My Father and Atticus Finch (5 page)

Foster knew she had to, and not just for the small salary. Bertha had to keep her job as a teacher. Teaching was what got her wrought up; Bertha believed in teaching Coffee County high school boys and girls
King Lear
and
Great Expectations
and Byron, Shelley, and Keats
the way he believed in defending their parents against the banks. Foster suspected that not even a proposal of marriage would keep Bertha in Enterprise unless she could teach.

They had walked three blocks from Miss Pauline's and into the colored section of Enterprise. Foster smiled and nodded hello to an older Negro man, who tipped his hat to Bertha and stepped aside to make room for the white couple to pass. The man was one of a small number of Coffee County Negroes who actually owned the land he farmed, one of an even smaller number of Foster's clients, white or colored, who paid him in cash for his legal work. Foster had taken great pleasure the previous year in turning away the bank's effort to foreclose on the man's farm.

Foster's thoughts returned to Bertha. If she didn't give the superintendent what he wanted for his grandson, she might get fired and would quickly run out of money. He knew she saved little from her teacher's salary, half of which she was already sending to her mother in Weogufka, and that she was spending too much of what was left on the Book-of-the-Month Club, explaining, when he asked how she could afford so many
of the Club's selections, that she wanted to “learn what to read from the smart people in New York.” The exception was poetry, about which she felt confident enough to buy on her own.

“You know, the superintendent's been in the education field quite some time,” Foster said. “Surely he knows a thing or two about grading an English paper.”

Bertha did not reply.

“Well, then, if you won't budge, I guess we'll both wind up in the poorhouse,” he said, impulsively taking her hand, still hoping to persuade her to give the boy a satisfactory grade.

“Well then yourself, Foster Beck,” Bertha said, freeing her hand. He had no business hint-hinting what to do about her boss, and he knew it. And it was unfair for him to tell her what to do to keep her job while at the same time risking his own career over the Charles White case.

“Foster. Your family's already done more than anyone in south Alabama for the colored.” She wanted to end the talk of the superintendent and return to the perils of representing an admitted Negro rapist.

Foster wasn't sure if it was true that his family had done all that much for the colored, but he knew what she really meant and why she said it. He paused, watching three young boys—two white, one black—playing football. Then he said, “Bertha, I'm going to take it on. It's about what the law requires of a lawyer, not about Daddy. For all I know, Daddy might not even want me to take it.”

“You'll be very unpopular taking this case.”

Foster almost said what he thought: a lawyer who had any self-respect would put popularity aside. But he suppressed that thought, convinced it would come out sounding pompous and self–righteous. Instead he said, “Maybe I'll be unpopular, but there's not much risk of that. Charles White signed a full confession, so there's no need to have a public trial over whether he did it. But the state can't use the confession and still ask for the electric chair, so the only question is whether he's sentenced to life imprisonment or whether I can get him less time and a chance for parole. I'll negotiate for that in private, in Judge Parks's chambers. There won't be any need for a public trial.”

The boy playing quarterback overthrew his receiver, the ball bouncing into the dirt road. Foster picked up the ball and, as his sister Frances had taught him, threw a perfect spiral. The three boys,
obviously surprised that the slight, bespectacled man could throw a spiral at all, much less accurately, acknowledged the feat with respectful “awwhh”s before resuming their game.

“So he really
is
guilty?” Bertha said. “He signed a confession.”

Foster thought about how to reply to that. Charles White was a big man, but he had been arrested in a small Southern town, then rushed in a car full of white lawmen with guns to Montgomery before he could be lynched. Charles hadn't admitted to being scared, but even with all his arrogance and size and being from the North, he had to have been one scared Negro when they offered to keep him safe in Kilby prison instead of taking him back to Troy that night and a likely lynching, then proposed giving him a life sentence instead of the electric chair. But only if he confessed—meaning the confession might be false, or partly false? When he'd asked Charles what had actually happened, all he'd said was, “It wasn't like she said”—not exactly a denial. Maybe he took some kind of advantage of her and now was trying to blame her? It was not, after all, unusual for a criminal to recant, or at least try to mitigate, a confession.

