She was on her feet, holding the back of the chair.
“Atticus, I’m throwing it at you and I’m gonna grind it in: you better go warn your younger friends that if they want to preserve Our Way of Life, it begins at home. It doesn’t begin with the schools or the churches or anyplace but home. Tell ’em that, and use your blind, immoral, misguided, nigger-lovin’ daughter as your example. Go in front of me with a bell and say, ‘Unclean!’ Point me out as your mistake. Point me out: Jean Louise Finch, who was exposed to all kinds of guff from the white trash she went to school with, but she might never have gone to school for all the influence it had on her. Everything that was Gospel to her she got at home from her father. You sowed the seeds in me, Atticus, and now it’s coming home to you—”
“Are you finished with what you have to say?”
She sneered. “Not half through. I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me. You cheated me, you’ve driven me out of my home and now I’m in a no-man’s-land but good—there’s no place for me any more in Maycomb, and I’ll never be entirely at home anywhere else.”
Her voice cracked. “Why in the name of God didn’t you marry again? Marry some nice dim-witted Southern lady who would have raised me right? Turned me into a simpering, mealy-mouthed magnolia type who bats her eyelashes and crosses her hands and lives for nothing but her lil’ole hus-band. At least I would have been blissful. I’d have been typical one hundred per cent Maycomb; I would have lived out my little life and given you grandchildren to dote on; I would have spread out like Aunty, fanned myself on the front porch, and died happy. Why didn’t you tell me the difference between justice and justice, and right and right? Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t think it necessary, nor do I think so now.”
“Well, it was necessary and you know it. God! And speaking of God, why didn’t you make it very plain to me that God made the races and put the black folks in Africa with the intention of keeping them there so the missionaries could go tell them that Jesus loved ’em but meant for ’em to stay in Africa? That us bringing ’em over here was all a bad mistake, so they’re to blame? That Jesus loved all mankind, but there are different kinds of men with separate fences around ’em, that Jesus meant that any man can go as far as he wants within that fence—”
“Jean Louise, come down to earth.”
He said it so easily that she stopped short. Her wave of invective had crashed over him and still he sat there. He had declined to be angry. Somewhere within her she felt that she was no lady but no power on earth would prevent him from being a gentleman, yet the piston inside drove her on:
“All right, I’ll come down to earth. I’ll land right in the livingroom of our house. I’ll come down to you. I believed in you. I looked up to you, Atticus, like I never looked up to anybody in my life and never will again. If you had only given me some hint, if you had only broken your word with me a couple of times, if you had been bad-tempered or impatient with me—if you had been a lesser man, maybe I could have taken what I saw you doing. If once or twice you’d let me catch you doing something vile, then I would have understood yesterday. Then I’d have said that’s just His Way, that’s My Old Man, because I’d have been prepared for it somewhere along the line—”
Her father’s face was compassionate, almost pleading. “You seem to think I’m involved in something positively evil,” he said. “The council’s our only defense, Jean Louise—”
“Is Mr. O’Hanlon our only defense?”
“Baby, Mr. O’Hanlon’s not, I’m happy to say, typical of the Maycomb County council membership. I hope you noticed my brevity in introducing him.”
“You were sort of short, but Atticus, that man—”
“Mr. O’Hanlon’s not prejudiced, Jean Louise. He’s a sadist.”
“Then why did you all let him get up there?”
“Because he wanted to.”
“Sir?”
“Oh yes,” said her father vaguely. “He goes about addressing citizens’ councils all over the state. He asked permission to speak to ours and we gave it to him. I rather think he’s paid by some organization in Massachusetts—”
Her father swung away from her and looked out the window. “I’ve been trying to make you see that the Maycomb council, at any rate, is simply a method of defense against—”
“Defense, hell! Atticus, we aren’t on the Constitution now. I’m trying to make you see something. You now, you treat all people alike. I’ve never in my life seen you give that insolent, back-of-the-hand treatment half the white people down here give Negroes just when they’re talking to them, just when they ask ’em to do something. There’s no get-along-there-nigger in your voice when you talk to ’em.
“Yet you put out your hand in front of them as a people and say, ‘Stop here. This is as far as you can go!’”
“I thought we agreed that—”
Her voice was heavy with sarcasm: “We’ve agreed that they’re backward, that they’re illiterate, that they’re dirty and comical and shiftless and no good, they’re infants and they’re stupid, some of them, but we haven’t agreed on one thing and we never will. You deny that they’re human.”
“How so?”
“You deny them hope. Any man in this world, Atticus, any man who has a head and arms and legs, was born with hope in his heart. You won’t find that in the Constitution, I picked that up in church somewhere. They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.