Go Set a Watchman (11 page)

The courthouse clock creaked, strained, said, “Phlugh!” and struck the hour. Two. When the sound shivered away she saw her father rise and address the assembly in his dry courtroom voice:

“Gentlemen, our speaker for today is Mr. Grady O’Hanlon. He needs no introduction. Mr. O’Hanlon.”

Mr. O’Hanlon rose and said, “As the cow said to the milkman on a cold morning, ‘Thank you for the warm hand.’”

She had never seen or heard of Mr. O’Hanlon in her life. From the gist of his introductory remarks, however, Mr. O’Hanlon made plain to her who he was—he was an ordinary, God-fearing man just like any ordinary man, who had quit his job to devote his full time to the preservation of segregation. Well, some people have strange fancies, she thought.

Mr. O’Hanlon had light-brown hair, blue eyes, a mulish face, a shocking necktie, and no coat. He unbuttoned his collar, untied his tie, blinked his eyes, ran his hand through his hair, and got down to business:

Mr. O’Hanlon was born and bred in the South, went to school there, married a Southern lady, lived all his life there, and his main interest today was to uphold the Southern Way of Life and no niggers and no Supreme Court was going to tell him or anybody else what to do … a race as hammer-headed as … essential inferiority … kinky woolly heads … still in the trees … greasy smelly … marry your daughters … mongrelize the race … mongrelize …
mongrelize
… save the South … Black Monday … lower than cockroaches … God made the races … nobody knows why but He intended for ’em to stay apart … if He hadn’t He’d’ve made us all one color … back to Africa …

She heard her father’s voice, a tiny voice talking in the warm comfortable past.
Gentlemen, if there’s one slogan in this world I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none.

These top-water nigger preachers … like apes … mouths like Number 2 cans … twist the Gospel … the court prefers to listen to Communists … take ’em all out and shoot ’em for treason …

Against Mr. O’Hanlon’s humming harangue, a memory was rising to dispute him: the courtroom shifted imperceptibly, in it she looked down on the same heads. When she looked across the room a jury sat in the box, Judge Taylor was on the bench, his pilot fish sat below in front of him writing steadily; her father was on his feet: he had risen from a table at which she could see the back of a kinky woolly head….

Atticus Finch rarely took a criminal case; he had no taste for criminal law. The only reason he took this one was because he knew his client to be innocent of the charge, and he could not for the life of him let the black boy go to prison because of a half-hearted, court-appointed defense. The boy had come to him by way of Calpurnia, told him his story, and had told him the truth. The truth was ugly.

Atticus took his career in his hands, made good use of a careless indictment, took his stand before a jury, and accomplished what was never before or afterwards done in Maycomb County: he won an acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge. The chief witness for the prosecution was a white girl.

Atticus had two weighty advantages: although the white girl was fourteen years of age the defendant was not indicted for statutory rape, therefore Atticus could and did prove consent. Consent was easier to prove than under normal conditions—the defendant had only one arm. The other was chopped off in a sawmill accident.

Atticus pursued the case to its conclusion with every spark of his ability and with an instinctive distaste so bitter only his knowledge that he could live peacefully with himself was able to wash it away. After the verdict, he walked out of the courtroom in the middle of the day, walked home, and took a steaming bath. He never counted what it cost him; he never looked back. He never knew two pairs of eyes like his own were watching him from the balcony.

