Go Set a Watchman

13

ALEXANDRA WAS AT the kitchen table absorbed in culinary rites. Jean Louise tiptoed past her to no avail.

“Come look here.”

Alexandra stepped back from the table and revealed several cut-glass platters stacked three-deep with delicate sandwiches.

“Is that Atticus’s dinner?”

“No, he’s going to try to eat downtown today. You know how he hates barging in on a bunch of women.”

Holy Moses King of the Jews. The Coffee.

“Sweet, why don’t you get the livingroom ready. They’ll be here in an hour.”

“Who’ve you invited?”

Alexandra called out a guest list so preposterous that Jean Louise sighed heavily. Half the women were younger than she, half were older; they had shared no experience that she could recall, except one female with whom she had quarreled steadily all through grammar school. “Where’s everybody in my class?” she said.

“About, I suppose.”

Ah yes. About, in Old Sarum and points deeper in the woods. She wondered what had become of them.

“Did you go visiting this morning?” asked Alexandra.

“Went to see Cal.”

Alexandra’s knife clattered on the table. “Jean Louise!”

“Now what the hell’s the matter?” This is the last round I will ever have with her, so help me God. I have never been able to do anything right in my life as far as she’s concerned.

“Calm down, Miss.” Alexandra’s voice was cold. “Jean Louise, nobody in Maycomb goes to see Negroes any more, not after what they’ve been doing to us. Besides being shiftless now they look at you sometimes with open insolence, and as far as depending on them goes, why that’s out.

“That NAACP’s come down here and filled ’em with poison till it runs out of their ears. It’s simply because we’ve got a strong sheriff that we haven’t had bad trouble in this county so far. You do not realize what is going on. We’ve been good to ’em, we’ve bailed ’em out of jail and out of debt since the beginning of time, we’ve made work for ’em when there was no work, we’ve encouraged ’em to better themselves, they’ve gotten civilized, but my dear-that veneer of civilization’s so thin that a bunch of uppity Yankee Negroes can shatter a hundred years’ progress in five…

“No ma’am, after the thanks they’ve given us for looking after ’em, nobody in Maycomb feels much inclined to help ’em when they get in trouble now. All they do is bite the hands that feed ’em. No sir, not any more-they can shift for themselves, now.”

She had slept twelve hours, and her shoulders ached from weariness.

“Mary Webster’s Sarah’s carried a card for years-so’s everybody’s cook in this town. When Calpurnia left I simply couldn’t be bothered with another one, not for just Atticus and me. Keeping a nigger happy these days is like catering to a king—”

My Sainted Aunt is talking like Mr. Grady O’Hanlon, who left his job to devote his full time to the preservation of segregation.

“—you have to fetch and tote for them until you wonder who’s waiting on who. It’s just not worth the trouble these days-where are you going?”

“To get the livingroom ready.”

She sank into a deep armchair and considered how all occasions had made her poor indeed. My aunt is a hostile stranger, my Calpurnia won’t have anything to do with me, Hank is insane, and Atticus-something’s wrong with me, it’s something about me. It has to be because all these people cannot have changed.

Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m something else and I don’t know what. Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me-these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.

They are all trying to tell me in some weird, echoing way that it’s all on account of the Negroes… but it’s no more the Negroes than I can fly and God knows, I might fly out the window any time, now.

“Haven’t you done the livingroom?” Alexandra was standing in front of her.

Jean Louise got up and did the livingroom.

THE MAGPIES ARRIVED at 10:30, on schedule. Jean Louise stood on the front steps and greeted them one by one as they entered. They wore gloves and hats, and smelled to high heaven of attars, perfumes, eaus, and bath powder. Their makeup would have put an Egyptian draftsman to shame, and their clothes-particularly their shoes-had definitely been purchased in Montgomery or Mobile: Jean Louise spotted A. Nachman, Gayfer’s, Levy’s, Hammel’s, on all sides of the livingroom.

