To Kill a Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’

‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’

‘People in their right minds never take pride in their talents,’

If I said as sunnily as I could, ‘Hey, Mrs Dubose,’ I would receive for an answer, ‘Don’t you say hey to me, you ugly girl! You say good afternoon, Mrs Dubose!’

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

‘but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.’

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

‘Mr Finch?’ A soft husky voice came from the darkness above: ‘They gone?’ Atticus stepped back and looked up. ‘They’ve gone,’ he said. ‘Get some sleep, Tom. They won’t bother you any more.’ From a different direction, another voice cut crisply through the night: ‘You’re damn tootin’ they won’t. Had you covered all the time, Atticus.’ Mr Underwood and a double-barrelled shotgun were leaning out his window above the Maycomb Tribune office.

Well, I hoped Jem would understand folks a little better when he was older; I wouldn’t. ‘First day Walter comes back to school’ll be his last,’ I affirmed.

Lmaoooo

‘Well, Mr Finch didn’t act that way to Mayella and old man Ewell when he cross-examined them. The way that man called him “boy” all the time and sneered at him, an’ looked around at the jury every time he answered –’ ‘Well, Dill, after all he’s just a Negro.’ ‘I don’t care one speck. It ain’t right, somehow it ain’t right to do ’em that way. Hasn’t anybody got any business talkin’ like that – it just makes me sick.’

‘Cry about what, Mr Raymond?’ Dill’s maleness was beginning to assert itself. ‘Cry about the simple hell people give other people – without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give coloured folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people, too.’

She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offence, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.

‘I think I’ll be a clown when I get grown,’ said Dill. Jem and I stopped in our tracks. ‘Yes sir, a clown,’ he said. ‘There ain’t one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I’m gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.’ ‘You got it backwards, Dill,’ said Jem. ‘Clowns are sad, it’s folks that laugh at them.’

As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.’

‘There are lots of reasons. For one thing, Miss Maudie can’t serve on a jury because she’s a woman.’ ‘You mean women in Alabama can’t –?’ I was indignant. ‘I do. I guess it’s to protect our frail ladies from sordid cases like Tom’s. Besides,’ Atticus grinned, ‘I doubt if we’d ever get a complete case tried – the ladies’d be interrupting to ask questions.’

Rude

‘Soon’s school starts I’m gonna ask Walter home to dinner,’ I planned, having forgotten my private resolve to beat him up next time I saw him.

‘You know she’s not used to girls,’ said Jem, ‘leastways, not girls like you. She’s trying to make you a lady. Can’t you take up sewin’ or somethin’?’ ‘Hell no.

Naw, Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.’

Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.

With these facts in mind and Halloween at hand, some wicked children had waited until the Misses Barber were thoroughly asleep, slipped into their living-room (nobody but the Radleys locked up at night), stealthily made away with every stick of furniture therein, and hid it in the cellar. I deny having taken part in such a thing.

Mrs Grace Merriweather had composed an original pageant entitled Maycomb County: Ad Astra Per Aspera, and I was to be a ham.

She brought me something to put on, and had I thought about it then, I would have never let her forget it: in her distraction, Aunty brought me my overalls.

A strange small spasm shook him, as if he heard fingernails scrape slate, but as I gazed at him in wonder the tension slowly drained from his face. His lips parted into a timid smile, and our neighbour’s image blurred with my sudden tears. ‘Hey, Boo,’ I said.

Atticus disengaged himself and looked at me. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, it’d be sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?’

I was beginning to learn his body English. His hand tightened on mine and he indicated that he wanted to leave. I led him to the front porch, where his uneasy steps halted. He was still holding my hand and he gave no sign of letting me go. ‘Will you take me home?’ He almost whispered it, in the voice of a child afraid of the dark.