“Nothing. I’m—I’m just trying to say that in trying to do right we’ve left ourselves open for something that could be truly dangerous to our set-up.”
She ran her fingers through her hair. She looked at the rows of brown-and-black bound books, law reports, on the wall opposite. She looked at a faded picture of the Nine Old Men on the wall to the left of her. Is Roberts dead? she wondered. She could not remember.
Her father’s voice was patient: “You were saying—?”
“Yes sir. I was saying that I—I don’t know much about government and economics and all that, and I don’t want to know much, but I do know that the Federal Government to me, to one small citizen, is mostly dreary hallways and waiting around. The more we have, the longer we wait and the tireder we get. Those old mossbacks on the wall up there knew it—but now, instead of going about it through Congress and the state legislatures like we should, when we tried to do right we just made it easier for them to set up more hallways and more waiting—”
Her father sat up and laughed.
“I told you I didn’t know anything about it.”
“Sweet, you’re such a states’ rightist you make me a Roosevelt Liberal by comparison.”
“States’ rightist?”
Atticus said, “Now that I’ve adjusted my ear to feminine reasoning, I think we find ourselves believing the very same things.”
She had been half willing to sponge out what she had seen and heard, creep back to New York, and make him a memory. A memory of the three of them, Atticus, Jem, and her, when things were uncomplicated and people did not lie. But she would not have him compound the felony. She could not let him add hypocrisy to it:
“Atticus, if you believe all that, then why don’t you do right? I mean this, that no matter how hateful the Court was, there had to be a beginning—”
“You mean because the Court said it we must take it? No ma’am. I don’t see it that way. If you think I for one citizen am going to take it lying down, you’re quite wrong. As you say, Jean Louise, there’s only one thing higher than the Court in this country, and that’s the Constitution—”
“Atticus, we are talking at cross-purposes.”
“You are dodging something. What is it?”
The dark tower. Childe Roland to the dark tower came. High school lit. Uncle Jack. I remember now.
“What is it? I’m trying to say that I don’t approve of the way they did it, that it scares me to death when I think about the way they did it, but they had to do it. It was put under their noses and they had to do it. Atticus, the time has come when we’ve got to do right—”
“Do right?”
“Yes sir. Give ’em a chance.”
“The Negroes? You don’t think they have a chance?”
“Why, no sir.”
“What’s to prevent any Negro from going where he pleases in this country and finding what he wants?”
“That’s a loaded question and you know it, sir! I’m so sick of this moral double-dealing I could—”
He had stung her, and she had shown him she felt it. But she could not help herself.
Her father picked up a pencil and tapped it on his desk. “Jean Louise,” he said. “Have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?”
“You’re queering the pitch on me, Atticus, so let’s keep the sociology out of it for a second. Of course I know that, but I heard something once. I heard a slogan and it stuck in my head. I heard ‘Equal rights for all; special privileges for none,’ and to me it didn’t mean anything but what it said. It didn’t mean one card off the top of the stack for the white man and one off the bottom for the Negro, it—”
“Let’s look at it this way,” said her father. “You realize that our Negro population is backward, don’t you? You will concede that? You realize the full implications of the word ‘backward,’ don’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“You realize that the vast majority of them here in the South are unable to share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship, and why?”
“Yes sir.”
“But you want them to have all its privileges?”
“God damn it, you’re twisting it up!”
“There’s no point in being profane. Think this over: Abbott County, across the river, is in bad trouble. The population is almost three-fourths Negro. The voting population is almost half-and-half now, because of that big Normal School over there. If the scales were tipped over, what would you have? The county won’t keep a full board of registrars, because if the Negro vote edged out the white you’d have Negroes in every county office—”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Honey,” he said. “Use your head. When they vote, they vote in blocs.”
“Atticus, you’re like that old publisher who sent out a staff artist to cover the Spanish-American War. ‘You draw the pictures. I’ll make the war.’ You’re as cynical as he was.”