My Father and Atticus Finch (18 page)

M
Y FATHER
would not have minded that much. I know for a fact that he much preferred the drama and the contest of quail hunting to dove shoots: walking, sometimes for hours, alone or with Tump, later with me, through miles of harvested fields, second-growth woods, and bramble, until finally Old Prince, the legendary family bird dog, a purebred pointer, would suspend his weaving and freeze, sensing the gathering covey, the birds huddling, tensing, preparing to explode in their classic shock wave of feathered thunder that never failed to startle even experienced quail hunters, the sudden, surprise burst a part of the covey's natural defense, so that if one or two birds fell to a fox or a hunter, the rest would survive to breed and replenish. Shooting lots of doves on a baited field from a fixed position had little romance to it, in my father's mind.

The lack of an invitation did leave my father without plans for the long Thanksgiving weekend. No one in Enterprise had invited him to Thanksgiving dinner, and he probably was not in a mood to face his father, who would have celebrated the holiday well into his drugs and liquor. My mother had gone to Weogufka the Wednesday
after school let out to be with her mother, and Frances was in Meridian, Mississippi, with Delmas's family. Having nothing else to do, my father decided to visit Charles White in Montgomery during that Thanksgiving weekend.

C
HARLES HAD BEEN MOVED
from the colored incarceration section of Kilby prison to the colored death row, a string of dark, stinking, windowless cells in which two, sometimes four, Negro men awaited electrocution. He looked bad. He had lost a lot of weight, was unshaven for no telling how long, and his once coal-black steel-wool hair, unshorn since Foster paid a barber to clean him up for trial back in mid-July, had begun thinning and turning gray. Charles was lying on the wet floor in his cell when Foster found him, but he quickly struggled to his feet when he recognized his lawyer and his eyes changed from dull to flashing black.

“I'm free!” Charles said, before Foster could even say hello.

“Not yet, Charles. I just came to see how you're doing.”

Charles slumped, clinging to the bars with both hands to keep from falling back onto the floor. Foster had never seen him so defeated. “
Shee-uh
. I done tol' you I don't want to live this bad.”

Foster immediately noticed Charles's Southern Negro accent and poor grammar, an articulation he must have picked up from his cellmates. “Charles, you can't give up now. We're going to win this. It'll just take a little more time.”

“This place ain't nothin' for a white man. What you think it like for a nigger?”

Foster had no answer for that. Instead, he said, “You've lost a lot of weight.”

“Prob-ly. Couldn't help but. All I can do to eat some of the slop just to keep back the hungry pains.”

One of the two other Negroes in Charles's cell got up off the floor and approached the bars where Charles White stood.

“You a law-yah, suh?” the man said. His tone was pitiful, begging.

“Git back, nigger!” Charles White shouted, pushing his cellmate away and raising a threatening arm.

“Charles, they won't give us a place to talk. I'm sorry.”

For a moment, Charles seemed more focused on the possibility of beating his cellmate, even though the man had retreated. When he finally turned back to Foster, he said, “When you think we gon' hear sump'in?”

“It may be a while yet.” In fact, Foster was pleased it was taking so long: people were saying it was already the longest time the Alabama Supreme Court had sat on a Judge Parks appeal. Foster tried to explain why the delay was a good sign.

“Yo' brief was powerful,” Charles said. “I'm hidin' it here under my mattress till you need it back.”

“No, Charles, you can keep that carbon copy. The Supreme Court has the original, and I have another carbon at my office.” Foster wondered what Charles would say if he knew the reason the brief read so well: because of Bertha's edits. She had come to his office after school to read and revise his drafts, and it was soon apparent that she had superior knowledge of the rules of good grammar; perhaps more important, Foster thought she added an almost musical flow to his chop-chop analytical arguments.

“That solicitor wrote anything back?”

