My Father and Atticus Finch (3 page)

Some of the earliest stories I heard about my father's law practice in those Depression years concerned his battles with the banks. Their determination to foreclose on homes and farms in Crenshaw
and Coffee counties was “the most frightening thing happening . . . The man of the house was humiliated. Young people were fearful they would never be able to get a job. The government . . . advocated loans to big corporations and railroads with the idea that it would trickle down to the masses, but these companies used the money to help their desperate financial affairs and unemployment grew, breadlines grew longer and gloom settled over the land. Then Roosevelt was elected and there was the New Deal.”

F
OSTER
B
ECK
was a lifelong Democrat. He was also a racial progressive, at least by the standards of the times. I distinctly remember him taking me aside when he got home from work—by then we lived in Montgomery—on the day in 1954 that the U.S. Supreme Court decided the school desegregation case. “Son,” he said, “The court was right to decide it this way. There will be some high talk, but you are not to engage in it.”

He was right about the high talk. It was after that Supreme Court decision that the worst white Alabamians began openly speaking of their hatred for “niggers,” and even some white moderates flew Confederate battle flags and demanded the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Many Americans remember what followed: the bombing of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Montgomery home, the savage beatings of the Freedom Riders at the bus station in Montgomery, the rise of George Wallace. In view of the climate of fear in those days, it is perhaps understandable that my father, to my knowledge, did not often talk publicly about his controversial defense of a black-on-white rape case fifteen years earlier in a small town eighty-five miles southeast of Montgomery.

Nevertheless, he took stances involving race that made an
impression on me. For example, I remember, as a twelve-year-old boy, sitting where I had been told to sit, on a flour bin in the kitchen behind a closed swing door, and overhearing him angrily reprimand a newspaper reporter in the next room for his ugly remark about the “all-nigger choir” that had been asked to sing at Mr. M. L.'s funeral in Glenwood. Another time, when I was eleven, he took me to a Montgomery Rebels baseball game in which the first black players in our league would be playing for the visiting Jacksonville Braves. There were predictions of violence at the baseball field and some nasty shouts—I could hear them easily because we sat on the third base side, right behind the Jacksonville dugout, to show our support for the black players—and the taunts grew louder when a black player came out of the dugout and stood in the on-deck circle, then moved to the plate. The home crowd eventually fell silent after one of the black men got two hits, one a double that rattled the scoreboard. I remember my father saying, after the game, “Son, I don't think we will get to see him next year in Montgomery,” and sure enough, Hank Aaron was called up to the Milwaukee Braves for the next season.

The racial tension at the ball field that day in Montgomery would not have been new to my father, and I wonder if it took him back to his first meeting with Charles White, Alias, in Kilby prison, where he was being held, pending trial, for his safety. Unlike when Mr. White testified in court, no stenographer was present to record their words at Kilby prison, so I have to surmise what was said from what eventually transpired and from what I remember my father telling me about that meeting. Suffice it to say, the demanding man defended by my father was not at all like the deferential Tom Robinson represented by Atticus Finch in
To Kill a Mockingbird.

   Chapter 5

T
HE AIR
in the Negro ward at Kilby was damp from years of plumbing leaks, backed-up sewage, and the sweat and breathing of its crowded captives. Foster gagged on the stink of urine, excrement, rotted food, and unwashed bodies.

“You gotta bail me outta here, lawyer,” Charles White demanded right off the bat, in a rude tone Foster had never heard used by a colored man addressing a white. Charles White was from Detroit and Chicago, not from the South, and his attitude showed it.

“Bail's already been denied, Charles. Sentencing's in three weeks, but I hope to have it all worked out before that.”

Charles White glared at him. Foster guessed that Charles must have weighed upward of 275 pounds, close to twice his own weight. Maybe five inches taller. Late forties to mid-fifties. A burly, dark black Negro. Scowling and stinking. “It didn't happen the way she said.”

