by Harper Lee
Jean Louise laughed. “Oh, Hester, what would the Communists want with Maycomb County?”
“I don’t know, but I do know there’s a cell right up the road in Tuscaloosa, and if it weren’t for those boys a nigger’d be goin’ to classes with the rest of ’em.”
“I don’t follow you, Hester.”
“Didn’t you read about those fancy professors asking those questions in that—that Convocation? Why, they’d’ve let her right in. If it hadn’t been for those fraternity boys. . . .”
“Golly, Hester. I’ve been readin’ the wrong newspaper. One I read said the mob was from that tire factory—”
“What do you read, the Worker?”
You are fascinated with yourself. You will say anything that occurs to you, but what I can’t understand are the things that do occur to you. I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth. We were both born here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder what you saw and heard.
“—everybody knows the NAACP’s dedicated to the overthrow of the South . . .”
Conceived in mistrust, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created evil.
“—they make no bones about saying they want to do away with the Negro race, and they will in four generations, Bill says, if they start with this one . . .”
I hope the world will little note nor long remember what you are saying here.
“—and anybody who thinks different’s either a Communist or might as well be one. Passive resistance, my hind foot . . .”
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another they are Communists.
“—they always want to marry a shade lighter than themselves, they want to mongrelize the race—”
Jean Louise interrupted. “Hester, let me ask you something. I’ve been home since Saturday now, and since Saturday I’ve heard a great deal of talk about mongrelizin’ the race, and it’s led me to wonder if that’s not rather an unfortunate phrase, and if probably it should be discarded from Southern jargon these days. It takes two races to mongrelize a race—if that’s the right word—and when we white people holler about mongrelizin’, isn’t that something of a reflection on ourselves as a race? The message I get from it is that if it were lawful, there’d be a wholesale rush to marry Negroes. If I were a scholar, which I ain’t, I would say that kind of talk has a deep psychological significance that’s not particularly flattering to the one who talks it. At its best, it denotes an alarmin’ mistrust of one’s own race.”
Hester looked at Jean Louise. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“I’m not sure of what I mean, either,” said Jean Louise, “except the hair curls on my head every time I hear talk like that. I guess it was because I wasn’t brought up hearing it.”
Hester bristled: “Are you insinuating—”
“I’m sorry,” said Jean Louise. “I didn’t mean that. I do beg your pardon.”
“Jean Louise, when I said that I wasn’t referring to us.”
“Who were you talking about, then?”
“I was talking about the—you know, the trashy people. The men who keep Negro women and that kind of thing.”
Jean Louise smiled. “That’s odd. A hundred years ago the gentlemen had colored women, now the trash have them.”
“That was when they owned ’em, silly. No, the trash is what the NAACP’s after. They want to get the niggers married to that class and keep on until the whole social pattern’s done away with.”
Social pattern. Double Wedding Ring quilts. She could not have hated us, and Atticus cannot believe this kind of talk. I’m sorry, it’s impossible. Since yesterday I feel like I’m being wadded down into the bottom of a deep, deep
“WELL, HOW’S NEW YORK?”
New York. New York? I’ll tell you how New York is. New York has all the answers. People go to the YMHA, the English-Speaking Union, Carnegie Hall, the New School for Social Research, and find the answers. The city lives by slogans, isms, and fast sure answers. New York is saying to me right now: you, Jean Louise Finch, are not reacting according to our doctrines regarding your kind, therefore you do not exist. The best minds in the country have told us who you are. You can’t escape it, and we don’t blame you for it, but we do ask you to conduct yourself within the rules that those who know have laid down for your behavior, and don’t try to be anything else.
She answered: please believe me, what has happened in my family is not what you think. I can say only this—that everything I learned about human decency I learned here. I learned nothing from you except how to be suspicious. I didn’t know what hate was until I lived among you and saw you hating every day. They even had to pass laws to keep you from hating. I despise your quick answers, your slogans in the subways, and most of all I despise your lack of good manners: you’ll never have ’em as long as you exist.
The man who could not be discourteous to a ground-squirrel had sat in the courthouse abetting the cause of grubby-minded little men. Many times she had seen him in the grocery store waiting his turn in line behind Negroes and God knows what. She had seen Mr. Fred raise his eyebrows at him, and her father shake his head in reply. He was the kind of man who instinctively waited his turn; he had manners.
Look sister, we know the facts: you spent the first twenty-one years of your life in the lynching country, in a county whose population is two-thirds agricultural Negro. So drop the act.
You will not believe me, but I will tell you: never in my life until today did I hear the word “nigger” spoken by a member of my family. Never did I learn to think in terms of The Niggers. When I grew up, and I did grow up with black people, they were Calpurnia, Zeebo the garbage collector, Tom the yard man, and whatever else their names were. There were hundreds of Negroes surrounding me, they were hands in the fields, who chopped the cotton, who worked the roads, who sawed the lumber to make our houses. They were poor, they were diseased and dirty, some were lazy and shiftless, but never in my life was I given the idea that I should despise one, should fear one, should be discourteous to one, or think that I could mistreat one and get away with it. They as a people did not enter my world, nor did I enter theirs: when I went hunting I did not trespass on a Negro’s land, not because it was a Negro’s, but because I was not supposed to trespass on anybody’s land. I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody, not just Negroes. I was given to understand that the reverse was to be despised. That is the way I was raised, by a black woman and a white man.
