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.”
“Jean Louise, I’m only trying to tell you some plain truths. You must see things as they are, as well as they should be.”
“Then why didn’t you show me things as they are when I sat on your lap? Why didn’t you show me, why weren’t you careful when you read me history and the things that I thought meant something to you that there was a fence around everything marked ‘White Only’?”
“You are inconsistent,” said her father mildly.
“Why so?”
“You slang the Supreme Court within an inch of its life, then you turn around and talk like the NAACP.”
“Good Lord, I didn’t get mad with the Court because of the Negroes. Negroes slapped the brief on the bench, all right, but that wasn’t what made me furious. I was ravin’ at what they were doing to the Tenth Amendment and all the fuzzy thinking. The Negroes were—”
Incidental to the issue in this war … to your own private war.
“You carry a card these days?”
“Why didn’t you hit me instead? For God’s sake, Atticus!”
Her father sighed. The lines around his mouth deepened. His hands with their swollen joints fumbled with his yellow pencil.
“Jean Louise,” he said, “let me tell you something right now, as plainly as I can put it. I am old-fashioned, but this I believe with all my heart. I’m a sort of Jeffersonian Democrat. Do you know what that is?”
“Huh, I thought you voted for Eisenhower. I thought Jefferson was one of the great souls of the Democratic Party or something.”
“Go back to school,” her father said. “All the Democratic Party has to do with Jefferson these days is put his picture up at banquets. Jefferson believed full citizenship was a privilege to be earned by each man, that it was not something given lightly nor to be taken lightly. A man couldn’t vote simply because he was a man, in Jefferson’s eyes. He had to be a responsible man. A vote was, to Jefferson, a precious privilege a man attained for himself in a—a live-and-let-live economy.”
“Atticus, you are rewriting history.”
“No I’m not. It might benefit you to go back and have a look at what some of our founding fathers really believed, instead of relying so much on what people these days tell you they believed.”
“You might be a Jeffersonian, but you’re no Democrat.”
“Neither was Jefferson.”