My Father and Atticus Finch (20 page)

“Shame!” Mr. M. L. repeated, holding the Moxley crystal at arm's length and frowning at it, as if looking for an imperfection in the glass.

Foster, unprepared for how much his father had declined, waited in silence. Outside, the winter sun had almost gone down.

“Light the wick,” Mr. M. L. ordered when he could not find the bell to summon Pete. Although there was electricity in Glenwood, Mr. M. L. sentimentally preferred the oil lamps of his childhood. Foster lit the wick and retrieved the bell.

Mr. M. L., still holding the crystal aloft, admired the whiskey glowing orange-brown in the lamplight. For a moment, he seemed to be trying to remember why he'd brought all this up about shame. Foster wondered, too.

“A shame they try to expiate these days,” his father continued, “by resort to quackery. They ignore men like my friend Carver. They refer to the quackery, and they say, ‘We in the South are
working on it
, but the Negro's not yet
ready
for equal treatment. You've heard 'em say that about the Negro not being ready.”

“Daddy, I'm not sure what all of this—”

“They
say
the Nigra's not ready because they're
ashamed
of not changing how things are
.
”

Foster took a seat across the library from his father and waited.

“Of
course
some of the Negroes aren't ready. I've been inside the Nigra schools here in Crenshaw County. They don't have as many books as are here in my library.”

“That's true.”

“Some of those Negro children, though, would do just as well as the good white students and better than your poorer ones. But nobody says the poor white students aren't ‘ready' and ought to be sent to a worse school with no books.”

“Daddy, I agree all that's so—”

“Everything I'm saying is so. And the decent ones know it's so. That's how come they're ashamed. But they don't want to hear about
any change from one of their own. No sir. Doesn't matter if he's a Hard Shell, a Methodist, a Catholic or a Jew, if he's white and Southern, they can't abide hearing about it. That's how they saw you, son, as one of their own, and that's why you lost that case.”

M
Y FATHER SAID
he didn't argue or try to defend himself that Christmas. Upon thinking about it, I'm not surprised. The thought that a Yankee lawyer—someone who was not “one of their own”—might have done better would have made him feel all the worse for Charles White.

There also was, so I've heard, some tension that Christmas about my mother. As the father of two daughters, both of whom he had sent to college, Mr. M. L. was comfortable around educated women such as my mother. Maybe that Christmas, he put some pressure on my father to propose. Years later, my mother would laugh at “the very idea,” and tell me “Mr. M. L. just wanted a male heir to carry forward the Beck name.”

I do know that during that Christmas holiday, my grandfather gave my father a gold coin that he had inherited from his own father, Joseph Beck, who joined an Alabama regiment when he was fourteen years old and went off to fight for the Confederacy. I'm not sure, though, of the motive for the gift. The family joked that after President Roosevelt's decision to devalue gold, Mr. M. L. didn't think the coin would be worth a damn. I prefer to think the gold coin was meant as an early wedding gift.

F
OR SURE
, Pete Tate and Tump Garner would have said nothing about a wedding that Christmas Day: the subject of white people's
personal lives, like race relations, was way off limits. Tump, though, indirectly said a little something about the Charles White case.

“We appreciative for what you doin', Mr. Foster,” Tump told my father. It was the day after New Year's, the second day of 1939, and the two of them and Old Prince were quail hunting. The men were standing, Daddy told me years later, on furrows at the edge of a ploughed-under cotton field that would lie fallow until spring, beneath a winter-blue, cloudless sky, a light breeze from the west, the temperature in the mid-thirties. Old Prince, frisky at the promise of another hunt, was weaving back and forth into the second-growth piney woods, nose to the ground in search of a covey. My father knew what Tump meant, and always cherished his memory of that moment: the fine weather, the dog, the hunt, the fact that nothing more needed to be said.

   Chapter 34

F
OSTER HAD ASKED
B
ERTHA
to spend a few days of the Christmas and New Year's holiday with him in Glenwood, but she claimed that she was needed at home, even though her brother Lincoln would be there for a while before returning to Fitzgerald, Georgia. And she had not suggested that Foster visit her in Weogufka. Foster was beginning to feel a chill and to suspect that he was going to have to commit to her sometime soon or risk losing her.