“I can argue all that when we ask for a lighter sentence, Charles—”

“
Shee-uh
,” Charles White interrupted. There were no chairs for
the Negro prisoners who had lined up to see their families behind the mesh screen of heavy steel. Charles had to squat to make eye contact with his appointed lawyer, who had been given a low stool on the visitors' side of the screen. The only other white person in the holding pen was a guard armed with a double-barreled shotgun, a measure that struck Foster as ridiculous. He was more afraid of the guard accidentally discharging his shotgun than of the manacled colored men squatting behind the thick steel mesh. And he certainly was not afraid of the Negro women and children on his side of the screen, wailing and moaning for the fifteen minutes they were allowed to visit.

Having expressed his contempt for his lawyer, Charles White leaned his head back and stared at the prison ceiling stained in shades of brown, yellow, and olive, the residue from years of mildew, leaks, and worse.

“You want to tell me what did happen?” As soon as the words came out of his mouth, Foster almost wished he could retract them. Why go into whatever happened? There was not going to be a trial on guilt. Charles already had confessed.

For a flickering moment, Charles White looked at him as if he were looking at another human being; however, he did not reply.

“Charles, you say it didn't happen the way she says. But then why'd you sign that confession?”

“You don't know? They say I don't sign, they turn around and take me straight back to Troy that night. They say I'm dyin' on a rope that night. If I sign, they promise I can stay here in this place till the trial, then I can come back here to serve out my sentence.”

“Who promised?”

“Five white men. Sheriff, deputy, three others.”

“Maybe we can suppress the confession on the ground it was coerced. But if we succeed, the state may try to seek the death penalty. Are you all right with a life sentence?”

“I don't want to go to jail for life for something I didn't do.”

“If you plead in exchange for a promise of life, not the chair, at least you will be alive—”

“Not how I want to live,” Charles White said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Foster guessed Charles was getting tired of squatting in order to look him in the eye, and he thought about standing up, but he didn't.

“Charles, I may be able to bargain for less time than life. And make you eligible for parole.” Again, Foster almost wished he could retract. He had never tried to bargain for less than life with eligibility for parole in a capital case. He would have to research it.

“I'm not entering a plea of guilty. I want that confession suppressed,” Charles White said, staring at his seated lawyer. Foster was surprised Charles even knew what a plea was, much less a motion to suppress.

“Well, I think that'll be up to the judge whether to suppress but—”

“Do something for me, lawyer,” Charles White interrupted, no longer squatting, towering over his seated lawyer like a dark storm.

Foster pushed back on his stool and found his feet. He was still almost half a foot shorter than his client, but it was Charles's mental toughness, not his physique, that left him intimidated and uncertain. This man—if he was going to represent him—was not a grateful, churchgoing colored client from Enterprise who needed his help fighting a foreclosure by the bank, but a strapping, sassy Northern black who had already confessed to raping a white girl and was now
demanding a trial, even if it meant the state could ask for the death penalty. Though he was also a man, according to the United States Constitution, entitled to a lawyer. He did not like Charles White, but that was not the point. The point was to give the man good representation, convince him to enter a plea, get him as short a sentence as he could, a chance someday for parole. That could be worked out privately, in chambers, without Judge Parks or a jury ever having to look at, much less listen to, Charles White.

   Chapter 6

A
S WAS TYPICAL
of Southerners in the 1940s and 1950s, I grew up hearing a lot of history about my family, and not only the Beck side. My mother—at the time of the trial, one of several ladies my father was seeing—was from Rayfield and Stewart stock. The Alabama Rayfields fought for the Confederacy, I was told, but the Alabama Stewarts had refused, and so of course I heard stories about that.

One favorite was that because my maternal great-grandfather Rayfield lost a leg during the Civil War, he couldn't plow or hunt, and was of no use, just another mouth to feed. The children were too little to reach the plow handles, so great-grandmother Rayfield plowed the spring corn.

