All Roads Lead to Star Trek/The Search for a Chifferobe

I. World's Collide, Now and Later

I was wondering yesterday where Tom Robinson's descendants might have ended up . . . and remembered the destiny of one of them: Star Fleet!
Admiral Cartwright (Brock Peters) appears in two of the Star Trek movies--below, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, "the one with the whales".
I wonder if anyone has written that fan-fic? (Maybe I should.)

I used to scoff at the idea of Star Trek being forward-thinking and optimistic--to teenage me in the 1970s, much as I loved it (how much? A LOT), it seemed hopelessly square and hokey--especially the captain. (Spock was and remains forward-thinking.)
The show first aired in 1966, only four years after the film of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Worlds collide. Brock Peters as Tom Robinson, below right, (later Adm. Cartwright) is interrogated and humiliated by prosecutor Mr Gilmer, played by William Windom (below, left), who later plays a mad captain in a classic Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine".

II. "It just makes me sick."

I finished To Kill a Mockingbird last night. The interrogation leads to one of the book's most pointed moments. Scout, her brother Jem, and their friend Dill have snuck into the courtroom to watch the trial. During the interrogation Dill breaks down in sobs, and Scout has to take him outside.

Scout, daughter of a lawyer, a little younger, and something of a brute herself, tries to explain away Mr. Gilmer's humiliation of Tom Robinson. "Dill, that's his job. He's supposed to act that way".
Dill won't have it.

"Well, Mr. Finch didn't act that way to Mayella and old man Ewell when he cross-examined them. The way that man called him 'boy' all the time and sneered at him, an' looked around at the jury every time he answered––"

"Well, Dill, after all he's just a Negro."

"I don't care one speck. It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way. Hasn't anybody got any business talkin' like that. It just makes me sick."

I'd totally forgotten that.
Later, when the jury returns a guilty verdict,

"It was Jem's turn to cry. His face was streaked with angry tears as we made our way through the cheerful crowd. 'It ain't right,' he muttered all the way to the corner of the square where we found Atticus waiting.   
. . .
"It ain't right, Atticus, said Jem.
'No son, it's not right.'
We walked home."

I'm glad I persisted with TKM--the second half is almost a different book from the anecdotal first half.  The second is like a screenplay for a trial drama––and that's what dominates the movie, and my memory.

That's probably what I dimly remembered yesterday when I wrote that I think Atticus is fighting for THE LAW, not for social change in the sense of, say, racially integrated schools or marriages.
And that's literally what he says in his summation: that all men are NOT created equal (in gifts of intelligence, etc.). . .

"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal––there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, a stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. The institution, gentlemen, is a court. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal." [bf mine]

So that's what I'm remembering--the heroic Gregory Peck in the courtroom, not the complicated character of Atticus Finch in the novel. I can totally see how the novel's Atticus would later resist racial integration, as he does in Go Set a Watchman.
When that book next comes into the thrift store (it regularly gets donated), I'll pick it up, but I don't feel the urge to rush out and get it from the library.

III. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Star Trek: The Original Series came out of the post-WWII mentality of its creator (Gene Roddenberry), not a 1968 Summer of Love one, so yeah, some of it is square and dated. But its vision remains powerful, and far, far from being realized:
A united Earth, one not torn by wars and environmental destruction.

Powerful, and elusive.
I felt so angry yesterday seeing photos of New York City choked with smoke from forest fires. We've had decades of warning, and of course we didn't heed them.
What did we think this was going to look like?
Well, we're starting to see it now.

One thing I love about Star Trek's vision is that it's not an easy optimism: humans do not arrive at a better future in a straight happy line. It imagines that between now and then, Earth will suffer an almost apocalyptic World War III.

So, let's hold on tight (to our masks), it's going to be a bumpy smoky ride!

IV. The Search for a Chifferobe

I'd started rereading To Kill a Mockingbird in the first place partly because of an unusual piece of furniture that got donated to the thrift store a few weeks ago. I would have called it an armoire, or a wardrobe, with a row of drawers on one side. It was cool.

Supershopper Louise, from Mississippi, said to me, "Isn't that a wonderful piece."

The donations bay was crammed with pieces of furniture. "Which one?" I said.

"The chifferobe!"

I had never in my life heard anyone say that word--have you?
Except in a movie--in To Kill a Mockingbird, Mayella Ewell says in court that she asked Tom Robinson into her yard to chop up a chifferobe from the dump, for kindling.

Atticus later asks her for clarification--what was it she asked Tom Robinson to chop up?

"A chifferobe, a old dresser full of drawers on one side."

I was telling my sister about that--she and I had been inspired by the movie girl Scout when we were kids. (Now that I've read the book closely, I don't think I ever did before. I mean, I've read it a coupla times, but I think always only with the idea of reliving the movie in my head.)

Sister goes to monthly book tours at the local fine arts museum, Mia. (info here). Docents choose pieces of art to go with the book of the month. (Hm--next month's book is Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.)

She says the tours vary widely--sometimes they're super literal match-ups of book and art, sometimes creative interpretations. But the best thing is that they take you to areas you might not haven't bothered to explore.

I said, wouldn't it be fun to try that game matching words & pictures yourself--to put together your own tour?

"Let's try it ourselves with To Kill a Mockingbird," she said. "I bet they have a chifferobe in their furniture collection!"

So then I thought I ought to reread the book, which fit with my plan of rereading Books That Influenced Girlette Me anyway, before we went on a scavenger hunt at Mia.

And that's what we're doing today, the museum's one day to stay open late. I'm feeling okay (still coughing, and the bad air doesn't help), and I'm going to work. She'll pick me up there at three, then we're going for tea in the museum's café, and then we're going to look for a chifferobe.

Here's one from Wikipedia. The word is mainly Southern--a portmanteau of chiffonier + wardrobe.

Chiffonier? I'd never heard that word.
It's a sort of chest of drawers, for little things, like sewing supplies.
"The  name comes from the French for a rag-picker, suggesting that it was originally intended as a receptacle for odds and ends which had no place elsewhere." [wikipedia]
From chiffon, diminutive of chiffe "rag, piece of cloth, scrap, flimsy stuff"

 Off I go! Have a lovely day. Don't breathe the air!