What do they talk about these days? Jean Louise had lost her ear, but she presently recovered it. The Newlyweds chattered smugly of their Bobs and Michaels, of how they had been married to Bob and Michael for four months and Bob and Michael had gained twenty pounds apiece. Jean Louise crushed the temptation to enlighten her young guests upon the probable clinical reasons for their loved ones’ rapid growth, and she turned her attention to the Diaper Set, which distressed her beyond measure:

When Jerry was two months old he looked up at me and said… toilet training should really begin when… he was christened he grabbed Mr. Stone by the hair and Mr. Stone… wets the bed now. I broke her of that the same time I broke her from sucking her finger, with… the cu-utest, absolutely the cutest sweatshirt you’ve ever seen: it’s got a little red elephant and “Crimson Tide” written right across the front… and it cost us five dollars to get it yanked out.

The Light Brigade sat to the left of her: in their early and middle thirties, they devoted most of their free time to the Amanuensis Club, bridge, and getting one-up on each other in the matter of electrical appliances:

John says… Calvin says it’s the… kidneys, but Allen took me off fried things… when I got caught in that zipper I like to have never… wonder what on earth makes her think she can get away with it… poor thing, if I were in her place I’d take… shock treatments, that’s what she had. They say she… kicks back the rug every Saturday night when Lawrence Welk comes on… and laugh, I thought I’d die! There he was, in… my old wedding dress, and you know, I can still wear it.

Jean Louise looked at the three Perennial Hopefuls on her right. They were jolly Maycomb girls of excellent character who had never made the grade. They were patronized by their married contemporaries, they were vaguely felt sorry for, and were produced to date any stray extra man who happened to be visiting their friends. Jean Louise looked at one of them with acid amusement: when Jean Louise was ten, she made her only attempt to join a crowd, and she asked Sarah Finley one day, “Can I come to see you this afternoon?” “No,” said Sarah, “Mamma says you’re too rough.”

Now we are both lonely, for entirely different reasons, but it feels the same, doesn’t it?

The Perennial Hopefuls talked quietly among themselves:

longest day I ever had… in the back of the bank building… a new house out on the road by… the Training Union, add it all up and you spend four hours every Sunday in church… times I’ve told Mr. Fred I like my tomatoes… boiling hot. I told ’em if they didn’t get air-conditioning in that office I’d… throw up the whole game. Now who’d want to pull a trick like that?

Jean Louise threw herself into the breach: “Still at the bank, Sarah?”

“Goodness yes. Be there till I drop.”

Um. “Ah, what ever happened to Jane-what was her last name? You know, your high school friend?” Sarah and Jane What-Was-Her-Last-Name were once inseparable.

“Oh her. She got married to a right peculiar boy during the war and now she rolls her ah’s so, you’d never recognize her.”

“Oh? Where’s she living now?”

“Mobile. She went to Washington during the war and got this hideous accent. Everybody thought she was puttin’ on so bad, but nobody had the nerve to tell her so she still does it. Remember how she used to walk with her head way up, like this? She still does.”

“She does?”

“Uh hum.”

Aunty has her uses, damn her, thought Jean Louise when she caught Alexandra’s signal. She went to the kitchen and brought out a tray of cocktail napkins. As she passed them down the line, Jean Louise felt as if she were running down the keys of a gigantic harpsichord:

I never in all my life… saw that marvelous picture… with old Mr. Healy… lying on the mantelpiece in front of my eyes the whole time… is it? Just about eleven, I think… she’ll wind up gettin’ a divorce. After all, the way he… rubbed my back every hour the whole ninth month… would have killed you. If you could have seen him… piddling every five minutes during the night. I put a stop… to everybody in our class except that horrid girl from Old Sarum. She won’t know the difference… between the lines, but you know exactly what he meant.

Back up the scale with the sandwiches:

Mr. Talbert looked at me and said… he’d never learn to sit on the pot… of beans every Thursday night. That’s the one Yankee thing he picked up in the… War of the Roses? No, honey, I said Warren proposes… to the garbage collector. That was all I could do after she got through… the rye. I just couldn’t help it, it made me feel like a big… A-men! I’ll be so glad when that’s over… the way he’s treated her… piles and piles of diapers, and he said why was I so tired? After all, he’d been… in the files the whole time, that’s where it was.