That was the risk Frances meant to convey when she told him that Bertha was now seriously thinking about going to the New York World's Fair as soon as school was out, maybe even looking for a job up there. Foster knew Bertha didn't tell Frances much and that Frances would exaggerate to serve a purpose, such as prodding him to propose marriage. But Bertha going to the 1939 New York World's Fair did not sound like a threat—more like exactly the sort of thing Bertha would light on doing. In truth, he was a little hurt that she had not already told him herself. But that changed shortly after New Year's, when he received a letter Bertha had written and mailed while she was still in Weogufka for the holidays.

Sadly, I have never found the letter, but I heard about it. Given the stories she told about the trip and my knowledge of my mother, I'm sure that the letter brimmed with excitement. Mother had been reading all she could find about New York City, which she had wanted to visit since she was a girl, and the theme of the Fair, “Dawn of a New Day,” greatly appealed to her optimistic nature. I do know she cleared the trip with her mother, Mrs. Stewart, who urged her to go, insisting she would “do just fine”; and I do not doubt that she reminded Mother for the umpteenth time that Grandma Rayfield farmed that rocky piece of land with a one-legged Confederate husband and a boy who couldn't reach the plow handles.

S
O THERE IT WAS:
a letter saying she was going to New York as soon as summer vacation began. And she was telling him she was going, not asking about doing it, and in a letter that pretty much said there was no point trying to change her mind. Also, there was a postscript. If she got a job, she might be gone all summer.

“Maybe gone forever,” Frances warned when he showed her the letter.

“I doubt it, Frances.” He expected just such a reaction from his sister. “For one thing, she would never want to be that far from Mrs. Stewart.”

“She says in the letter her mother told her to go on to New York. Mrs. Stewart said she could manage just fine. And for another thing, she may not have a job for the next school year. Bertha's in big trouble with the superintendent.”

“I already know about that, Frances. It's nothing. All she has to do is give his grandson an A. That's not big trouble.”

“She won't give him an A, and it has turned into something. But
it's not just because of the grade. You know why they're really pushing this, don't you?”

He knew: it was a way for some in the better class to pressure him either to stop acting stiff-necked or get out of town.

“But she has to teach, Foster. You know how she is about wanting to teach.”

Foster thought of saying that sometimes people could not do exactly what they wanted to do, but instead had to do what it took to make a living. But he saw his sister's reply coming from a mile away: how he had done what he wanted to do, taking on the Charles White case.

“Of course I know how Bertha is about wanting to teach, Frances. I know her better than you do. But I also know what you are up to. And I can't support myself and Daddy these days, much less her too, so she needs to keep her job. She doesn't need to be taking on the Coffee County school superintendent tonight.” He was referring to a school board meeting called for that evening, just before classes resumed after the Christmas holidays, to resolve the coming year's budget problems—maybe by letting a couple of teachers go.

A
S A BOY
, I remember hearing more than once about the county superintendent's demand that his grandson receive a better grade. Even years later, when we lived in Montgomery, my mother's voice would shake when she spoke of the threat; it was one of the two times—the other was when she visited me in Atlanta several months after my father's death—that I saw tears in her eyes. She resented the superintendent's bullying, she really cared about teaching, and, of course, she wanted to, had to, keep her job.

I have no written record of the meeting in Enterprise. I have to
believe, however, that some parents would have stood up for her that night. I know she was seen as a truly superb teacher. While researching this book—more than half a century after my mother last taught in the Coffee County schools—an elderly Enterprise man with whom I spoke brought up, without prompting, that she was a much respected and beloved teacher. And without question she had that reputation as a teacher at Morningview School throughout my childhood in Montgomery. At Christmas, my mother would receive cards and letters from men and women throughout the South, including one letter from a partner at a big law firm in Washington, D.C., extolling her virtues, claiming she was the best teacher they'd ever had. Years after my mother passed away, I was having lunch at Atlanta's Commerce Club when a prominent businessman asked if I was really Bertha Stewart's son, then praised her teaching in the same superlatives.

