To Kill a Mockingbird pdfdrive com

PART ONE

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1
W
hen he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the
elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were
assuaged,  he  was  seldom  self-conscious  about  his  injury.  His  left  arm  was
somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand
was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have
cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.
When  enough  years  had  gone  by  to  enable  us  to  look  back  on  them,  we
sometimes  discussed  the  events  leading  to  his  accident.  I  maintain  that  the
Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long
before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us
the idea of making Boo Radley come out.
I  said  if  he  wanted  to  take  a  broad  view  of  the  thing,  it  really  began  with
Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon
Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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