“Nothing to speak of, Charles. As I said, I'm very confident we have the better of it.” Foster was in fact very confident. Even the
lawyers in Troy were saying that this time, Judge Parks might get reversed; Foster wanted to say more about all that to Charles, but he was torn. He didn't want to get Charles's hopes up too high, but at the same time his client needed encouragement. Charles implored him with his eyes to say more, and Foster gave in. “It's not just me. Other lawyers are saying the Supreme Court's going to reverse. But it won't do a speck of good if you don't hold on and take care of your health.”

Charles's countenance lifted a little with the assurance. Foster knew his client would have vigorously cross-examined him before the trial, but now he was reduced to grasping at the thin offerings. Foster was beginning to understand why Charles always said he didn't want to live that bad; it was not his first time behind bars, and Alabama's Negro ward was doubtless worse than the places where he had served time up North. For the first time, Foster was beginning to worry that Charles might give up and take his own life. Suicide was not unheard of at Kilby prison, especially among the Negroes kept there.

“They turn me loose, I won't be stayin' in Alabama for the next sunrise,” Charles said. He seemed already to be dreaming of living in Chicago or Detroit, anywhere but Alabama. Foster decided not to warn him that a reversal wouldn't necessarily mean he was free to go and probably would mean a retrial, as Judge Parks had threatened; it was better not to say all that to Charles just yet. Maybe he could get him released on bail after the Alabama Supreme Court reversed. Provided he didn't kill himself first.

   Chapter 31

T
HE FIRST EXTENDED
cold snap marked the time for hog killings in rural Alabama. The killing, bleeding, gutting, scraping to remove the hair, and butchering had to be done in a single, long, cold day so the meat would not spoil before it could be salted, smoked, and cured.

My father wrote about the butchering of hogs in our family history. “When it was time to kill hogs [my mother] would send for Aunt Missouri and Uncle Berry, faithful black friends, and together they would stuff and season the sausage, prepare the hams and shoulders for curing, clean the chitterlings, cut up the backbone and render the fat into lard. We would pester her until she sliced off a piece of tenderloin and quickly fried it for us over the coals. It was a custom then for those killing hogs to send their neighbors some fresh meat. So, Mama would wrap pieces of backbone, tenderloin and cracklins in a piece of newspaper and I would carry it to the neighbors. It was a day light to dark job for all, but my, how good that fresh meat was.”

I never got to witness an entire hog killing from dawn to dusk,
even though we made frequent weekend trips throughout the 1940s and 1950s to Glenwood, but I saw enough. And as was always the case growing up in the South, I heard the stories passed around, especially about the killings that were not just family but community events. There likely would have been several such community hog killings on the farms around Enterprise in 1938. I know that my parents attended one of them, and I know this because of the part I was told was played by my mother.

T
HE MAYHEM
, blood, and gore of hog killings discouraged squeamish girls, even some of the boys and men, from wanting to see it more than once. Bertha Stewart was not squeamish but she had refrained, after her first one, from attending further killings because she saw “nothing uplifting” in the ritual, so Foster was surprised when Bertha said, “I'm going to a hog killing this year.”

“I don't think that's a good idea,” he said. “And I know why you are saying you want to go.”

“I'm not going to let them sideline us. We need to go for a while just to show our faces.”

And so, at the crack of first light, Bertha, along with Foster and six other men, gathered at the chosen hog farm to do what needed to be done. A .22 rifle, used rather than a more powerful gun or an axe in order to minimize damage to the prized brains, was carefully aimed and fired by each of the men into a marked spot between each animal's eyes. After some teasing about her owl kill off the back porch years before in Weogufka, Bertha took a turn and succeeded in killing a hog.

The next step was to bleed and gut the dead animals. The hind
legs of each three-hundred-pound or greater hog carcass were carefully tied to one end of a strong rope, and the other end was thrown over a sturdy hickory branch, then hitched to a team of mules which hoisted the dead hog up off the ground. As each hog corpse swung in the cold air, the hog owner stuck a big, sharp butcher knife into a carefully chosen artery and then got out of the way fast as the blood spouted and sprayed. Once the bleeding was done, the hog farmer used the same trusty knife to slice open the belly, being careful not to nick the intestines, which were removed and placed in pots of cold water until they could be cleaned and preserved for those who favored chitterlings.

