To Kill A Mockingbird

 "To Kill A Mocking bird"

By Harper Lee

Good, Evil, and Human Dignity | Prejudice | Growing Up | Courage | Small Town Southern Life.

Part - 1

Chapter 1 , 2 :

"To Kill A Mockingbird"

At the poin when he was almost thirteen, my sibling Jem got his arm severely broken at the

elbow. Whenever it mended, and Jem's feelings of dread toward always being unable to play football were

alleviated, he was only occasionally unsure about his physical issue. His left arm was

fairly more limited than his right; when he stood or strolled, the rear of his hand

was at right points to his body, his thumb corresponding to his thigh. He could never have

minded less, inasmuch as he could pass and dropkick.

At the point when enough years had gone by to empower us to think back on them, we

at times talked about the occasions prompting his mishap. I keep up with that the Ewells

begun everything, except Jem, who was four years my senior, said it began well before

that. He said it started the mid year Dill came to us, when Dill initially gave us the thought

of making Boo Radley come out.

I said if he had any desire to take a wide perspective on the thing, it truly started with Andrew

Jackson. On the off chance that General Jackson hadn't run the Creeks up the spring, Simon Finch

couldn't have ever traveled up the Alabama, and where might we be in the event that he hadn't?

We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted 

Atticus. Our father said we were both right.

Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that 

we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings. All we had 

was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was 

exceeded only by his stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the 

persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more 

liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way 

across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up 

the Saint Stephens. Mindful of John Wesley’s strictures on the use of many words 

in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit 

he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory 

of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten 

his teacher’s dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and 

with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some 

forty miles above Saint Stephens. He returned to Saint Stephens only once, to find 

a wife, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters. Simon lived to 

an impressive age and died rich.

It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon’s homestead, 

Finch’s Landing, and make their living from cotton. The place was self-sufficient: 

modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless 

produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles 

of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile.

Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the North 

and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of everything but their land, yet 

the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into the twentieth 

century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his 

younger brother went to Boston to study medicine. Their sister Alexandra was the 

Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most 

of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full.

When my father was admitted to the bar, he returned to Maycomb and began his 

practice. Maycomb, some twenty miles east of Finch’s Landing, was the county

seat of Maycomb County. Atticus’s office in the courthouse contained little more 

than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama. His 

first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail. 

Atticus had urged them to accept the state’s generosity in allowing them to plead 

Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were 

Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The 

Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb’s leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding 

arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to 

do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-

coming-to-him was a good enough defense for anybody. They persisted in 

pleading Not Guilty to first-degree murder, so there was nothing much Atticus 

could do for his clients except be present at their departure, an occasion that was 

probably the beginning of my father’s profound distaste for the practice of 

criminal law.

During his first five years in Maycomb, Atticus practiced economy more than 

anything; for several years thereafter he invested his earnings in his brother’s 

education. John Hale Finch was ten years younger than my father, and chose to 

study medicine at a time when cotton was not worth growing; but after getting 

Uncle Jack started, Atticus derived a reasonable income from the law. He liked 

Maycomb, he was Maycomb County born and bred; he knew his people, they 

knew him, and because of Simon Finch’s industry, Atticus was related by blood 

or marriage to nearly every family in the town.

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.

People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of 

the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four

hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, 

nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries 

of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: 

Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.

We lived on the main residential street in town— Atticus, Jem and I, plus 

Calpurnia our cook. Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, 

read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment.

Calpurnia was something else again. She was all angles and bones; she was 

nearsighted; she squinted; her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard. She 

was always ordering me out of the kitchen, asking me why I couldn’t behave as 

well as Jem when she knew he was older, and calling me home when I wasn’t 

ready to come. Our battles were epic and one-sided. Calpurnia always won, 

mainly because Atticus always took her side. She had been with us ever since Jem 

was born, and I had felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember.

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was a Graham 

from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to the state 

legislature. He was middle-aged then, she was fifteen years his junior. Jem was 

the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two 

years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her 

family. I did not miss her, but I think Jem did. He remembered her clearly, and 

sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then go off and play 

by himself behind the car-house. When he was like that, I knew better than to 

bother him.

