Part One


Chapter 1

To Kill a Mockingbird



When 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.



It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon's

homestead, Finch's Landing, and make their living from cotton. The

place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires

around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to

sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing,

supplied by river-boats from Mobile.

Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between

the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of

everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land

remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when my

father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger

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

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

who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering

if his trot-lines were full.

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

began his practice. Maycomb, some twenty miles east of Finch's

Landing, was the county seat of Maycomb County. Atticus's office in

the courthouse contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a

checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama. His first two clients

were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail. Atticus

had urged them to accept the state's generosity in allowing them to

plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives,

but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with

jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb's leading blacksmith in

a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a

mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three

witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him

was a good enough defense for anybody. They persisted in pleading

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

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

occasion that was probably the beginning of my father's profound

distaste for the practice of criminal law.

During his first five years in Maycomb, Atticus practiced economy

more than anything; for several years thereafter he invested his

earnings in his brother's education. John Hale Finch was ten years

younger than my father, and chose to study medicine at a time when

cotton was not worth growing; but after getting Uncle Jack started,

Atticus derived a reasonable income from the law. He liked Maycomb, he

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

and because of Simon Finch's industry, Atticus was related by blood or

marriage to nearly every family in the town.



Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first

knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew

on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was

hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules

hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the

live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the

morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps,

and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and

sweet talcum.

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

and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A

day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no

hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy

it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.

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

County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear

itself.

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

plus Calpurnia our cook. Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he

played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment.

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

she was nearsighted; she squinted; her hand was wide as a bed slat and

twice as hard. She was always ordering me out of the kitchen, asking

me why I couldn't behave as well as Jem when she knew he was older,

and calling me home when I wasn't ready to come. Our battles were epic

and one-sided. Calpurnia always won, mainly because Atticus always

took her side. She had been with us ever since Jem was born, and I had

felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember.

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

a Graham from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to

the state legislature. He was middle-aged then, she was fifteen

years his junior. Jem was the product of their first year of marriage;

four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died

from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her family. I did

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

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

and play by himself behind the car-house. When he was like that, I

knew better than to bother him.



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

boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia) were Mrs. Henry

Lafayette Dubose's house two doors to the north of us, and the

Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to

break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an unknown entity the

mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end;

Mrs. Dubose was plain hell.

That was the summer Dill came to us.

Early one morning as we were beginning our day's play in the back

yard, Jem and I heard something next door in Miss Rachel Haverford's

collard patch. We went to the wire fence to see if there was a

puppy- Miss Rachel's rat terrier was expecting- instead we found

someone sitting looking at us. Sitting down, he wasn't much higher

than the collards. We stared at him until he spoke:

"Hey."

"Hey yourself," said Jem pleasantly.



"I'm Charles Baker Harris," he said. "I can read."

"So what?" I said.

"I just thought you'd like to know I can read. You got anything

needs readin' I can do it...."

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

"Goin' on seven."



"Shoot no wonder, then," said Jem, jerking his thumb at me. "Scout

yonder's been readin' ever since she was born, and she ain't even

started to school yet. You look right puny for goin' on seven."

"I'm little but I'm old," he said.

Jem brushed his hair back to get a better look. "Why don't you

come over, Charles Baker Harris?" he said. "Lord, what a name."

"'s not any funnier'n yours. Aunt Rachel says your name's Jeremy

Atticus Finch."

Jem scowled. "I'm big enough to fit mine," he said. "Your name's

longer'n you are. Bet it's a foot longer."



"Folks call me Dill," said Dill, struggling under the fence.

"Do better if you go over it instead of under it," I said.

Where'd you come from?

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

his aunt, Miss Rachel, and would be spending every summer in Maycomb

from now on. His family was from Maycomb County originally, his mother

worked for a photographer in Meridian, had entered his picture in a

Beautiful Child contest and won five dollars. She gave the money to

Dill, who went to the picture show twenty times on it.

