Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
By the time Mrs. Cat called the drugstore for an order of chocolate malted mice the class was wriggling like a bucketful of catawba worms. Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.
Walter looked as if he had been raised on fish food: his eyes, as blue as Dill Harris's, were red-rimmed and watery. There was no color in his face except at the tip of his nose, which was moistly pink. He fingered the straps of his overalls, nervously picking at the metal hooks.
The cooties' host showed not the faintest interest in the furor he had wrought. He searched the scalp above his forehead, located his guest and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger.Dec 20 2019
The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics.
Some tinfoil was sticking in a knot-hole just above my eye level, winking at me in the afternoon sun.
Ground, sky and houses melted into a mad palette, my ears throbbed, I was suffocating.
The tire bumped on gravel, skeetered across the road, crashed into a barrier and poped me like a cork onto pavement.
"...There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, ..."Dec 21 2019
Then I saw the shadow. It was the shadow of a man with a hat on. At first I thought it was a tree, but there was no wind blowing and tree-trunks never walked. The back porch was bathed in moonlight, and the shadow, crisp as toast, moved across the porch toward Jem.
The moon was setting and the lattice-work shadows were fading into fuzzy nothingness. Jem's white shirt-tail dipped and bobbed like a small ghost dancing away to escape the coming morning. A faint breeze stirred and cooled the sweat running down my sides.
The night-crawlers had retired, but ripe chinaberries drummed on the roof when the wind stirred, and the darkness was desolate with the barking of distant dogs.
Jem waved my words away as if fanning gnats.
Miss Maudie's sunhat was suspended in a thin layer of ice, like a fly in amber.Dec 22 2019
Talking to Francis gave me the sensation of settling slowly to the bottom of the ocean.
"If Uncle Atticus lets you run around with stray dogs, that's his own business, like Grandma says, so it ain't your fault. I guess it ain't your fault if uncle Atticus is a nigger-lover besides, but I'm here to tell you it certainly does mortify the rest of the family -"
When stalking one's prey, it is best to take one's time. Say nothing, and as sure as eggs he will become curious and emerge.
"...Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand...I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town..."
Tim Johnson was not much more than a speck in the distance, but he was closer to us. He walked erratically, as if his right legs were shorter than his left legs. He reminded me of a car stuck in a sand-bed.
I saw Miss Stephanie Crawford's face framed in the glass window of her front door.
Tim Johnson was advancing at a snail's pace, but he was not playing or sniffing at foliage: he seemed dedicated to one course and motivated by an invisible force that was inching him toward us. We could see him shiver like a horse shedding flies; his jaw opened and shut; he was alist, but he was being pulled gradually toward us.Dec 23 2019
She was horrible. Her face was the color of a dirty pillowcase, and the corners of her mouth glistened with wet, which inched like a glacier down the deep grooves enclosing her chin.
Her mouth seemed to have a private existence of its own. It worked separate and apart from the rest of her, out and in, like a clam hole at low tide.
"...baby, it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you. So don't let Mrs. Dubose get you down. She has enough troubles of her own."
Dec 24 2019
It was dim inside, with a damp coolness slowly dispelled by the gathering congregation.
That Calpurnia lead a modest double life never dawned on me.
Aunt Alexandra fitted into the world of Maycomb like a hand into a glove, but never into the world of Jem and me.
Aunt Alexandra was standing stiff as a stork.Dec 25 2019
I understood, pondered a while, and concluded that the only way I could retire with a shred of dignity was to go to the bathroom, where I stayed long enough to make them think I had to go. Returning, I lingered in the hall to hear a fierce discussion going on in the livingroom. Through the door I could see Jem on the sofa with a football magazine in front of his face, his head turning as if its pages contained a live tennis match.
I felt the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me, and for the second time in my life I thought of running away.
Revived, I entered the livingroom. Atticus had retreated behind his newspaper and Aunt Alexandra was worrying her embroidery. Punk, punk, punk, her needle broke the taut circle. She stopped, and puled the cloth tighter: punk-punk-punk. She was furious.
Atticus's remarks were still rankling, which made me miss the request in Jem's question. My feathers rose again. "You tryin' to tell me what to do?"
"...Scout, let's get us a baby."
"Where?"
There was a man Dill had heard of who had a boat that he rowed across to a foggy island where all these babies were; you could order one-
"That's a like. Aunty said God drops 'em down the chimney. At least thats what I think she said." For once, Aunty's diction had not been too clear.
"Well that ain't so. You get babies from each other. But there's this man, too - he has all these babies just waitin' to wake up, he breathes life into 'em..."
Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of a gray house with sad brown doors.
