My Father and Atticus Finch

by Joseph Madison Beck

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right. Whatever you’re going to say under oath, you should go ahead and say it all to me now so I can try to break you down, like E. C. will try to do on cross-examination.”

  “I understand. I’ll do that.”

  Chapter 25

  AFTER CONSIDERING whom to call first for the defense, and still hopeful that Charles would not insist on taking the stand, Foster settled on Carrie Louise Bray, the daughter of Mary Etta Bray. Carrie Louise had a reputation as a reliable girl who could be counted on to fetch a white woman’s wash on Tuesday and return every garment the next day, clean, dry from the sun, and neatly folded. She was washing clothes in her backyard on the Tuesday in question.

  “Miss Elizabeth, she stopped and spoke to me before she went in through the back door,” Carrie Louise testified. “When she left she come around by the washtub and told me good-bye. She didn’t complain about a thing and she wasn’t crying. I did not see anything apparently wrong with her.” A second witness, Annie McCray, who was present at Etta’s home on the day in question and was in the yard helping Carrie Louise with the washing, also swore that when the “young lady” came out of the house to leave, “she just said bye to Carrie Louise and went on up the street. She was not crying.”

  “Anything further, Mr. Beck?” Judge Parks asked wearily. He did not expect the defense had anything more. He was furious that Foster had been unable to persuade his client to do what His Honor thought best. He did not believe there was a chance in a million the jury would unanimously acquit, which meant a hung jury and a retrial. And he certainly did not think Foster would put Charles White himself on the stand to testify. In anticipation that the defense would rest, Judge Parks had at the ready a Supreme Court-approved admonition to the jury that a defendant had the constitutional right not to testify.

  Nor did Solicitor E. C. Orme think the lawyer from Enterprise would dare subject Charles White to cross-examination. Orme wasn’t even paying much attention to the colloquy between the judge and defense counsel and was marking up his closing argument.

  Foster rose. He had planned to ask for a ten-minute recess, one last chance to talk Charles White out of taking the stand, also to answer any last-minute questions if he were still determined to go ahead. But before Foster could speak, Charles White was on his feet.

  “I want to testify, Judge Parks. I want to tell what did happen.”

  The angry stir that immediately began in the courtroom was mounting in volume when Judge Parks rapped his gavel—though not before the white boy standing in the back who had been designated to run outside and tell the crowd surrounding the courthouse when there was something to report—had bolted for the door. “The nigger’s takin’ the stand! The nigger’s gon’ testify!” the boy shouted to the crowd outside.

  “We’ll have perfect order here or I’ll clear this courtroom this minute,” Judge Parks shouted as he stood and pounded a mahogany gavel the size of a ball-peen hammer. “Sheriff Reeves?”

  Anyone who had ever been arrested by Sheriff B. R. Reeves did not want to have that experience again, so the buzz in the courtroom quickly subsided.

  Outside, the captain of the Alabama Highway Patrol detachment, seeing the crowd surge upon the announcement that Charles White would testify, ordered his squad to form a line and assume the position of “present arms.” The advancing rabble held up, quieted down, and became sullen, convinced from previous unhappy encounters with law enforcement that the armed men from Montgomery might just as soon shoot them as not if they rushed the door.

  Inside, the clerk asked Charles White if he would swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God. Charles White said he would.

  MY FATHER TOLD ME that Charles White spoke in a tone and with a demeanor he had not previously seen. Because Solicitor E. C. Orme had been sternly warned by Judge Parks, in a whispered bench conference, that he had better not object to Foster’s questions absent indisputable cause, Charles White’s testimony proceeded without interruption, and is reproduced here at nearly its full length, as recorded by Court Reporter McCartha.

  “My name is Charles White, C. W. White, William White. I am living mostly now in Ohio. My occupation is a cook and molder. I last came to Troy the first day of June, Wednesday morning, at the dawn of day. I stopped here as a healer and adviser. I stopped at Mary Etta Bray’s house early that morning and I blowed my horn and I got no reply and then I went to Claire Cardwell’s and after I went to Claire Cardwell’s I came back to Mary’s house. I set up my office in what I call the end room adjoining the front room at Mary Etta’s house.”

