‘Mockingbird’ recollections

On-stage Atticus stirs memories of courage

Igrew up in Covington, Louisiana, a small city similar to other Deep South county seats like Bentonville, or Monroeville, Alabama, the latter being the hometown of “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee. In fact, the original stately columned courthouse in my hometown could have been a stand-in for the one in the movie version of Lee’s novel.

With that background I found myself on Fayetteville’s Dickson Street last month attending a performance of the Broadway stage adaptation of the book at the Walton Arts Center. I was blindsided. The experience became more personal than expected.

My seat was close to the stage. Every emotion in actor Richard Thomas’ face and voice during his courtroom closing argument were just yards away. I was drawn to compare my father, a feed store merchant, not a country lawyer, to the Atticus Finch character. Last century, my father took a stand not for just one Black person, as in the play, but for hundreds in our segregated parish school system. The connection simply fell into place. I choked up more than once.

My scene in St. Tammany Parish was not set in the Great Depression of the novel but rather the 1960s Baby Boom, when the economy was humming. Growth and progress came to Covington, where outflow from New Orleans met inflow from Texas — engineers and geologists working in the burgeoning offshore oil industry.

Times were indeed a-changing. My father was a school board member who with a few colleagues determined that integrating the system was not only the upright thing to do — the status quo of “separate but equal” was indeed separate yet not equal — but also pragmatic as inaction would sooner than later cause federal court intervention. So the years-long, ultimately successful and locally driven process began in small steps, first by student choice and later complete desegregation.

During that transition white citizens who objected felt it their right to harass my family and vandalize our business property because of my father’s stance. Late-night phone calls were obscene. Jagged roofing tacks strewn across the parking lot of our Purina feed store overnight were meant to deter customers. The tack and western wear display windows were shot out. From the parking lot I witnessed a 9-year-old sticking her head out a passing Chevy Impala as she yelled “N ***** lovers!” I knew the car. With hateful message clearly received, I also assumed her family would be switching to another brand of laying mash further down the street.

My high school sophomore-year transportation was a spiffy Ford Falcon Ranchero pickup with bright red and white corporate-branded checkerboards on the doors framing “Talley’s Feed & Seed” in bold typeface. Without question, that kid driving it around this town was Broughton and Evelyn’s only boy.

One Friday night after a home football game I met friends at a local roadhouse. Food was served in addition to alcohol so teens under the state’s 18-year-old drinking age were allowed. Even when 16 or 17, a beer would sometimes find its way into my hand, but never to excess. Otherwise the proprietor, Mr. Pizzie, would threaten to call your folks. He exercised a blend of in parentis loco and laissez-faire.

Promptly at seven Saturday morning my father awakened me for work at the store with his signature, “Get up son … Life’s hard but it’s fair.” Moments later he returned to my bedroom door in a huff atypical for this Baptist deacon: “Ted! Where in hell did you go last night?”

“Daddy, I went to The Heritage, that’s all,” was my sleepy response.

He led me to the carport. In the bed of the Ranchero was a burlap-wrapped cross, soaked in kerosene. A mere threatening calling card or had my approach in the dark foiled a plot to ignite it directly behind the truck cab, above the fuel tank? We rode to the store in silence.

In the novel, young Jem Finch was saved from the knife-wielding racist Bob Ewell by Boo Radley. Earlier, Atticus had offered daughter Scout a lesson in empathy: “You never really understand a person … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

That’s a noble idea. But last-century fiction is one thing, current-day reality another as racism simmers under red MAGA hats. I have neither patience nor empathy. Boo Radley was not in that parking lot in 1966 to save me, only angels hovering above my teenage naiveté and a small pickup truck.

That’s why I wept crossing Dickson Street on an otherwise lovely evening in the Ozarks.