not much difference, he never said anything. Aunt Alexandra ignored my
question.
I could think of nothing else to say to her. In fact I could never
think of anything to say to her, and I sat thinking of past painful
conversations between us: How are you, Jean Louise? Fine, thank you
ma'am, how are you? Very well, thank you, what have you been doing
with yourself? Nothin'. Don't you do anything? Nome. Certainly you
have friends? Yessum. Well what do you all do? Nothin'.
It was plain that Aunty thought me dull in the extreme, because I
once heard her tell Atticus that I was sluggish.
There was a story behind all this, but I had no desire to extract it
from her then. Today was Sunday, and Aunt Alexandra was positively
irritable on the Lord's Day. I guess it was her Sunday corset. She was
not fat, but solid, and she chose protective garments that drew up her
bosom to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear, and
managed to suggest that Aunt Alexandra's was once an hour-glass
figure. From any angle, it was formidable.
The remainder of the afternoon went by in the gentle gloom that
descends when relatives appear, but was dispelled when we heard a
car turn in the driveway. It was Atticus, home from Montgomery. Jem,
forgetting his dignity, ran with me to meet him. Jem seized his
briefcase and bag, I jumped into his arms, felt his vague dry kiss and
said, "'d you bring me a book? 'd you know Aunty's here?"
Atticus answered both questions in the affirmative. "How'd you
like for her to come live with us?"
I said I would like it very much, which was a lie, but one must
lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do
anything about them.
"We felt it was time you children needed- well, it's like this,
Scout," Atticus said. "Your aunt's doing me a favor as well as you
all. I can't stay here all day with you, and the summer's going to
be a hot one."
"Yes sir," I said, not understanding a word he said. I had an
idea, however, that Aunt Alexandra's appearance on the scene was not
so much Atticus's doing as hers. Aunty had a way of declaring What
Is Best For The Family, and I suppose her coming to live with us was
in that category.
Maycomb welcomed her. Miss Maudie Atkinson baked a Lane cake so
loaded with shinny it made me tight; Miss Stephanie Crawford had
long visits with Aunt Alexandra, consisting mostly of Miss Stephanie
shaking her head and saying, "Uh, uh, uh." Miss Rachel next door had
Aunty over for coffee in the afternoons, and Mr. Nathan Radley went so
far as to come up in the front yard and say he was glad to see her.
When she settled in with us and life resumed its daily pace, Aunt
Alexandra seemed as if she had always lived with us. Her Missionary
Society refreshments added to her reputation as a hostess (she did not
permit Calpurnia to make the delicacies required to sustain the
Society through long reports on Rice Christians); she joined and
became Secretary of the Maycomb Amanuensis Club. To all parties
present and participating in the life of the county, Aunt Alexandra
was one of the last of her kind: she had river-boat, boarding-school
manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was
born in the objective case; she was an incurable gossip. When Aunt
Alexandra went to school, self-doubt could not be found in any
textbook, so she knew not its meaning. She was never bored, and
given the slightest chance she would exercise her royal prerogative:
she would arrange, advise, caution, and warn.
She never let a chance escape her to point out the shortcomings of
other tribal groups to the greater glory of our own, a habit that
amused Jem rather than annoyed him: "Aunty better watch how she talks-
scratch most folks in Maycomb and they're kin to us."
Aunt Alexandra, in underlining the moral of young Sam Merriweather's
suicide, said it was caused by a morbid streak in the family. Let a
sixteen-year-old girl giggle in the choir and Aunty would say, "It
just goes to show you, all the Penfield women are flighty."
Everybody in Maycomb, it seemed, had a Streak: a Drinking Streak, a
Gambling Streak, a Mean Streak, a Funny Streak.
Once, when Aunty assured us that Miss Stephanie Crawford's
tendency to mind other people's business was hereditary, Atticus said,
"Sister, when you stop to think about it, our generation's practically
the first in the Finch family not to marry its cousins. Would you
say the Finches have an Incestuous Streak?"
Aunty said no, that's where we got our small hands and feet.
I never understood her preoccupation with heredity. Somewhere, I had
received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best
they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the
opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been
squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.
"That makes the Ewells fine folks, then," said Jem. The tribe of
which Burris Ewell and his brethren consisted had lived on the same
plot of earth behind the Maycomb dump, and had thrived on county
welfare money for three generations.
