My Father and Atticus Finch

by Joseph Madison Beck

  After another stretch of silence, Foster began to feel badly about the way he had spoken and to wish he could take some of it back. He would “forgive” them all—whatever she meant by that—if doing so would bring the town’s respect back to her and a return of the modest prosperity he had enjoyed before taking the case, which, like a disease, had paralyzed his little law practice. But instead of saying any of that, he thanked Bertha and Frances for the meal and got up to leave.

  “I’m not sure I can keep my practice open much after New Year’s,” he blurted out to Frances at the door. It was humiliating; he had vowed to avoid the financial difficulties of his father, and here he was, about to lose everything.

  “You know, two can live as cheaply as one,” Frances said, still hoping to salvage the evening.

  Foster knew exactly what Frances meant by that but remained silent. He had too much pride to ever let Bertha support him, even if they could get by just on her salary and what little he was still bringing in. Not knowing when, if ever, the town’s resentment would subside, he was hesitant to offer her false hope for the future, though he suspected that, even without Frances’s hectoring, Bertha was coming to the end of her patience with him. He couldn’t blame her.

  For her part, Bertha could have strangled Frances for saying two could live as cheaply as one. And she was a little sorry to have argued with Foster about forgiveness and church, but the fact was, she had been loyal and supportive throughout the ordeal with Charles White. And besides, things were changing for her, too. Her father’s death had left her mother alone and solely responsible for the Weogufka farm. While Mrs. Stewart had cancelled her late husband’s subscriptions to science journals and sold off the exotic birds and animals he had bred, without his steady salary as a mail carrier, she barely had enough money for the few necessities she couldn’t raise in the pasture or grow in the garden; and always there were the land taxes.

  Bertha knew her mother’s situation and was sure she could find a teaching position in Rockford or Sylacauga—even Montgomery would be a lot closer to home than Enterprise—and she was beginning to wonder if Foster would ever commit to her, if not for one reason, then for another. She was beginning to resent him for that. At first it had been just a little resentment, but it was growing, and besides, she had her pride and didn’t want to keep hint-hinting around.

  Foster was the right one for her, she knew that, and he also was likely the only one who would ever appreciate a woman her age who was sometimes described, not necessarily as a compliment, as “regal,” and always pigeonholed as a poor cook and bookish and a little too much on the independent side—for example, wanting to keep her own checkbook. Things like that annoyed other men, so they would never ask her out more than once or twice, much less to marry. Bertha was afraid to bring things to a head with Foster and possibly end their courtship, and yet she was afraid to do nothing and become a year older. In the meantime, she was feeling a need to look after herself.

  “I’m going to have to spend more weekends at home,” she said after Foster said he might not be able to keep his office open much after the New Year. “Mama’s having a hard time managing by herself.” It was the best she could do for an excuse to end the conversation.

  Outside, the rain slacked up; the lightning and thunder had finally moved east, blowing toward the Chattahoochee River and Georgia. By the time Miss Pauline returned from prayer meeting to find the electricity turned off and Bertha and Frances reading by the oil lamps, the sky was clear and cold.

  Chapter 33

  “CHRISMUS GIF, young Cap’n. You shore is the spittin’ image of the ole Cap’n.”

  As a child, I heard that exact greeting from Pete Tate on many a Christmas morning in Glenwood, the custom being that the first one to say “Christmas gift” was supposed to receive one. My father told me that he, too, heard it when he was a boy, a reminder that Glenwood was slow to change. Though some things did change—the dime he always gave Pete Tate had become a quarter from me.

  My father enjoyed telling me about Christmases when he was a boy in Glenwood, the home filled with family and other celebrants from throughout the county, the sounds of laughter and carols, the mouthwatering smells. On Christmas mornings, his father, “the ole Cap’n,” would give Pete a good slug of Four Roses, and his mother, Miss Lessie, would fix Pete a big plate of sausage, eggs, biscuits, and ribbon cane syrup, and round up some spare clothes for him and his family. Pete would bestow his own gift by cutting a load of firewood and laying a good fire.

