“About, I suppose.”
Ah yes. About, in Old Sarum and points deeper in the woods. She wondered what had become of them.
“Did you go visiting this morning?” asked Alexandra.
“Went to see Cal.”
Alexandra’s knife clattered on the table. “Jean Louise!”
“Now what the hell’s the matter?” This is the last round I will ever have with her, so help me God. I have never been able to do anything right in my life as far as she’s concerned.
“Calm down, Miss.” Alexandra’s voice was cold. “Jean Louise, nobody in Maycomb goes to see Negroes any more, not after what they’ve been doing to us. Besides being shiftless now they look at you sometimes with open insolence, and as far as depending on them goes, why that’s out.
“That NAACP’s come down here and filled ’em with poison till it runs out of their ears. It’s simply because we’ve got a strong sheriff that we haven’t had bad trouble in this county so far. You do not realize what is going on. We’ve been good to ’em, we’ve bailed ’em out of jail and out of debt since the beginning of time, we’ve made work for ’em when there was no work, we’ve encouraged ’em to better themselves, they’ve gotten civilized, but my dear—that veneer of civilization’s so thin that a bunch of uppity Yankee Negroes can shatter a hundred years’ progress in five….
“No ma’am, after the thanks they’ve given us for looking after ’em, nobody in Maycomb feels much inclined to help ’em when they get in trouble now. All they do is bite the hands that feed ’em. No sir, not any more—they can shift for themselves, now.”
She had slept twelve hours, and her shoulders ached from weariness.
“Mary Webster’s Sarah’s carried a card for years—so’s everybody’s cook in this town. When Calpurnia left I simply couldn’t be bothered with another one, not for just Atticus and me. Keeping a nigger happy these days is like catering to a king—”
My Sainted Aunt is talking like Mr. Grady O’Hanlon, who left his job to devote his full time to the preservation of segregation.
“—you have to fetch and tote for them until you wonder who’s waiting on who. It’s just not worth the trouble these days—where are you going?”
“To get the livingroom ready.”
She sank into a deep armchair and considered how all occasions had made her poor indeed. My aunt is a hostile stranger, my Calpurnia won’t have anything to do with me, Hank is insane, and Atticus—something’s wrong with me, it’s something about me. It has to be because all these people cannot have changed.
Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m something else and I don’t know what. Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.
They are all trying to tell me in some weird, echoing way that it’s all on account of the Negroes … but it’s no more the Negroes than I can fly and God knows, I might fly out the window any time, now.
“Haven’t you done the livingroom?” Alexandra was standing in front of her.
Jean Louise got up and did the livingroom.
THE MAGPIES ARRIVED at 10:30, on schedule. Jean Louise stood on the front steps and greeted them one by one as they entered. They wore gloves and hats, and smelled to high heaven of attars, perfumes, eaus, and bath powder. Their makeup would have put an Egyptian draftsman to shame, and their clothes—particularly their shoes—had definitely been purchased in Montgomery or Mobile: Jean Louise spotted A. Nachman, Gayfer’s, Levy’s, Hammel’s, on all sides of the livingroom.
What do they talk about these days? Jean Louise had lost her ear, but she presently recovered it. The Newlyweds chattered smugly of their Bobs and Michaels, of how they had been married to Bob and Michael for four months and Bob and Michael had gained twenty pounds apiece. Jean Louise crushed the temptation to enlighten her young guests upon the probable clinical reasons for their loved ones’ rapid growth, and she turned her attention to the Diaper Set, which distressed her beyond measure:
When Jerry was two months old he looked up at me and said … toilet training should really begin when … he was christened he grabbed Mr. Stone by the hair and Mr. Stone … wets the bed now. I broke her of that the same time I broke her from sucking her finger, with … the cu-utest, absolutely the cutest sweatshirt you’ve ever seen: it’s got a little red elephant and “Crimson Tide” written right across the front … and it cost us five dollars to get it yanked out.
The Light Brigade sat to the left of her: in their early and middle thirties, they devoted most of their free time to the Amanuensis Club, bridge, and getting one-up on each other in the matter of electrical appliances: