My Father and Atticus Finch (16 page)

“Like I've been telling you all along, I don't want to live that bad.”

“Charles! The judge will set your execution sometime next month.”

“I'm not gonna tell that judge I did what I never did.”

“I believe you.”

“They'll stay my execution if you appeal,” Charles said, always the expert on criminal law procedure.

“I will appeal.”

“I might ask for mercy just to put that white judge to his conscience.” Charles White chuckled at the thought.

“Please do that! Put him to his conscience.”

I
T WAS ALMOST
ten thirty when Foster finally returned to his hotel, a second free night having been arranged by Judge Parks. He had to wake the unhappy little clerk, who seemed pleased to report that food was not available—not in the dining room, not through room service at such a late hour. But when Foster arrived upstairs, he found a fine supper of turnip greens, sweet potatoes, ham hock, hoecake, and blackberry cobbler in dishes laid out on his bed, courtesy, he knew, of the Negro kitchen workers and the maid. There was more than he could finish, and he wished he could have shared it with Charles White.

According to the
Montgomery Advertiser,
however, Charles White had already left Troy, taken later that same evening from the colored cell in Troy back to Kilby prison—once again “for safekeeping”—to be returned the following day to face Judge Parks at the sentencing.

T
HE MID
-J
ULY HEAT
on the following afternoon squatted low over the town of Troy, sparing no one, black or white. The newly tarred portions of streets in the business district were scorching and sticky
to the touch; the unpaved, dusty brown alleys in the colored section were as hot as the sand on the Gulf of Mexico. Those who could do so remained indoors or sat under a tree; those who had to move moved slowly. Speech, when necessary, was short and sluggish, sentences were begun but left unfinished. Words ending in consonants were shortened—to eatin', fussin', fightin'. Longer words were heaved out, the accent on the first syllable—
in
-surance,
um
-brella—the speaker seemingly exhausted by the end of the word.

A court clerk had posted a note in the courthouse lobby that the sentencing of Charles White, Alias, would be at 2:30 p.m., a setting that allowed town and rural residents alike to have their big noon dinners and still get to court on time. But most had already had enough of Charles White. The courtroom was less than a quarter full when Charles, seeming to Foster to have aged overnight, hobbled in, the heavy black chains he was forced to wear, now that the jury had rendered its verdict, clanking with each step.

Judge Parks was probably not surprised that so few had come to watch. He must have known the community was confident of what he would do. With Charles White and his lawyer still standing, Judge Parks asked the defendant if he had “anything to say why the sentence of the law should not now be pronounced upon you?” The transcript recorded that Charles White “says nothing,” but the
Messenger
reported—accurately, from what I remember being told—that he spoke up as follows.

“I wish to thank the court for its protection during the trial. I am a stranger here but believe I had a fair trial. I deny any guilt in connection with the crime, and ask for the mercy of the court.”

Judge Parks glared at Foster. If Charles White wanted mercy, he should have admitted the crime and begged for forgiveness. That was
how a plea for mercy was done. And what was meant by this denying any guilt “in connection with” the crime? Was he not only denying he had committed any crime, but also insinuating that the crime was Elizabeth Liger's testimony under oath? Judge Parks looked at his previously prepared notes for a moment before quickly saying, according to both the transcript and the
Messenger,
“It is the sentence of this court, founded on the jury verdict fixing your punishment at death, that you shall be put to death by electricity by causing to pass through your body a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death and the application and continuance of said current through your body until you are dead. It is further ordered that the date of your execution be, and is hereby set, for Monday, the fifteenth day of August, 1938, one month from today.”

Judge Parks appeared to ignore the announcement that there would be an appeal, but he must have heard what was said because, as he stood up to leave, he ruled, “Questions of law having arisen in this case for the decision of the Supreme Court of Alabama, and on motion of the defendant, it is considered, ordered, and adjudged by the court that the sentence in this case be, and hereby is, suspended, pending the defendant's appeal to the said Supreme Court of Alabama.”

