Authors: Harper Lee
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:
O kine no longer mine
With those big brown eyes of thine….
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.”