My Father and Atticus Finch (21 page)

Charles White was a healer, so he likely would have carried salves and potions in his medicine bag. Did Southern white women use salves, not just medicinally but for other purposes, in private? Elizabeth Liger could have asked Charles White, after he told her fortune, to give her a little of the salve in his medicine bag, show her how to use it. I doubt he would have applied it to her private parts—he swore he didn't. But even applying it herself, especially in his presence, could later have given her guilty second thoughts, leading her to claim she had been raped. And a Troy jury in 1938 might not have stood for a black man touching a white woman that way or teaching her how to touch herself. Charles White had to be punished for doing something unspeakable, something that could not be tolerated.

Would my father have been able to convince a unanimous jury to acquit if the two black men who were called had been impanelled? I doubt it. Such men in those days would have known they could be bull-whipped or worse if they didn't go along.

Would the verdict have been different if women had been allowed to serve—would women have better understood the temptations of a salve? I will never know, although I remember an intriguing comment my father once volunteered, when we were talking about the case, almost as an apology for losing the trial. He told me, in a tone of voice I remember as embarrassed, that Alabama women were not allowed to serve on felony case juries in 1938. Thinking back on it, I wonder if he thought that some women on the jury might have been more understanding about the salve?

I
N MY FORTY-FOUR
years as a lawyer, I have never known anyone who more thoroughly enjoyed the practice of law than my father. I think it was for him a match of the intellectual, the practical, and the compassionate. But I do not think that my father's law practice was thriving in 1939, despite the fact that he had kept the Alabama Supreme Court at bay for so long. I gather he did do a little criminal law work—and, ironically, for some of the rough white element, who still didn't like him but called on him anyway because he was good. Also, he gave them time to pay. And he still had his loyal black clients. But neither the poor whites nor the black clients had much cash money to spare; they only had what little was left in ribbon cane syrup from the syrup making, or in salt pork from the hog killing, or what they had put up from their gardens; and I remember my father saying he already had plenty of all that from previous cases he had taken. Yet he would not turn down his clients' meager offerings, because he wouldn't offend their pride—that was another thing he told me more than once when I was a boy:
never offend another man's pride.

As for the folks who could pay, some of them—for, as Mr. M. L. always said, the white South was not of one mind about race—asked him to draw up a contract, close a real estate sale, or write a will. But this work was spotty and low-paying.

Besides worrying about making a living, my father also worried, in the last days of April 1939, that Charles White was going to take his own life if the Alabama Supreme Court didn't hurry up. But if my father made another trip to Kilby prison to encourage Charles to hang on, I have no record of it. I imagine him instead staying put in
Enterprise, living as frugally as possible, going to his office every day in hopes someone would crack the screen door and ask him a question he could charge a decent amount to answer; and when no clients came, reading his favorite book,
Plutarch's Lives
, which had been given to him by my mother, and other good books borrowed from the school library.

I do know that when he found a thought he especially admired in those days, he recorded it in his “Common Place Book”—a little notebook, now in my possession, that he had been keeping since college. Among the dozens of quotations by such authors as Plato, Aristotle, and John Stuart Mill is the following, the very first entry, reproduced without attribution. “Unless superior gifts are linked with a strong sense of social obligation, their possession is a menace rather than a blessing to society.”

In lighter moods, my father might have returned to the heroic wild animal stories by Ernest Thompson Seton that he had read as a child, and when he tired of them, to the
Saturday Evening Post
, which he read cover to cover—he told me it cost only a nickel back then. And always, since much of the news focused on Europe, he would have been glad to get the
Atlanta Constitution
, even if it arrived two days late.

When his one good eye got too tired to read any more, he would have gone fishing alone, preferring his own society to the poor company willing to fish with him. The walk to the creek would have refreshed him, even if the bream, his favorites, were not biting. The trees that had been dark gray all winter must have been putting out tiny new light green leaves, as they did every April; and although it would have been a few more days before his favorite magnolias had reached their peak, he could have admired, in the meantime,
the sprays of dancing white dogwood flowers suspended in the cool April air, and the sudden explosions of red and pink Pride of Mobile azaleas ornamenting the front yards of white and black Enterprise alike.

