“I beg your pardon?”
Dr. Finch bit his under lip and let it go. “Um hum. A bigot. Not a big one, just an ordinary turnip-sized bigot.”
Jean Louise rose and went to the bookshelves. She pulled down a dictionary and leafed through it. “‘Bigot,’” she read. “‘Noun. One obstinately or intolerably devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion.’ Explain yourself, sir.”
“I was just tryin’ to answer your running question. Let me elaborate a little on that definition. What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out. Now you, you were turned inside out by the granddaddy of all father things, so you ran. And how you ran.
“You’ve no doubt heard some pretty offensive talk since you’ve been home, but instead of getting on your charger and blindly striking it down, you turned and ran. You said, in effect, ‘I don’t like the way these people do, so I have no time for them.’ You’d better take time for ’em, honey, otherwise you’ll never grow. You’ll be the same at sixty as you are now—then you’ll be a case and not my niece. You have a tendency not to give anybody elbow room in your mind for their ideas, no matter how silly you think they are.”
Dr. Finch clasped his hands and rested them on the back of his head. “Good grief, baby, people don’t agree with the Klan, but they certainly don’t try to prevent them from puttin’ on sheets and making fools of themselves in public.”
“Why did you let Mr. O’Hanlon get up there?” “Because he wanted to.” Oh God, what have I done?
“But they beat people, Uncle Jack—”
“Now, that’s another thing, and it’s just one more thing you’ve failed to take into consideration about your father. You’ve been extravagant with your talk of despots, Hitlers, and ring-tailed sons of bitches—by the way, where did you get that? Reminds me of a cold winter’s night, possum hunting—”
Jean Louise winced. “He told you all that?”
“Oh yes, but don’t start worrying about what you called him. He’s got a lawyer’s hide. He’s been called worse in his day.”
“Not by his daughter, though.”
“Well, as I was saying—”
For the first time in her memory, her uncle was bringing her back to the point. For the second time in her memory, her uncle was out of character: the first time was when he sat mutely in their old livingroom, listening to the soft murmurs: the Lord never sends you more than you can bear, and he said, “My shoulders ache. Is there any whiskey in this house?” This is a day of miracles, she thought.
“—the Klan can parade around all it wants, but when it starts bombing and beating people, don’t you know who’d be the first to try and stop it?”
“Yes sir.”
“The law is what he lives by. He’ll do his best to prevent someone from beating up somebody else, then he’ll turn around and try to stop no less than the Federal Government—just like you, child. You turned and tackled no less than your own tin god—but remember this, he’ll always do it by the letter and by the spirit of the law. That’s the way he lives.”
“Uncle Jack—”
“Now don’t start feeling guilty, Jean Louise. You’ve done nothing wrong this day. And don’t, for the sake of John Henry Newman, start worrying over what a bigot you are. I told you you were only a turnip-sized one.”
“But Uncle Jack—”
“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”
“Uncle Jack, I thought I’d gone through all that being-disillusioned-about-your-parents stuff when I took my bachelor’s degree, but there’s something—”
Her uncle began fidgeting with his coat pockets. He found what he was seeking, pulled one from the package, and said, “Have you a match?”
Jean Louise was mesmerized.
“I said, do you have a match?”
“Have you gone nuts? You beat hell out of me when you caught me at it … you old bastard!”
He had, unceremoniously, one Christmas when he found her under the house with stolen cigarettes.
“This should prove to you there’s no justice in this world. I smoke sometimes, now. It’s my one concession to old age. I find myself becoming anxious sometimes … it gives me something to do with my hands.”
Jean Louise found a match flip on the table by her chair. She struck one and held it to her uncle’s cigarette. Something to do with his hands, she thought. She wondered how many times his hands in rubber gloves, impersonal and omnipotent, had set some child on its feet. He’s crazy, all right.
Dr. Finch held his cigarette with his thumb and two fingers. He looked at it pensively. “You’re color blind, Jean Louise,” he said. “You always have been, you always will be. The only differences you see between one human and another are differences in looks and intelligence and character and the like. You’ve never been prodded to look at people as a race, and now that race is the burning issue of the day, you’re still unable to think racially. You see only people.”
“But, Uncle Jack, I don’t especially want to run out and marry a Negro or something.”
“You know, I practiced medicine for nearly twenty years, and I’m afraid I regard human beings mostly on a basis of relative suffering, but I’ll risk a small pronouncement. There’s nothing under the sun that says because you go to school with one Negro, or go to school with them in droves, you’ll want to marry one. That’s one of the tom-toms the white supremacists beat. How many mixed marriages have you seen in New York?”
“Come to think of it, darn few. Relatively, that is.”
“There’s your answer. The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they can’t scare us with the essential inferiority line, they’ll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that’s the one thing they know is feared in our fundamentalist hearts down here. They try to strike terror in Southern mothers, lest their children grow up to fall in love with Negroes. If they didn’t make an issue of it, the issue would rarely arise. If the issue arose, it would be met on private ground. The NAACP has a great deal to answer for in that department, too. But the white supremacists fear reason, because they know cold reason beats them. Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”