My Father and Atticus Finch (4 page)

Frances was happy to explain: in Coffee County, one county over from Crenshaw, where she and Foster grew up. In
south
Alabama, Frances said proudly. Bertha would love it down there.

It did not take Bertha long after moving to Enterprise to recognize how much she and Foster had in common.
“Maybe too much,” she told Frances. “We're both awkward socially.”

Frances protested.

“And we both read too many books to suit most folks.”

Frances thought Bertha had a point there. Those two needed to go to Choctawhatchee Bay for a weekend with fishing poles and no books, Frances told Bertha, but she knew it wouldn't happen, and not just because it wouldn't look right, an unmarried couple. Bertha had tried fishing with Foster on the Conecuh River and hated it.

“We even have similar fathers,” Bertha said. “I love Mr. M. L.,” she quickly added.

Frances dearly loved her father: for rising above the ordinary men of Crenshaw County; for seeing enough promise in her to send
her to college. His bouts of depression and alcoholism, his occasional resort to cocaine, were to Frances only romantic proof of his adventuresome nature. She would concede, however, that some thought him crazy.

“Papa's even crazier,” Bertha said. “Naming his first-born son Abraham Lincoln Stewart. Sending a pillow to that Eugene Debs in the Atlanta penitentiary.”

Frances did not think much of Bertha's father sending a pillow to the Socialist Party leader Debs, but she could not help being amused by his naming his Alabama son Abraham Lincoln. It was no wonder Bertha's brother had moved to Fitzgerald, Georgia (founded by Union and Confederate veterans), after vet school—where he simply went by “Doc Stewart.” Frances had never met Bertha's father, but from what she heard, he was not at all like her own father. Mr. Stewart did not drink or use drugs, did not swear, and he read the Bible every day on his mail route. Bertha's story about her father razor-blading the naked man's picture out of her biology book fit Frances's image of Mr. Stewart. Just the opposite of Mr. M. L.

I
HEARD MY MOTHER
say more than once that “Foster saw prettier girls”—that as a single, up-and-coming lawyer, “there were opportunities,” and not only in Enterprise but in Dothan, Eufaula, Mobile. Maybe so, but she must have grown on him. He often said when I was a teenager that she embodied the word “quality”; she appealed to his serious nature. She was almost regal, with her erect bearing, graceful neck, long straight black hair, and calm blue eyes that widened and sparkled when she became excited. And when she spoke he actually found himself listening, unlike his experience with other girls.

She was Alabama born and raised but not ensnared by and mired in Alabama. She dreamed of travel to New York, even Europe. When she talked with fervor about the poetry of Emily Dickinson or proudly showed him her daintily inscribed college notes on
King Lear
, he had to smile at her genuine emotion. And for all of her schoolteacherish ways, she had once fired a shotgun off the back porch into the pitch-black woods behind her rural Weogufka home to scare a screech owl that was keeping her mama, Miss Cora, awake. To the amusement of her brothers, the unlucky owl was found lying dead on the ground the next morning. All the same, my father did not bring up marriage in 1938, let alone propose. “He was not ready,” Mother said, when I asked why they had dated so long before getting married.

My mother was the only woman my father talked to about the Charles White case: about what he was going to do.

T
HE FIRST TIME
they talked about it, they were sitting together on the front porch of the boardinghouse in Enterprise where my mother stayed, a white-painted, wide-planked two-story Victorian bordered by blooming gardenias and surrounded by pecan trees and crepe myrtle. She was sitting on the porch swing and he was sitting next to her in a straw-bottomed chair. He had just begun to tell her about Charles White when he was interrupted. Miss Pauline—Mother's landlady, as I recall her name—was offering iced tea from behind the front screen door. Miss Pauline did not like to open the screen because it let in flies.