Alexandra walked behind her, muffling the keys with coffee until they subsided to a gentle hum. Jean Louise decided that the Light Brigade might suit her best, and she drew up a hassock and joined them. She cut Hester Sinclair from the covey: “How’s Bill?”

“Fine. Gets harder to live with every day. Wasn’t that bad about old Mr. Healy this morning?”

“Certainly was.”

Hester said, “Didn’t that boy have something to do with you all?”

“Yes. He’s our Calpurnia’s grandson.”

“Golly, I never know who they are these days, all the young ones. Reckon they’ll try him for murder?”

“Manslaughter, I should think.”

“Oh.” Hester was disappointed. “Yes, I reckon that’s right. He didn’t mean to do it.”

“No, he didn’t mean to do it.”

Hester laughed. “And I thought we’d have some excitement.”

Jean Louise’s scalp jumped. I guess I’m losing my sense of humor, maybe that’s what it is. I’m gettin’ like Cousin Edgar.

Hester was saying, “—hasn’t been a good trial around here in ten years. Good nigger trial, I mean. Nothing but cuttin’ and drinkin’.”

“Do you like to go to court?”

“Sure. Wildest divorce case last spring you ever saw. Some yaps from Old Sarum. It’s a good thing Judge Taylor’s dead-you know how he hated that sort of thing, always askin’ the ladies to leave the courtroom. This new one doesn’t care. Well—”

“Excuse me, Hester. You need some more coffee.”

Alexandra was carrying the heavy silver coffee pitcher. Jean Louise watched her pour. She doesn’t spill a drop. If Hank and I-Hank.

She glanced down the long, low-ceilinged livingroom at the double row of women, women she had merely known all her life, and she could not talk to them five minutes without drying up stone dead. I can’t think of anything to say to them. They talk incessantly about the things they do, and I don’t know how to do the things they do. If we married-if I married anybody from this town-these would be my friends, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say to them. I would be Jean Louise the Silent. I couldn’t possibly bring off one of these affairs by myself, and there’s Aunty having the time of her life. I’d be churched to death, bridge-partied to death, called upon to give book reviews at the Amanuensis Club, expected to become a part of the community. It takes a lot of what I don’t have to be a member of this wedding.

“—a mighty sad thing,” Alexandra said, “but that’s just the way they are and they can’t help it. Calpurnia was the best of the lot. That Zeebo of hers, that scamp’s still in the trees, but you know, Calpurnia made him marry every one of his women. Five, I think, but Calpurnia made him marry every one of ’em. That’s Christianity to them.”

Hester said, “You never can tell what goes on in their heads. My Sophie now, one day I asked her, ‘Sophie,’ I said, ‘what day does Christmas come on this year?’ Sophie scratched that wool of hers and said, ‘Miss Hester, I thinks it comes on the twenty-fifth this year.’ Laugh, I thought I’d die. I wanted to know the day of the week, not the day of the year. Thi-ick!”

Humor, humor, humor, I have lost my sense of humor. I’m gettin’ like the New York Post.

“—but you know they’re still doing it. Stoppin’ ’em just made ’em go underground. Bill says he wouldn’t be surprised if there was another Nat Turner Uprisin’, we’re sittin’ on a keg of dynamite and we just might as well be ready,” Hester said.

“Ahm, ah-Hester, of course I don’t know much about it, but I thought that Montgomery crowd spent most of their meeting time in church praying,” said Jean Louise.

“Oh my child, don’t you know that was just to get sympathy up in the East? That’s the oldest trick known to mankind. You know Kaiser Bill prayed to God every night of his life.”

An absurd verse vibrated in Jean Louise’s memory. Where had she read it?

She wondered where Hester had picked up her information. She could not conceive of Hester Sinclair’s having read anything other than Good Housekeeping save under strong duress. Someone had told her. Who?

