Stories about my Father 40
As a lawyer, my grandfather Morris represented both White and Black clients.
I must admit, I had to do some research to find out if White and Black should both be capitalized in that sentence. Unsurprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be much agreement on the matter. Neither gets capitalized if they are just being used as adjectives as in, “The black car sped past the white bicycle.” When talking about race, however, capitalizing Black, as well as Indigenous, etc., has become expected. Capitalizing White, however, seems to be open to debate. The argument that to me anyway, resonates and makes the most sense is that not capitalizing White gives it the power of normalcy – whiteness that way is assumed to be the norm, and all the rest are “other.” Therefore, capitalizing it takes that power away from it. So, until somebody presents me with a different more compelling argument, White and Black it is.
What my grandfather’s clients had in common was not their race, it was their poverty. Lawyering was not the path to riches a hundred years ago the way it is today. I suppose if you were lucky enough to have extremely wealthy clients you could do well for yourself, but those were few and far between. Morris, if the truth be told, could only get the clients that nobody else wanted.
Morris believed that everyone, regardless of their background, deserved a fair and honest trial. He stood by the law and always fought for it to the best of his ability. I’ve always thought that he had a lot in common with Atticus Finch. Not as the saint he was portrayed as in To Kill a Mockingbird, but the real man of the south Harper Lee wrote about in Go Set a Watchman. In Morris’s eyes, everyone was equal in the eyes of the law. In life, maybe not so much.
As time went on, Morris began to develop a reputation. There were some in town who referred to him as the N---- Lawyer because of the people he chose to represent. In general, though, people thought he was an honest man and clients would seek him out. They knew that they wouldn’t be turned away. The Great Depression struck right after his and Eunice’s return to Lynchburg, so times got even harder. Clients couldn’t always pay. Sometimes there’d be a knock on the kitchen door, and somebody would be standing there with a chicken or a bag of potatoes to pay off their debt. It didn’t seem to matter. Inside the courtroom, he did his job to the best of his ability for everyone. He never sued anyone for non-payment.
I remember somebody stopping by the house to talk with him while we were there on a visit. In a sincere southern drawl, the man said to me, “Your grandfather is very well respected in Lynchburg.” Morris maintained relationships with many of his clients throughout his life. I was always happy to be described to someone we met as Mr. Hester’s grandson.
One of his clients was a White man, who was indicted for killing his own father by striking him with a fireplace poker. They had been drinking and got into an argument. The son lost his temper and hit him with the poker. While the act, itself, wasn’t contested, my grandfather argued that it had happened in the heat of the moment and had not been pre-meditated. The jury disagreed and thought it was. Later, Morris heard that one of the jurors had voted to convict because he believed that there was some more to the story than had come out at the trial. If Morris had been able to confirm that, it would have been grounds for a mistrial or an appeal. As it was, the man had received a lenient sentence compared to what he could have gotten so my grandfather left it alone.
Many years later, after the convicted man had died, Morris got a letter from his son, who was now, himself, a lawyer. He’d been a child at the time and said that it had been very hard on his family when their father had been sent to prison. The son had looked up the case and reviewed it. In doing so, he realized that his father could have gotten the death penalty for what he’d done. He’d written to thank Morris for helping to spare his life.
Morris was often appointed by the court to cases where the accused couldn’t afford their own lawyer. The $25 fee was low, even by the standards of the day, but he was glad to get the cases because the fees eventually added up. He was assigned to a case where a Black man had been accused by his estranged wife of having molested their eight-year-old daughter. It didn’t seem as if there’d be anything that he could do to defend this man, but he did a little investigating. One of their neighbors told him that she’d heard the wife say, “I am going to put that man away so he ain’t gonna ever bother me no more.” Morris arranged for the child to testify, herself, behind closed doors in the judge’s chambers. The way the girl described what had happened convinced the judge that she’d been coached in her testimony, and he dismissed the case.
One case of his that got a lot of sensational attention was billed as, “The Head” in the Lynchburg newspapers. Morris had been appointed to represent a White man who was already serving time in the penitentiary for another murder. A dog had been digging and discovered a long bone. The dog’s owner dug further and found a human skull. It turned out, when the dental records were checked, that the bones belonged to a man who’d been missing for several months. The head had been severed from the body by an axe or a meat cleaver.
