“I wish Bob Ewell wouldn’t chew tobacco,” was all Atticus said about it.
According to Miss Stephanie Crawford, however, Atticus was leaving the post
office when Mr. Ewell approached him, cursed him, spat on him, and threatened
to kill him. Miss Stephanie (who, by the time she had told it twice was there and
had seen it all—passing by from the Jitney Jungle, she was)—Miss Stephanie said
Atticus didn’t bat an eye, just took out his handkerchief and wiped his face and
stood there and let Mr. Ewell call him names wild horses could not bring her to
repeat. Mr. Ewell was a veteran of an obscure war; that plus Atticus’s peaceful
reaction probably prompted him to inquire, “Too proud to fight, you nigger-lovin‘
bastard?” Miss Stephanie said Atticus said, “No, too old,” put his hands in his
pockets and strolled on. Miss Stephanie said you had to hand it to Atticus Finch,
he could be right dry sometimes.
Jem and I didn’t think it entertaining.
“After all, though,” I said, “he was the deadest shot in the county one time. He
could—”
“You know he wouldn’t carry a gun, Scout. He ain’t even got one—” said Jem.
“You know he didn’t even have one down at the jail that night. He told me havin‘
a gun around’s an invitation to somebody to shoot you.”
“This is different,” I said. “We can ask him to borrow one.”
We did, and he said, “Nonsense.”
Dill was of the opinion that an appeal to Atticus’s better nature might work: after
all, we would starve if Mr. Ewell killed him, besides be raised exclusively by
Aunt Alexandra, and we all knew the first thing she’d do before Atticus was
under the ground good would be to fire Calpurnia. Jem said it might work if I
cried and flung a fit, being young and a girl. That didn’t work either. But when he
noticed us dragging around the neighborhood, not eating, taking little interest in
our normal pursuits, Atticus discovered how deeply frightened we were. He
tempted Jem with a new football magazine one night; when he saw Jem flip the
pages and toss it aside, he said, “What’s bothering you, son?”
Jem came to the point: “Mr. Ewell.”
“What has happened?”
“Nothing’s happened. We’re scared for you, and we think you oughta do
something about him.”
Atticus smiled wryly. “Do what? Put him under a peace bond?”
“When a man says he’s gonna get you, looks like he means it.”
“He meant it when he said it,” said Atticus. “Jem, see if you can stand in Bob
Ewell’s shoes a minute. I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he
had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind
always does. So if spitting in my face and threatening me saved Mayella Ewell
one extra beating, that’s something I’ll gladly take. He had to take it out on
somebody and I’d rather it be me than that houseful of children out there. You
understand?”
Jem nodded.
Aunt Alexandra entered the room as Atticus was saying, “We don’t have anything
to fear from Bob Ewell, he got it all out of his system that morning.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Atticus,” she said. “His kind’d do anything to pay
off a grudge. You know how those people are.”
“What on earth could Ewell do to me, sister?”
“Something furtive,” Aunt Alexandra said. “You may count on that.”
“Nobody has much chance to be furtive in Maycomb,” Atticus answered.
After that, we were not afraid. Summer was melting away, and we made the most
of it. Atticus assured us that nothing would happen to Tom Robinson until the
higher court reviewed his case, and that Tom had a good chance of going free, or
at least of having a new trial. He was at Enfield Prison Farm, seventy miles away
in Chester County. I asked Atticus if Tom’s wife and children were allowed to
visit him, but Atticus said no.
“If he loses his appeal,” I asked one evening, “what’ll happen to him?”
“He’ll go to the chair,” said Atticus, “unless the Governor commutes his sentence.
Not time to worry yet, Scout. We’ve got a good chance.”
Jem was sprawled on the sofa reading Popular Mechanics. He looked up. “It ain’t
right. He didn’t kill anybody even if he was guilty. He didn’t take anybody’s life.”
“You know rape’s a capital offense in Alabama,” said Atticus.
“Yessir, but the jury didn’t have to give him death—if they wanted to they
could’ve gave him twenty years.”
“Given,” said Atticus. “Tom Robinson’s a colored man, Jem. No jury in this part
of the world’s going to say, ‘We think you’re guilty, but not very,’ on a charge
like that. It was either a straight acquittal or nothing.”
Jem was shaking his head. “I know it’s not right, but I can’t figure out what’s
wrong—maybe rape shouldn’t be a capital offense…”
Atticus dropped his newspaper beside his chair. He said he didn’t have any
quarrel with the rape statute, none what ever, but he did have deep misgivings
when the state asked for and the jury gave a death penalty on purely
circumstantial evidence. He glanced at me, saw I was listening, and made it
easier. “—I mean, before a man is sentenced to death for murder, say, there
should be one or two eye-witnesses. Some one should be able to say, ‘Yes, I was
there and saw him pull the trigger.’”
