"Were You Ever a Turtle. :
To Ki/! a Mockingbird-Casting the Sel| as the Other,
Neil Heims
one is generous and nurturing; the latter, selfish, exploitative, and abuS° e.
s_~.. Robinson’s case does not merely introduce the pr
acial injure. It also introduces the consequent problems o~ow to live
a virtuous ll~in a world governed by injustice and of~dw to live a life
guided by toldr~nce among intolerant people. To, ill a Mockingbird
addresses the_pro’t~..m of how to remain unpr~y6ked by evil and how
no!.to s~uccumb t.o ev.t~c_tion in response,_wh~.e struggling to o.v.erc_ome
evil. The episode that ~out narrates a~r the enc0unter_with Cecil
Jacobs recapitulates the el~ode with~fn and amplifies it; it combines
the issue of racist aggression~,nd ~!~ problem of self-discipline. And
always, because Scout is the "to~6oy," she is_at atime and in_a culture
that demands that girls learn t~eti~e_as "ladies," the issue ofhow she
copes with compelled gend~,Cidentit~Present, and,‘ at the trial, in the
person of Mayella Ewell,iR is bound up~ith racial bigotry. Scout, in
the episode at Finch’s~dnding when_she cb~ronts Francis Hancock,
who taunts her by ca~l~ng Atticus a "nigger-lovbrQ_and a disgrace to the
family--and JemJn the story_ of his en~counter w~]~ _Mrs. Dubo_se_that
follows soon a!fief--must both acquire the strength ar~he moral_character to be~ble to resist retaliation against persons ~, with..her
brother,it6 remain themse!ves even as t.hey .re..s!rain th_ems.el~., T.his is
the. %tr~ngth th.at cha.r.acte,zes Atticus, the. ability !o a.bs .o.rb an.d.t~ r.ate
u ’ st aggression without rancor even as he remains dedicated to fighting injustice and endeavors to do so.
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Scout first experiences a miscarriage of justice and identifies it as
such after she "split[s her] knuckle to the bone on [her cousin Francis’s] front teeth" after he repeats the taunt that her father is a "niggerlover." She tells her Uncle Jack, after he punishes her for cussing and
fighting, that his punishment was not "fair." When he reproaches her
for her lingering resentment because, he says, she "had [it] coming and
"Were You Ever a Turtle?"
57
you know it," using a formula she has recently learned from Atticus,
when he told her that her Aunt Alexandra "didn’t understand girls
much," Scout tells her uncle that he does not "understand children
much." He begins to repeat her infractions in justification of his behavior, but Scout respectfully interrupts him.
You gonna give me a chance to tell you? she says. You never stopped to
gimme a chance to tell you my side of it--you just lit right into me. When
Jem an’ I fuss Atticus doesn’t ever just listen to Jem’s side of it, he hears
mine, too.
Scout explains that Francis had called Atticus a "nigger-lover" and that
she had, therefore the "extreme provocation" that Jack had earlier told
her was necessary to justify outbursts of temper or the use of unacceptable words like "hell" and "damn."
Jack is chastened, humbled, .and enlightened by Scout’s explanation. But Scout has more to show him about what constitutes real character as she has learned it from her father. When he hears what Francis’s "extreme provocations" have been, Jack is ready to drive back to
Finch’s landing, make the matter public, and see that Francis is properly reprimanded. Scout begs him not to. Since Atticus "asked me one
time not to let anything I heard about him make me mad... I’d ruther
him think we were fightin’ about somethin’ else." Jack does keep her
secret in a conversation later with Atticus that Scout overhears. That
conversation serves as one of the preludes to the ensuing action, Tom
Robinson’s trial. And through his conversation with Jack, Atticus, who
knows Scout is eavesdropping, and who knows without having to be
told what the cause of Scout’s fight was, indirectly lets Scout know
what difficulties await her and how he expects her to behave.