“Like most of the rest of us, my clients usually aren't purely innocent or purely guilty, Bertha. Something improper may have gone on between them. I don't know exactly what. The fact is, even if it wasn't rape, it's not something a Negro needs to be talking about to a white jury. And he won't have to. It won't be tried. I'll negotiate the best plea deal I can for him and be done with it.”

But for the first time, he was beginning to have some doubts. Charles White had sounded pretty strong when he told him there could be no plea deal; he wanted to go to trial. Foster was thinking that maybe Charles really was innocent, and had been forced by the threat of the lynch rope that night to admit to a crime he did not commit.

   Chapter 9

S
OUTHERNERS
were like an ethnic group back when I was growing up, with our own version of history, our particular grievances, our preferred preparations of foods, our unique accents. Like other American ethnic groups, we had our rituals, especially in small towns and rural areas. At least as late as the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was, in parts of the South, an annual rite called Confederate Grave Decoration Day.

I recall hearing that my father received a surprise visit from a Pike County court official on a Confederate Grave Decoration Day event held in Crenshaw County. If that event was held on the first Sunday in July—the preferred date for some Protestant denominations—then, based on the 1938 calendar, the visit from the Pike County court official would have occurred on the afternoon of July 3.

There would be a few firecrackers on Monday, July 4, but Independence Day was not as festive an occasion in south Alabama as up North. For many in south Alabama, the Fourth was a Yankee holiday, celebrating a successful rebellion. By comparison, Confederate Grave Decoration Day commemorated what was, for many Southern whites, a failed rebellion, a noble but misunderstood lost cause.

Initially, the day was observed in places such as Glenwood as a way of honoring the fallen and upholding some shred of pride. After a few years of just decorating graves, however, Glenwood's Confederate widows reasoned that as long as they were all going to be together, they might as well share food and recipes and bring along their children to romp and play. Since Confederate Grave Decoration Day was held on a Sunday afternoon in a church cemetery, it was only natural that afternoon preaching and singing were soon included.

The Becks were members of the Methodist church; Mr. M. L. had donated the lumber for the new church building. But for events such as the first Sunday in July, he favored the Glenwood Hard Shell Baptist Church.

The Hard Shell Baptist Church and adjoining cemetery, located on a forlorn dirt road outside Glenwood, a quarter mile from the Conecuh River, were surrounded by cypress trees, volunteer oaks, and other hardwoods, and also by scattered young, second-growth pines that would not be ready to cut for another twenty years, assuming they thrived in the swampy terrain. The church building was an unadorned, whitewashed wooden structure that rested on stacks of river rocks, high enough off the ground to remain dry each spring when the Conecuh overflowed its banks, and to allow small children, dogs, and rattlesnakes to crawl around underneath. Inside, there were several dozen carved hardwood pews, a simple altar, and a wooden podium. A choir of twenty women ranging in age from young teens to grandmothers, along with a few balding men, sat behind the podium, beneath an unpainted wooden cross that had split in a couple of places as the pine wood dried out over the years. There were always more people than seats on the first Sunday in July, but no one had to remain standing for long because worshipers, having made their appearance, were only too happy to relinquish their
places on the hard pews and join the others standing around eating and talking under the magnolias and water oaks in the yard outside.

The service was led by Brother Ed, a hard-fat, bald man in his fifties who preached against liquor, the Pope, card playing, dancing, and painted faces, and who exuded fiery passion more than love. From time to time, younger men, some of them itinerant preachers, some just laymen, would relieve Brother Ed during the all-day service. In these intervals, Brother Ed was hard to find.

My father knew that his father preferred the Hard Shell Baptists on the first Sunday to what he called “those blue-nosed Methodists,” and he knew why: Mr. M. L. had developed a special friendship over the years with Brother Ed. As a teenager, my father would observe Brother Ed coming to the house in the late afternoons. He and Mr. M. L. would retire to the study, close the sliding pocket door, and after a while come out in a jolly mood to sit on the porch and smoke Virginia cheroots. My father wrote in our family history that he would slip into the study before the maid came and smell the empty glasses with a few grains of sugar left in the bottom and understand what they had been up to. In those days, my father explained, Alabama was a dry state, but Florida was wet until national Prohibition. An Alabama law called the Two Quarts Law said an Alabama man could order two quarts of whiskey a month from Florida for his needs. Mr. M. L.'s needs were not met by two quarts, and as a boy, my father would find whiskey cartons addressed to Brother Ed and other supposed teetotalers.