When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries 

(within calling distance of Calpurnia) were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose’s house 

two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We 

were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an 

unknown entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for 

days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell.

That was the summer Dill came to us.

Early one morning as we were beginning our day’s play in the back yard, Jem and 

I heard something next door in Miss Rachel Haverford’s collard patch. We went

to the wire fence to see if there was a puppy— Miss Rachel’s rat terrier was 

expecting— instead we found someone sitting looking at us. Sitting down, he 

wasn’t much higher than the collards. We stared at him until he spoke:

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” said Jem pleasantly.

“I’m Charles Baker Harris,” he said. “I can read.”

“So what?” I said.

“I just thought you’d like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin‘ I 

can do it…”

“How old are you,” asked Jem, “four-and-a-half?”

“Goin‘ on seven.”

“Shoot no wonder, then,” said Jem, jerking his thumb at me. “Scout yonder’s 

been readin‘ ever since she was born, and she ain’t even started to school yet. You 

look right puny for goin’ on seven.”

“I’m little but I’m old,” he said.

Jem brushed his hair back to get a better look. “Why don’t you come over, 

Charles Baker Harris?” he said. “Lord, what a name.”

“‘s not any funnier’n yours. Aunt Rachel says your name’s Jeremy Atticus Finch.”

Jem scowled. “I’m big enough to fit mine,” he said. “Your name’s longer’n you 

are. Bet it’s a foot longer.”

“Folks call me Dill,” said Dill, struggling under the fence.

“Do better if you go over it instead of under it,” I said. “Where’d you come from?”

Dill was from Meridian, Mississippi, was spending the summer with his aunt, 

Miss Rachel, and would be spending every summer in Maycomb from now on. 

His family was from Maycomb County originally, his mother worked for a 

photographer in Meridian, had entered his picture in a Beautiful Child contest and 

won five dollars. She gave the money to Dill, who went to the picture show 

twenty times on it.

“Don’t have any picture shows here, except Jesus ones in the courthouse 

sometimes,” said Jem. “Ever see anything good?”

Dill had seen Dracula, a revelation that moved Jem to eye him with the beginning 

of respect. “Tell it to us,” he said.

Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair 

was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but 

I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and 

darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the 

center of his forehead.

When Dill reduced Dracula to dust, and Jem said the show sounded better than 

the book, I asked Dill where his father was: “You ain’t said anything about him.”

“I haven’t got one.”

“Is he dead?”

“No…”

“Then if he’s not dead you’ve got one, haven’t you?”

Dill blushed and Jem told me to hush, a sure sign that Dill had been studied and 

found acceptable. Thereafter the summer passed in routine contentment. Routine 

contentment was: improving our treehouse that rested between giant twin 

chinaberry trees in the back yard, fussing, running through our list of dramas 

based on the works of Oliver Optic, Victor Appleton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. 

In this matter we were lucky to have Dill. He played the character parts formerly 

thrust upon me— the ape in Tarzan, Mr. Crabtree in The Rover Boys, Mr. Damon 

in Tom Swift. Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed 

with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.

But by the end of August our repertoire was vapid from countless reproductions, 

and it was then that Dill gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

The Radley Place fascinated Dill. In spite of our warnings and explanations it 

drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no nearer than the light-pole on 

the corner, a safe distance from the Radley gate. There he would stand, his arm 

around the fat pole, staring and wondering.

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one 

faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, 

was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago

darkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles 

drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains 

of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard— a “swept” yard that was never 

swept— where johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance.

Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and 

I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down, 

and peeped in windows. When people’s azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was 

because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in 

Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid 

nocturnal events: people’s chickens and household pets were found mutilated; 

although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in 

Barker’s Eddy, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their 

initial suspicions. A Negro would not pass the Radley Place at night, he would cut 

across to the sidewalk opposite and whistle as he walked. The Maycomb school 

grounds adjoined the back of the Radley lot; from the Radley chickenyard tall 

pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the 

children: Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a 

lost ball and no questions asked.

