Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird #2)(32)

William Willoughby was indeed the last of his kind, for a while, at least. He was bleeding slowly to death in the midst of abundance, for his life’s blood was poverty. Every county in the Deep South had a Willoughby, each so like the other that they constituted a category called He, the Great Big Man, the Little Man, allowing for minor territorial differences. He, or whatever his subjects called him, occupied the leading administrative office in his county—usually he was sheriff or judge or probate—but there were mutations, like Maycomb’s Willoughby, who chose to grace no public office. Willoughby was rare—his preference to remain behind the scenes implied the absence of vast personal conceit, a trait essential for two-penny despots.

Willoughby chose to run the county not in its most comfortable office, but in what was best described as a hutch—a small, dark, evil-smelling room with his name on the door, containing nothing more than a telephone, a kitchen table, and unpainted captain’s chairs of rich patina. Wherever Willoughby went, there followed axiomatically a coterie of passive, mostly negative characters known as the Courthouse Crowd, specimens Willoughby had put into the various county and municipal offices to do as they were told.

Sitting at the table by Willoughby was one of them, Tom-Carl Joyner, his right-hand man and justly proud: wasn’t he in with Willoughby from the beginning? Did he not do all of Willoughby’s legwork? Did he not, in the old days during the Depression, knock on tenant-cabin doors at midnight, did he not drum it into the head of every ignorant hungry wretch who accepted public assistance, whether job or relief money, that his vote was Willoughby’s? No votee, no eatee. Like his lesser satellites, over the years Tom-Carl had assumed an ill-fitting air of respectability and did not care to be reminded of his nefarious beginnings. Tom-Carl sat that Sunday secure in the knowledge that the small empire he had lost so much sleep building would be his when Willoughby lost interest or died. Nothing in Tom-Carl’s face indicated that he might have a rude surprise coming to him: already, prosperity-bred independence had undermined his kingdom until it was foundering; two more elections and it would crumble into thesis material for a sociology major. Jean Louise watched his self-important little face and almost laughed when she reflected that the South was indeed pitiless to reward its public servants with extinction.

She looked down on rows of familiar heads—white hair, brown hair, hair carefully combed to hide no hair—and she remembered how, long ago when court was dull, she would quietly aim spitballs at the shining domes below. Judge Taylor caught her at it one day and threatened her with a bench warrant.

The courthouse clock creaked, strained, said, “Phlugh!” and struck the hour. Two. When the sound shivered away she saw her father rise and address the assembly in his dry courtroom voice:

“Gentlemen, our speaker for today is Mr. Grady O’Hanlon. He needs no introduction. Mr. O’Hanlon.”

Mr. O’Hanlon rose and said, “As the cow said to the milkman on a cold morning, ‘Thank you for the warm hand.’”

She had never seen or heard of Mr. O’Hanlon in her life. From the gist of his introductory remarks, however, Mr. O’Hanlon made plain to her who he was—he was an ordinary, God-fearing man just like any ordinary man, who had quit his job to devote his full time to the preservation of segregation. Well, some people have strange fancies, she thought.

Mr. O’Hanlon had light-brown hair, blue eyes, a mulish face, a shocking necktie, and no coat. He unbuttoned his collar, untied his tie, blinked his eyes, ran his hand through his hair, and got down to business:

Mr. O’Hanlon was born and bred in the South, went to school there, married a Southern lady, lived all his life there, and his main interest today was to uphold the Southern Way of Life and no niggers and no Supreme Court was going to tell him or anybody else what to do … a race as hammer-headed as … essential inferiority … kinky woolly heads … still in the trees … greasy smelly … marry your daughters … mongrelize the race … mongrelize … mongrelize … save the South … Black Monday … lower than cockroaches … God made the races … nobody knows why but He intended for ’em to stay apart … if He hadn’t He’d’ve made us all one color … back to Africa …

She heard her father’s voice, a tiny voice talking in the warm comfortable past. Gentlemen, if there’s one slogan in this world I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none.

These top-water nigger preachers … like apes … mouths like Number 2 cans … twist the Gospel … the court prefers to listen to Communists … take ’em all out and shoot ’em for treason …