The case was a big deal at the time. Eunice would go to watch from the courthouse gallery every day. It was all very exciting. The newspapers published daily reports including one that said, “Mr. Hester jumped screaming to his feet,” which seems utterly unlikely. The prosecutor introduced a bloody axe that had been found in the defendant’s car. The defendant said that he’d hit a chicken on the road and used the axe to put it out of its misery (and take it home to eat). The prosecution never bothered to examine the blood to see whether it was human or not. This was long before DNA testing was possible, but they still could have been able to tell whether it was human or chicken. The jury decided there wasn’t enough evidence against the man, so they acquitted him.
He once represented a Black congregation that had bought some land just outside of town where they intended to build a new church. The neighbors objected on the grounds that the church, which would be up on a hill, would likely have a graveyard. Water from rainstorms, they argued, would contaminate their wells further down the hill. As my father tells the story, “Daddy retained Dr. Hamacker, the biology professor at Randolph Macon, whose son, Richard was a classmate and friend of mine, as an expert witness. I went by the Hamackers’ house with Daddy to see what the professor had devised. He had taken a very large bottle with no bottom and turned it upside down over a pan. He filled the bottle with soil and then dumped a dye solution into the top and collected the water in the pan. The next day the water was clear. He testified that it showed that even if water did drain directly from a grave, it would be purified as it passed through the soil.”
I think my father enjoyed the excitement of having a trial lawyer for a father. He tagged along whenever he could. “Daddy used to eat lunch at one of a handful of restaurants that usually had a large table where lawyers and some other professional men, occasionally including the rabbi, customarily sat. I used to love to eat with him at these restaurants. The place I liked the best was the dining room of the Carol Hotel at Eighth and Main Streets. The hotel had become very run down, but the dining room still retained some of its former elegance. It was a very high-ceilinged room with tall windows around two sides, and a patterned floor made of small tiles. A few big potted plants were scattered around. Meat, two vegetables, bread, and a cup of coffee cost 35 cents. Desert was a dime extra. The tip was also a dime.”
Morris was approached and asked to run for a judgeship seat several times. He always turned it down because he felt the fact that his father was still practicing could be seen as a conflict of interest. Finally, in his late sixties, long after Albert had passed away, he agreed. The main hurdle to becoming a judge was getting the endorsement of the Lynchburg Bar Association. After some campaigning, however, he got it, and everybody thought that the job was as good as his. There were even articles announcing his win that ran in the local paper. I have a stack of letters from his friends and other local judges congratulating him and telling him how happy they were for him. Unfortunately, though, the city appointed someone else.
He was bitterly disappointed. The position came with a steady, substantial salary which would have been the first time in his life that he didn’t have to live case to case. My father consoled him with the fact that he would have agonized over the decisions he’d have had to make. He’d never have been able to leave the job in the courtroom. He agreed with my dad, but he still wasn’t happy about it. He would have made a fantastic judge. He would have been fair and balanced with everyone. My father was right, though, the job would probably have eaten him alive.
Morris eventually closed his office. By that time, he was already in his eighties. He continued to work for clients from home. One man who came by once to pick up the income taxes my grandfather had prepared confessed to my dad that he always had somebody else do them too. He was grateful to Morris for all the help he’d given his family over the years and didn’t want him to think that he’d lost faith in him. While he made enough money to cover the cost of his annual law license renewal, he kept going. He only stopped, finally, at the age of 88, and officially retired.
Later, when he was in his nineties, he either fell or had some sort of medical procedure that made it very difficult for him to walk. He had been given a walker which he refused to use. There was a big white stuffed armchair that got moved into the dining room with the TV set up in front of it for him. My aunt would help him into the chair, and he’d sit there during the day. When it came time for meals, she’d help him up to the table. He’d been warned against exerting himself and his prescription was to take it easy and let everyone help him.
One day, he blithely walked into the kitchen without any assistance at all and asked my aunt and grandmother when lunch would be. They were shocked. All the time he’d been in the dining room over the past weeks, he’d been practicing getting up and walking when nobody was looking. The looks on their faces, he said, made it all worth it.
In 2023, there are likely plenty of things Morris did or said that one could look at and criticize. He was, however, not of this time. As a man of his own time, he was someone that his white Yankee grandson, warts, and all, is proud to be related to.