Cora Rayfield, the seventh of eight Rayfield children, eventually caught the eye of Oscar Stewart, a bookish, scientifically inclined young man from nearby Weogufka, Alabama. Because Oscar Stewart's father had refused to serve in the Confederate Army—seeing no point in fighting to own slaves he did not own—the Stewart family was spared the worst of Reconstruction and prospered relative to most.

That made all the Stewarts damn Scalawags and Republicans, in the opinion of some of the Rayfields; but, aware of all the land the Yankees had let the Stewart family keep in and around Weogufka, they consented to the marriage. In the fullness of time, Cora and Oscar Stewart produced seven children, five of whom—Bertha Mae, Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, John Oscar, and Mary—survived. The closest real town (for there was not much to Weogufka) was a day's trip there and back, but the Stewart family rarely needed store-bought goods, with more than two hundred rocky acres of corn, apple and pear orchards, a large, bountiful garden filled with peas, okra, beans, and tomatoes, two fishponds, and sixty acres reserved as pasture for their several dozen cows, sheep, goats, and two mules. There was also a very talented horse that pulled Oscar Stewart's buggy by memory around his rural mail route each morning while Oscar read the
Atlanta Constitution
and studied the Bible.

Oscar carried the mail because it paid a regular government check and didn't take even half a day, but his first love was animal husbandry, especially the latest genetics of chicken breeding, and as soon as he finished the mail route, he turned to his scientific books, manuals, and paraphernalia. Bertha, his oldest, did not regard her father as a warm, loving man, but, like her mother, she was in awe of his intelligence. Oscar returned the admiration, seeing in Bertha someone much like him—curious, bookish—and so he insisted she go to the University of Alabama. Bertha's fondest memory of Papa was over the Christmas holidays of her junior year, the sheer delight that came into his eyes as he hungrily paged through her biology textbook. On returning to Tuscaloosa, she was not surprised to discover that Papa had used his straight razor to remove a page of the book depicting a nude man.

Bertha Stewart had come to the university as the valedictorian of Weogufka High School, but she was far behind the freshmen from the big-city schools of Mobile, Montgomery, and Birmingham, and could only muster C's and an occasional B her first year. Through hard study, sheer grit, and no social life, she caught up and was a straight-A student her final two years, grades that earned her a job as the high school English teacher in Eclectic, Alabama, not far from Weogufka. It was in Eclectic that Bertha met Frances Beck, the two of them sharing a bedroom at a farmhouse on the edge of town. Room and board plus ninety dollars a month was all the compensation the county school board could afford in 1936.

Frances Beck had majored in chemistry and biology at the Woman's College of Alabama in Montgomery (today's Huntingdon College), but the Eclectic school board felt the sciences should be taught by a man, so Frances—a skilled athlete who could throw a football or a baseball like a man—was assigned to teach home economics and physical education to the girls at the high school.

One afternoon, as the two of them walked from school back to the farmhouse, Frances told Bertha about a letter she had received from her brother. Foster wrote that they were looking for teachers in Enterprise, Frances said. She had been feeding Bertha tidbits of information about Foster for months, seeing in her well-read housemate a good match for her similarly bookish brother. On the other hand, the two were different in ways Frances thought might appeal to Foster. If he tended to brood and worry, Bertha was an optimist by nature. He loved history, she loved poetry. While Foster was cautious with money—understandable in view of their father, Mr. M. L., who was not—Bertha didn't hesitate to spend what little she had, though only, she insisted, on “the finer things.” Foster was always weighing the ethical answers to this and that, even though
he didn't darken the door of a church very often, while Bertha went to church regularly but had a wild side, having once danced the Charleston on a table at a party in Montgomery. Bertha would be a tonic for Foster, who, Frances suspected, had inherited a touch of their daddy's melancholia, but who, unlike Mr. M. L, would not medicate with alcohol or cocaine. The need for teachers in Enterprise spurred Frances to propose that they apply and move there if offered jobs.

   Chapter 7

“W
HERE
IS
E
NTERPRIS
e,” Bertha wanted to know.