Read My Father and Atticus Finch Online

Authors: Joseph Madison Beck

My Father and Atticus Finch (2 page)

BOOK: My Father and Atticus Finch
13.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

My father wrote in the family history that his father paid his black workers “above the usual wage for the community” and that, unlike some white employers, he “tried to not let them get in debt to him. . . . Nevertheless, these blacks were expected to come in the back door and sit in the kitchen when they came to the house.” Thus, while he believed his mother and father were “quite tolerant” by the standards of the time, he added, “I would [also] say that they were paternalistic.”

Paternalism alone did not make Mr. M. L. a progressive on race. And although it was pretty well known in parts of south Alabama that Mr. M. L. and the Jacksons and Joe Cassady had driven the
Klan out of Crenshaw County in 1935, and that they did it partly to protect the county's black population, even that didn't make Mr. M. L. a progressive on race in the minds of the better class of whites, who thought that however much good the Klan had done during Reconstruction, by the 1930s they were just troublemakers.

The idea that Mr. M. L. was not just paternalistic but progressive probably got started with the controversy over Will Pickett, a dark, smooth-skinned black man who was in debt to a rival sawmill owner. Mr. M. L. paid off Will's debt so that he wouldn't be arrested and hired him to work in his own sawmill. “I don't hold with peonage,” he said when the rival called him a nigger lover while the two were standing toe to toe, fists balled, at the flowing well in Glenwood. The story was told and retold in Glenwood, Mr. M. L.'s commercial base in Crenshaw County, and repeated as far as Troy and Enterprise. Most in south Alabama saw it as only partly about being a racial progressive, and at least as much about Mr. M. L. outsmarting a competitor and gaining a dependable employee (except on Saturday night when, according to the family history, Will would drink, stagger to town, get arrested for sassing some white person and wind up in Glenwood's small jail until Monday morning, when my grandfather would pay his seven-dollar fine and send him to the mill with a big headache and a reprimand).

It was my grandfather's relationship with Tump Garner—a remarkable black man I had the honor of knowing myself when I was a boy—more than buying Will Pickett out of peonage, that got the idea started that Mr. M. L. really
was
a progressive on race. According to our family history, Tump could saw an order of lumber, repair a steam engine, and grind meal to fool the folks who thought water-
ground meal was the only meal fit to eat. He could take a log hook and turn the log before the average man, white or black, could get his hook set. On Emancipation Day, Tump celebrated by leading the Glenwood Negroes against the Goshen Negroes in baseball, playing any position with or without a glove, all the while chanting and singing as the whites sat on the side cheering and passing the hat when he hit a home run. By the time my father went off to college, Tump was Mr. M. L.'s sawyer, millwright, and miller. When the family's Model T, the first in Glenwood, broke down, Tump, who had never before even seen a car, took it apart and fixed it so that—as Mr. M. L. swore to one and all—it ran better than when it was new. All of which made it only fair, Mr. M. L. reasoned, that Tump should be paid better than the whites he courteously supervised at the sawmill, even if that led some in Glenwood to grumble that Mr. M. L. was turning a little
too
progressive on race.

My father told me that his father also had his blind spots. There was the time, again reported in the family history, when my father prepared a letter to a Negro who owed Mr. M. L. money on an account. My father began the letter with the customary salutation, “Dear Sir.” Mr. M. L. had him rewrite the letter, suggesting he leave off the “Dear Sir” and just write the one word, “Tom,” as the salutation.

Progressive or not, my grandfather discussed race with my father infrequently. One occasion I heard about was when Mr. M. L. had been drinking in the afternoon. “You free a million illiterate slaves, I'm fine with that,” he said. “Slavery never was right. But, after the War, you had Nigras getting the vote before they tried on their first pair of shoes. Measures had to be taken. I was too young to understand
it all, but I do believe the Jim Crow laws were meant to be temporary. Granted, over the years, those laws became a way of life, and these days, we're stuck with 'em.”