On the last day of April 1939, he received the envelope that changed forever his views about the law.

   Chapter 36

B
ACK BEFORE THE
I
NTERNET
, whenever I received an opinion in the mail from a higher court, I would tear open the envelope and turn first to the end to see how it came out. If my father did the same, he would have read these words from
State of Alabama v. Charles White, Alias
: “Affirmed, all justices concur.”

But, of course, affirmed;
unanimously
affirmed. Why had he allowed himself to dream of any other result—because he believed the majesty of the law extended to a colored man? For a minute or two, he had no appetite for reading even one more word of the opinion, only numbness and dread. Because he knew, without reading more, that the Alabama Supreme Court would refer only to the facts it liked, would use all the words in its arsenal to make the outcome seem reasonable and fair, even though it could never be reasonable or fair. When finally he gave in and read the rest of it, the numbness went away, to be replaced by anger.

The first sentences jolted him: “The Appellant was convicted of the offense of forcibly ravishing Elizabeth Liger, a white woman . . . the Appellant is of the negro race . . .”

Why mention their races like that, at the beginning of the opinion? It struck him as a taunt. There had been no claim that the trial was unfair due to racial prejudice. To be sure, he had thought about making such a claim when the only Negroes called for jury duty were struck, but he decided that word around town of such a pre-trial motion would only inflame the Troy community, especially the white men who eventually would be the ones serving on the jury. Besides, the Scottsboro case didn't require Negroes on the jury, only that they be called for possible service. As for the trial itself, Judge Parks had run it tightly, keeping a firm hand on the spectators, holding a full squadron of the Highway Patrol at the ready.

The opinion continued: Charles White “allured” Elizabeth Liger to the home of Mary Etta Gray, “also of the negro race,” where he “forcibly ravished her.” There was nothing about the intact hymen, not one word about the absence of blood or bruises. The doctors who described Elizabeth Liger as having the mental development of a child were “competent” to give that opinion. The testimony about Elizabeth's obsession with fortune-tellers was permissible to show “the lure held out” by the defendant fortune-teller and his “accomplice,” Mary Etta, “to inveigle the victim into the defendant's net.” As for whether Judge Parks should have allowed him to ask, at the end of his cross-examination, “Miss Elizabeth, I will ask you again if this isn't a fact, that this negro was polite and courteous to you all the time that you were there?” the Supreme Court of Alabama held, “The question indicates on its face that it is a mere repetition,” and calls for “a conclusion which it was the province of the jury to draw.”

“T
HEY WANTED IT
to come out this way, so they found ways to justify it,” Bertha said, trying to console Foster. She had come straight to his office after teaching school, as the word spread around Enterprise of the Supreme Court's decision. “That's how the law works, isn't it? It works because even if we hate the result, we go along with it because it has been ‘explained' to us, like we are children, and we don't know how to fight anymore.”

He had no answer for that. “I don't know how to fight anymore,” he said, drained of emotion. “And I feel as if I have been used. But I'm still writing the governor to ask for clemency. It probably won't do any good, but it's all I have left. The Supreme Court fixed his execution for June 9.”

“I'll be in New York by then. Please call me or write something.”

R
EGRETTABLY
, I
DON'T
have a copy of any of the letters my mother wrote to my father about the New York World's Fair, but I know she wrote to him and I heard a lot about her visit.

Not surprisingly, Mother spent an entire afternoon not at the Fair but at the New York Public Library, believing she might never again have a chance to “feast on so many books.” As for the Fair, she was not as interested in the Food Zone as in the Chrysler exhibit, where she watched a Plymouth being assembled in a theater with this new invention—specially cooled air, something we laughed about years later in Montgomery after the installation of our new window unit air conditioner. And there was a written account I so wish I could find—of how Mother, having eaten all the sandwiches and cookies she had packed in Alabama, finally treated herself to a
meal in the big city—at an automat. My father, always one to avoid expensive places to eat, would have been keen for the fact that you could put a nickel in a slot and get a tasty pot pie, rice pudding, or chocolate cake. Indeed, years later, when we took a family trip in our green Nash automobile, once more eating sandwiches packed in Montgomery all the way to New York, our first meal “on the town” was at an automat.