“But lots of folks have been hung—hanged—on circumstantial evidence,” said
Jem.
“I know, and lots of ‘em probably deserved it, too—but in the absence of eye-
witnesses there’s always a doubt, some times only the shadow of a doubt. The law
says ’reasonable doubt,‘ but I think a defendant’s entitled to the shadow of a
doubt. There’s always the possibility, no matter how improbable, that he’s
innocent.”
“Then it all goes back to the jury, then. We oughta do away with juries.” Jem was
adamant.
Atticus tried hard not to smile but couldn’t help it. “You’re rather hard on us, son.
I think maybe there might be a better way. Change the law. Change it so that only
judges have the power of fixing the penalty in capital cases.”
“Then go up to Montgomery and change the law.”
“You’d be surprised how hard that’d be. I won’t live to see the law changed, and
if you live to see it you’ll be an old man.”
This was not good enough for Jem. “No sir, they oughta do away with juries. He
wasn’t guilty in the first place and they said he was.”
“If you had been on that jury, son, and eleven other boys like you, Tom would be
a free man,” said Atticus. “So far nothing in your life has interfered with your
reasoning process. Those are twelve reasonable men in everyday life, Tom’s jury,
but you saw something come between them and reason. You saw the same thing
that night in front of the jail. When that crew went away, they didn’t go as
reasonable men, they went because we were there. There’s something in our
world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our
courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always
wins. They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life.”
“Doesn’t make it right,” said Jem stolidly. He beat his fist softly on his knee.
“You just can’t convict a man on evidence like that—you can’t.”
“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.”
Atticus was speaking so quietly his last word crashed on our ears. I looked up,
and his face was vehement. “There’s nothing more sickening to me than a low-
grade white man who’ll take advantage of a Negro’s ignorance. Don’t fool
yourselves—it’s all adding up and one of these days we’re going to pay the bill
for it. I hope it’s not in you children’s time.”
Jem was scratching his head. Suddenly his eyes widened. “Atticus,” he said, “why
don’t people like us and Miss Maudie ever sit on juries? You never see anybody
from Maycomb on a jury—they all come from out in the woods.”
Atticus leaned back in his rocking-chair. For some reason he looked pleased with
Jem. “I was wondering when that’d occur to you,” he said. “There are lots of
reasons. For one thing, Miss Maudie can’t serve on a jury because she’s a woman
—”
“You mean women in Alabama can’t—?” I was indignant.
“I do. I guess it’s to protect our frail ladies from sordid cases like Tom’s.
Besides,” Atticus grinned, “I doubt if we’d ever get a complete case tried—the
ladies’d be interrupting to ask questions.”
Jem and I laughed. Miss Maudie on a jury would be impressive. I thought of old
Mrs. Dubose in her wheelchair—“Stop that rapping, John Taylor, I want to ask
this man something.” Perhaps our forefathers were wise.
Atticus was saying, “With people like us—that’s our share of the bill. We
generally get the juries we deserve. Our stout Maycomb citizens aren’t interested,
in the first place. In the second place, they’re afraid. Then, they’re—”
“Afraid, why?” asked Jem.
“Well, what if—say, Mr. Link Deas had to decide the amount of damages to
award, say, Miss Maudie, when Miss Rachel ran over her with a car. Link
wouldn’t like the thought of losing either lady’s business at his store, would he?
So he tells Judge Taylor that he can’t serve on the jury because he doesn’t have
anybody to keep store for him while he’s gone. So Judge Taylor excuses him.
Sometimes he excuses him wrathfully.”
“What’d make him think either one of ‘em’d stop trading with him?” I asked.
Jem said, “Miss Rachel would, Miss Maudie wouldn’t. But a jury’s vote’s secret,
Atticus.”
Our father chuckled. “You’ve many more miles to go, son. A jury’s vote’s
supposed to be secret. Serving on a jury forces a man to make up his mind and
declare himself about something. Men don’t like to do that. Sometimes it’s
unpleasant.”
“Tom’s jury sho‘ made up its mind in a hurry,” Jem muttered.
Atticus’s fingers went to his watchpocket. “No it didn’t,” he said, more to himself
than to us. “That was the one thing that made me think, well, this may be the
shadow of a beginning. That jury took a few hours. An inevitable verdict, maybe,
but usually it takes ‘em just a few minutes. This time—” he broke off and looked
at us. “You might like to know that there was one fellow who took considerable
wearing down—in the beginning he was rarin’ for an outright acquittal.”
“Who?” Jem was astonished.