Not seeing his father or Brother Ed—who had been temporarily relieved from his preaching duties—Foster assumed the two of them had slipped out into the woods for a slug of Four Roses. He turned his attention to Bertha.

The line for food—having paused to allow an enfeebled veteran of the War Between the States to cut in and fill his plate—was beginning to move again. Foster took Bertha's elbow and carefully guided her around the smoking fire pits, where thick, juicy sides of beef and sugar-cured pork had been slow-cooking over hickory since before midnight, and handed her a thick, cream-colored platter from a stack at the head of the line. The tables placed end to end, a good seventy-five feet in their combined length, swayed under the cast-iron pots and kettles heaped with sweet corn, string beans, little white Glenwood peas, and fried okra, all harvested the previous fall and put up in mason jars. There were also early tomatoes and fresh okra, large bowls of stuffed eggs, camp stew, rice dishes, fruit salads, casseroles, turnip greens, fried chickens, sliced breads, and all manner of fresh-baked pies, cakes, and cookies, the competing fragrances of smoked meat and fresh pastry creating a sensory delirium. To drink, there were big zinc tubs of lemonade for the children and sweet tea for the grownups, both beverages cooled by chunks from the two-hundred-pound block of ice fetched that morning from the icehouse in Luverne. Thirty or more round-top trunks used by the ladies to bring the food they had cooked were set in a neat row off to the sides, their lids closed to keep out the flies. Each trunk was marked by a special colored ribbon so its owner could find hers quickly whenever one of her platters or pots on the tables began to run low, but the identifying ribbons were hardly necessary as the ladies mostly stood like sentinels right behind their respective trunks, nodding and smiling encouragement to the men as they appraised each dish. The ladies pretended to inquire this or that of one another, but they never really took their eyes off the tables.

“We left off Confederate and called it just Grave Decoration
Day, but we did this at our Presbyterian cemetery in Weogufka, same sort of thing,” Bertha said. She always stood up for her hometown, defensive of it because Foster acted like Weogufka was in north Alabama and hillbilly, even though all you had to do was look at a map to see that Weogufka was smack in the center of the state. “'Cept we did it first Sunday in May, not July. You see, Foster,” she said, smiling and softening her tone, “it's not really about the War. It's a competition among the ladies to see who goes home with the least leftovers.”

Bertha tried her best, but she was not much of a cook and was cheerfully unapologetic about her failing. Having a sweet tooth, she had made and brought a peach cobbler, which, as the contribution of a newcomer to Enterprise, was relegated to the far end of the row of tables. Foster was the first one to take a slice, having loyally saved room on his plate.

“Where's Mr. M. L.?” Bertha asked Frances, as she and Foster strolled up to a tall magnolia. The lower limbs had been cut off years ago, leaving room to sit under the tree in the shade. The Becks had reserved a family space by laying out flowered quilts on the bare, swept ground. Frances was seated beside Delmas, her serious beau, who had come all the way from Meridian, Mississippi. As always, Frances was in high spirits.

Frances giggled and winked at her blushing brother. She said she expected Mr. M. L. and Brother Ed were praying over something out in the woods.

Frances did not tease her brother in Bertha's presence out of meanness; she loved him, and wanted the best for him. As youngsters growing up in Glenwood, the two had been great friends, secretly picking cotton when they needed money for something forbidden,
receiving a dollar per hundred pounds. Frances could outpick Foster, a hundred pounds to seventy, as a six-year-old girl, and outrun and outwrestle him as late as their teens, when their mother put a stop to it. Frances suspected she could still outpick, outrun, and outwrestle her brother. She knew he'd had no dates in high school, and, from all she could learn, few in college. Ever since law school, though, Foster had been viewed as something of a catch, and she suspected he was enjoying playing the field for the first time in his life. Frances had wanted him to have that, but now he was thirty-two, time to settle down, and she had handpicked the lively Bertha.