My Father and Atticus Finch (8 page)

At the front door, Miss Loventrice, a conscientious Methodist too frail for mission work, watched over the jars of stick candy, tended the cash register, and kept the books—though only Mr. M. L. could approve the credit furnished each year to the county's white and black farmers for the seed, groceries, and merchandise they and their families needed to carry them through the spring and summer, until the crops came in and they could settle up.

My memories of the store square with my father's written history, though he provides some additional details. After confirming that “We sold dry goods and ladies and gents furnishings, groceries and hardware,” the family history records, “In the fall when farmers brought cotton to town they wanted a change from their diet of sow belly and syrup and craved salmon, dry salt mullet, kit fish and wedges of hook cheese. A meat box was purposely located near the water bucket and, after a drink of water, what was left in the dipper was thrown in the meat box to keep the salt meat moist so it would not lose weight.”

As for credit for those who could not pay cash, Mr. M. L. “had a slogan printed on his wrapping paper, ‘I have always thought well of credit used and not abused, for it is capital that never melts away.' ”

Across the unpaved, sandy-brown square from M. L. Beck General Merchandise was the U.S. Post Office, festooned with colorful signs advertising brands of chewing tobacco and snuff, the candidacies of any Democrats running for office, and Buffalo Rock and Coca-Cola, along with weatherbeaten cardboard announcements of fish fries and church revivals. Next to the post office stood a row
of tin-roofed, single-story wooden office buildings, one of which housed M. L. Beck Timber and Lumber Company. At one end of the square was another row of one-story wooden buildings, some painted white, some peeling white, some unpainted, offering the services and wares of a pharmacy and healer, a live bait store, a beauty parlor, a blacksmith, and the town's barbershop, owned by an ancient Negro named Friday who catered only to white men. A small grocery store at the end of the row struggled to compete with M. L. Beck General Merchandise by selling fresh sandwiches from the back door.

On the other end of the square, an artesian well, two hundred feet deep, its flow said to be neither diminished by drought nor increased by wet spells—the same well where my grandfather stood toe to toe with a rival sawmill owner over the freeing from peonage of Will Pickett—bubbled up crystal-clear drinking water through a white marble fountain equipped with three brass drinking fixtures that piped runoff into a horse trough. Mr. M. L. liked to point out in letters to his correspondents up North that the drinking fixtures were not segregated by race.

If much of Glenwood's commerce took place at M. L. Beck General Merchandise, the flowing well was its cultural and political center. My father remembered and wrote in his family history of the time when he was a boy and U.S. Senator Hugo Black came to Glenwood to campaign. After being introduced to the voters by Mr. M. L., and surrounded by white men (the women and Negroes standing respectfully in the back), Senator Black made a rousing speech in support of the New Deal. By 1938, though, Hugo Black was on the U.S. Supreme Court and a new man, Lister Hill, a Montgomery lawyer and graduate of Columbia University in New York,
held Black's seat in the Senate. My father admired Senator Hill but doubted he would ever bother to campaign at the well in Glenwood; the town was losing population as young men and women moved to the cities. I was told, only half in jest, that if you wanted to know the population of Glenwood, all you had to do was to meet the 5 p.m. Central of Georgia on any Sunday, at the platform behind Mr. M. L.'s store, because the entire town would be there.

But if the town, by 1938, may have seemed smaller to my father, I am certain his daddy still loomed large the day of his visit, just a few days before the trial in Troy of Charles White.

   Chapter 15

M
Y FATHER
soon figured out why he had been summoned to Glenwood that day: to be told not to take the case of
State of Alabama v. Charles White, Alias
. When the case only concerned whether Charles would spend the rest of his life or twenty years in Kilby prison, Mr. M. L. had not taken much interest in it. But now, word was his son planned to argue the Negro's innocence to a jury.

Mr. M. L. began the conversation not by bringing up Charles White, but by talking about what he saw as the cause of the race problem in the South.