  After testifying that he saw but never spoke to “the white lady” the previous week at the Liger store, where he had gone with Mary Etta “to get something in order to live on,” Charles recalled seeing her again at the Liger store on Monday morning, the same morning Mary Etta told Miss Elizabeth that he was a fortune-teller. He said he was there looking for spare ribs and neck bones. “I didn’t say anything to the young lady. She never parted her lips to me.

  “The next time I saw her was on Monday evening. It was at Mary Etta’s house. Mary come to me and said, ‘There is a lady from the store that is here and she wants you to give her a reading and she said she has only a quarter.’ And I said, ‘I don’t read for a quarter. I will answer three questions for a quarter but my reading is a dollar.’ And she goes back and tells the white lady, and then in a few minutes Mary came back again and she said, ‘She has decided to take three questions, must I bring her in?’ And I said, ‘If you like.’

  “When she came in she spoke first, she said ‘Howdy do,’ I told her howdy and she says to me, she says, ‘I guess I will take three questions for a quarter.’

  “She took a seat and turned around a little bit and then she went to proceeding with her questions. Her first question was, ‘I want to know is I ever going to have a husband?’ And I told her, ‘Yes, ma’am; in the near future,’ and the next question was ‘Can you describe him to me?’ And I said, ‘Yes, ma’am. He is three or four years older than you; he is fair-skinned, blue eyes and blond hair;’ and the next question she asked me was, ‘Would my people be mad with me if I got married?’ I said, ‘No, your mother might shed a few tears, but when she finds out that you have a good husband, her heart will shout for joy.’

  “I had answered her three questions and then she got to talking about some boys out at a baseball park here some place. When she was talking about her people being cruel to her I said, ‘I don’t think that your people are cruel to you, but if you wait until you get older you will thank your mother for being what you call tight today.’ When she said she had a notion to run away I told her not to do that.

  “I didn’t put any salve on her that day. I didn’t put my hand on her. Nothing else happened, only she just talked. She didn’t say anything about coming back but she did say this, she said, ‘I want a reading,’ but she didn’t say when she would be back.

  “She come back the next day, that is June 7. It was one o’clock when she came in. I was out on the front porch.

  “The first thing that called my attention to her was that Mary came out on the porch and said, ‘The store lady is down here again and she wants a full reading.’ I was sitting there talking to Mary’s brother and some other negro man on the porch and I had about forgotten about what Mary told me about the white lady. I opened the screen door and went in the hall and into my room and I hadn’t hardly got in there until Mary and the white lady came and I sat down and she was setting in the same chair that she did before. The white lady sat still and I reached out and pulled the door to.”

  “Did you lock it?” Foster asked.

  “No, I didn’t lock it. There wasn’t even any key there to lock it with.

  “The young lady then said, ‘I have come after my full reading and I want you to tell me everything and I have got my dollar for you.’ I told her to shuffle the cards and she did and laid them down and I told
her to cut them to her right and she cut the cards to her right, and I said, ‘You must have been a fast pinochle player, or whist player,’ and I said, ‘Would you mind turning out a card on the first pile?’ ”

  Charles’s testimony proceeded, card by card, until finally the nine of spades was turned. “And I looked dead in her face and I said, ‘The nine of spades says there is trouble here,’ and she said, ‘For me?’ And I said, ‘Trouble means between you and your people.’