Aunt Alexandra's theory had something behind it, though. Maycomb was
an ancient town. It was twenty miles east of Finch's Landing,
awkwardly inland for such an old town. But Maycomb would have been
closer to the river had it not been for the nimble-wittedness of one
Sinkfield, who in the dawn of history operated an inn where two
pig-trails met, the only tavern in the territory. Sinkfield, no
patriot, served and supplied ammunition to Indians and settlers alike,
neither knowing or caring whether he was a part of the Alabama
Territory or the Creek Nation so long as business was good. Business
was excellent when Governor William Wyatt Bibb, with a view to
promoting the newly created county's domestic tranquility,
dispatched a team of surveyors to locate its exact center and there
establish its seat of government. The surveyors, Sinkfield's guests,
told their host that he was in the territorial confines of Maycomb
County, and showed him the probable spot where the county seat would
be built. Had not Sinkfield made a bold stroke to preserve his
holdings, Maycomb would have sat in the middle of Winston Swamp, a
place totally devoid of interest. Instead, Maycomb grew and sprawled
out from its hub, Sinkfield's Tavern, because Sinkfield reduced his
guests to myopic drunkenness one evening, induced them to bring
forward their maps and charts, lop off a little here, add a bit there,
and adjust the center of the county to meet his requirements. He
sent them packing next day armed with their charts and five quarts
of shinny in their saddlebags- two apiece and one for the Governor.
Because its primary reason for existence was government, Maycomb was
spared the grubbiness that distinguished most Alabama towns its
size. In the beginning its buildings were solid, its courthouse proud,
its streets graciously wide. Maycomb's proportion of professional
people ran high: one went there to have his teeth pulled, his wagon
fixed, his heart listened to, his money deposited, his soul saved, his
mules vetted. But the ultimate wisdom of Sinkfield's maneuver is
open to question. He placed the young town too far away from the
only kind of public transportation in those days- river-boat- and it
took a man from the north end of the county two days to travel to
Maycomb for store-bought goods. As a result the town remained the same
size for a hundred years, an island in a patchwork sea of cottonfields
and timberland.
Although Maycomb was ignored during the War Between the States,
Reconstruction rule and economic ruin forced the town to grow. It grew
inward. New people so rarely settled there, the same families
married the same families until the members of the community looked
faintly alike. Occasionally someone would return from Montgomery or
Mobile with an outsider, but the result caused only a ripple in the
quiet stream of family resemblance. Things were more or less the
same during my early years.
There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked
this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had
lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to
one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even
gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by
time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third
Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the
Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take
a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss
Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs.
Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's
nothing unusual- her mother did the same.
Aunt Alexandra fitted into the world of Maycomb like a hand into a
glove, but never into the world of Jem and me. I so often wondered how
she could be Atticus's and Uncle Jack's sister that I revived
half-remembered tales of changelings and mandrake roots that Jem had
spun long ago.
These were abstract speculations for the first month of her stay, as
she had little to say to Jem or me, and we saw her only at mealtimes
and at night before we went to bed. It was summer and we were
outdoors. Of course some afternoons when I would run inside for a
drink of water, I would find the livingroom overrun with Maycomb
ladies, sipping, whispering, fanning, and I would be called: "Jean
Louise, come speak to these ladies."
When I appeared in the doorway, Aunty would look as if she regretted
her request; I was usually mud-splashed or covered with sand.
"Speak to your Cousin Lily," she said one afternoon, when she had
trapped me in the hall.
"Who?" I said.
"Your Cousin Lily Brooke," said Aunt Alexandra.
"She our cousin? I didn't know that."
Aunt Alexandra managed to smile in a way that conveyed a gentle
apology to Cousin Lily and firm disapproval to me. When Cousin Lily
Brooke left I knew I was in for it.
It was a sad thing that my father had neglected to tell me about the
Finch Family, or to install any pride into his children. She
summoned Jem, who sat warily on the sofa beside me. She left the
room and returned with a purple-covered book on which Meditations
of Joshua S. St. Clair was stamped in gold.
"Your cousin wrote this," said Aunt Alexandra. "He was a beautiful
character."
Jem examined the small volume. "Is this the Cousin Joshua who was
locked up for so long?"
Aunt Alexandra said, "How did you know that?"
"Why, Atticus said he went round the bend at the University. Said he
tried to shoot the president. Said Cousin Joshua said he wasn't
anything but a sewer-inspector and tried to shoot him with an old
flintlock pistol, only it just blew up in his hand. Atticus said it
cost the family five hundred dollars to get him out of that one-"
Aunt Alexandra was standing stiff as a stork. "That's all," she
said. "We'll see about this."
Before bedtime I was in Jem's room trying to borrow a book, when
Atticus knocked and entered. He sat on the side of Jem's bed, looked