Atticus’s eyes twinkled. “It’s not for me to say, but I’ll tell you this much. He was
one of your Old Sarum friends…”
“One of the Cunninghams?” Jem yelped. “One of—I didn’t recognize any of
‘em… you’re jokin’.” He looked at Atticus from the corners of his eyes.
“One of their connections. On a hunch, I didn’t strike him. Just on a hunch.
Could’ve, but I didn’t.”
“Golly Moses,” Jem said reverently. “One minute they’re tryin‘ to kill him and
the next they’re tryin’ to turn him loose… I’ll never understand those folks as
long as I live.”
Atticus said you just had to know ‘em. He said the Cunninghams hadn’t taken
anything from or off of anybody since they migrated to the New World. He said
the other thing about them was, once you earned their respect they were for you
tooth and nail. Atticus said he had a feeling, nothing more than a suspicion, that
they left the jail that night with considerable respect for the Finches. Then too, he
said, it took a thunderbolt plus another Cunningham to make one of them change
his mind. “If we’d had two of that crowd, we’d’ve had a hung jury.”
Jem said slowly, “You mean you actually put on the jury a man who wanted to
kill you the night before? How could you take such a risk, Atticus, how could
you?”
“When you analyze it, there was little risk. There’s no difference between one
man who’s going to convict and another man who’s going to convict, is there?
There’s a faint difference between a man who’s going to convict and a man who’s
a little disturbed in his mind, isn’t there? He was the only uncertainty on the
whole list.”
“What kin was that man to Mr. Walter Cunningham?” I asked.
Atticus rose, stretched and yawned. It was not even our bedtime, but we knew he
wanted a chance to read his newspaper. He picked it up, folded it, and tapped my
head. “Let’s see now,” he droned to himself. “I’ve got it. Double first cousin.”
“How can that be?”
“Two sisters married two brothers. That’s all I’ll tell you—you figure it out.”
I tortured myself and decided that if I married Jem and Dill had a sister whom he
married our children would be double first cousins. “Gee minetti, Jem,” I said,
when Atticus had gone, “they’re funny folks. ‘d you hear that, Aunty?”
Aunt Alexandra was hooking a rug and not watching us, but she was listening.
She sat in her chair with her workbasket beside it, her rug spread across her lap.
Why ladies hooked woolen rugs on boiling nights never became clear to me.
“I heard it,” she said.
I remembered the distant disastrous occasion when I rushed to young Walter
Cunningham’s defense. Now I was glad I’d done it. “Soon’s school starts I’m
gonna ask Walter home to dinner,” I planned, having forgotten my private resolve
to beat him up the next time I saw him. “He can stay over sometimes after school,
too. Atticus could drive him back to Old Sarum. Maybe he could spend the night
with us sometime, okay, Jem?”
“We’ll see about that,” Aunt Alexandra said, a declaration that with her was
always a threat, never a promise. Surprised, I turned to her. “Why not, Aunty?
They’re good folks.”
She looked at me over her sewing glasses. “Jean Louise, there is no doubt in my
mind that they’re good folks. But they’re not our kind of folks.”
Jem says, “She means they’re yappy, Scout.”
“What’s a yap?”
“Aw, tacky. They like fiddlin‘ and things like that.”
“Well I do too—”
“Don’t be silly, Jean Louise,” said Aunt Alexandra. “The thing is, you can scrub
Walter Cunningham till he shines, you can put him in shoes and a new suit, but
he’ll never be like Jem. Besides, there’s a drinking streak in that family a mile
wide. Finch women aren’t interested in that sort of people.”
“Aun-ty,” said Jem, “she ain’t nine yet.”
“She may as well learn it now.”
Aunt Alexandra had spoken. I was reminded vividly of the last time she had put
her foot down. I never knew why. It was when I was absorbed with plans to visit
Calpurnia’s house—I was curious, interested; I wanted to be her “company,” to
see how she lived, who her friends were. I might as well have wanted to see the
other side of the moon. This time the tactics were different, but Aunt Alexandra’s
aim was the same. Perhaps this was why she had come to live with us—to help us
choose our friends. I would hold her off as long as I could: “If they’re good folks,
then why can’t I be nice to Walter?”
“I didn’t say not to be nice to him. You should be friendly and polite to him, you
should be gracious to everybody, dear. But you don’t have to invite him home.”
“What if he was kin to us, Aunty?”
“The fact is that he is not kin to us, but if he were, my answer would be the same.”
“Aunty,” Jem spoke up, “Atticus says you can choose your friends but you sho‘
can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you
acknowledge ‘em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don’t.”
“That’s your father all over again,” said Aunt Alexandra, “and I still say that Jean
Louise will not invite Walter Cunningham to this house. If he were her double
first cousin once removed he would still not be received in this house unless he
comes to see Atticus on business. Now that is that.”