“All rise,” called out the assistant clerk, but Judge Parks had already left his courtroom.

   Chapter 28

L
OSS
, the passed-down memory of the Lost Cause, shaped the spirit of the white South far into the twentieth century. As the years went by, the principal reason for the Civil War—to preserve slavery—gradually became an
unacceptable
reason for the War, and the loss of such a war all the more unacceptable. An
acceptable
reason for the War and the loss had to be found. Rebellion against an economic tyranny, ruthlessly imposed through punitive tariffs, became that reason. Loss of such a War by men who were gallant but vastly outnumbered—the loss by an agrarian culture to a predatory industrial juggernaut—became an acceptable kind of loss. Among the better class, the idealized model for acceptance of loss was Robert E. Lee's dignified surrender at Appomattox. As for the rough element, most of them born losers and destined to remain losers throughout their comparatively short and violent lives, loss in this life was natural, and because it was unavoidable, it had to be accepted.

Foster Beck had lost. White men who would have taken the law into their own hands on the night of the crime (had not Charles White been rushed to Kilby), who would have imposed their own
false justice on the morning of the trial (but for the presence of the Highway Patrol), were now prepared to let Foster Beck be, provided he was not stiff-necked and accepted his loss. After the Scottsboro decision, someone had to represent Charles White; otherwise, the authorities would have had to turn him loose. If Foster Beck would not be admired for taking on the case when he could have gotten out of it, both the better class and the rough element would tolerate him now because he had lost. Charles White, Alias, would soon be electrocuted, and that would be the end of the matter.

Besides, there were diversions as the summer of 1938 turned to fall, beginning with football. All of white Enterprise—save only the seriously bedridden—would be at the high school's home games. Pike County Solicitor E. C. Orme, so I recall hearing, drove over from Troy to attend one of those games and came over to the Enterprise side at the half to shake hands with Foster, “to meet Miss Bertha,” and to say, loudly, what a good fight Foster had put up, how he was going to make a good lawyer someday. Bertha beamed with pleasure and pride at the compliments, even though Foster said, as soon as E. C. left to shake other hands, that E. C. probably only said all that because he was thinking of running for lieutenant governor and had come to Enterprise to campaign.

Fall in south Alabama was also the time for syrup-making, a joyous annual ritual as much about socializing as about turning out buckets of fresh ribbon cane syrup. The only uncertainty was exactly when it would occur: not too early, so as to allow the cane pulp time to sweeten, but not too late: it had to be before the first killing frost. Farmers were put on the watch for a sign from the weather, town elders were consulted, and as expectations and excitement built, a weekend, usually in October, was selected. As a boy, I attended a syrup making with my father at a farm somewhere near Glenwood,
and I am sure my parents went to them when they lived in Enterprise. My father insisted on going to one in the fall of 1938; it was supposed to have been a step toward normalcy in the community after the Charles White trial.

“W
E HAD SYRUP MAKINGS
in Weogufka, just like this one in Enterprise,” Bertha said to Foster. “Sometimes, our Weogufka syrup would go to sugar and we would have rock candy at Christmas time.”

They were standing together at the mill, beneath the changing fall leaves of oak and hickory trees, in the swept dirt yard of a farmhouse a mile outside of Enterprise. Six-foot-long sugar cane stalks, stripped of their leaves with machete-like knives while standing in the field, had been stacked on a mule-drawn wagon and hauled to the mill site, where local men fed them into a big stone grinder. A patient mule walked round and round while hitched to a pole connected to heavy stone rollers. The slowly revolving stones, powered by the mule, crushed and squeezed out the cane juice that was then filtered through a burlap cloth and collected in a big cooking pan that rested on a frame made from railroad irons. Beneath the iron frame was a watched hickory fire that kept the juice just short of a low boil. An apprentice helper—from time immemorial, one of the mill owner's grandsons—stood at the ready beside the cooking pan, dipping a boat paddle into the swirl, slowly moving the thickening cane juice around a series of left–right “dividers” that channeled it on its serpentine path back and forth across the pan, until it was cooked down into a crimson-black syrup and declared by the syrup master to be ready to be poured off into shiny silver-colored buckets and offered for sale.