The lesson that Atticus must teach and which Scout and Jem must
master in order to weather the events of Part Two of To Kill a Mockingbird, the virtues of suppressing pride and of cultivating modesty and
humility without betraying one’s own integrity, and the capacity to rec58
Critical Insights
ognize the humanity of people who do not recognize one’s own humanity or the humanity of others, is developed in the last chapters, ten
and eleven, of Part One of To Kill a Mockingbird. In chapter nine,
much to the children’s amazement, Atticus shoots a rabid dog dead,
head-on, with one cool and perfect shot. They are astonished because
Atticus seems old to them and, unlike the other fathers in Maycomb,
Atticus "didn’t do anything." His work was not colorful or even, really,
visible. "He worked in an office, not in a drugstore." He was not a
dump-truck driver, a sheriff, a farmer, or a garage mechanic. He did not
hunt, play poker, fish, drink, or smoke. "He sat in the livingroom and
read." He did not, in their estimation, "do anything that could arouse
the admiration of anyone." Consequently his shooting the mad dog is a
revelation to them, but not just of his prowess. What is more impressive is that he never spoke of his marksmanship and never went hunting. Their neighbor, Maudie Atkinson, explains to the children that
Atticus is "civilized in his heart." She explains that because he knows
he "has an unfair advantage over most living things," he refrained from
shooting "till he had to." When Scout ventures that Atticus ought to be
proud of his gift, Maudie responds, "People in their right minds never
take pride in their talents." When Scout tells Jem a little later that
they’d "really have something to talk about at school," he tells her that
they ought to say nothing. "If he’d wanted us to know it, he’da told us.
If he was proud of it, he’da told us." Jem finds a quality in his father
that he senses is worthy of emulation. "Atticus is a gentleman," he
says, "just like me." But Jem is premature. There is one more trial that
he must undergo on his path to enlightenment before the final encounter with evil. His encounter with Mrs. Dubose provides not only a lesson in self-control, self-suppression, or bearing insults without yielding to rage but also something more even than what Atticus intended.
After Mrs. Dubose’s death, Atticus tells Jem that even if Jem had not
destroyed Mrs. Dubose’s camellias in a rage, he would "have made you
go read to her anyway," not only becau.se he wanted to distract her from
the suffering of withdrawal from morphine, but also because
"Were You Ever a Turtle?"
59
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’re licked before you
begin but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. You rarely
win, but sometimes you do.
Atticus i~ challenging the strong-man ethos of courage. He is also providing the philosophical underpinning of his own action in Part Two
when he undertakes the defense of Tom Robinson with complete determination despite his strong sense of almost-sure defeat. But there is
something more than a lesson about discrediting machismo for Jem in
the encounter with Mrs. Dubose. He learns to return good for evil, to
feel no animosity for one who uses him badly, to see the soul beneath
the slime. That is what it means to be a gentleman.
Although there is .never a scene of direct reconciliation between
Mrs. Dubose and Jem, there is a deep, albeit indirect, encounter between them. Scout sees Jem "fingering the.., petals" of the camellia
Mrs. Dubose sent him before she died, accepting as a gift what he had
first tried to destroy. The flower represents that buried part of Mrs.
Dubose’s nature, her soul, the essence she could only show in her garden bu.t not, until this gift to Jem, in herself. Thus are the opposite sensibilities of the story demarcated, as were the "summer boundaries."
On the one side, there is reconciliation and a human connection that
can be too deep for words, as represented by the communion Mrs.
Dubose forges with Jem and, at the end of the novel, by Boo Radley’s
action; and on the other, there is self-consuming, prideful revenge, the
force that Bob Ewell serves and in whose clutches he lives and dies.
4~
Tom Robinson serves a complex and disturbing function in To Kill a
Mockingbird. He is at the moral center of the novel, not because of anything he has done to secure such a place but because of what is done to
him. His story is not, really, about him but about white reactions to him
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Critical Insights