The misery of that house began many years before Jem and I were born. The 

Radleys, welcome anywhere in town, kept to themselves, a predilection 

unforgivable in Maycomb. They did not go to church, Maycomb’s principal 

recreation, but worshiped at home; Mrs. Radley seldom if ever crossed the street 

for a mid-morning coffee break with her neighbors, and certainly never joined a 

missionary circle. Mr. Radley walked to town at eleven-thirty every morning and 

came back promptly at twelve, sometimes carrying a brown paper bag that the 

neighborhood assumed contained the family groceries. I never knew how old Mr. 

Radley made his living— Jem said he “bought cotton,” a polite term for doing 

nothing—but Mr. Radley and his wife had lived there with their two sons as long 

as anybody could remember.

The shutters and doors of the Radley house were closed on Sundays, another 

thing alien to Maycomb’s ways: closed doors meant illness and cold weather 

only. Of all days Sunday was the day for formal afternoon visiting: ladies wore 

corsets, men wore coats, children wore shoes. But to climb the Radley front steps

and call, “He-y,” of a Sunday afternoon was something their neighbors never did. 

The Radley house had no screen doors. I once asked Atticus if it ever had any; 

Atticus said yes, but before I was born.

According to neighborhood legend, when the younger Radley boy was in his 

teens he became acquainted with some of the Cunninghams from Old Sarum, an 

enormous and confusing tribe domiciled in the northern part of the county, and 

they formed the nearest thing to a gang ever seen in Maycomb. They did little, but 

enough to be discussed by the town and publicly warned from three pulpits: they 

hung around the barbershop; they rode the bus to Abbottsville on Sundays and 

went to the picture show; they attended dances at the county’s riverside gambling 

hell, the Dew-Drop Inn & Fishing Camp; they experimented with stumphole 

whiskey. Nobody in Maycomb had nerve enough to tell Mr. Radley that his boy 

was in with the wrong crowd.

One night, in an excessive spurt of high spirits, the boys backed around the square 

in a borrowed flivver, resisted arrest by Maycomb’s ancient beadle, Mr. Conner, 

and locked him in the courthouse outhouse. The town decided something had to 

be done; Mr. Conner said he knew who each and every one of them was, and he 

was bound and determined they wouldn’t get away with it, so the boys came 

before the probate judge on charges of disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, 

assault and battery, and using abusive and profane language in the presence and 

hearing of a female. The judge asked Mr. Conner why he included the last charge; 

Mr. Conner said they cussed so loud he was sure every lady in Maycomb heard 

them. The judge decided to send the boys to the state industrial school, where 

boys were sometimes sent for no other reason than to provide them with food and 

decent shelter: it was no prison and it was no disgrace. Mr. Radley thought it was. 

If the judge released Arthur, Mr. Radley would see to it that Arthur gave no 

further trouble. Knowing that Mr. Radley’s word was his bond, the judge was 

glad to do so.

The other boys attended the industrial school and received the best secondary 

education to be had in the state; one of them eventually worked his way through 

engineering school at Auburn. The doors of the Radley house were closed on 

weekdays as well as Sundays, and Mr. Radley’s boy was not seen again for

fifteen years.

But there came a day, barely within Jem’s memory, when Boo Radley was heard 

from and was seen by several people, but not by Jem. He said Atticus never talked 

much about the Radleys: when Jem would question him Atticus’s only answer 

was for him to mind his own business and let the Radleys mind theirs, they had a 

right to; but when it happened Jem said Atticus shook his head and said, “Mm, mm, mm.”

So Jem received most of his information from Miss Stephanie Crawford, a 

neighborhood scold, who said she knew the whole thing. According to Miss 

Stephanie, Boo was sitting in the livingroom cutting some items from The 

Maycomb Tribune to paste in his scrapbook. His father entered the room. As Mr. Radley passed by, Boo drove the scissors into his parent’s leg, pulled them out, 

wiped them on his pants, and resumed his activities.

