My Father and Atticus Finch

by Joseph Madison Beck

  “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

  MY 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.”

  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.”

  FOSTER BECK 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

  THE 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 priva
tely, in chambers, without Judge Parks or a jury ever having to look at, much less listen to, Charles White.

  Chapter 6

  AS 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.