… not the question of whether snot-nosed niggers will go to school with your children or ride the front of the bus … it’s whether Christian civilization will continue to be or whether we will be slaves of the Communists … nigger lawyers … stomped on the Constitution … our Jewish friends … killed Jesus … voted the nigger … our granddaddies … nigger judges and sheriffs … separate is equal … ninety-five per cent of the tax money … for the nigger and the old hound dog … following the golden calf … preach the Gospel … old lady Roosevelt … nigger-lover … entertains forty-five niggers but not one fresh white Southern virgin … Huey Long, that Christian gentleman … black as burnt light’ud knots … bribed the Supreme Court … decent white Christians … was Jesus crucified for the nigger …

Jean Louise’s hand slipped. She removed it from the balcony railing and looked at it. It was dripping wet. A wet place on the railing mirrored thin light coming through the upper windows. She stared at her father sitting to the right of Mr. O’Hanlon, and she did not believe what she saw. She stared at Henry sitting to the left of Mr. O’Hanlon, and she did not believe what she saw …

… but they were sitting all over the courtroom. Men of substance and character, responsible men, good men. Men of all varieties and reputations … it seemed that the only man in the county not present was Uncle Jack. Uncle Jack—she was supposed to go see him sometime. When?

She knew little of the affairs of men, but she knew that her father’s presence at the table with a man who spewed filth from his mouth—did that make it less filthy? No. It condoned.

She felt sick. Her stomach shut, she began to tremble.

Hank.

Every nerve in her body shrieked, then died. She was numb.

She pulled herself to her feet clumsily, and stumbled from the balcony down the covered staircase. She did not hear her feet scraping down the broad stairs, or the courthouse clock laboriously strike two-thirty; she did not feel the dank air of the first floor.

The glaring sun pierced her eyes with pain, and she put her hands to her face. When she took them down slowly to adjust her eyes from dark to light, she saw Maycomb with no people in it, shimmering in the steaming afternoon.

She walked down the steps and into the shade of a live oak. She put her arm out and leaned against the trunk. She looked at Maycomb, and her throat tightened: Maycomb was looking back at her.

Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not wanted. We have secrets.

In obedience to them, in the silent heat she walked down Maycomb’s main thoroughfare, a highway leading to Montgomery. She walked on, past houses with wide front yards in which moved green-thumbed ladies and slow large men. She thought she heard Mrs. Wheeler yelling to Miss Maudie Atkinson across the street, and if Miss Maudie saw her she would say come in and have some cake, I’ve just made a big one for the Doctor and a little one for you. She counted the cracks in the sidewalk, steeled herself for Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose’s onslaught—
Don’t you say hey to me, Jean Louise Finch, you say good afternoon!
—hurried by the old steep-roofed house, past Miss Rachel’s, and found herself home.

HOME-MADE ICE CREAM.

She blinked hard. I’m losing my mind, she thought.

She tried to walk on but it was too late. The square, squat, modern ice cream shop where her old home had been was open, and a man was peering out the window at her. She dug in the pockets of her slacks and came up with a quarter.

“Could I have a cone of vanilla, please?”

“Don’t come in cones no more. I can give you a—”

“That’s all right. Give me whatever it comes in,” she said to the man.

“Jean Louise Finch, ain’tcha?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Used to live right here, didn’tcha?”

“Yes.”

“Matter of fact, born here, weren’tcha?”

“Yes.”

“Been livin’ in New York, haven’tcha?”

“Yes.”

“Maycomb’s changed, ain’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t remember who I am, do you?”

“No.”

“Well I ain’t gonna tell you. You can just sit there and eat your ice cream and try to figure out who I am, and if you can I’ll give you another helpin’ free of charge.”

“Thank you sir,” she said. “Do you mind if I go around in the back—”

“Sure. There’s tables and chairs out in the back. Folks set out there at night and eat their ice cream.”

The back yard was strewn over with white gravel. How small it looks with no house, no carhouse, no chinaberry trees, she thought. She sat down at a table and put the container of ice cream on it. I’ve got to think.

It happened so quickly that her stomach was still heaving. She breathed deeply to quieten it, but it would not stay still. She felt herself turning green with nausea, and she put her head down; try as she might she could not think, she only knew, and what she knew was this:

The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, “He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman,” had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.

9

INTEGRITY, HUMOR, AND
patience were the three words for Atticus Finch. There was also a phrase for him: pick at random any citizen from Maycomb County and its environs, ask him what he thought of Atticus Finch, and the answer would most likely be, “I never had a better friend.”

