Authors: Charles J. Shields

Mockingbird (44 page)

BOOK: Mockingbird

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Living in a town like Monroeville was not a pleasure for me. My relatives and friends from there have always been special, but I couldn't wait to get away. No library, no recreation, no entertainment at all except the local movie and church activities. Believe me, it was a very sterile place to grow up. My friends whose family could afford to take them on trips or to the cities for shows, entertainment, etc., probably have different memories. A number of my classmates were sent to private schools in Atlanta, Birmingham or Mobile. Those of us whose parents struggled to survive, working six days a week, more than eight hours a day, have different memories.

Freda Noble, e-mail to author, 29 April 2003.

The economy in our town was terrible. I say that from the perspective of looking back. At the time, nobody really considered themselves as being poor because, I suppose, everybody was in the same boat. I know that in 1934 my dad, who was the Ford Dealer, only sold five new cars the entire year. It nearly killed him to have to lay off sales personnel and (again looking back) greatly affected his health. Truly, those were the days that tried men's souls.

George Thomas Jones, e-mail to author, 5 August 2004.

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62
.â“Judge Mick,” as he was known around town, had hair as white as duck down. He had a hawklike profile accentuated by a habit of studying things and people with an intense, thoughtful stare. As probate judge of Monroe County, he spent most of his days at the courthouse reviewing and ruling on wills, contested estates, property transfers, and so on. On his father's side he was French, descended from one of the largest slaveholding families in North Carolina. His mother was the daughter of another prominent familyâthe McCorveys of Scotland, Alabama. His background was a source of personal pride and he liked to advertise it by the way he dressed. In an era when most businessmen toiled in dark, self-effacing three-piece suits, Judge Fountain was dapper. He sported a white suit in summer, a cambric cotton shirt, and a bow tie that provided a spot of color. In autumn and winter, he selected a white, red, or pink camellia from his lush garden and pinned it to his lapel. His mild manner belied his toughness, though. He had a crease in his forehead from a bullet during a shootout in 1894 when he killed the outlaw Wyatt Tate. “Fountain wore a big coat on that rainy day; Tate's first shot went under Fountain's arm; second shot grazed his forehead; had a scar there until he died. They wanted to give him a shot of whiskey, but being a Methodist, he was dead set against itâsaid he'd rather die than drink whiskey.” Claude Nunnelly, interview with author, 7 December 2003.

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83
.âConsider the views of the nation's twenty-eighth president, Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson. Using the executive office, he rolled back earlier gains in racial equality by segregating the federal workforce. Wilson's racism extended to his scholarly work too, including
A History of the American People
(1902), in which he wrote glowingly of the cause of the Ku Klux Klan. Wilson wrote to a black leader that segregation
benefitted
blacks because it didn't put them into direct competition with whites. At the time, many Americans, including Mr. Lee, would have argued that this was a liberal view of the way American society worked. “Honey,” says Atticus in
Go Set a Watchman
, “you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people. You should know it, you've seen it all your life. They've made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they're far from it yet.”