You must have lived it. If a man says to you, “This is the truth,” and you believe him, and you discover what he says is not the truth, you are disappointed and you make sure you will not be caught out by him again.
But a man who has lived by truth—and you have believed in what he has lived—he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing. I think that is why I’m nearly out of my mind. . . .
“New York? It’ll always be there.” Jean Louise turned to her inquisitor, a young woman with a small hat, small features, and small sharp teeth. She was Claudine McDowell.
“Fletcher and I were up there last spring and we tried to get you day and night.”
I’ll bet you did. “Did you enjoy it? No, don’t tell me, let me tell you: you had a marvelous time but you wouldn’t dream of living there.”
Claudine showed her mouse-teeth. “Absolutely! How’d you guess that?”
“I’m psychic. Did you do the town?”
“Lord yes. We went to the Latin Quarter, the Copacabana, and The Pajama Game. That was the first stage show w
e’d ever seen and we were right disappointed in it. Are they all like that?”
“Most of ’em. Did you go to the top of the you-know-what?”
“No, but we did go through Radio City. You know, people could live in that place. We saw a stage show at Radio City Music Hall, and Jean Louise, a horse came out on the stage.”
Jean Louise said she wasn’t surprised.
“Fletcher and I surely were glad to get back home. I don’t see how you live there. Fletcher spent more money up there in two weeks than we spend in six months down here. Fletcher said he couldn’t see why on earth people lived in that place when they could have a house and a yard for far less down here.”
I can tell you. In New York you are your own person. You may reach out and embrace all of Manhattan in sweet aloneness, or you can go to hell if you want to.
“Well,” said Jean Louise, “it takes considerable getting used to. I hated it for two years. It intimidated me daily until one morning when someone pushed me on a bus and I pushed back. After I pushed back I realized I’d become a part of it.”
“Pushing, that’s what they are. They have no manners up there,” said Claudine.
“They have manners, Claudine. They’re just different from ours. The person who pushed me on the bus expected to be pushed back. That’s what I was supposed to do; it’s just a game. You won’t find better people than in New York.”
Claudine pursed her lips. “Well, I wouldn’t want to get mixed up with all those Italians and Puerto Ricans. In a drugstore one day I looked around and there was a Negro woman eating her dinner right next to me, right next to me. Of course I knew she could, but it did give me a shock.”
“Did she hurt you in any way?”
“Reckon she didn’t. I got up real quick and left.”
“You know,” said Jean Louise gently, “they go around loose up there, all kinds of folks.”
Claudine hunched her shoulders. “I don’t see how you live up there with them.”
“You aren’t aware of them. You work with them, eat by and with them, ride the buses with them, and you aren’t aware of them unless you want to be. I don’t know that a great big fat Negro man’s been sitting beside me on a bus until I get up to leave. You just don’t notice it.”
“Well, I certainly noticed it. You must be blind or something.”
Blind, that’s what I am. I never opened my eyes. I never thought to look into people’s hearts, I looked only in their faces. Stone blind . . . Mr. Stone. Mr. Stone set a watchman in church yesterday. He should have provided me with one. I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour on the hour. I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference. I need a watchman to go forth and proclaim to them all that twenty-six years is too long to play a joke on anybody, no matter how funny it is.
14
“Aunty,” said Jean Louise, when they had cleared away the rubble of the morning’s devastation, “if you don’t want the car I’m going around to Uncle Jack’s.”
“All I want’s a nap. Don’t you want some dinner?”
“No ma’am. Uncle Jack’ll give me a sandwich or something.”
“Better not count on it. He eats less and less these days.”
She stopped the car in Dr. Finch’s driveway, climbed the high front steps to his house, knocked on the door, and went in, singing in a raucous voice:
“Old Uncle Jack with his cane and his crutch
When he was young he boogie-woogied too much;
Put the sales tax on it—”
Dr. Finch’s house was small, but the front hallway was enormous. At one time it was a dog-trot hall, but Dr. Finch had sealed it in and built bookshelves around the walls.
He called from the rear of the house, “I heard that, you vulgar girl. I’m in the kitchen.”
She walked down the hall, through a door, and came to what was once an open back porch. It was now something faintly like a study, as were most of the rooms in his house. She had never seen a shelter that reflected so strongly the personality of its owner. An eerie quality of untidiness prevailed amid order: Dr. Finch kept his house militarily spotless, but books tended to pile up wherever he sat down, and because it was his habit to sit down anywhere he got ready, there were small stacks of books in odd places about the house that were a constant curse to his cleaning woman. He would not let her touch them, and he insisted on apple-pie neatness, so the poor creature was obliged to vacuum, dust, and polish around them. One unfortunate maid lost her head and lost his place in Tuckwell’s Pre-Tractarian Oxford, and Dr. Finch shook a broom at her.