I know my mother wrote in June 1939 to encourage my father, who was despondent after the decision by the Alabama Supreme Court, that there would someday be a brighter future. The motto of the New York World's Fair, she reminded him more than once, was “Dawn of a New Day.”

O
NE OF
B
ERTHA'S
June letters arrived in Enterprise on the morning of June 9, but Foster was not at his office to receive it, and when he returned late that afternoon, it was not the first thing he read. June 9 was the date set for the execution of Charles White, following the governor's denial of clemency, and the event was covered by the press. So the first thing he read was the newspaper.

Beneath the headline, “4 Die In Second Largest Mass Execution At Kilby,” the
Montgomery Advertiser
reported that three of the negro convicts broke down, “admitting their crimes to L. C. Champney, negro chaplain.” The article turned to the fourth man.

“Charles White, Alias, negro ‘fortune teller' and conceded habitual criminal, came in to the death chamber confident and assured at 12:20. He protested that the electrode was fastened to his head too tightly, but attendants said his head was large and it was necessarily a ‘tight fit.' ”

Foster stopped, removed his glasses, and wiped his eyes. It made
him sad to think of Charles having to put up with the final insult of a tight electrode, but he wanted to hug him for protesting the fit. The newspaper article continued:

“When asked, ‘Do you realize you are about to die?' White quipped, ‘Do I realize it!' and grinned. He then launched into a dramatic speech addressed to ‘The Honorable Warden and to All Spectators.' He wound up with an assertion that he was ‘Glad to go to Jesus an innocent man.' He was pronounced dead at 12:32 a.m.”

Foster put the newspaper aside and sat at the rolltop desk his father had lent him and stared out his new window for a long time, until dusk, until the creamy white magnolia blossoms in front of the funeral home across the street were only faint outlines, pale, floating apparitions in the twilight. Then, getting up to leave the office, he noticed Bertha's unopened letter. It was getting dark in Enterprise, and Foster, with his poor eyesight, had to light the wick of his office lamp to make out what she wrote, about the wonders of the New York World's Fair and the Dawn of a New Day.

   Epilogue

F
OSTER DID ASK
B
ERTHA
if she would come back, and she returned to Enterprise from New York in the summer of 1939. After a long engagement—his idea—they married in 1941, in a civil ceremony with Frances as matron of honor. Both were surprised to learn, in 1942, that Bertha was pregnant, not something they had planned, given their precarious financial condition. The birth in early February of the following year was very difficult; Bertha came close to dying. (I remember her telling me that the Enterprise physician scolded her that she had no business becoming a mother at her age). The child, Joseph Madison, named for my father's double first cousin, Dr. Joseph Moxley, and, of course, for Mr. M. L., spent his first three weeks in the hospital nursery, happily watched over and entertained by female nurses and attendants, black and white, until Bertha was healthy enough to take him home.

T
HANKS TO A LETTER
from my father to Mr. Yarbrough, his law partner, forwarded to me by an Enterprise lawyer, I know a little about his work in the years immediately after the Charles White
case. With his law practice continuing to decline, he took a job with the War Department—the predecessor of the Department of Defense—as a closing attorney, and, later, as a project manager, for the Camp Rucker Military Project in Enterprise (today's Fort Rucker), examining titles to land, drafting conveyances, and disbursing purchase money. It was not work he talked about the way he talked about his trials, but at least it allowed him to remain in the town he loved. Then, even that was taken away. At an age, so I was told, when few men were drafted, and despite being blind in one eye, he was called in May 1943 to serve in the army by Coffee County authorities who had not forgotten or forgiven him for the Charles White case. He served initially as a private and was promoted to corporal before being honorably discharged when the war ended. He returned to Enterprise to find the remains of his meager practice securely in the hands of other lawyers. Unable to make a living as an attorney and at the same time help his father, who had closed his sawmill and M. L. Beck General Merchandise, and was on the verge of losing his remaining land, he moved his small family to Montgomery, where he took a job reviewing disability claims for the Veterans Administration. Yet he never stopped dreaming that he would someday return to Coffee County and again practice his beloved law. He even bought a vacant lot in Enterprise.