By the time the gutted and bled hog bodies were hauled by mule-drawn wagons to the butchering site, the large black cast iron scalding vats had been heated over a wood fire and were beginning to steam, but not boil. The water had to be the right temperature—hot but not too hot—or the hair wouldn't “slip.” At some point, the hog farmer's wife took charge and supervised the transfer of the hairless pink and gray carcasses as they were lifted and laid on the scrubbed cutting table used every year. There, the hog was blocked with an axe into parts small enough, at thirty or so pounds, to be carved into hams, pork chops, ribs, and bacon by the strong and experienced women who had come to help.

Bertha was unsure she could handle the unwieldy chunks of slippery hog meat while at the same time using a sharp knife, and she was relieved when, with a contemptuous glare, one of the older farm women turned down her offer to help. Partly it was because the woman did not want the high school Shakespeare teacher to ruin the cuts of pork, but there was also a chill, and not just owing to the cold snap. Word had gone around that Foster had used his Thanksgiving
holiday to visit the nigger rapist at Kilby, and that was not appreciated by the better class and was all but intolerable to the rough element, both classes being well represented at hog killings. Believing she had made her point, Bertha was glad to have to leave to teach
Macbeth
, and to have papers on
Lear
to grade as her excuse for not returning in the afternoon to watch the shoulder trimmings being ground into sausage, seasoned, and stuffed into casings made from the hogs' intestines, to see the fat cooked down into lard, to gather a share of the crispy residues for winter use in crackling bread.

M
ID TO LATE
D
ECEMBER
was about the time word got around that Foster Beck had not just visited his guilty nigger rapist in Kilby but had paid for the appeal transcript with his own money. Even among some of the better class, this latest revelation was resented. The rough element, picking up the scent, took their betters' discontent as a nod and a wink that it would be all right for them to do something.

On a cold day the week before Christmas, three strong-backed brothers decided to teach Foster Beck a lesson. They found him fishing on a creek bank late in the afternoon, alone because no one wanted to fish with him, and when he ignored their taunts, they pushed him down on the muddy bank and called him “nigger lover.” When he still wouldn't fight back, they pushed him into the cold water and then stood on the bank and peed all along the edge. When he finally became angry enough to try to fight his way out of the creek, they pushed him back down into the water, over and over, and held him under water for a while, until finally they became a little embarrassed at his stubborn efforts to resist. Still, they might not
have let him come out of the water until dark, but the late December chill got so bad the brothers had to leave.

When the story of what happened on the creek bank got around, the self-respecting folks let it be known, without having to make an issue of it, that enough was enough. They knew from experience that if they let the creek incident pass, it would whet the appetite of the rough element for more; violence was like a contagion with them, and it could get out of control. Besides, Foster Beck had not been intimidated by the window-breaking or the creek bullying; more of that sort of thing probably would not turn him around. On the other hand, everybody knew Foster worried about money. To placate the rough element, some of the better class spread around that Foster Beck's retainer from one of his best-paying clients was being eliminated, and that there would be less paying legal work in the future. They also began musing over ways to get at Bertha.

“Course I won't press charges,” Foster said to Frances, who heard about the creek incident with the three brothers. “That would just keep it going. If I were to press charges, they would circle the wagons.”

“That's ridiculous, Foster. They obviously are unified already.”

“That's just the hardheads. The fact is, the whites in this town are not of one mind on race. It's just like Daddy always said, the South's not solid, just different. The business people, the educated ones, understand somebody had to defend Charles White after Scottsboro, and they're the ones who feel like now it's time to leave me alone and move on.”

“If you won't press charges, I will,” Frances said. She was hopping mad. “They might kill you next time.”

“No, Frances, that won't happen. They just needed to let off a little steam. Things'll cool off now.” He was convinced the worst had finally blown over.