When Atticus switched on the overhead light in the livingroom he found Jem at the window, pale except for the vivid mark of the screen on his nose.
In ones and twos, men got out of the cars. Shadows because substances as light revealed solid shapes moving toward the jail door.Dec 27 2019
Aunt Alexandra sipped coffee and radiated waves of disapproval.
A wagonload of unusually stern-faced citizens appeared. When they pointed to Miss Maudie Atkinson's yard, ablaze with summer flowers, Miss Maudie herself came out on the porch. There was an odd thing about Miss Maudie-on her porch she was too far away for us to see her features clearly, but we could always catch her mood by the way she stood. She was now standing arms akimbo, her shoulders dropping a little, her head cocked to one side, her glasses winking in the sunlight. We knew she wore a grin of the uttermost wickedness.
"I am not. 't's morbid, watching a poor devil on trial for his life. Look at all those folks, it's like a Roman carnival."
"but around here once you have a drop of Negro blood, that makes you all black..."
To reach the courtroom, on the second floor, one passed sundry sunless county cubbyholes: the tax assessor, the tax collector, the country clerk, the county solicitor, the circuit clerk, the judge of probate lived in cool dim hutches that smelled of decaying record books mingled with old damp cement and stale urine. It as necessary to turn on the lights in the daytime; there was always a film of dust on the rough floorboards. The inhabitants of these offices seemed untouched by wind or sun.
With his infinite capacity for calming turbulent seas, he could make a rape case as dry as a sermon.
The varmints had a lean time of it, for the Ewells gave the dump a thorough gleaning every day, and the fruits of their industry (those that were not eaten) made the plot of ground around the cabin look like the playhouse of an insane child...
All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbors was, that if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white.
As Judge Taylor banged his gavel, Mr. Ewell was sitting smugly in the witness chair, surveying hi handiwork. With one phrase he had turned happy picknickers into a sulky, tense, murmuring crowd, being slowly hypnotized by gavel taps lessening in intensity until the only sound in the courtroom was a dim pink-pink-pink: the judge might have been rapping the bench with a pencil.
He seemed to grow ruddy again; his chest swelled, and once more he was a red little rooster.
Mr. Ewell wrote on the back of the envelope and looked up complacently to see Judge Taylor staring at him as if he were some fragrant gardenia in full bloom on the witness stand, to see Mr. Glimer half-sitting, half-standing at his table.
Mr. Braxton Underwood, who had been sitting quietly in a chair reserved for the Press, soaking up testimony with his sponge of a brain, allowed his bitter eyes to rove over the Colored balcony, and they met mine.Dec 28 2019
"She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards."
"...confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption-the evil assumption-that all Negros lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber."
I shut my eyes. Judge Taylor was polling the jury:" Guilty...guilty...guilty...guilty..." I peeked at Jem: his hands were white from gripping the balcony rail, and his shoulders jerked as if each "guilty" was a separate stab between them.
"I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill.
"Yes sir, a clown," he said. "There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off."
He told me havin' a gun around's an invitation to somebody to shoot you.
Dec 30 2019
"You couldn't, but they could and did. The older you grow the more of it you'll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it-whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."
"... The thing about it is, out kind of folks don't like the Cunninghams, the Cunninghams don't like the Ewells, and the Ewellshate and despise the colored folks."
"No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks."Dec 31 2019
Sam was trotting behind his mother when they came up. Dill said Helen said, " 'evening', Mr. Finch, won't you have a seat?" But she didn't say any more. Neither did Atticus.
"Scout," said Dill, "she just fell down in the dirt. Just fell down in the dirt, like a giant with a big foot just came along and stepped on her. Just ump-" Dill's fat foot hit the ground. "Like you'd step on an ant."
Mr. Underwood simply figured it was a sin to kill cripples, be they standing, sitting, or escaping. He likened Tom's death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children, ...
We said it. Then Miss Gates said, "That's the difference between America and Germany. We are a democracy and Germany is a dictatorship. Dictator-ship," she said. "Over here we don't believe in persecuting anybody. Persecution comes from people who are prejudiced. Pre-ju-dice," she enunciated carefully. "There are no better people in the world than the Jews, and why Hitler doesn't think so is a mystery to me."
Cecil spoke up. "Well I don't know for certain," he said, "... They're white, ain't they?"
"Well, coming out of the courthouse that night Miss Gates was-she was goin' down the steps in front of us, you musta not seen her-she was talking with Miss Stephanie Crawford. I head he say it's time somebody taught 'em a lesson, they were gettin' way above themselves, an' the next thing they think they can do is marry us. Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an' then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home-"Jan 1 2020
Finished the book.
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