She had said Indeed Not, but this time she would give her reasons: “But I want to
play with Walter, Aunty, why can’t I?”
She took off her glasses and stared at me. “I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Because—
he—is—trash, that’s why you can’t play with him. I’ll not have you around him,
picking up his habits and learning Lord-knows-what. You’re enough of a problem
to your father as it is.”
I don’t know what I would have done, but Jem stopped me. He caught me by the
shoulders, put his arm around me, and led me sobbing in fury to his bedroom.
Atticus heard us and poked his head around the door. “‘s all right, sir,” Jem said
gruffly, “’s not anything.” Atticus went away.
“Have a chew, Scout.” Jem dug into his pocket and extracted a Tootsie Roll. It
took a few minutes to work the candy into a comfortable wad inside my jaw.
Jem was rearranging the objects on his dresser. His hair stuck up behind and
down in front, and I wondered if it would ever look like a man’s—maybe if he
shaved it off and started over, his hair would grow back neatly in place. His
eyebrows were becoming heavier, and I noticed a new slimness about his body.
He was growing taller. When he looked around, he must have thought I would
start crying again, for he said, “Show you something if you won’t tell anybody.” I
said what. He unbuttoned his shirt, grinning shyly.
“Well what?”
“Well can’t you see it?”
“Well no.”
“Well it’s hair.”
“Where?”
“There. Right there.”
He had been a comfort to me, so I said it looked lovely, but I didn’t see anything.
“It’s real nice, Jem.”
“Under my arms, too,” he said. “Goin‘ out for football next year. Scout, don’t let
Aunty aggravate you.”
It seemed only yesterday that he was telling me not to aggravate Aunty.
“You know she’s not used to girls,” said Jem, “leastways, not girls like you. She’s
trying to make you a lady. Can’t you take up sewin‘ or somethin’?”
“Hell no. She doesn’t like me, that’s all there is to it, and I don’t care. It was her
callin‘ Walter Cunningham trash that got me goin’, Jem, not what she said about
being a problem to Atticus. We got that all straight one time, I asked him if I was
a problem and he said not much of one, at most one that he could always figure
out, and not to worry my head a second about botherin‘ him. Naw, it was Walter—
that boy’s not trash, Jem. He ain’t like the Ewells.”
Jem kicked off his shoes and swung his feet to the bed. He propped himself
against a pillow and switched on the reading light. “You know something, Scout?
I’ve got it all figured out, now. I’ve thought about it a lot lately and I’ve got it
figured out. There’s four kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind
like us and the neighbors, there’s the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods,
the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes.”
“What about the Chinese, and the Cajuns down yonder in Baldwin County?”
“I mean in Maycomb County. The thing about it is, our kind of folks don’t like
the Cunninghams, the Cunninghams don’t like the Ewells, and the Ewells hate
and despise the colored folks.”
I told Jem if that was so, then why didn’t Tom’s jury, made up of folks like the
Cunninghams, acquit Tom to spite the Ewells?“
Jem waved my question away as being infantile.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve seen Atticus pat his foot when there’s fiddlin‘ on the
radio, and he loves pot liquor better’n any man I ever saw—”
“Then that makes us like the Cunninghams,” I said. “I can’t see why Aunty—”
“No, lemme finish—it does, but we’re still different somehow. Atticus said one
time the reason Aunty’s so hipped on the family is because all we’ve got’s
background and not a dime to our names.”
“Well Jem, I don’t know—Atticus told me one time that most of this Old Family
stuff’s foolishness because everybody’s family’s just as old as everybody else’s. I
said did that include the colored folks and Englishmen and he said yes.”
“Background doesn’t mean Old Family,” said Jem. “I think it’s how long your
family’s been readin‘ and writin’. Scout, I’ve studied this real hard and that’s the
only reason I can think of. Somewhere along when the Finches were in Egypt one
of ‘em must have learned a hieroglyphic or two and he taught his boy.” Jem
laughed. “Imagine Aunty being proud her great-grandaddy could read an’ write—
ladies pick funny things to be proud of.”
“Well I’m glad he could, or who’da taught Atticus and them, and if Atticus
couldn’t read, you and me’d be in a fix. I don’t think that’s what background is,
Jem.”
“Well then, how do you explain why the Cunninghams are different? Mr. Walter
can hardly sign his name, I’ve seen him. We’ve just been readin‘ and writin’
longer’n they have.”
“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.”
Jem turned around and punched his pillow. When he settled back his face was
cloudy. He was going into one of his declines, and I grew wary. His brows came
together; his mouth became a thin line. He was silent for a while.
“That’s what I thought, too,” he said at last, “when I was your age. If there’s just
one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike,
why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I’m
beginning to understand something. I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo
Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all this time… it’s because he wants to stay
inside.”
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