Mrs. Radley ran screaming into the street that Arthur was killing them all, but 

when the sheriff arrived he found Boo still sitting in the livingroom, cutting up the 

Tribune. He was thirty-three years old then.

Miss Stephanie said old Mr. Radley said no Radley was going to any asylum, 

when it was suggested that a season in Tuscaloosa might be helpful to Boo. Boo 

wasn’t crazy, he was high-strung at times. It was all right to shut him up, Mr. Radley conceded, but insisted that Boo not be charged with anything: he was not 

a criminal. The sheriff hadn’t the heart to put him in jail alongside Negroes, so 

Boo was locked in the courthouse basement.

Boo’s transition from the basement to back home was nebulous in Jem’s memory. 

Miss Stephanie Crawford said some of the town council told Mr. Radley that if he 

didn’t take Boo back, Boo would die of mold from the damp. Besides, Boo could 

not live forever on the bounty of the county.

Nobody knew what form of intimidation Mr. Radley employed to keep Boo out of 

sight, but Jem figured that Mr. Radley kept him chained to the bed most of the 

time. Atticus said no, it wasn’t that sort of thing, that there were other ways of 

making people into ghosts.

My memory came alive to see Mrs. Radley occasionally open the front door, walk 

to the edge of the porch, and pour water on her cannas. But every day Jem and I would see Mr. Radley walking to and from town. He was a thin leathery man with 

colorless eyes, so colorless they did not reflect light. His cheekbones were sharp 

and his mouth was wide, with a thin upper lip and a full lower lip. Miss Stephanie 

Crawford said he was so upright he took the word of God as his only law, and we 

believed her, because Mr. Radley’s posture was ramrod straight.

He never spoke to us. When he passed we would look at the ground and say, 

“Good morning, sir,” and he would cough in reply. Mr. Radley’s elder son lived 

in Pensacola; he came home at Christmas, and he was one of the few persons we 

ever saw enter or leave the place. From the day Mr. Radley took Arthur home, 

people said the house died.

But there came a day when Atticus told us he’d wear us out if we made any noise 

in the yard and commissioned Calpurnia to serve in his absence if she heard a 

sound out of us. Mr. Radley was dying.

He took his time about it. Wooden sawhorses blocked the road at each end of the 

Radley lot, straw was put down on the sidewalk, traffic was diverted to the back 

street. Dr. Reynolds parked his car in front of our house and walked to the 

Radley’s every time he called. Jem and I crept around the yard for days. At last 

the sawhorses were taken away, and we stood watching from the front porch 

when Mr. Radley made his final journey past our house.

“There goes the meanest man ever God blew breath into,” murmured Calpurnia, 

and she spat meditatively into the yard. We looked at her in surprise, for 

Calpurnia rarely commented on the ways of white people.

The neighborhood thought when Mr. Radley went under Boo would come out, 

but it had another think coming: Boo’s elder brother returned from Pensacola and 

took Mr. Radley’s place. The only difference between him and his father was 

their ages. Jem said Mr. Nathan Radley “bought cotton,” too. Mr. Nathan would 

speak to us, however, when we said good morning, and sometimes we saw him 

coming from town with a magazine in his hand.

The more we told Dill about the Radleys, the more he wanted to know, the longer 

he would stand hugging the light-pole on the corner, the more he would wonder.

“Wonder what he does in there,” he would murmur. “Looks like he’d just stick 

his head out the door.”

Jem said, “He goes out, all right, when it’s pitch dark. Miss Stephanie Crawford 

said she woke up in the middle of the night one time and saw him looking straight 

through the window at her… said his head was like a skull lookin‘ at her. Ain’t 

you ever waked up at night and heard him, Dill? He walks like this-” Jem slid his 

feet through the gravel. “Why do you think Miss Rachel locks up so tight at 

night? I’ve seen his tracks in our back yard many a mornin’, and one night I heard 

him scratching on the back screen, but he was gone time Atticus got there.”

“Wonder what he looks like?” said Dill.

Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, 

judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, 

that’s why his hands were bloodstained—if you ate an animal raw, you could 

never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; 

what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most 

of the time.

“Let’s try to make him come out,” said Dill. “I’d like to see what he looks like.”

Jem said if Dill wanted to get himself killed, all he had to do was go up and knock 

on the front door.

Our first raid came to pass only because Dill bet Jem The Gray Ghost against two 

Tom Swifts that Jem wouldn’t get any farther than the Radley gate. In all his life, 

Jem had never declined a dare.

Jem thought about it for three days. I suppose he loved honor more than his head, 

for Dill wore him down easily: “You’re scared,” Dill said, the first day. “Ain’t 

scared, just respectful,” Jem said. The next day Dill said, “You’re too scared even 

to put your big toe in the front yard.” Jem said he reckoned he wasn’t, he’d passed 

the Radley Place every school day of his life.

“Always runnin‘,” I said.

But Dill got him the third day, when he told Jem that folks in Meridian certainly 

weren’t as afraid as the folks in Maycomb, that he’d never seen such scary folks 

as the ones in Maycomb.

This was enough to make Jem march to the corner, where he stopped and leaned 

against the light-pole, watching the gate hanging crazily on its homemade hinge.

“I hope you’ve got it through your head that he’ll kill us each and every one, Dill 

Harris,” said Jem, when we joined him. “Don’t blame me when he gouges your 

eyes out. You started it, remember.”

“You’re still scared,” murmured Dill patiently.

Jem wanted Dill to know once and for all that he wasn’t scared of anything: “It’s 

just that I can’t think of a way to make him come out without him gettin‘ us.” 

Besides, Jem had his little sister to think of.

When he said that, I knew he was afraid. Jem had his little sister to think of the 

time I dared him to jump off the top of the house: “If I got killed, what’d become 

of you?” he asked. Then he jumped, landed unhurt, and his sense of responsibility 

left him until confronted by the Radley Place.

“You gonna run out on a dare?” asked Dill. “If you are, then-”

“Dill, you have to think about these things,” Jem said. “Lemme think a minute… 

it’s sort of like making a turtle come out…”

“How’s that?” asked Dill.

“Strike a match under him.”

I told Jem if he set fire to the Radley house I was going to tell Atticus on him.

Dill said striking a match under a turtle was hateful.

“Ain’t hateful, just persuades him—‘s not like you’d chunk him in the fire,” Jem 

growled.

“How do you know a match don’t hurt him?”

“Turtles can’t feel, stupid,” said Jem.

“Were you ever a turtle, huh?”

“My stars, Dill! Now lemme think… reckon we can rock him…”

Jem stood in thought so long that Dill made a mild concession: “I won’t say you 

ran out on a dare an‘ I’ll swap you The Gray Ghost if you just go up and touch the 

house.”

Jem brightened. “Touch the house, that all?”

Dill nodded.

“Sure that’s all, now? I don’t want you hollerin‘ something different the minute I get back.”

“Yeah, that’s all,” said Dill. “He’ll probably come out after you when he sees you 

in the yard, then Scout’n‘ me’ll jump on him and hold him down till we can tell 

him we ain’t gonna hurt him.”

We left the corner, crossed the side street that ran in front of the Radley house, 

and stopped at the gate.

“Well go on,” said Dill, “Scout and me’s right behind you.”

“I’m going,” said Jem, “don’t hurry me.”

He walked to the corner of the lot, then back again, studying the simple terrain as 

if deciding how best to effect an entry, frowning and scratching his head.

Then I sneered at him.

Jem threw open the gate and sped to the side of the house, slapped it with his 

palm and ran back past us, not waiting to see if his foray was successful. Dill and 

I followed on his heels. Safely on our porch, panting and out of breath, we looked 

back.

The old house was the same, droopy and sick, but as we stared down the street we 

thought we saw an inside shutter move. Flick. A tiny, almost invisible movement, 

and the house was still.