“No, thank you, Miss Pauline,” Foster said, feeling the statement was really addressed to him. Bertha could open the screen door and
go to the icebox for tea anytime she wanted. He had never seen the icebox, never even been inside the house. He didn't want to look at Miss Pauline and start a conversation, but he was afraid she would keep on standing at the screen trying to listen. He decided to lower his voice with Bertha. It was best that Miss Pauline, one of Enterprise's biggest gossips, not hear about Charles White.

“He's signed a full confession in exchange for a promise of a life sentence,” he whispered. “All I'll be doing is trying to get him twenty years and a chance for parole, instead of life imprisonment.” He did not tell her that Charles wanted the confession suppressed and a trial on guilt or innocence. He still believed he could convince Charles to enter the guilty plea for a reduced sentence and a chance of parole. No need to worry Bertha over a trial, something that was unlikely to come about.

“What's he like?”

“Demanding. I don't like him one bit.”

“I suppose the next thing you'll say is it's not relevant whether you like him?”

“It's not relevant to my duty as a lawyer to represent him. But realistically, there's no question his attitude could affect the sentence he gets, that's human nature, especially with a Negro defendant. I will try to work out something in advance, before Charles and the judge meet each other.”

“Can you coach him to be obsequious?”

“I'm not sure. He's from up North. Course I've only met him once . . .” His already lowered voice trailed off as he heard the slap of the screen door behind him.

Miss Pauline was holding a tin serving tray, decorated with painted white magnolia blossoms.

“Thank you, ma'am!” Bertha beamed, taking a tall glass, shining golden brown in the afternoon sun. “Ummm! This hits the spot!”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Foster mumbled, rising halfway from his chair. A chunk of ice, broken off the block by Miss Pauline with an ice pick, floated to the inside edge of his glass, making it hard for him to sip without spilling. The glass sweated condensation in the heat, making it slippery.

To fill the silence, Miss Pauline wondered how Enterprise would get through the summer with it already this hot in June.

Foster said nothing, so Bertha said, “Well, we'll just have to drink lots of your fine sweet tea, Miss Pauline!” She shot Foster a look that said, I have to get along with my landlady. She was glad that Foster was a serious man who spoke grammatically and made good use of his verbs and adverbs, but she thought he sometimes seemed a little aloof.

“I was just leaving,” Foster said, placing his glass of tea on a white wicker side table. “But thank you again, Miss Pauline,” he added unconvincingly. “Bertha, can we talk just a minute out front?”

Miss Pauline had been pining to learn what the two were whispering about. She had already tried to eavesdrop from inside before lighting on the strategy of serving the tea. Now she regretted using up two chunks from the ice block for no return. She thought Foster was cold and ill-mannered and wished Bertha had another suitor. She retreated behind the closed screen door. Was Bertha coming in now? Miss Pauline did not want to hold the door open long and let in the flies.

“Just shortly, ma'am,” Bertha said.

“I wanted to say something else,” Foster said when Miss Pauline had disappeared behind the screen.

“I know.”

“The thing is, he ought not to have to be obsequious. The time he spends in prison shouldn't be based on attitudes about race.”

“Wouldn't a white defendant need to be polite and humble too?”

“Yes, but it's different. You know how it is.”

Of course she knew, though not as well as he did. There were no Negroes in Weogufka—none she knew of in all of Coosa County. The hilly, rocky land that far north in Alabama was not suited for cotton. “I'm beginning to dislike Charles White myself,” she said.

Foster shook his head in disapproval.

“You said
you
didn't like him one bit.”

“But I said it—” He paused as they both nodded a greeting to an older white man, a neighbor of Miss Pauline's. The man nodded in return to Foster and tipped his hat to Bertha before continuing on his business. “I said it because of his attitude. I wanted him to be grateful. Now I'm the one who wants
his
respect.”

“Is that why you're doing it?”

Foster put off a direct answer. The fact was, he was doing it because he could not refuse to represent Charles White and still believe what he claimed to believe and wanted to believe about law and the Constitution. But instead of all that, which he worried would sound pious and self-centered, he said, “I was asked because all the Troy lawyers came up with excuses. Everybody knows that. So in a way, no one can hold it against me.”