“Goin’ in for history these days, Hester?”

“What? Oh, I was just sayin’ what my Bill says. Bill, he’s a deep reader. He says the niggers who are runnin’ the thing up north are tryin’ to do it like Gandhi did it, and you know what that is.”

“I’m afraid I don’t. What is it?”

“Communism.”

“Ah-I thought the Communists were all for violent overthrow and that sort of thing.”

Hester shook her head. “Where’ve you been, Jean Louise? They use any means they can to help themselves. They’re just like the Catholics. You know how the Catholics go down to those places and practically go native themselves to get converts. Why, they’d say Saint Paul was a nigger just like them if it’d convert one black man. Bill says-he was in the war down there, you know-Bill says he couldn’t figure out what was voo-doo and what was R.C. on some of those islands, that he wouldn’t’ve been surprised if he’d seen a voo-doo man with a collar on. It’s the same way with the Communists. They’ll do anything, no matter what it is, to get hold of this country. They’re all around you, you can’t tell who’s one and who isn’t. Why, even here in Maycomb County—”

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 we’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:

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. Highly 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.

“As I sit here and breathe, I never thought the good God would let me live to see someone walk into the middle of a revolution, pull a lugubrious face, and say, ‘What’s the matter?’” He laughed again, shaking his head.

“Matter, child? I’ll tell you what’s the matter if you collect yourself and refrain from carrying on like-arum! — I wonder if your eyes and ears ever make anything save spasmodic contact with your brain.” His face tightened. “You won’t be pleased with some of it,” he said.

“I don’t care what it is, Uncle Jack, if you’ll only tell me what’s turned my father into a nigger-hater.”

“Hold your tongue.” Dr. Finch’s voice was stern. “Don’t you ever call your father that. I detest the sound of it as much as its matter.”

“What am I to call him, then?”

Her uncle sighed at length. He went to the stove and turned on the front burner under the coffeepot. “Let us consider this calmly,” he said. When he turned around Jean Louise saw amusement banish the indignation in his eyes, then meld into an expression she could not read. She heard him mutter, “Oh dear. Oh dear me, yes. The novel must tell a story.”

“What do you mean by that?” she said. She knew he was quoting at her but she didn’t know what, she didn’t know why, and she didn’t care. Her uncle could annoy the hell out of her when he chose, apparently he was choosing to do so now, and she resented it.

“Nothing.” He sat down, took off his glasses, and returned them to his vest pocket. He spoke deliberately. “Baby,” he said, “all over the South your father and men like your father are fighting a sort of rearguard, delaying action to preserve a certain kind of philosophy that’s almost gone down the drain—”

“If it’s what I heard yesterday I say good riddance.”

Dr. Finch looked up. “You’re making a bad mistake if you think your daddy’s dedicated to keeping the Negroes in their places.”

Jean Louise raised her hands and her voice: “What the hell am I to think? It made me sick, Uncle Jack. Plain-out sick—”

Her uncle scratched his ear. “You no doubt, somewhere along the line, have had certain historical facts and nuances placed in front of you—”

“Uncle Jack, don’t hand me that kind of talk now-fightin’ the War has nothing to do with it.”

“On the contrary, it has a great deal to do with it if you want to understand. The first thing you must realize is something-God help us, it was something-that three-fourths of a nation have failed to this day to understand. What kind of people were we, Jean Louise? What kind of people are we? Who are we still closest to in this world?”

“I thought we were just people. I have no idea.”

Her uncle smiled, and an unholy light appeared in his eyes. He’s gonna skate off now, she thought. I can never catch him and bring him back.

“Consider Maycomb County,” said Dr. Finch. “It’s typical South. Has it never struck you as being singular that nearly everybody in the county is either kin or almost kin to everybody else?”

“Uncle Jack, how can someone be almost kin to someone else?”

“Quite simple. You remember Frank Buckland, don’t you?”

In spite of herself, Jean Louise felt she was being lured slowly and stealthily into Dr. Finch’s web. He is a wonderful old spider, but nevertheless he is a spider. She inched toward him: “Frank Buckland?”

