Go Set a Watchman - Lee Harper - Страница 41
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“Yes sir, I’m upset about something. That citizens’ councilin’ you’re doing. I think it’s disgusting and I’ll tell you that right now.”
Her father leaned back in his chair. He said, “Jean Louise, you’ve been reading nothing but New York papers. I’ve no doubt all you see is wild threats and bombings and such. The Maycomb council’s not like the North Alabama and Tennessee kinds. Our council’s composed of and led by our own people. I bet you saw nearly every man in the county yesterday, and you knew nearly every man there.”
“Yes sir, I did. Every man from that snake Willoughby on down.”
“Each man there was probably there for a different reason,” said her father.
No war was ever fought for so many different reasons. Who said that? “Yeah, but they all met for one reason.”
“I can tell you the two reasons I was there. The Federal Government and the NAACP. Jean Louise, what was your first reaction to the Supreme Court decision?”
That was a safe question. She would answer him.
“I was furious,” she said.
She was. She had known it was coming, knew what it would be, had thought she was prepared for it, but when she bought a newspaper on the street corner and read it, she stopped at the first bar she came to and drank down a straight bourbon.
“Why?”
“Well sir, there they were, tellin’ us what to do again—”
Her father grinned. “You were merely reacting according to your kind,” he said. “When you started using your head, what did you think?”
“Nothing much, but it scared me. It seemed all backward—they were putting the cart way out in front of the horse.”
“How so?”
He was prodding her. Let him. They were on safe ground. “Well, in trying to satisfy one amendment, it looks like they rubbed out another one. The Tenth. It’s only a small amendment, only one sentence long, but it seemed to be the one that meant the most, somehow.”
“Did you think this out for yourself?”
“Why, yes sir. Atticus, I don’t know anything about the Constitution….”
“You seem to be constitutionally sound so far. Proceed.”
Proceed with what? Tell him she couldn’t look him in the eye? He wanted her views on the Constitution, then he’d have ’em: “Well, it seemed that to meet the real needs of a small portion of the population, the Court set up something horrible that could—that could affect the vast majority of folks. Adversely, that is. Atticus, I don’t know anything about it—all we have is the Constitution between us and anything some smart fellow wants to start, and there went the Court just breezily canceling one whole amendment, it seemed to me. We have a system of checks and balances and things, but when it comes down to it we don’t have much check on the Court, so who’ll bell the cat? Oh dear, I’m soundin’ like the Actors Studio.”
“What?”
“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.”
“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’?”
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