"Don't have any picture shows here, except Jesus ones in the

courthouse sometimes," said Jem. "Ever see anything good?"

Dill had seen ®Dracula,¯ * a revelation that moved Jem to eye him

with the beginning of respect. "Tell it to us," he said.

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

shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff;

he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the

old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was

sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of

his forehead.

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

better than the book, I asked Dill where his father was: "You ain't

said anything about him."



"I haven't got one."

"Is he dead?"

"No..."

"Then if he's not dead you've got one, haven't you?"

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

studied and found acceptable. Thereafter the summer passed in

routine contentment. Routine contentment was: improving our

treehouse that rested between giant twin chinaberry trees in the

back yard, fussing, running through our list of dramas based on the

works of Oliver Optic, Victor Appleton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. In

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

parts formerly thrust upon me- the ape in ®Tarzan,¯ Mr. Crabtree in

®The Rover Boys,¯ Mr. Damon in ®Tom Swift.¯ Thus we came to know

Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans,

strange longings, and quaint fancies.



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

reproductions, and it was then that Dill gave us the idea of making

Boo Radley come out.

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

explanations it drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no

nearer than the light-pole on the corner, a safe distance from the

Radley gate. There he would stand, his arm around the fat pole,

staring and wondering.

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

south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the

lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and

green shutters, but had long ago darkened to the color of the

slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves

of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains of a picket

drunkenly guarded the front yard- a "swept" yard that was never swept-

where johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance.

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

but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night

when the moon was down, and peeped in windows. When people's azaleas

froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any

stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work. Once the

town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events: people's

chickens and household pets were found mutilated; although the culprit

was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker's Eddy,

people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their

initial suspicions. A Negro would not pass the Radley Place at

night, he would cut across to the sidewalk opposite and whistle as

he walked. The Maycomb school grounds adjoined the back of the

Radley lot; from the Radley chickenyard tall pecan trees shook their

fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children:

Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard

was a lost ball and no questions asked.

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

born. The Radleys, welcome anywhere in town, kept to themselves, a

predilection unforgivable in Maycomb. They did not go to church,

Maycomb's principal recreation, but worshiped at home; Mrs. Radley

seldom if ever crossed the street for a mid-morning coffee break

with her neighbors, and certainly never joined a missionary circle.

Mr. Radley walked to town at eleven-thirty every morning and came back

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

neighborhood assumed contained the family groceries. I never knew

how old Mr. Radley made his living- Jem said he "bought cotton," a

polite term for doing nothing- but Mr. Radley and his wife had lived

there with their two sons as long as anybody could remember.



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

another thing alien to Maycomb's ways: closed doors meant illness

and cold weather only. Of all days Sunday was the day for formal

afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets, men wore coats, children wore

shoes. But to climb the Radley front steps and call, "He-y," of a

Sunday afternoon was something their neighbors never did. The Radley

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

Atticus said yes, but before I was born.

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

his teens he became acquainted with some of the Cunninghams from Old

Sarum, an enormous and confusing tribe domiciled in the northern

part of the county, and they formed the nearest thing to a gang ever

seen in Maycomb. They did little, but enough to be discussed by the

town and publicly warned from three pulpits: they hung around the

barbershop; they rode the bus to Abbottsville on Sundays and went to

the picture show; they attended dances at the county's riverside

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

stumphole whiskey. Nobody in Maycomb had nerve enough to tell Mr.

Radley that his boy was in with the wrong crowd.

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

around the square in a borrowed flivver, resisted arrest by

Maycomb's ancient beadle, Mr. Conner, and locked him in the courthouse

outhouse. The town decided something had to be done; Mr. Conner said

he knew who each and every one of them was, and he was bound and

determined they wouldn't get away with it, so the boys came before the

probate judge on charges of disorderly conduct, disturbing the

peace, assault and battery, and using abusive and profane language

in the presence and hearing of a female. The judge asked Mr. Conner

why he included the last charge; Mr. Conner said they cussed so loud

he was sure every lady in Maycomb heard them. The judge decided to

send the boys to the state industrial school, where boys were

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

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

Radley thought it was. If the judge released Arthur, Mr. Radley

would see to it that Arthur gave no further trouble. Knowing that

Mr. Radley's word was his bond, the judge was glad to do so.