Chapter 2: 

Dill left us early in September, to return to Meridian. We saw him off on the five 

o’clock bus and I was miserable without him until it occurred to me that I would 

be starting to school in a week. I never looked forward more to anything in my 

life. Hours of wintertime had found me in the treehouse, looking over at the 

schoolyard, spying on multitudes of children through a two-power telescope Jem 

had given me, learning their games, following Jem’s red jacket through wriggling

circles of blind man’s buff, secretly sharing their misfortunes and minor victories. 

I longed to join them.

Jem condescended to take me to school the first day, a job usually done by one’s 

parents, but Atticus had said Jem would be delighted to show me where my room 

was. I think some money changed hands in this transaction, for as we trotted 

around the corner past the Radley Place I heard an unfamiliar jingle in Jem’s 

pockets. When we slowed to a walk at the edge of the schoolyard, Jem was 

careful to explain that during school hours I was not to bother him, I was not to 

approach him with requests to enact a chapter of Tarzan and the Ant Men, to 

embarrass him with references to his private life, or tag along behind him at 

recess and noon. I was to stick with the first grade and he would stick with the 

fifth. In short, I was to leave him alone.

“You mean we can’t play any more?” I asked.

“We’ll do like we always do at home,” he said, “but you’ll see—school’s 

different.”

It certainly was. Before the first morning was over, Miss Caroline Fisher, our 

teacher, hauled me up to the front of the room and patted the palm of my hand 

with a ruler, then made me stand in the corner until noon.

Miss Caroline was no more than twenty-one. She had bright auburn hair, pink 

cheeks, and wore crimson fingernail polish. She also wore high-heeled pumps and 

a red-and-white-striped dress. She looked and smelled like a peppermint drop. 

She boarded across the street one door down from us in Miss Maudie Atkinson’s 

upstairs front room, and when Miss Maudie introduced us to her, Jem was in a 

haze for days.

Miss Caroline printed her name on the blackboard and said, “This says I am Miss 

Caroline Fisher. I am from North Alabama, from Winston County.” The class 

murmured apprehensively, should she prove to harbor her share of the 

peculiarities indigenous to that region. (When Alabama seceded from the Union 

on January 11, 1861, Winston County seceded from Alabama, and every child in 

Maycomb County knew it.) North Alabama was full of Liquor Interests, Big 

Mules, steel companies, Republicans, professors, and other persons of no background.

Miss Caroline began the day by reading us a story about cats. The cats had long 

conversations with one another, they wore cunning little clothes and lived in a 

warm house beneath a kitchen stove. 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. 

Miss Caroline came to the end of the story and said, “Oh, my, wasn’t that nice?”

Then she went to the blackboard and printed the alphabet in enormous square 

capitals, turned to the class and asked, “Does anybody know what these are?”

Everybody did; most of the first grade had failed it last year.

I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint 

line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First 

Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she 

discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss 

Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere 

with my reading.

“Teach me?” I said in surprise. “He hasn’t taught me anything, Miss Caroline. 

Atticus ain’t got time to teach me anything,” I added, when Miss Caroline smiled 

and shook her head. “Why, he’s so tired at night he just sits in the livingroom and 

reads.”

“If he didn’t teach you, who did?” Miss Caroline asked good-naturedly. 

“Somebody did. You weren’t born reading The Mobile Register.”

“Jem says I was. He read in a book where I was a Bullfinch instead of a Finch. 

Jem says my name’s really Jean Louise Bullfinch, that I got swapped when I was 

born and I’m really a-”

Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. “Let’s not let our imaginations run 

away with us, dear,” she said. “Now you tell your father not to teach you any 

more. It’s best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from 

here and try to undo the damage-”

“Ma’am?”

“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never 

deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the 

daily papers. In the long hours of church—was it then I learned? I could not 

remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about 

it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of 

my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of 

shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger 

separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, 

listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of 

Lorenzo Dow—anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his 

lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not 

love breathing.

I knew I had annoyed Miss Caroline, so I let well enough alone and stared out the 

window until recess when Jem cut me from the covey of first-graders in the 

schoolyard. He asked how I was getting along. I told him.