It went back to the loss of the war, not to slavery or the war itself. The victorious Yankees pompously called what followed the loss “Reconstruction,” but it really was punishment, pure and simple. And that was what got the Klan started. Mr. M. L. was mostly repeating what he had been told by his own father, but, true to his nature, he claimed to have made an independent study of it, from which he had concluded that when it came to the causes of racial disharmony, the Yankees and Reconstruction were more to blame than Southern whites.

Have we made progress despite that burden, Mr. M. L. asked rhetorically, then answered his own question: of course we had. They were sitting on the porch of M. L. Beck Timber and Lumber, across the unpaved, sandy street from M. L. Beck General Merchandise. Mr. M. L. was doing the talking, except when he was interrupted to receive greetings as the town of Glenwood, colored and white, ambled back and forth across the square. For the moment, Foster thought, his father seemed to be his old self, a tall man for south Alabama, a physically domineering gift he used to full advantage. He was intellectually domineering as well, in the Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and East Texas towns he had visited. While Mr. M. L. had never traveled up North, he had taken pleasure in corresponding over the years with newspaper editors in places like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York as well as with a rabbi in Chicago, and he claimed to have learned much about other parts of the country from those exchanges. His collection of books by Jack London, Stephen Crane, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Bret Harte, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain, along with the wild animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton, the
Encyclopedia Britannica
, and histories of the world by Ridpath and of the Jews by Josephus, spilled out of three tall mahogany cases.

Foster knew his father was right. There had been progress; he had heard about it for years and he would hear it again now: his father's routing of the Klan—it was why some Crenshaw County Negroes were alive; his freeing of Will Pickett from the chains of peonage; his payment and promotion of Tump Garner; his letter from Dr. George Washington Carver . . . which reminded him, he wanted to get that letter back so he could frame it and hang it in his library.

“Daddy, I know all that's the truth. But you said yourself it was also paternalistic.”

For a moment Mr. M. L. seemed to be stumped, trying to remember if he had ever said any such a thing. But if he had said it, he assured his son, there was no harm in a little paternalism, in helping people when they couldn't do for themselves. Foster himself, he recalled, had been a sickly, coddled baby and was even now the puniest of his litter, boy or girl.

Mr. M. L. glowered behind bushy eyebrows and angrily rapped his pipe bowl against the side of his front porch rocking chair, shaking yesterday's tobacco remains into the sand that had been deposited a millennium ago, when parts of south Alabama lay beneath the Gulf of Mexico. During the centuries that followed, the pure white sand left behind by the receding Gulf waters had mixed with the black belt alluvium washed downstream by Alabama's mighty rivers, producing a fine-grained, beige-colored soil.

Foster knew there was no point arguing how it could be better, knew his father had more to say. In the silence, three crows mocked a newborn calf that wobbled to its feet in the green pasture behind the flowing well. A Negro man of indeterminate age whom Foster had seen from time to time over the years but did not know by name watered his mule at the trough. Two white men stood off to the side of the drinking fountain, under the shade of an ancient water oak, watching the Negro and his mule. The crows, their voices gradually becoming fainter, flew off to torment another animal. In the distance, Foster could hear the faint, familiar metal and wood sounds of a cotton wagon clattering across the Conecuh River wooden bridge nearly half a mile away, the loose planks rattling one by one.

Foster decided it was time to get to the point of the visit. “What if he's innocent, Daddy?”

Then he would get off. He wouldn't need Foster.

“No one in Enterprise will even know I have the case . . .”

His father said he knew. If it was known in Glenwood, it would be known in Enterprise.

Mr. M. L. stopped, smiled, and said good morning to two Negro women, who smiled back as they crossed the square, headed to M. L. Beck General Merchandise. They would buy their families' needs with M. L. Beck coins, not the Yankee dollar. “I didn't invest all that money in your education so you could throw it away on some Nigra from
Dee
-troit who had no business being in Troy to begin with,” his father said, oblivious to whether the women were out of earshot.

“You raised all of us to be fair to Negroes, Daddy.”