“And the judge asked you, of all the other lawyers in south Alabama, because you are Mr. M. L.'s son.”

He resisted the thought. “And not because I'm a great trial lawyer?”

Both of them laughed and Bertha squeezed his hand. People
said Foster had no sense of humor, but she said that was unfair: he laughed at human folly; he teased her in ways she usually found affectionate; most of all, he laughed at himself. But he refused to laugh at some of the jokes he was supposed to go along with—vulgar jokes, cruel ones—and that refusal got him into trouble with the men who told those jokes.

   Chapter 8

M
Y MOTHER WORRIED
about the effect on my father's modest law practice if word got around about the Charles White case. If he insisted on seeking a short sentence and parole for an admitted Negro rapist, it should be for his own independent reasons, not because of his daddy. But she would have to be careful raising the question so as not to give offense to the great man in the eyes of his son.

My father's relationship with his father was complex. The monthly round trips from Montgomery to Glenwood that my father dutifully insisted on making when I was a child speak louder than words of his devotion. Two of the letters he wrote his father on his birthday provide some additional insight into that relationship.

His first letter, postmarked June 1936, and written on his law firm stationery, begins by recalling the good times and lessons learned on their camping and fishing trips, reminiscences that, while sincere, were likely intended to bring some cheer to his moody, often depressed father. But he must have known that resorting to sentimentality would not be sufficient to that task, for his letter shifts
in tone—to the kind of subtle flattery that might have appealed to Mr. M. L. Unless “the elders,” my father wrote, “transmitted their experiences to succeeding generations, mistakes that could have been avoided would be repeated time after time. [The Creek Indian Nation] had their elder council to expound their philosophies and to counsel and advise the impetuous and active younger warriors. Voltaire drew students and rulers alike to seek knowledge at his feet. Jefferson directly influenced the nation long after he actively retired. But things like that seem to be the exception now.”

These thoughts were repeated nine years later in another birthday letter, this one dated June 1945, written from Fort McPherson in Atlanta not long before my father was discharged from the army. “In the old days before books and printing, the elders were looked to for a philosophy of life. Their words, based on their experiences, were valued because from them their children learned how to cope with life. . . . It seems now we don't have time for such. Books have taught us much of the mechanics of living, but we seem to lack a satisfactory philosophy of life. As a result younger generations will have to make the same mistakes over and over. Maybe that is the implacable law of life,” my father pessimistically wrote, before concluding, on a lighter note, that having looked “all over Atlanta for a shirt large enough,” he would be sending his father only some socks as a birthday present.

I don't think it is reading too much between the lines to suggest, from those letters, that my father not only respected his father but also wanted to please him—and perhaps impress him. If that is so, it is no wonder that my mother worried that my father was taking on the Charles White case because of his daddy.

“A
LL THE SAME
, I hope you aren't taking this Charles White case because of Mr. M. L.,” Bertha cautioned as they continued their stroll from Miss Pauline's.

“Daddy's got nothing to do with what I'm doing or not doing about Charles White,” Foster said. He knew that was a bit of a lie. He could not escape who he was and how he was raised. Born legally blind in one eye and weakened by diphtheria as a baby, the smallest of the five children to survive and a favorite of his mother simply
because
he survived, he had been a shy, serious child, in awe of the tall, strapping, garrulous man that townspeople and visitors alike called Mr. M. L. As an adult, Foster had come to be proud of his father's intellect and open-mindedness, while deploring his abuse of alcohol, so much so that he barely touched liquor himself.

“Besides, Bertha, you've got enough to worry about with your own job. Did you ever talk to the superintendent, find out what he wants?” The superintendent, a powerful man in Enterprise, where Bertha was the high school English teacher, had presided over Coffee County's schools, white and colored, for more than thirty years. Foster had heard from Frances that Bertha was under pressure from the superintendent about something, and he was trying to change the subject.

“He wants a better grade for his grandson. I can't let him make me, but I have to keep my job.”