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he could not refuse to represent Charles White and still believe what he claimed to believe and wanted to believe about law and the Constitution. But instead of all that, which he worried would sound pious and self-centered, he said, “I was asked because all the Troy lawyers came up with excuses. Everybody knows that. So in a way, no one can hold it against me.”
    â€œAnd the judge asked you, of all the other lawyers in south Alabama, because you are Mr. M. L.’s son.”
    He resisted the thought. “And not because I’m a great trial lawyer?”
    Both of them laughed and Bertha squeezed his hand. Peoplesaid Foster had no sense of humor, but she said that was unfair: he laughed at human folly; he teased her in ways she usually found affectionate; most of all, he laughed at himself. But he refused to laugh at some of the jokes he was supposed to go along with—vulgar jokes, cruel ones—and that refusal got him into trouble with the men who told those jokes.

   Chapter 8
    M Y MOTHER WORRIED about the effect on my father’s modest law practice if word got around about the Charles White case. If he insisted on seeking a short sentence and parole for an admitted Negro rapist, it should be for his own independent reasons, not because of his daddy. But she would have to be careful raising the question so as not to give offense to the great man in the eyes of his son.
    My father’s relationship with his father was complex. The monthly round trips from Montgomery to Glenwood that my father dutifully insisted on making when I was a child speak louder than words of his devotion. Two of the letters he wrote his father on his birthday provide some additional insight into that relationship.
    His first letter, postmarked June 1936, and written on his law firm stationery, begins by recalling the good times and lessons learned on their camping and fishing trips, reminiscences that, while sincere, were likely intended to bring some cheer to his moody, often depressed father. But he must have known that resorting to sentimentality would not be sufficient to that task, for his letter shiftsin tone—to the kind of subtle flattery that might have appealed to Mr. M. L. Unless “the elders,” my father wrote, “transmitted their experiences to succeeding generations, mistakes that could have been avoided would be repeated time after time. [The Creek Indian Nation] had their elder council to expound their philosophies and to counsel and advise the impetuous and active younger warriors. Voltaire drew students and rulers alike to seek knowledge at his feet. Jefferson directly influenced the nation long after he actively retired. But things like that seem to be the exception now.”
    These thoughts were repeated nine years later in another birthday letter, this one dated June 1945, written from Fort McPherson in Atlanta not long before my father was discharged from the army. “In the old days before books and printing, the elders were looked to for a philosophy of life. Their words, based on their experiences, were valued because from them their children learned how to cope with life. . . . It seems now we don’t have time for such. Books have taught us much of the mechanics of living, but we seem to lack a satisfactory philosophy of life. As a result younger generations will have to make the same mistakes over and over. Maybe that is the implacable law of life,” my father pessimistically wrote, before concluding, on a lighter note, that having looked “all over Atlanta for a shirt large enough,” he would be sending his father only some socks as a birthday present.
    I don’t think it is reading too much between the lines to suggest, from those letters, that my father not only respected his father but also wanted to please him—and perhaps impress him. If that is so, it is no wonder that my mother worried that my father was taking on the Charles White case