“If I didn’t have to stay I’d leave. Jem, that damn lady says Atticus’s been 

teaching me to read and for him to stop it-”

“Don’t worry, Scout,” Jem comforted me. “Our teacher says Miss Caroline’s 

introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. It’ll be in all 

the grades soon. You don’t have to learn much out of books that way—it’s like if 

you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one, see?”

“Yeah Jem, but I don’t wanta study cows, I-”

“Sure you do. You hafta know about cows, they’re a big part of life in Maycomb 

County.”

I contented myself with asking Jem if he’d lost his mind.

“I’m just trying to tell you the new way they’re teachin‘ the first grade, stubborn. 

It’s the Dewey Decimal System.”

Having never questioned Jem’s pronouncements, I saw no reason to begin now. 

The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Caroline waving cards at 

us on which were printed “the,” “cat,” “rat,” “man,” and “you.” No comment seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these impressionistic 

revelations in silence. I was bored, so I began a letter to Dill. Miss Caroline 

caught me writing and told me to tell my father to stop teaching me. “Besides,” 

she said. “We don’t write in the first grade, we print. You won’t learn to write 

until you’re in the third grade.”

Calpurnia was to blame for this. It kept me from driving her crazy on rainy days, I 

guess. She would set me a writing task by scrawling the alphabet firmly across the 

top of a tablet, then copying out a chapter of the Bible beneath. If I reproduced 

her penmanship satisfactorily, she rewarded me with an open-faced sandwich of 

bread and butter and sugar. In Calpurnia’s teaching, there was no sentimentality: I 

seldom pleased her and she seldom rewarded me.

“Everybody who goes home to lunch hold up your hands,” said Miss Caroline, 

breaking into my new grudge against Calpurnia.

The town children did so, and she looked us over.

“Everybody who brings his lunch put it on top of his desk.”

Molasses buckets appeared from nowhere, and the ceiling danced with metallic 

light. Miss Caroline walked up and down the rows peering and poking into lunch 

containers, nodding if the contents pleased her, frowning a little at others. She 

stopped at Walter Cunningham’s desk. “Where’s yours?” she asked.

Walter Cunningham’s face told everybody in the first grade he had hookworms. 

His absence of shoes told us how he got them. People caught hookworms going 

barefooted in barnyards and hog wallows. If Walter had owned any shoes he 

would have worn them the first day of school and then discarded them until mid-

winter. He did have on a clean shirt and neatly mended overalls.

“Did you forget your lunch this morning?” asked Miss Caroline.

Walter looked straight ahead. I saw a muscle jump in his skinny jaw.

“Did you forget it this morning?” asked Miss Caroline. Walter’s jaw twitched 

again.

“Yeb’m,” he finally mumbled.

Miss Caroline went to her desk and opened her purse. “Here’s a quarter,” she said 

to Walter. “Go and eat downtown today. You can pay me back tomorrow.”

Walter shook his head. “Nome thank you ma’am,” he drawled softly.

Impatience crept into Miss Caroline’s voice: “Here Walter, come get it.”

Walter shook his head again.

When Walter shook his head a third time someone whispered, “Go on and tell 

her, Scout.”

I turned around and saw most of the town people and the entire bus delegation 

looking at me. Miss Caroline and I had conferred twice already, and they were 

looking at me in the innocent assurance that familiarity breeds understanding.

I rose graciously on Walter’s behalf: “Ah—Miss Caroline?”

“What is it, Jean Louise?”

“Miss Caroline, he’s a Cunningham.”

I sat back down.

“What, Jean Louise?”

I thought I had made things sufficiently clear. It was clear enough to the rest of 

us: Walter Cunningham was sitting there lying his head off. He didn’t forget his 

lunch, he didn’t have any. He had none today nor would he have any tomorrow or 

the next day. He had probably never seen three quarters together at the same time 

in his life.

I tried again: “Walter’s one of the Cunninghams, Miss Caroline.”

“I beg your pardon, Jean Louise?”