  “After I got through reading for her she asked me plainly, is there any more work that you can do, and what do you charge for it?’ And I said, ‘It all depends on what you want me to do?’ And she turned herself out from under the table again and she said, ‘I want a nice home and a good husband and I want children, and I don’t want to live in this durned place’—that was what she said. I said, ‘Well, it will cost you twelve dollars.’ She put her hand on the back of the chair she was sitting in and she said, ‘I haven’t got twelve dollars; I have got ten dollars,’ and I said, ‘It will be all right; you can owe me the other.’ And then she said, ‘I haven’t got the ten dollars; I have got $8.65,’ and I said, ‘Whatever you care to leave will be all right.’ Then she turned around to me and she says, ‘I will have to get it from my mother’s book.’ Then I said to her, looking up from where I sat, ‘Are you going to steal from your mother?’ And she said, ‘No, it is money I have saved, my money.’ And I said, ‘Don’t take money from your mother,’ and she said, ‘I will be back in a few minutes.’

  “She was back in about ten minutes. I was in the room writing a letter when she came back. She came on in with a long smile on her face and sat down, and she ran her fingers in her bitty pocketbook, and she commenced taking out the money and the first bill she put down was a five-dollar bill and she had a one-dollar bill on top of it and she placed another one on that; she put down two case quarters, two case halves, one dime, and one five-cent piece. $8.65.

  “Then I said, ‘Now, you told me you wanted a husband, you said you wanted a nice home, a nice husband, babies, and you didn’t want to live here.’ I said, ‘Would you mind raising and coming around here and face me?’ And she got up and got in front of me. I turned and with my right hand I got a vial—it is a secret, holy oil that I get from India—and I said, ‘I am fixing to use this; it is a process from India.’ I had a new eye-water dropper that I got here in this city from a drugstore, and I made a sign below her waist outside of her clothes; I set that down and got another vial the same size which was loadstone perfume—you can’t get it at any drugstore—and I made a sign from the left up on her chest and I said, ‘I have finished; you may sit down,’ and she went over and seated herself in the chair nicely, and commenced talking to me, and she said, ‘When will I meet this man?’ I said, ‘The fellow that you will meet, he will treat you—’ and then she cut me off, she said, ‘Would he ask too much of me like the other fellow did?’ I said, ‘No, ma’am; you are going to tell him about all your troubles and he is going to act nice with you; he is going to marry you,’ and then she says to me, ‘I am going to the ball game Thursday,’ and she said, ‘Do you think any of those boys will talk to me?’ And she said, ‘If they do, I am coming back down here Friday and tell you.’

  “That is all that happened down there. I never did lock the door. I did not put any salve on her private parts. I didn’t even put my hands on the white lady. I didn’t put her down on the bed. The lady treated me nice; she made me no advances at all. I treated her white. I wasn’t ever scared while she was in there. The lady left at two o’clock. One officer came to the house and it was fifteen or twenty minutes to four. There was another officer came there and he asked me, ‘What is the matter, boy?’ And I said ‘Officer, I don’t know,’ and then this officer said ‘Come on.’ ”

  E. C. ORME must have known he was not going to shake Charles White on the details. But Charles lost his gamble, because, as Foster had predicted, the State had obtained documents reporting the prior offenses.

  “Yes, I was convicted in Michigan in 1917 for armed robbery. Yes, in January 1924, I was convicted at Springfield, Ohio, for the offense of burglary in an inhabited dwelling and got from twenty to thirty years. I [served] eight years and they turned me loose. I got to be a spiritual adviser and healer. It came to me when I was in prison.”

  As for the allegedly locked door, Charles steadfastly swore he didn’t have a key to the room and had never even seen a key to the house.

  Painful as it was for Foster to watch the prior convictions come out, it was better than if he had asked and Charles White had lied to him on direct, and then been shown on cross-examination to have perjured himself. His property crimes were serious, but he had never been convicted of rape, so maybe the jury would focus on the lack of evidence of this alleged crime? And Foster thought Charles’s explanation of how he came to be a spiritual advisor and healer, “It came on me when I was in prison,” might have gone over well with a jury that believed in forgiveness.

  Chapter 26

  THOUGH I WISH that before my father’s death I’d been more curious about the Charles White case, I was at least interested enough to ask him about his closing argument to the jury. I was a young lawyer myself by then, and closing arguments are something young lawyers tend to focus on, if only because they have been repeatedly dramatized in books and movies—one of the most eloquent, of course, being the closing argument in which Atticus Finch urges the jury, “In the name of God, do your duty.”