My grandfather, like a lot of Southerners, sometimes said “Nigra” instead of “Negro,” but he fiercely insisted, to my father and to anyone who challenged him, that saying “Nigra” was not the same as saying “nigger,” that “Nigra” was exactly the same as saying “Negro” only with a Southern accent. My father remembered getting his mouth washed out with soap for saying the word “nigger” and the word “fuck” when he was six years old, just repeating what other boys said at school—washed out once for each bad word.

   Chapter 3

“I
F
I
TAKE
this case, Judge,” Foster said, “I will just do it on my own, sir.” He was trying not to sound defensive or disrespectful. “Don't bring Daddy into it, please, sir.”

Judge Parks tut-tutted but did not apologize.

“It's all right, Judge, but I want to think about it. And I want to meet my client while I'm thinking about it. My possible client. Can you get me in to see him?”

Judge Parks could do that. He would call the warden at Kilby himself. Driving to Montgomery, Foster would go right through Troy, so he should stop on the way back and they would see what was what.

When Foster did not respond, the judge reminded him about the article in the
Messenger
. If Foster couldn't find it, the judge would clip it and give him his own copy. It would tell him all he needed to know.

The June 8, 1938,
Messenger
was there in his office, at the bottom of the stack, under the Atlanta paper of the day before. The article about Charles White was on page one, under the headline “NEGRO RUSHED TO KILBY PRISON AFTER ATTACK.”

“A wandering negro fortune teller, giving the name of C. W. White,” the
Messenger
reported, was removed from the Troy jail “for safekeeping” following his attack on a local white girl. The
Messenger
explained that the white girl had been “enticed” to the site of the crime by “a negro woman, Mary Etta Bray,” for the purpose of having her fortune told. As word of the crime was passed and with feelings running “high,” the attacker's female accomplice was also delivered to Montgomery for safekeeping.

At Kilby, the
Messenger
reported, “the negro volunteered a detailed confession of the attack” and the confession was reduced to writing and signed in the presence of numerous law enforcement officials.

A physician, called to attend to the girl, later confirmed that “the negro had accomplished his dastardly purpose.”

Foster clipped the article from the
Messenger
with scissors and slipped it into an empty cubbyhole in the rolltop desk. He wanted to think about what he had read. First of all, there was a confession. That meant the only thing he could do would be to get Charles White a term of years instead of the electric chair. That should be easy: the state of Alabama could not ask for the death penalty if it had obtained the confession in return for a promise of a life sentence. He could drive to Montgomery to meet White, stop over in Troy to negotiate the plea, and be back the same day, depending on the weather and the roads, and then he'd be done with it. Most people in Enterprise—unless someone had listened in on the party line to his conversation with Judge Parks—would never learn of the case, and if some found out, the better class of people, the ones who could pay cash money for his work, would see it for what it was. After the Scottsboro cases, it became law that Alabama must provide a Negro
with a lawyer in all future capital cases. Surely, the better class knew that much from all the talk about Scottsboro—they might even quietly thank him for handling the matter rather than having someone come down to Troy from the North and act superior.

Practicalities aside, he was still in his thirties, still idealistic, reverent about the Constitution—a government of laws, not of men—and not yet immune to the siren call, the image of himself as the lone lawyer standing for the unpopular client because it was right that a man have a lawyer. It was why, really, he went to law school to begin with. He had liked himself when defending farmers and sharecroppers, white and colored, from the banks, and never mind that most of his clients couldn't pay cash money—he was getting by all right, and with each win for the poor, the commercial interests of Enterprise and all of Coffee County were taking note that he could win hard cases. With their growing respect would eventually come more paying work; it was just a matter of time.

Beginning to feel better about the Charles White matter, Foster leaned back in his office chair and turned to his right, so that the electric fan could cool the left side of his face, and stared out the office window he had reopened after all the shouting over the broken wagon axle subsided. The magnolia blossoms across the street, in front of the funeral home, were creamy white perfections, proof to him that if there were a God, he was a master artist.

If I leave early in the morning, he thought, I can be at Kilby prison before noon, assuming the roads to Montgomery are dry, see about this Charles White, Alias, and be back in Enterprise the same afternoon.

