She glanced down the long, low-ceilinged livingroom at the double row of women, women she had merely known all her life, and she could not talk to them five minutes without drying up stone dead. I can’t think of anything to say to them. They talk incessantly about the things they do, and I don’t know how to do the things they do. If we married—if I married anybody from this town—these would be my friends, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say to them. I would be Jean Louise the Silent. I couldn’t possibly bring off one of these affairs by myself, and there’s Aunty having the time of her life. I’d be churched to death, bridge-partied to death, called upon to give book reviews at the Amanuensis Club, expected to become a part of the community. It takes a lot of what I don’t have to be a member of this wedding.
“—a mighty sad thing,” Alexandra said, “but that’s just the way they are and they can’t help it. Calpurnia was the best of the lot. That Zeebo of hers, that scamp’s still in the trees, but you know, Calpurnia made him marry every one of his women. Five, I think, but Calpurnia made him marry every one of ’em. That’s Christianity to them.”
Hester said, “You never can tell what goes on in their heads. My Sophie now, one day I asked her, ‘Sophie,’ I said, ‘what day does Christmas come on this year?’ Sophie scratched that wool of hers and said, ‘Miss Hester, I thinks it comes on the twenty-fifth this year.’ Laugh, I thought I’d die. I wanted to know the day of the week, not the day of the year. Thi-ick!”
Humor, humor, humor, I have lost my sense of humor. I’m gettin’ like the New York Post.
“—but you know they’re still doing it. Stoppin’ ’em just made ’em go underground. Bill says he wouldn’t be surprised if there was another Nat Turner Uprisin’, we’re sittin’ on a keg of dynamite and we just might as well be ready,” Hester said.
“Ahm, ah—Hester, of course I don’t know much about it, but I thought that Montgomery crowd spent most of their meeting time in church praying,” said Jean Louise.
“Oh my child, don’t you know that was just to get sympathy up in the East? That’s the oldest trick known to mankind. You know Kaiser Bill prayed to God every night of his life.”
An absurd verse vibrated in Jean Louise’s memory. Where had she read it?
By right Divine, my dear Augusta,
We’ve had another awful buster;
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below.
Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.
She wondered where Hester had picked up her information. She could not conceive of Hester Sinclair’s having read anything other than Good Housekeeping save under strong duress. Someone had told her. Who?
“Goin’ in for history these days, Hester?”
“What? Oh, I was just sayin’ what my Bill says. Bill, he’s a deep reader. He says the niggers who are runnin’ the thing up north are tryin’ to do it like Gandhi did it, and you know what that is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t. What is it?”
“Communism.”
“Ah—I thought the Communists were all for violent overthrow and that sort of thing.”
Hester shook her head. “Where’ve you been, Jean Louise? They use any means they can to help themselves. They’re just like the Catholics. You know how the Catholics go down to those places and practically go native themselves to get converts. Why, they’d say Saint Paul was a nigger just like them if it’d convert one black man. Bill says—he was in the war down there, you know—Bill says he couldn’t figure out what was voo-doo and what was R.C. on some of those islands, that he wouldn’t’ve been surprised if he’d seen a voo-doo man with a collar on. It’s the same way with the Communists. They’ll do anything, no matter what it is, to get hold of this country. They’re all around you, you can’t tell who’s one and who isn’t. Why, even here in Maycomb County—”
Jean Louise laughed. “Oh, Hester, what would the Communists want with Maycomb County?”
“I don’t know, but I do know there’s a cell right up the road in Tuscaloosa, and if it weren’t for those boys a nigger’d be goin’ to classes with the rest of ’em.”
“I don’t follow you, Hester.”
“Didn’t you read about those fancy professors asking those questions in that—that Convocation? Why, they’d’ve let her right in. If it hadn’t been for those fraternity boys….”
“Golly, Hester. I’ve been readin’ the wrong newspaper. One I read said the mob was from that tire factory—”
“What do you read, the Worker?”
You are fascinated with yourself. You will say anything that occurs to you, but what I can’t understand are the things that do occur to you. I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth. We were both born here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder what you saw and heard.
“—everybody knows the NAACP’s dedicated to the overthrow of the South …”
Conceived in mistrust, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created evil.
“—they make no bones about saying they want to do away with the Negro race, and they will in four generations, Bill says, if they start with this one …”
I hope the world will little note nor long remember what you are saying here.
“—and anybody who thinks different’s either a Communist or might as well be one. Passive resistance, my hind foot …”
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another they are Communists.
“—they always want to marry a shade lighter than themselves, they want to mongrelize the race—”
Jean Louise interrupted. “Hester, let me ask you something. I’ve been home since Saturday now, and since Saturday I’ve heard a great deal of talk about mongrelizin’ the race, and it’s led me to wonder if that’s not rather an unfortunate phrase, and if probably it should be discarded from Southern jargon these days. It takes two races to mongrelize a race—if that’s the right word—and when we white people holler about mongrelizin’, isn’t that something of a reflection on ourselves as a race? The message I get from it is that if it were lawful, there’d be a wholesale rush to marry Negroes. If I were a scholar, which I ain’t, I would say that kind of talk has a deep psychological significance that’s not particularly flattering to the one who talks it. At its best, it denotes an alarmin’ mistrust of one’s own race.”