My Father and Atticus Finch Read Online Free Page B

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 nowdemanding 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