”Atticus said to Jem one day, ‘I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’”
In chapter 10 Jem and Scout find out something about their father. When a mad dog is on his way to their street Atticus is the one who has to put him down, he has to shoot the dog and he only has one chance to do it. The sheriff, Mr Heck Tate, says to Atticus: ”This is a one-shot job” (p.106), and hands him his rifle. Atticus says he hasn’t shot a gun in thirty years but he shoots the dog anyway, and he doesn’t miss. Later Miss Maudie tells Scout and Jem that ”Atticus Finch was the deadest shot in Maycomb County in his time” (p.108), and both Scout and Jem are truly proud of their father. Scout even wants to brag about her father at school but Jem tells her not to, ”I reckon if he’d wanted us to know he’da told us. If he was proud of it, he’da told us” (p.109). Just after this it says; ”‘– I wouldn’t care if he couldn’t do a blessed thing.’ Jem picked up a rock and threw it jubilantly at the car-house. Running after it, he called back: ‘Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!’”, and it shows that Jem was really happy about having Atticus as his father and that even if Atticus didn’t do much, he would always be a gentleman in Jem’s eyes.
In chapter 11 you get to know a new side to Jem, one out of control. Mrs Henry Lafayette Dubose lives on their street and she isn’t really nice to the children when they walk past. She says mean things to them, but Atticus tells them not to get bothered by it, ”Just hold your head high and be a gentleman” (p.111). But one day Jem looses his mind and cuts off every tops of Mrs Dubose’s camellia bushes. Scout explains to the reader that ”At the time, however, I tought the only explanation for what he did was that for a few minutes he simply went mad” (p.114), and that is the reason why Jem has to read to Mrs Dubose every day, for a month. Atticus says to Scout that evening; ”I never thought Jem’d be the one to lose his head over this – thought I’d have more trouble with you” (p.116), and this proves that Scout is the one always getting into troubles and Jem the one who usually is the gentleman, but also that Scout is growing up and she listens to her father, pleasing him, while Jem might have a little less patience when it comes down to it.
In chapter 12 Atticus is called into an emergency session and leaves for two weeks, leaving Calpurnia in charge. On Saturday it’s church, and Calpurnia doesn’t know what to do with the children, she can’t leave them at home and the can’t go with them to the white church because black people aren’t allowed there. But white children aren’t allowed in the black church either, according to Lula. It doesn’t really say who Lula is, only that she is a troublemaker that nobody seems to like. But the other people let Jem and Scout in to the church, and in there it looked very different to the church they were used to; ”There was no sign of piano, organ, hymnbooks, church programmes – the familiar ecclesiastical impedimenta we saw every Sunday” (p.132).
Scout and Jem learn more about their family when their aunt Alexandra comes to live with them. Alexandra wants Scout to act more like a lady and on page 145 she wants Scout to speak to the ladies sitting in the living-room; ”Speak to your Cousin Lily” Alexandra says, and Scout replies; ”She’s our cousin? I didn’t know that”, which shows that the Finch Family is bigger than I first expected and how little Jem & Scout know about their family and the history. Another cousin is also brought up, cousin Joshua, who is a beautiful character according to Alexandra, but a little crazy according to Jem. He ended up costing the Finch’s 500 dollars.
In the end of that chapter Atticus says: ”Get more like Cousin Joshua every day, don’t I? Do you think I’ll end up costing the family five hundred dollars?”, and after that it says: ”I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work”, and I have no clue what she means by this! I annoys me, because I think it has some kind of meaning, but I really don’t know what to think.
When Dill shows up, so do strange men who want to talk to Atticus. One night Jem, Scout and Dill sneak out after Atticus and find him outside the jail. A mob appears, with men who want to get their hands on Tom Robinson. Since Atticus is a lawyer he has been given a case, he is to defend Tom Robinson, a black man who is accused of raping Mayella Ewell, and the mob wants him dead.
Scout recognizes one of the men in the mob: Mr Walter Cunningham. Later that night she understands that the mob would have hurt Atticus if it weren’t for her, so in the morning Scout asks Atticus if Mr Cunningham is on their side and he says; ”Mr Cunningham’s basically a good man, he just has his blind spots along with the rest of us” (p.173), which probably means that he is usually on the good side, but in this case it’s different because Atticus thinks that both sides are right or something.
I get the impression that Atticus has different opinions, that he doesn’t want to defend Tom or he doesn’t believe that he is innocent, because on page 180 someone says; ”you know the court appointed him to defend this nigger”, and at the trial when Jem, Scout and Dill sneak in to the courthouse they see that Atticus is feeling bad over making Mayella Ewell cry because of the questions he has to ask to convince the jury that Tom Robinson is innocent, because it’s his job.
One thing that really stuck to me was this on page 158:
”Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of a grey house with sad brown doors.” I don’t know why this particular part stuck with me, and out of all the things this book is about, but I guess it’s because I have a weakness for this kind of things. I also think it’s extremely beautiful.
I have no idea how the book is going to end, anything could happen really, but I do hope that Tom Robinson is innocent.