“The naturalist. Carried dead fish around in his suitcase and kept a jackal in his rooms.”

“Yes sir?”

“You remember Matthew Arnold, don’t you?”

She said she did.

“Well, Frank Buckland was Matthew Arnold’s father’s sister’s husband’s brother’s son, therefore, they were almost kin. See?”

“Yes sir, but—”

Dr. Finch looked at the ceiling. “Wasn’t my nephew Jem,” he said slowly, “engaged to marry his great-uncle’s son’s wife’s second cousin?”

She put her hands over her eyes and thought furiously. “He was,” she finally said. “Uncle Jack, I think you’ve made a non sequitur but I’m not at all positive.”

“All the same thing, really.”

“But I don’t get the connection.”

Dr. Finch put his hands on the table. “That’s because you haven’t looked,” he said. “You’ve never opened your eyes.”

Jean Louise jumped.

Her uncle said, “Jean Louise, there are to this day in Maycomb County the living counterparts of every butt-headed Celt, Angle, and Saxon who ever drew a breath. You remember Dean Stanley, don’t you?”

They were coming back to her, the days of the endless hours. She was in this house, in front of a warm fire, being read to from musty books. Her uncle’s voice was its usual low growl, or pitched high with helpless laughter. The absentminded, fluff-haired little clergyman and his stalwart wife drifted into her memory.

“Doesn’t he remind you of Fink Sewell?”

“No sir,” she said.

“Think, girl. Think. Since you are not thinking, I’ll give you a hint. When Stanley was Dean of Westminster he dug up nearly everybody in the Abbey looking for James the First.”

“Oh my God,” she said.

During the Depression, Mr. Finckney Sewell, a Maycomb resident long noted for his independence of mind, disentombed his own grandfather and extracted all his gold teeth to pay off a mortgage. When the sheriff apprehended him for grave-robbery and gold-hoarding, Mr. Fink demurred on the theory that if his own grandfather wasn’t his, whose was he? The sheriff said old Mr. M. F. Sewell was in the public domain, but Mr. Fink said testily he supposed it was his cemetery lot, his granddaddy, and his teeth, and declined forthwith to be arrested. Public opinion in Maycomb was with him: Mr. Fink was an honorable man, he was trying his best to pay his debts, and the law molested him no further.

“Stanley had the highest historical motives for his excavations,” mused Dr. Finch, “but their minds worked exactly alike. You can’t deny he invited every heretic he could lay hands on to preach in the Abbey. I believe he once gave communion to Mrs. Annie Besant. You remember how he supported Bishop Colenso.”

She remembered. Bishop Colenso, whose views on everything were considered unsound that day and are archaic in this, was the little dean’s particular pet. Colenso was the object of acrimonious debate wherever the clergy gathered, and Stanley once made a ringing Convocation speech in his defense, asking that body was it aware that Colenso was the only colonial bishop who had bothered to translate the Bible into Zulu, which was rather more than the rest had done.

“Fink was just like him,” said Dr. Finch. “He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal in the depths of the Depression and dared anybody to say a word about it.” Dr. Finch chuckled. “Jake Jeddo at the post office nearly had a spasm every time he put the mail up.”

Jean Louise stared at her uncle. She sat in his kitchen, in the middle of the Atomic Age, and in the deepest recesses of her consciousness she knew that Dr. Finch was outrageously correct in his comparisons.

“—just like him,” Dr. Finch was saying, “or take Harriet Martineau—”

Jean Louise found herself treading water in the Lake District. She floundered to keep her head up.

“Do you remember Mrs. E. C. B. Franklin?”

She did. She groped through the years for Miss Martineau, but Mrs. E.C.B. was easy: she remembered a crocheted tam, a crocheted dress through which peeped pink crocheted drawers, and crocheted stockings. Every Saturday Mrs. E.C.B. walked three miles to town from her farm, which was called Cape Jessamine Copse. Mrs. E.C.B. wrote poetry.