The other boys attended the industrial school and received the

best secondary education to be had in the state; one of them

eventually worked his way through engineering school at Auburn. The

doors of the Radley house were closed on weekdays as well as

Sundays, and Mr. Radley's boy was not seen again for fifteen years.

But there came a day, barely within Jem's memory, when Boo Radley

was heard from and was seen by several people, but not by Jem. He said

Atticus never talked much about the Radleys: when Jem would question

him Atticus's only answer was for him to mind his own business and let

the Radleys mind theirs, they had a right to; but when it happened Jem

said Atticus shook his head and said, "Mm, mm, mm."



So Jem received most of his information from Miss Stephanie

Crawford, a neighborhood scold, who said she knew the whole thing.

According to Miss Stephanie, Boo was sitting in the livingroom cutting

some items from ®The Maycomb Tribune¯ to paste in his scrapbook. His

father entered the room. As Mr. Radley passed by, Boo drove the

scissors into his parent's leg, pulled them out, wiped them on his

pants, and resumed his activities.

Mrs. Radley ran screaming into the street that Arthur was killing

them all, but when the sheriff arrived he found Boo still sitting in

the livingroom, cutting up the ®Tribune.¯ He was thirty-three years

old then.

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

asylum, when it was suggested that a season in Tuscaloosa might be

helpful to Boo. Boo wasn't crazy, he was high-strung at times. It

was all right to shut him up, Mr. Radley conceded, but insisted that

Boo not be charged with anything: he was not a criminal. The sheriff

hadn't the heart to put him in jail alongside Negroes, so Boo was

locked in the courthouse basement.

Boo's transition from the basement to back home was nebulous in

Jem's memory. Miss Stephanie Crawford said some of the town council

told Mr. Radley that if he didn't take Boo back, Boo would die of mold

from the damp. Besides, Boo could not live forever on the bounty of

the county.

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

Boo out of sight, but Jem figured that Mr. Radley kept him chained

to the bed most of the time. Atticus said no, it wasn't that sort of

thing, that there were other ways of making people into ghosts.



My memory came alive to see Mrs. Radley occasionally open the

front door, walk to the edge of the porch, and pour water on her

cannas. But every day Jem and I would see Mr. Radley walking to and

from town. He was a thin leathery man with colorless eyes, so

colorless they did not reflect light. His cheekbones were sharp and

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

Stephanie Crawford said he was so upright he took the word of God as

his only law, and we believed her, because Mr. Radley's posture was

ramrod straight.

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

say, "Good morning, sir," and he would cough in reply. Mr. Radley's

elder son lived in Pensacola; he came home at Christmas, and he was

one of the few persons we ever saw enter or leave the place. From

the day Mr. Radley took Arthur home, people said the house died.

But there came a day when Atticus told us he'd wear us out if we

made any noise in the yard and commissioned Calpurnia to serve in

his absence if she heard a sound out of us. Mr. Radley was dying.

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

end of the Radley lot, straw was put down on the sidewalk, traffic was

diverted to the back street. Dr. Reynolds parked his car in front of

our house and walked to the Radley's every time he called. Jem and I

crept around the yard for days. At last the sawhorses were taken away,

and we stood watching from the front porch when Mr. Radley made his

final journey past our house.

"There goes the meanest man ever God blew breath into," murmured

Calpurnia, and she spat meditatively into the yard. We looked at her

in surprise, for Calpurnia rarely commented on the ways of white

people.



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

out, but it had another think coming: Boo's elder brother returned

from Pensacola and took Mr. Radley's place. The only difference

between him and his father was their ages. Jem said Mr. Nathan

Radley "bought cotton," too. Mr. Nathan would speak to us, however,

when we said good morning, and sometimes we saw him coming from town

with a magazine in his hand.