Mr. M. L. agreed with that, but said he didn't raise his children to stir up trouble when they didn't have to. Judge Parks could get the Negro a smart Yankee lawyer.

“Why not one of us, an Alabama lawyer?”

The answer came easily: because we live here.

“It comes down to this. Are we in Alabama a government of laws, not of men, like you always said we were?” Foster was remembering talks around the family dinner table when he was a boy. “After Scottsboro . . .”

His father didn't want to even hear the word “Scottsboro.” He said his son didn't know what happened there.

“But they deserved to have a lawyer.”

Mr. M. L. agreed with that. But it didn't have to be someone who lived in Scottsboro, and it wasn't. You push this thing too fast, you'll set us all back, he said. And the Negroes would be the ones who would suffer if race relations were set back.

Further analysis was interrupted by his father's violent fit of
coughing, followed by repeated throat clearings and spitting into the sand. Foster waited, then finally said, “Daddy, you should ask a doctor about that cough. You really should.”

Foster knew it was pointless to tell his father to ask a doctor what he should do about the cough. His father dismissed anyone who tried to tell him what he should do, especially if the “should-do” advice came from anyone in the medical profession. Mr. M. L. had already heard a lifetime of what he should do from his father-in-law, a former Confederate Army surgeon—a man, Mr. M. L. joked, who was responsible for more Confederate deaths than General Grant.

The coughing subsided. Mr. M. L.'s tone became softer, almost affectionate. Foster knew the shift signaled a change in tactics. Mr. M. L., everyone said, knew how to sell, and he was about to try a new approach. “I'm with you, son, on your Negro's right to an attorney. That's a fine idea. But it doesn't account for people. White people today remember what it was like during Reconstruction.”

“They remember what they were told. There's hardly anyone here today who was alive during Reconstruction.”

“Oral history is all we have. You won't read our side in the Yankee's history books, but during Reconstruction, with the Nigra in control, white women were afraid to come out of their homes. That's why you have to be especially careful defending a rape by a black of a white.”

“Alleged rape. In fact there was never—”

“Now we have well-intentioned ideas
,
the presumption of innocence, noble ideas. I agree with the ideas. And then you have the way things are in the minds and hearts of the people. That's what you don't understand.”

“I understand this much. People are drawn to a winner, and I'm going to win this, Daddy. I can prove as a matter of law there was no rape.”

“Maybe as a matter of law
,
but you can't enforce a law that's crossways with what a jury will support.” Mr. M. L. paused to refire his pipe. Foster looked at his watch and thought of saying what
he
believed about law, but instead he waited as clouds of pipe smoke filled the air on the porch around them, then drifted off into the square.

“You were too young to remember the Tick Dip Law that came on after the panic of 1914. That was a well-intentioned law.”

“Yes sir, Daddy, but I've heard you tell about it.”

“I'd gone a little into the cattle business, that was how I came to follow it, but I might have followed it anyhow because of what it teaches about human nature. The county said you had to bring your cattle once a year to one of the dipping tubs. Big concrete county tubs filled with creosote and kerosene. The county workers drove the cows one by one up a wooden ramp and whipped and pushed on 'em till they gave up and jumped in the tub. The cows fought and bellowed, but what ended the tick dip law was the cattlemen, not the cows. The cattlemen hated the damn law. They would come around at night and dynamite the tubs. The county would replace 'em and the cattlemen would blow 'em up again. The county would put out a guard at night and they would blow 'em up again. Now, the Tick Dip Law was a well-intentioned law, but the men who passed it didn't understand people.”

“I'm going to do it, Daddy. I'm going to do it because I'm a lawyer.”

“You're a wet-behind-the-ears lawyer.” The tone shifted back to
assaultive. “You never tried a case like this. You'll get your Negro electrocuted.”

It was in fact Foster's biggest fear: that he would lose at trial and Charles would die because of his incompetence. His father had figured out his fear and was going to use it on him.

“You know why you'll lose that trial?”

The fact that his father was not trained in the law would not deter him in the slightest from opining, so there was no point in saying “Why?”