southern person. . . . " added Mrs. Jessamy, a collector of African-American art and a trustee for the Walters Art Gallery. "I want to always be assumed to be honest, fair and down-to-earth, a regular person without any pretense."
But Mrs. Jessamy is quick to add that she could never move back to rural Mississippi.
"I like the city, the cultural activities, the hustle and bustle," she said. "I think it's a beautiful place to live, and the only taint on it is crime. If we can do something about that, we will have given ourselves the greatest gift of all."