  My father’s closing argument was not recorded in the transcript. As a result, I have nothing but my memory of what he said to me and my knowledge of my father’s lifelong, passionate belief that the law was there for the poor as well as the rich, for blacks as well as whites.

  His was a jury of the humble: from my comparison of the fifty-five names and occupations on the jury summons with the names of the twelve who served (as reported by the Messenger), there were nine farmers, one dairyman, a store clerk, and a mechanic. My father knew, from asking them on voir dire, that these struggling working-class men, personally or through their kin, had suffered foreclosures, evictions, arrests, and beatings—or worse—at the hands of mean sheriffs and bullying prosecutors; their white skin had not shielded them from abuse. Here, he would argue, those same authorities had charged forcible rape where, plainly, there had been no such thing, and they should not be allowed to get away with it. In a free society, the law was there to restrain the government, not just to punish the poor man. Before the authorities—beginning with the sheriff banging, uninvited, on the door of the home at midnight, followed by the rough and humiliating handcuffing in the presence of wife and children, the jailhouse threats and interrogation, the days and nights behind bars without bail—before the State of Alabama, with all of its heavy, creaking prosecutorial machinery, could do all that to a man and then deprive him of his actual life, it had to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, guilt of the crime being charged: forcible rape. And that was as true for a poor man accused of a crime as for a rich one.

  It is easy to see the parallels between the populist closing argument I believe my father made to his jury and the fictional one. Atticus Finch told his jury there was “one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller.” On the other hand, no such comparison can be drawn between what the real and fictional judges said to their respective juries about the law that they should apply in a rape case. This is because Harper Lee did not write any instructions by her fictional Judge Taylor to his fictional jury. However, I have the transcript of exactly what Judge Parks told the real jury in State of Alabama v. Charles White, Alias, and it is worth quoting as it illuminates, if it does not justify, what was to come.

  “Rape,” Judge Parks explained, means the defendant “forcibly had sexual intercourse with Elizabeth Liger.” Before discussing the meaning of the word “forcibly” and the concept of consent, the Judge said, “First, I will say the sexual intercourse is complete under the law if there was any penetration
of the vagina. [A]n emission on the part of the male . . . is not, under our present law, necessary.”

  Thinking, I suspect, of the extraordinary testimony by Dr. Stewart that Elizabeth Liger was intact following the alleged rape, and not wanting to retry the case, Judge Parks again told the jury, “It need not be a full penetration, nothing more than . . . that the private parts of the man entered to some extent into the female. . . . It does not have to be full penetration of the male organ into the vagina of the female, because, as I said there, if it is only partial, if it only penetrates to the hymen and no further, it would be sufficient under the law.”

  Judge Parks next addressed the legal requirement of force. The jury had been told that Dr. Stewart saw no bruises or sign of blood on Ms. Liger when he examined her immediately after the alleged incident; however, Judge Parks instructed, “It is not necessary that the force should be actual; it may be constructive force used upon the female to make her yield her consent to the intercourse.”

  Turning to the issue of consent, and referring to what he called a leading case, Judge Parks told the jury, “Carnal intercourse with a woman incapable from mental disease (where that disease be idiocy or mania) of giving consent is rape.”

  “Here,” Judge Parks reminded the jury, “it is insisted by the State that . . . she did have a mania upon the subject of fortune-telling.”

  After summarizing once more the minimal requirement of penetration, Judge Parks returned to the issue of consent: “Now on that subject [of whether she was mentally incapacitated] I think it is entirely proper that you consider the social relation of the races, not on the question of his color, but on the question of her knowledge of the consequences of this act. If she knew that she was having intercourse with a colored man and what the possibilities or consequences that followed such intercourse might be, he didn’t know, but whatever they were she was hereafter facing in her own society. Did she have the capacity to know and think upon those things? If she did not, then she would be incapacitated in giving her consent.”