Dr. Finch said, “Remember the minor women poets?”

“Yes sir,” she said.

“Well?”

When she was a child she had deviled for a while at the Maycomb Tribune office and had witnessed several altercations, including the last, between Mrs. E.C.B. and Mr. Underwood. Mr. Underwood was an old-time printer and stood for no nonsense. He worked all day at a vast black Linotype, refreshing himself at intervals from a gallon jug containing harmless cherry wine. One Saturday Mrs. E.C.B. stalked into the office with an effusion Mr. Underwood said he refused to disgrace the Tribune with: it was a cow obituary in verse, beginning:

and containing grave breaches of Christian philosophy. Mr. Underwood said, “Cows don’t go to heaven,” to which Mrs. E.C.B. replied, “This one did,” and explained poetic license. Mr. Underwood, who in his time had published memorial verses of indeterminate variety, said he still couldn’t print this because it was blasphemous and didn’t scan. Furious, Mrs. E.C.B. unlocked a frame and scattered the Biggs Store ad all over the office. Mr. Underwood inhaled like a whale, drank an enormous slug of cherry wine in her face, swallowed it down, and cursed her all the way to the courthouse square. After that, Mrs. E.C.B. composed verse for her private edification. The county felt the loss.

“Now are you willing to concede that there is some faint connection, not necessarily between two eccentrics, but with a-um-general turn of mind that exists in some quarters across the water?”

Jean Louise threw in the towel.

Dr. Finch said more to himself than to his niece, “In the 1770s where did the white-hot words come from?”

“Virginia,” said Jean Louise, confidently.

“And in the 1940s, before we got into it, what made every Southerner read his newspaper and listen to newscasts with a special kind of horror? Tribal feelin’, honey, at the bottom of it. They might be sons of bitches, the British, but they were our sons of bitches—”

Dr. Finch caught himself. “Go back now,” he said briskly. “Go back to the early 1800s in England, before some pervert invented machinery. What was life there?”

Jean Louise answered automatically, “A society of dukes and beggars—”

“Hah! You are not so far corrupted as I thought, if you still remember Caroline Lamb, poor thing. You’ve almost got it, but not quite: it was mainly an agricultural society, with a handful of landowners and multitudes of tenants. Now, what was the South before the War?”

“An agricultural society with a handful of large landowners, multitudes of dirt farmers, and slaves.”

“Correct. Leave the slaves out of it for a while, and what do you have? Your Wade Hamptons by the scores, and your small landowners and tenants by the thousands. The South was a little England in its heritage and social structure. Now, what is the one thing that has beat in the heart of every Anglo-Saxon-don’t cringe, I know it’s a dirty word these days-no matter what his condition or status in life, no matter what the barriers of ignorance, since he stopped painting himself blue?”

“He is proud. He’s sort of stubborn.”

“You’re damn right. What else?”

“I–I don’t know.”

“What was it that made the ragtag little Confederate Army the last of its kind? What made it so weak, but so powerful it worked miracles?”

“Ah-Robert E. Lee?”

“Good God, girl!” shouted her uncle. “It was an army of individuals! They walked off their farms and walked to the War!”

As if to study a rare specimen, Dr. Finch produced his glasses, put them on, tilted his head back, and looked at her. “No machine,” he said, “when it’s been crushed to powder, puts itself together again and ticks, but those dry bones rose up and marched and how they marched. Why?”

“I reckon it was the slaves and tariffs and things. I never thought about it much.”

Dr. Finch said softly, “Jehovah God.”

He made a visible effort to master his temper by going to the stove and silencing the coffeepot. He poured out two cups of blistering black brew and brought them to the table.

“Jean Louise,” he said dryly, “not much more than five per cent of the South’s population ever saw a slave, much less owned one. Now, something must have irritated the other ninety-five per cent.”

Jean Louise looked blankly at her uncle.