  By the time my father tried the Charles White case, Christmases in Glenwood had become more somber occasions. For one thing, Mr. M. L.’s contacts with the local white community had begun to wither, and no wonder. As recorded in our family history, my grandfather, tolerant of different opinions about some issues, would get into nearly violent arguments over others, saying unforgivable things, then act surprised that his former adversary was hurt with him since he himself did not hold grudges and therefore did not expect others would.

  The bourbon and cocaine and whatever else my grandfather used to combat his melancholia—both the kind of mental depression he had always suffered and the kind that was new, brought on by advancing age—also took a toll. My father told me that his bouts of optimism one day, pessimism the next, had become steadily more unpredictable and pronounced. Sometimes, he would seem suspended in a lugubrious haze, other times he was vigorous, high as a kite, captured by his own impossible dreams—one of the most memorable being his long fascination with tracts of timber land in Brazil. My grandfather had read somewhere about millions of acres of virgin rain forest in Brazil, and the thought of all those tall trees waiting to be harvested had temporarily restored the old sawmill man’s appetite for money and adventure. For years, I was told, books and envelopes containing colorful pamphlets arrived at the house in Glenwood, extolling the beauty and mystery of Brazil and the opportunities there for an experienced lumberman.

  FOSTER WAS SAD, when he arrived in Glenwood for Christmas in 1938, to see the latest envelopes about Brazil piling up in the hallway unopened, for that meant his father’s final dream was nearing an end. Stepping over stacks of books and magazines in the dimly lit library, he reached to awkwardly hug his father, who was seated in his chair. Mr. M. L. looked up, startled, but did not stand or return the embrace. Instead, he began groping among the unpaid bills on the oak table beside his chair. His shaking hand knocked over the little bell he’d been looking for, and the clatter, as it hit the floor and rolled under the sofa, brought Pete to his side. Mr. M. L. held up a gnarled forefinger, about three inches apart from the crooked thumb he had injured a decade ago at the sawmill—his signal to Pete to pour him three inches of Four Roses. “Shame,” Mr. M. L. muttered as he turned to his son. “Shame eats at us like acid.”

  Pete came with the three inches in a crystal glass, part of a set of fine crystal used only on holidays. The set had been part of the marriage dowry of Lessie Mae Beck, née Lessie Mae Moxley, the beautiful and brilliant daughter of Dr. D. N. Moxley, the Confederate Army surgeon, and Sarah Narcissus King. After the war, Dr. Moxley settled near Glenwood and, according to the family history, practiced medicine on horseback within a range of twenty miles, pulling teeth for fifty cents, delivering babies for four dollars, making house calls for one to two dollars plus a small charge per mile, and accumulating fifteen hundred acres of land, including eight hundred acres in the Conecuh River swamp, where he kept a drove of wild hogs. The Moxleys belonged to a higher social class than the Becks, and eyebrows had been raised when Miss Lessie Moxley married Madison Lewis Beck.

  “Shame!” Mr. M. L. repeated, holding the Moxley crystal at arm’s length and frowning at it, as if looking for an imperfection in the glass.

  Foster, unprepared for how much his father had declined, waited in silence. Outside, the winter sun had almost gone down.

  “Light the wick,” Mr. M. L. ordered when he could not find the bell to summon Pete. Although there was electricity
in Glenwood, Mr. M. L. sentimentally preferred the oil lamps of his childhood. Foster lit the wick and retrieved the bell.

  Mr. M. L., still holding the crystal aloft, admired the whiskey glowing orange-brown in the lamplight. For a moment, he seemed to be trying to remember why he’d brought all this up about shame. Foster wondered, too.

  “A shame they try to expiate these days,” his father continued, “by resort to quackery. They ignore men like my friend Carver. They refer to the quackery, and they say, ‘We in the South are working on it, but the Negro’s not yet ready for equal treatment. You’ve heard ’em say that about the Negro not being ready.”

  “Daddy, I’m not sure what all of this—”

  “They say the Nigra’s not ready because they’re ashamed of not changing how things are.”