But when it comes to my mother's reputation as a teacher, what I remember most of all is her funeral in Montgomery. After my younger daughter played a composition on the piano in the Methodist church, I walked toward the pulpit. The new preacher, who had transferred to our church during my mother's final two years in an Atlanta nursing home, had not known Mother, and so she asked me to say a few words. And I remember thinking,
the minister is a woman
—the first female preacher in that church. My mother would have been so proud!

As I was just about to begin speaking, I saw four elderly guests, three women and one man, come hobbling down the aisle on walkers, looking for an empty pew. I stepped down from the pulpit to meet them, and when I asked how they knew my mother, one of the women, whose name was Mabel, said she had been a student in
Eclectic, where Mother had taught before moving to Enterprise. Of course I asked her to tell the congregation about my mother, and this is what she said, addressing the congregation from the pulpit.

“Miz Beck—I called her Miz Stewart in those days—knew I loved books, loved to just handle books, but we didn't have books on our farm in Eclectic. So she let me begin staying after class to reshelve books in the school library.”

In the church in Montgomery that day of my mother's funeral, you could have heard a pin drop. I know I was transfixed.

“One afternoon,” Mabel said. Her voice caught, and she trembled but continued, “I'd finished reshelving the books and was leaving to go home. Miz Stewart called out, ‘Mabel, what's that book you're takin' with you?' I showed the book. Miz Stewart fussed at me. ‘Mabel, that's not a
big
book. I want you to read
big books
, Mabel.' ”

Mabel again stopped and caught a deep breath. “Miz Stewart took that book from me and laid it aside and took me by the hand to a shelf and said, ‘
This
is the sort of book you should read from now on, Mabel. This is a
big
book.' ”

For a moment, Mabel's nervousness seemed to have returned, but then she plunged ahead. “The book Miz Stewart gave me was
The Forsyte Saga
. It was a big book all right. It took me nearly a month to get through all of it because it was so long, and I had to help at home. But by the time I did get through it, I had come to understand what Miz Stewart was meaning by it being a
big
book. Not just a long book. From that time on, I did as she said and only read big books.” Mabel looked at the congregation, then turned to the first woman to be a minister in the church, and said, “Miz Stewart changed my life.”

I'
M NOT CERTAIN
if my father went to the school board meeting that night. If he did not attend, it would have been to spare my mother the taint of being seen in public with him; she would have had enough on her hands without that. If he did go, he'd have sat in the back, out of sight, where he could have glimpsed the back of her neck as she lowered her head in embarrassment when—as surely must have occurred—one after another, the parents of Coffee County rose to extol my mother's teaching skill.

Whatever was said that night must have sufficed, because my mother did not lose her job in Enterprise—and she never changed that grade.

   Chapter 35

T
HE CONTINUED DELAY
by the Alabama Supreme Court in ruling on my father's appeal on behalf of Charles White gave him hope in the spring of 1939. There was speculation, as the weeks turned into months, that the delay could only mean one thing: the Supreme Court—not the Yankee-appointed Supreme Court in Washington, but the elected Alabama Supreme Court—was taking the appeal seriously.

Was my father's cautious optimism justified? After reading the transcript more than once and thinking about what he said and didn't say, I have come to regard
State of Alabama v. Charles White, Alias
as a riddle—like one of those Russian dolls that, as each outer shell is removed, reveals a another figure nesting inside. There could only have been a rape if intercourse was forced, and Elizabeth Liger showed no signs of bruises or blood; but the law also recognized use of “constructive” force. There could only have been a rape if there was penetration, and she was intact; but any unconsented penetration could amount to rape. Was Elizabeth Liger's mentality really that of a twelve-year-old, or, as my father repeatedly insisted, was that an excuse the State came up with so that whatever happened must have
been done without her lawful consent? And what did happen? A clue may reside in the testimony about the salve.