“Has it never occurred to you-have you never, somewhere along the line, received vibrations to the effect-that this territory was a separate nation? No matter what its political bonds, a nation with its own people, existing within a nation? A society highly paradoxical, with alarming inequities, but with the private honor of thousands of persons winking like lightning bugs through the night? No war was ever fought for so many different reasons meeting in one reason clear as crystal. They fought to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity.”

Dr. Finch’s voice softened. “It seems quixotic today, with jet airplanes and overdoses of Nembutal, that a man would go through a war for something so insignificant as his state.”

He blinked. “No, Scout, those ragged ignorant people fought until they were nearly exterminated to maintain something that these days seems to be the sole privilege of artists and musicians.”

As it rolled by, Jean Louise made a frantic dive for her uncle’s trolley: “That’s been over for a-nearly a hundred years, sir.”

Dr. Finch grinned. “Has it really? It depends how you look at it. If you were sitting on the sidewalk in Paris, you’d say certainly. But look again. The remnants of that little army had children-God, how they multiplied-the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to begin with-in some cases they became horrifyingly more. They were never destroyed. They were ground into the dirt and up they popped. Up popped Tobacco Road, and up popped the ugliest, most shameful aspect of it all-the breed of white man who lived in open economic competition with freed Negroes.

“For years and years all that man thought he had that made him any better than his black brothers was the color of his skin. He was just as dirty, he smelled just as bad, he was just as poor. Nowadays he’s got more than he ever had in his life, he has everything but breeding, he’s freed himself from every stigma, but he sits nursing his hangover of hatred…”

Dr. Finch got up and poured more coffee. Jean Louise watched him. Good Lord, she thought, my own grandfather fought in it. His and Atticus’s daddy. He was only a child. He saw the corpses stacked and watched the blood run in little streams down Shiloh’s hill…

“Now then, Scout,” said her uncle. “Now, at this very minute, a political philosophy foreign to it is being pressed on the South, and the South’s not ready for it-we’re finding ourselves in the same deep waters. As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons. I hope to God it’ll be a comparatively bloodless Reconstruction this time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Look at the rest of the country. It’s long since gone by the South in its thinking. The time-honored, common-law concept of property-a man’s interest in and duties to that property-has become almost extinct. People’s attitudes toward the duties of a government have changed. The have-nots have risen and have demanded and received their due-sometimes more than their due. The haves are restricted from getting more. You are protected from the winter winds of old age, not by yourself voluntarily, but by a government that says we do not trust you to provide for yourself, therefore we will make you save. All kinds of strange little things like that have become part and parcel of this country’s government. America’s a brave new Atomic world and the South’s just beginning its Industrial Revolution. Have you looked around you in the past seven or eight years and seen a new class of people down here?”

“New class?”

“Good grief, child. Where are your tenant farmers? In factories. Where are your field hands? Same place. Have you ever noticed who are in those little white houses on the other side of town? Maycomb’s new class. The same boys and girls who went to school with you and grew up on tiny farms. Your own generation.”

Dr. Finch pulled his nose. “Those people are the apples of the Federal Government’s eye. It lends them money to build their houses, it gives them a free education for serving in its armies, it provides for their old age and assures them of several weeks’ support if they lose their jobs—”

“Uncle Jack, you are a cynical old man.”

“Cynical, hell. I’m a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses. Your father’s the same—”

“If you tell me that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely I will throw this coffee at you.”

“The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won’t be that way much longer.”

Dr. Finch grinned like a friendly weasel. “Melbourne said once, that the only real duties of government were to prevent crime and preserve contracts, to which I will add one thing since I find myself reluctantly in the twentieth century: and to provide for the common defense.”

“That’s a cloudy statement.”

“Indeed it is. It leaves us with so much freedom.”

Jean Louise put her elbows on the table and ran her fingers through her hair. Something was the matter with him. He was deliberately making some eloquent unspoken plea to her, he was deliberately keeping off the subject. He was oversimplifying here, skittering off there, dodging and feinting. She wondered why. It was so easy to listen to him, to be lulled by his gentle rain of words, that she did not miss the absence of his purposeful gestures, the shower of “hum”s and “hah”s that peppered his usual conversation. She did not know he was deeply worried.