  Foster took a seat across the library from his father and waited.

  “Of course some of the Negroes aren’t ready. I’ve been inside the Nigra schools here in Crenshaw County. They don’t have as many books as are here in my library.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Some of those Negro children, though, would do just as well as the good white students and better than your poorer ones. But nobody says the poor white students aren’t ‘ready’ and ought to be sent to a worse school with no books.”

  “Daddy, I agree all that’s so—”

  “Everything I’m saying is so. And the decent ones know it’s so. That’s how come they’re ashamed. But they don’t want to hear about any change from one of their own. No sir. Doesn’t matter if he’s a Hard Shell, a Methodist, a Catholic or a Jew, if he’s white and Southern, they can’t abide hearing about it. That’s how they saw you, son, as one of their own, and that’s why you lost that case.”

  MY FATHER SAID he didn’t argue or try to defend himself that Christmas. Upon thinking about it, I’m not surprised. The thought that a Yankee lawyer—someone who was not “one of their own”—might have done better would have made him feel all the worse for Charles White.

  There also was, so I’ve heard, some tension that Christmas about my mother. As the father of two daughters, both of whom he had sent to college, Mr. M. L. was comfortable around educated women such as my mother. Maybe that Christmas, he put some pressure on my father to propose. Years later, my mother would laugh at “the very idea,” and tell me “Mr. M. L. just wanted a male heir to carry forward the Beck name.”

  I do know that during that Christmas holiday, my grandfather gave my father a gold coin that he had inherited from his own father, Joseph Beck, who joined an Alabama regiment when he was fourteen years old and went off to fight for the Confederacy. I’m not sure, though, of the motive for the gift. The family joked that after President Roosevelt’s decision to devalue gold, Mr. M. L. didn’t think the coin would be worth a damn. I prefer to think the gold coin was meant as an early wedding gift.

  FOR SURE, Pete Tate and Tump Garner would have said nothing about a wedding that Christmas Day: the subject of white people’s personal lives, like race relations, was way off limits. Tump, though, indirectly said a little something about the Charles White case.

  “We appreciative for what you doin’, Mr. Foster,” Tump told my father. It was the day after New Year’s, the second day of 1939, and the two of them and Old Prince were quail hunting. The men were standing, Daddy told me years later, on furrows at the edge of a ploughed-under cotton field that would lie fallow until spring, beneath a winter-blue, cloudless sky, a light breeze from the west, the temperature in the mid-thirties. Old Prince, frisky at the promise of another hunt, was weaving back and forth into the second-growth piney woods, nose to the ground in search of a covey. My father knew what Tump meant, and always cherished his memory of that moment: the fine weather, the dog, the hunt, the fact that nothing more needed to be said.

  Chapter 34

  FOSTER HAD ASKED BERTHA to spend a few days of the Christmas and New Year’s holiday with him in Glenwood, but she claimed that she was needed at home, even though her brother Lincoln would be there for a while before returning to Fitzgerald, Georgia. And she had not suggested that Foster visit her in Weogufka. Foster was beginning to feel a chill and to suspect that he was going to have to commit to her sometime soon or risk losing her.

  That was the risk Frances meant to convey when she told him that Bertha was now seriously thinking about going to the New York World’s Fair as soon as school was out, maybe even looking for a job up there. Foster knew Bertha didn’t tell Frances much and that Frances would exaggerate to serve a purpose, such as prodding him to propose marriage. But Bertha going to the 1939 New York World’s Fair did not sound like a threat—more like exactly the sort of thing Bertha would light on doing. In truth, he was a little hurt that she had not already told him herself. But that changed shortly after New Year’s, when he received a letter Bertha had written and mailed while she was still in Weogufka for the holidays.