   Chapter 4

M
Y FATHER WAS RAISED
by parents who were fairly well educated for post-Civil War Alabama. “My mother and father,” he wrote, “both attended the Male and Female Institute at Highland Home, Alabama, about 30 miles away [from Glenwood]. They boarded there during the school term and, for the times, it was considered to be an outstanding place of learning,” attended by numerous future leaders of Montgomery and south Alabama.

Education was central in the lives of the Beck children. “A permanent aim of my parents,” my father recalled in his family history, “was for their children to have every educational or cultural advantage they could afford. There were books, religious and classical, for us to read. . . . After my parents realized I liked to read, they would bring me a book when they made a trip to Montgomery.”

My father respected his father, but his great love—so I always heard—was for his mother. I never knew my grandmother on the Beck side, Miss Lessie as she was known; she died when I was a baby, but my father wrote admiringly of her in our history as a woman of multiple talents, whether she was butchering a freshly killed hog
or making clothes for her five children. She was also “an excellent doctor in her own right, which was not unusual because her father and brother were both country doctors.” She was the principal disciplinarian, but if the children “could convince her [that we really needed something], be it a piece of clothing, a trip, the use of a car or whatever, she devoted all of her efforts to seeing it was done. She was our champion and Daddy's opposition eventually crumbled.”

One side of my grandmother that I would not have known without my father's handwritten family history was her closeness with money—perhaps a reaction to the self-indulgence of her husband, Mr. M. L. Recalling that on the family's semi-annual shopping trips to Troy, a child under twelve could ride the train for half fare, my father wrote, “My mother was one of the most honest persons I ever knew, and yet it was a constant source of wonder how long I was able to ride for half fare. If the conductor was acquainted with Mama he did not make an issue of my age, but occasionally a strange conductor would tangle with my mother and eventually force her to pay up for me. Forevermore that conductor was a scoundrel to her.” On arriving in Troy, the children would try on shoes and clothes at one of the town's leading merchants, “but Mama would pretend the price was too high.” The family would then troop up to a rival merchant's store and go through the same procedure. She “knew the clerks and they knew her,” and she “played off one against the other. They would bargain and haggle over the price and eventually we [would] go home with new clothes.” My father's own legendary closeness with money was perhaps partly inspired by memories of those childhood shopping trips.

The years after World War I were good ones for the Becks of Glenwood. “Money was easier,” my father wrote, and automobiles were becoming common. “Even [Henry] Ford put a self-starter
on his car.” I believe that, like many a young man, my father first became skeptical of some of the strictures of religion during his college years, in the mid- to late 1920s, rejoicing in trivial violations of religious dogma while at the same time wanting to set himself apart from his rural roots. Women, he wrote approvingly, “bobbed their hair, in spite of the preachers,” and drinking bootlegged liquor was common in cities, although “the small town bumpkins were still restrained by the strict teaching in the churches as well as their lack of sophistication.”

I smile every time I read his somewhat snooty reference to small-town bumpkins who lacked sophistication; after all, he was himself a college student not long out of small town Glenwood when he formed those worldly impressions!

“Everything was rolling along merrily,” he wrote, “and then all of a sudden, the Depression.”

I heard about the Depression on many, many occasions—whether as a somber reminiscence or as a reminder to put aside something for the inevitable rainy day. It clearly was a life-changing event for my father. “No one who did not experience the Great Depression can ever realize the traumatic experiences its victims went through,” he wrote. “It was insidious in its early development. Rural merchants and farmers began to feel its effect as early as the middle of the late 1920s. . . . Then came the great stock Market Crash. Our communities had no stock market losses and we made jokes about people jumping out of windows on Wall Street. Then we realized that cotton was six cents a pound, corn fifty cents a bushel, timber four dollars a thousand. Credit, non-existent.”

BOOK: My Father and Atticus Finch
13.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Chew Bee or Not Chew Bee by Martin Chatterton
If I Never Went Home by Ingrid Persaud
The Most Dangerous Animal of All by Stewart, Gary L., Mustafa, Susan
A Dead Man in Trieste by Michael Pearce
ComfortZone by KJ Reed
The Villa by Rosanna Ley
Many Roads Home by Ann Somerville
Smart Moves by Stuart M. Kaminsky