“Uncle Jack,” she said. “What’s this got to do with the price of eggs in China, and you know exactly what I mean.”

“Ho,” he said. His cheeks became rosy. “Gettin’ smart, aren’t you?”

“Smart enough to know that relations between the Negroes and white people are worse than I’ve ever seen them in my life-by the way, you never mentioned them once-smart enough to want to know what makes your sainted sister act the way she does, smart enough to want to know what the hell has happened to my father.”

Dr. Finch clenched his hands and tucked them under his chin. “Human birth is most unpleasant. It’s messy, it’s extremely painful, sometimes it’s a risky thing. It is always bloody. So is it with civilization. The South’s in its last agonizing birth pain. It’s bringing forth something new and I’m not sure I like it, but I won’t be here to see it. You will. Men like me and my brother are obsolete and we’ve got to go, but it’s a pity we’ll carry with us the meaningful things of this society-there were some good things in it.”

“Stop woolgathering and answer me!”

Dr. Finch stood up, leaned on the table, and looked at her. The lines from his nose sprang to his mouth and made a harsh trapezoid. His eyes blazed, but his voice was still quiet:

“Jean Louise, when a man’s looking down the double barrel of a shotgun, he picks up the first weapon he can find to defend himself, be it a stone or a stick of stovewood or a citizens’ council.”

“That is no answer!”

Dr. Finch shut his eyes, opened them, and looked down at the table.

“You’ve been giving me some kind of elaborate runaround, Uncle Jack, and I’ve never known you to do it before. You’ve always given me a straight answer to anything I ever asked you. Why won’t you now?”

“Because I cannot. It is neither within my power nor my province to do so.”

“I’ve never heard you talk like this.”

Dr. Finch opened his mouth and clamped it shut again. He took her by the arm, led her into the next room, and stopped in front of the gilt-framed mirror.

“Look at you,” he said.

She looked.

“What do you see?”

“Myself, and you.” She turned toward her uncle’s reflection. “You know, Uncle Jack, you’re handsome in a horrible sort of way.”

She saw the last hundred years possess her uncle for an instant. He made a cross between a bow and a nod, said, “That’s kind of you, ma’am,” stood behind her, and gripped her shoulders. “Look at you,” he said. “I can only tell you this much. Look at your eyes. Look at your nose. Look at your chin. What do you see?”

“I see myself.”

“I see two people.”

“You mean the tomboy and the woman?”

She saw Dr. Finch’s reflection shake its head. “No-o, child. That’s there all right, but it’s not what I mean.”

“Uncle Jack, I don’t know why you elect to disappear into the mist…”

Dr. Finch scratched his head and a tuft of gray hair stood up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Go ahead. Go ahead and do what you’re going to do. I can’t stop you and I mustn’t stop you, Childe Roland. But it’s such a messy, risky thing. Such a bloody business—”

“Uncle Jack, sweetie, you’re not with us.”

Dr. Finch faced her and held her at arm’s length. “Jean Louise, I want you to listen carefully. What we’ve talked about today-I want to tell you something and see if you can hook it all together. It’s this: what was incidental to the issue in our War Between the States is incidental to the issue in the war we’re in now, and is incidental to the issue in your own private war. Now think it over and tell me what you think I mean.”

Dr. Finch waited.

“You sound like one of the Minor Prophets,” she said.

“I thought so. Very well, now listen again: when you can’t stand it any longer, when your heart is in two, you must come to me. Do you understand? You must come to me. Promise me.” He shook her. “Promise me.”

“Yes sir, I promise, but—”

“Now scat,” said her uncle. “Go off somewhere and play post office with Hank. I’ve got better things to do—”

“Than what?”

“None of your business. Git.”

When Jean Louise went down the steps, she did not see Dr. Finch bite his under lip, go to his kitchen, and tug Rose Aylmer’s fur, or return to his study with his hands in his pockets and walk slowly back and forth across the room until, finally, he picked up the telephone.