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

the longer he would stand hugging the light-pole on the corner, the

more he would wonder.

"Wonder what he does in there," he would murmur. "Looks like he'd

just stick his head out the door."

Jem said, "He goes out, all right, when it's pitch dark. Miss

Stephanie Crawford said she woke up in the middle of the night one

time and saw him looking straight through the window at her... said

his head was like a skull lookin' at her. Ain't you ever waked up at

night and heard him, Dill? He walks like this-" Jem slid his feet

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

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

night I heard him scratching on the back screen, but he was gone

time Atticus got there."

"Wonder what he looks like?" said Dill.



Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about

six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw

squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were

bloodstained- if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood

off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth

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

the time.

"Let's try to make him come out," said Dill. "I'd like to see what

he looks like."

Jem said if Dill wanted to get himself killed, all he had to do

was go up and knock on the front door.

Our first raid came to pass only because Dill bet Jem ®The Gray

Ghost¯ against two Tom Swifts that Jem wouldn't get any farther than

the Radley gate. In all his life, Jem had never declined a dare.

Jem thought about it for three days. I suppose he loved honor more

than his head, for Dill wore him down easily: "You're scared," Dill

said, the first day. "Ain't scared, just respectful," Jem said. The

next day Dill said, "You're too scared even to put your big toe in the

front yard." Jem said he reckoned he wasn't, he'd passed the Radley

Place every school day of his life.



"Always runnin'," I said.

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

Meridian certainly weren't as afraid as the folks in Maycomb, that

he'd never seen such scary folks as the ones in Maycomb.

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

and leaned against the light-pole, watching the gate hanging crazily

on its homemade hinge.

"I hope you've got it through your head that he'll kill us each

and every one, Dill Harris," said Jem, when we joined him. "Don't

blame me when he gouges your eyes out. You started it, remember."

"You're still scared," murmured Dill patiently.



Jem wanted Dill to know once and for all that he wasn't scared of

anything: "It's just that I can't think of a way to make him come

out without him gettin' us." Besides, Jem had his little sister to

think of.

When he said that, I knew he was afraid. Jem had his little sister

to think of the time I dared him to jump off the top of the house: "If

I got killed, what'd become of you?" he asked. Then he jumped,

landed unhurt, and his sense of responsibility left him until

confronted by the Radley Place.

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

"Dill, you have to think about these things," Jem said. "Lemme think

a minute... it's sort of like making a turtle come out..."

"How's that?" asked Dill.



"Strike a match under him."

I told Jem if he set fire to the Radley house I was going to tell

Atticus on him.

Dill said striking a match under a turtle was hateful.

"Ain't hateful, just persuades him- 's not like you'd chunk him in

the fire," Jem growled.

"How do you know a match don't hurt him?"



"Turtles can't feel, stupid," said Jem.

"Were you ever a turtle, huh?"

"My stars, Dill! Now lemme think... reckon we can rock him...."

Jem stood in thought so long that Dill made a mild concession: "I

won't say you ran out on a dare an' I'll swap you ®The Gray Ghost¯

if you just go up and touch the house."

Jem brightened. "Touch the house, that all?"



Dill nodded.

"Sure that's all, now? I don't want you hollerin' something

different the minute I get back."

"Yeah, that's all," said Dill. "He'll probably come out after you

when he sees you in the yard, then Scout'n' me'll jump on him and hold

him down till we can tell him we ain't gonna hurt him."

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

Radley house, and stopped at the gate.

"Well go on," said Dill, "Scout and me's right behind you."



"I'm going," said Jem, "don't hurry me."

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

simple terrain as if deciding how best to effect an entry, frowning

and scratching his head.

Then I sneered at him.

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

it with his palm and ran back past us, not waiting to see if his foray

was successful. Dill and I followed on his heels. Safely on our porch,

panting and out of breath, we looked back.

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

the street we thought we saw an inside shutter move. Flick. A tiny,

almost invisible movement, and the house was still.