  Sadly, I have never found the letter, but I heard about it. Given the stories she told about the trip and my knowledge of my mother, I’m sure that the letter brimmed with excitement. Mother had been reading all she could find about New York City, which she had wanted to visit since she was a girl, and the theme of the Fair, “Dawn of a New Day,” greatly appealed to her optimistic nature. I do know she cleared the trip with her mother, Mrs. Stewart, who urged her to go, insisting she would “do just fine”; and I do not doubt that she reminded Mother for the umpteenth time that Grandma Rayfield farmed that rocky piece of land with a one-legged Confederate husband and a boy who couldn’t reach the plow handles.

  SO THERE IT WAS: a letter saying she was going to New York as soon as summer vacation began. And she was telling him she was going, not asking about doing it, and in a letter that pretty much said there was no point trying to change her mind. Also, there was a postscript. If she got a job, she might be gone all summer.

  “Maybe gone forever,” Frances warned when he showed her the letter.

  “I doubt it, Frances.” He expected just such a reaction from his sister. “For one thing, she would never want to be that far from Mrs. Stewart.”

  “She says in the letter her mother told her to go on to New York. Mrs. Stewart said she could manage just fine. And for another thing, she may not have a job for the next school year. Bertha’s in big trouble with the superintendent.”

  “I already know about that, Frances. It’s nothing. All she has to do is give his grandson an A. That’s not big trouble.”

  “She won’t give him an A, and it has turned into something. But it’s not just because of the grade. You know why they’re really pushing this, don’t you?”

  He knew: it was a way for some in the better class to pressure him either to stop acting stiff-necked or get out of town.

  “But she has to teach, Foster. You know how she is about wanting to teach.”

  Foster thought of saying that sometimes people could not do exactly what they wanted to do, but instead had to do what it took to make a living. But he saw his sister’s reply coming from a mile away: how he had done what he wanted to do, taking on the Charles White case.

  “Of course I know how Bertha is about wanting to teach, Frances. I know her better than you do. But I also know what you are up to. And I can’t support myself and Daddy these days, much less her too, so she needs to keep her job. She doesn’t need to be taking on the Coffee County school superintendent tonight.” He was referring to a school board meeting called for that evening, just before classes resumed after the Christmas holidays, to resolve the coming year’s budget problems—maybe by letting a couple of teachers go.

  AS A BOY, I remember hearing more than once about the county superintendent’s demand that his grandson receive a better grade. Even years later, when we lived in Montgomery, my mother’s voice would shake when she spoke of the threat; it was one of the two times—the other was when she visited me in Atlanta several months after my father’s death—that I saw tears in her eyes. She resented the superintendent’s
bullying, she really cared about teaching, and, of course, she wanted to, had to, keep her job.

  I have no written record of the meeting in Enterprise. I have to believe, however, that some parents would have stood up for her that night. I know she was seen as a truly superb teacher. While researching this book—more than half a century after my mother last taught in the Coffee County schools—an elderly Enterprise man with whom I spoke brought up, without prompting, that she was a much respected and beloved teacher. And without question she had that reputation as a teacher at Morningview School throughout my childhood in Montgomery. At Christmas, my mother would receive cards and letters from men and women throughout the South, including one letter from a partner at a big law firm in Washington, D.C., extolling her virtues, claiming she was the best teacher they’d ever had. Years after my mother passed away, I was having lunch at Atlanta’s Commerce Club when a prominent businessman asked if I was really Bertha Stewart’s son, then praised her teaching in the same superlatives.

  But when it comes to my mother’s reputation as a teacher, what I remember most of all is her funeral in Montgomery. After my younger daughter played a composition on the piano in the Methodist church, I walked toward the pulpit. The new preacher, who had transferred to our church during my mother’s final two years in an Atlanta nursing home, had not known Mother, and so she asked me to say a few words. And I remember thinking, the minister is a woman—the first female preacher in that church. My mother would have been so proud!

  As I was just about to begin speaking, I saw four elderly guests, three women and one man, come hobbling down the aisle on walkers, looking for an empty pew. I stepped down from the pulpit to meet them, and when I asked how they knew my mother, one of the women, whose name was Mabel, said she had been a student in Eclectic, where Mother had taught before moving to Enterprise. Of course I asked her to tell the congregation about my mother, and this is what she said, addressing the congregation from the pulpit.