When her uncle appeared, Jean Louise thought styles may come and styles may go, but he and Atticus will cling to their vests forever. Dr. Finch was coatless, and in his arms was Rose Aylmer, his old cat.
“Where were you yesterday, in the river again?” He looked at her sharply. “Stick out your tongue.”
Jean Louise stuck out her tongue, and Dr. Finch shifted Rose Aylmer to the crook of his right elbow, fished in his vest pocket, brought out a pair of half-glasses, flicked them open, and clapped them to his face.
“Well, don’t leave it there. Put it back,” he said. “You look like hell. Come on to the kitchen.”
“I didn’t know you had half-glasses, Uncle Jack,” said Jean Louise.
“Hah—I discovered I was wasting money.”
“How?”
“Looking over my old ones. These cost half as much.”
A table stood in the center of Dr. Finch’s kitchen, and on the table was a saucer containing a cracker upon which rested a solitary sardine.
Jean Louise gaped. “Is that your dinner? Honestly, Uncle Jack, can you possibly get any weirder?”
Dr. Finch drew a high stool to the table, deposited Rose Aylmer upon it, and said, “No. Yes.”
Jean Louise and her uncle sat down at the table. Dr. Finch picked up the cracker and sardine and presented them to Rose Aylmer. Rose Aylmer took a small bite, put her head down, and chewed.
“She eats like a human,” said Jean Louise.
“I hope I’ve taught her manners,” said Dr. Finch. “She’s so old now I have to feed her bit by bit.”
“Why don’t you put her to sleep?”
Dr. Finch looked indignantly at his niece. “Why should I? What’s the matter with her? She’s got a good ten years yet.”
Jean Louise silently agreed and wished, comparatively speaking, that she would look as good as Rose Aylmer when she was as old. Rose Aylmer’s yellow coat was in excellent repair; she still had her figure; her eyes were bright. She slept most of her life now, and once a day Dr. Finch walked her around the back yard on a leash.
Dr. Finch patiently persuaded the old cat to finish her lunch, and when she had done so he went to a cabinet over the sink and took out a bottle. Its cap was a medicine dropper. He drew up a mighty portion of the fluid, set the bottle down, caught the back of the cat’s head, and told Rose Aylmer to open her mouth. The cat obeyed. She gulped and shook her head. Dr. Finch drew more fluid into the dropper and said, “Open your mouth,” to Jean Louise.
Jean Louise gulped and spluttered. “Dear Lord, what was that?”
“Vitamin C. I want you to let Allen have a look at you.”
Jean Louise said she would, and asked her uncle what was on his mind these days.
Dr. Finch, stooping at the oven, said, “Sibthorp.”
“Sir?”
Dr. Finch took from the oven a wooden salad bowl filled, to Jean Louise’s amazement, with greens. I hope it wasn’t on.
“Sibthorp, girl. Sibthorp,” he said. “Richard Waldo Sibthorp. Roman Catholic priest. Buried with full Church of England ceremonials. Tryin’ to find another one like him. Highl
y significant.”
Jean Louise was accustomed to her uncle’s brand of intellectual shorthand: it was his custom to state one or two isolated facts, and a conclusion seemingly unsupported thereby. Slowly and surely, if prodded correctly, Dr. Finch would unwind the reel of his strange lore to reveal reasoning that glittered with a private light of its own.
But she was not there to be entertained with the vacillations of a minor Victorian esthete. She watched her uncle maneuver salad greens, olive oil, vinegar, and several ingredients unknown to her with the same precision and assurances he employed on a difficult osteotomy. He divided the salad into two plates and said, “Eat, child.”
Dr. Finch chewed ferociously on his lunch and eyed his niece, who was arranging lettuce, hunks of avocado, green pepper, and onions in a neat row on her plate. “All right, what’s the matter? Are you pregnant?”
“Gracious no, Uncle Jack.”
“That’s about the only thing I can think of that worries young women these days. Do you want to tell me?” His voice softened. “Come on, old Scout.”
Jean Louise’s eyes blurred with tears. “What’s been happening, Uncle Jack? What is the matter with Atticus? I think Hank and Aunty have lost their minds and I know I’m losing mine.”
“I haven’t noticed anything the matter with them. Should I?”
“You should have seen them sitting in that meeting yesterday—”
Jean Louise looked up at her uncle, who was balancing himself dangerously on the back legs of his chair. He put his hands on the table to steady himself, his incisive features melted, his eyebrows shot up, he laughed loudly. The front legs of his chair came down with a bang, and he subsided into chuckles.
Jean Louise raged. She got up from the table, tipped over her chair, restored it, and walked to the door. “I didn’t come here to be made fun of, Uncle Jack,” she said.
“Oh sit down and shut up,” said her uncle. He looked at her with genuine interest, as if she were something under a microscope, as though she were some medical marvel that had inadvertently materialized in his kitchen.