“That’s okay, ma’am, you’ll get to know all the county folks after a while. The 

Cunninghams never took anything they can’t pay back—no church baskets and no 

scrip stamps. They never took anything off of anybody, they get along on what 

they have. They don’t have much, but they get along on it.”

My special knowledge of the Cunningham tribe—one branch, that is—was gained 

from events of last winter. Walter’s father was one of Atticus’s clients. After a 

dreary conversation in our livingroom one night about his entailment, before Mr. 

Cunningham left he said, “Mr. Finch, I don’t know when I’ll ever be able to pay 

you.”

“Let that be the least of your worries, Walter,” Atticus said.

When I asked Jem what entailment was, and Jem described it as a condition of 

having your tail in a crack, I asked Atticus if Mr. Cunningham would ever pay us.

“Not in money,” Atticus said, “but before the year’s out I’ll have been paid. You 

watch.”

We watched. One morning Jem and I found a load of stovewood in the back yard. 

Later, a sack of hickory nuts appeared on the back steps. With Christmas came a 

crate of smilax and holly. That spring when we found a crokersack full of turnip 

greens, Atticus said Mr. Cunningham had more than paid him.

“Why does he pay you like that?” I asked.

“Because that’s the only way he can pay me. He has no money.”

“Are we poor, Atticus?”

Atticus nodded. “We are indeed.”

Jem’s nose wrinkled. “Are we as poor as the Cunninghams?”

“Not exactly. The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them 

hardest.”

Atticus said professional people were poor because the farmers were poor. As 

Maycomb County was farm country, nickels and dimes were hard to come by for 

doctors and dentists and lawyers. Entailment was only a part of Mr. 

Cunningham’s vexations. The acres not entailed were mortgaged to the hilt, and 

the little cash he made went to interest. If he held his mouth right, Mr. 

Cunningham could get a WPA job, but his land would go to ruin if he left it, and 

he was willing to go hungry to keep his land and vote as he pleased. Mr. 

Cunningham, said Atticus, came from a set breed of men.

As the Cunninghams had no money to pay a lawyer, they simply paid us with 

what they had. “Did you know,” said Atticus, “that Dr. Reynolds works the same 

way? He charges some folks a bushel of potatoes for delivery of a baby. Miss 

Scout, if you give me your attention I’ll tell you what entailment is. Jem’s 

definitions are very nearly accurate sometimes.”

If I could have explained these things to Miss Caroline, I would have saved 

myself some inconvenience and Miss Caroline subsequent mortification, but it 

was beyond my ability to explain things as well as Atticus, so I said, “You’re shamin‘ him, Miss Caroline. Walter hasn’t got a quarter at home to bring you, and 

you can’t use any stovewood.”

Miss Caroline stood stock still, then grabbed me by the collar and hauled me back 

to her desk. “Jean Louise, I’ve had about enough of you this morning,” she said. 

“You’re starting off on the wrong foot in every way, my dear. Hold out your 

hand.”

I thought she was going to spit in it, which was the only reason anybody in 

Maycomb held out his hand: it was a time-honored method of sealing oral 

contracts. Wondering what bargain we had made, I turned to the class for an 

answer, but the class looked back at me in puzzlement. Miss Caroline picked up 

her ruler, gave me half a dozen quick little pats, then told me to stand in the 

corner. A storm of laughter broke loose when it finally occurred to the class that 

Miss Caroline had whipped me.

When Miss Caroline threatened it with a similar fate the first grade exploded 

again, becoming cold sober only when the shadow of Miss Blount fell over them. 

Miss Blount, a native Maycombian as yet uninitiated in the mysteries of the 

Decimal System, appeared at the door hands on hips and announced: “If I hear 

another sound from this room I’ll burn up everybody in it. Miss Caroline, the 

sixth grade cannot concentrate on the pyramids for all this racket!”

My sojourn in the corner was a short one. Saved by the bell, Miss Caroline 

watched the class file out for lunch. As I was the last to leave, I saw her sink 

down into her chair and bury her head in her arms. Had her conduct been more 

friendly toward me, I would have felt sorry for her. She was a pretty little thing.