“Bertha,” Foster teased, examining a maroon-striped ribbon
cane stalk, “what you were cooking in north Alabama was not ribbon cane but sorghum, something we feed to hogs in south Alabama.”

The two of them were standing off by themselves, breathing in the rich, almost too sweet aroma of the boiling cane juice—Bertha smiling, nodding, waving to friends and neighbors, sometimes being ignored in return, yet, ever the optimist, interpreting any return courtesies as a sign of forgiveness, encouraging Foster to believe that maybe he would not be resented much longer over the Charles White case; Foster, not particularly sociable by nature, judgmental of hypocrisy, frowning at the slights to Bertha, yet feigning optimism, if only not to disappoint her, whenever a man tipped his hat to her or a wife returned her smile. If Bertha would again be treated as a respected and beloved member of the community, the teacher everyone wanted for their children, then for him, the worst would have come to an end.

It was not to be. Word got around that fall that, far from accepting his loss, Foster Beck was serious about appealing, that the announcement in open court was not just for show. The thaw that Bertha imagined and that Foster hoped for became a chill. It was one thing for Foster Beck to defend a black man convicted for raping a white girl, even if he did sort of volunteer; but then to refuse to accept his loss and appeal on a lot of lawyer technicalities, that was pushing the limits of what some could tolerate.

N
OTHING WAS WRITTEN DOWN
and not much even had to be said out loud, but there was an “understanding” about race among whites in south Alabama, not only in 1938 but well into the 1950s and early 1960s when I was growing up in Montgomery. The understanding had come about gradually in the years following Reconstruction,
the product of a compromise put into place by the better class of whites. They knew there had to be some law and order and a new image of the South if the region was to ever recover and begin to achieve prosperity, but they also recognized that the rough white element needed to let off some of the steam from time to time, else there was no telling what could happen; they might even turn on the better class. For its part, the rough element believed that periodic bull whippings, castrations, and lynchings were good ways to keep blacks in their place; but the rough element also had to make a living, and for that they had to depend on the better class. The understanding, then, came down to this: the better class would look the other way during an occasional beating or castration, even a lynching. For its part, the rough element would not go on a violent tear every damn time it felt provoked by some black person.

Foster Beck's stiff-necked insistence on appealing the verdict put the understanding to the test. In the past, the white troublemakers had been Jews or Catholics from up North who soon went back to where they came from, but this man was white, raised Methodist, and a Southerner, and he had no intention of ever leaving south Alabama. That didn't mean they could not make him leave, but the way to accomplish it had to be calibrated. This was not some redneck whose disappearance would go unnoticed, but the son of a fairly well-known, if somewhat controversial, south Alabama businessman. Violence against such a person—a lawyer to boot—could be picked up by one of the liberal papers, the
Anniston
Star
or the
Atlanta
Constitution,
and eventually noticed by the Yankee press, and that could tarnish the fragile new image of a progressive Alabama. The better class let it be known to the rough element that they would handle Foster Beck by shunning him, and at first, that assurance seems to have been enough.

   Chapter 29

I
DISTINCTLY REMEMBER
pressing my father to tell me about the reactions in Enterprise to his taking on the defense of Charles White. He acknowledged that there were a few incidents. But he also told me that there were a number of fine white people in Enterprise who understood, if they did not all openly support, what he had done, and that between those relatively progressive men and women and the violent haters, there were many gradations, some defensible or at least respectable for the times, others not. Sadly, some of the sympathetic white citizens could not always forcefully and publicly condemn the violent ones—not because they endorsed violence but out of fear of retaliation against themselves or their families.