Atticus Finch’s secret of living was so simple it was deeply complex: where most men had codes and tried to live up to them, Atticus lived his to the letter with no fuss, no fanfare, and no soul-searching. His private character was his public character. His code was simple New Testament ethic, its rewards were the respect and devotion of all who knew him. Even his enemies loved him, because Atticus never acknowledged that they were his enemies. He was never a rich man, but he was the richest man his children ever knew.

His children were in a position to know as children seldom are: when Atticus was in the legislature he met, loved, and married a Montgomery girl some fifteen years his junior; he brought her home to Maycomb and they lived in a new-bought house on the town’s main street. When Atticus was forty-two their son was born, and they named him Jeremy Atticus, for his father and his father’s father. Four years later their daughter was born, and they named her Jean Louise for her mother and her mother’s mother. Two years after that Atticus came home from work one evening and found his wife on the floor of the front porch dead, cut off from view by the wisteria vine that made the corner of the porch a cool private retreat. She had not been dead long; the chair from which she had fallen was still rocking. Jean Graham Finch had brought to the family the heart that killed her son twenty-two years later on the sidewalk in front of his father’s office.

At forty-eight, Atticus was left with two small children and a Negro cook named Calpurnia. It is doubtful that he ever sought for meanings; he merely reared his children as best he could, and in terms of the affection his children felt for him, his best was indeed good: he was never too tired to play Keep-Away; he was never too busy to invent marvelous stories; he was never too absorbed in his own problems to listen earnestly to a tale of woe; every night he read aloud to them until his voice cracked.

Atticus killed several birds with one stone when he read to his children, and would probably have caused a child psychologist considerable dismay: he read to Jem and Jean Louise whatever he happened to be reading, and the children grew up possessed of an obscure erudition. They cut their back teeth on military history, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws,
True Detective Mysteries, The Code of Alabama
, the Bible, and Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury
.

Wherever Atticus went, Jem and Jean Louise would most of the time follow. He took them to Montgomery with him if the legislature was in summer session; he took them to football games, to political meetings, to church, to the office at night if he had to work late. After the sun went down, Atticus was seldom seen in public without his children in tow.

Jean Louise had never known her mother, and she never knew what a mother was, but she rarely felt the need of one. In her childhood her father had never misinterpreted her, nor bobbled once, except when she was eleven and came home to dinner from school one day and found that her blood had begun to flow.

She thought she was dying and she began to scream. Calpurnia and Atticus and Jem came running, and when they saw her plight, Atticus and Jem looked helplessly at Calpurnia, and Calpurnia took her in hand.

It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing, keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess.

When she was calm enough to listen, she considered that a cruel practical joke had been played upon her: she must now go into a world of femininity, a world she despised, could not comprehend nor defend herself against, a world that did not want her.

Jem left her when he was sixteen. He began slicking back his hair with water and dating girls, and her only friend was Atticus. Then Dr. Finch came home.

The two aging men saw her through her loneliest and most difficult hours, through the malignant limbo of turning from a howling tomboy into a young woman. Atticus took her air rifle from her hand and put a golf club in it, Dr. Finch taught her—Dr. Finch taught her what he was most interested in. She gave lip service to the world: she went through the motions of complying with the regulations governing the behavior of teenaged girls from good families; she developed a halfway interest in clothes, boys, hairdos, gossip, and female aspirations; but she was uneasy all the time she was away from the security of those who she knew loved her.

Atticus sent her to a women’s college in Georgia; when she finished he said it was high time she started shifting for herself and why didn’t she go to New York or somewhere. She was vaguely insulted and felt she was being turned out of her own house, but as the years passed she recognized the full value of Atticus’s wisdom; he was growing old and he wanted to die safe in the knowledge that his daughter could fend for herself.