“Yessum,” the big man said. “But it don’t look like there’s anything. Frank, he sho’ killed him, and there’s nothing nobody can do. Mr. Finch, he can’t do nothing about sump’n like that. Is there anything I can do for you while you’re home, ma’am?”
They were standing on the porch in the path cleared for them. Jean Louise sighed. “Yes, Zeebo, right now. You can come help me turn my car around. I’d be in the corn patch before long.”
“Yessum, Miss Jean Louise.”
She watched Zeebo manipulate the car in the narrow confine of the road. I hope I can get back home, she thought. “Thank you, Zeebo,” she said wearily. “Remember now.” The Negro touched his hatbrim and walked back to his mother’s house.
Jean Louise sat in the car, staring at the steering wheel. Why is it that everything I have ever loved on this earth has gone away from me in two days’ time? Would Jem turn his back on me? She loved us, I swear she loved us. She sat there in front of me and she didn’t see me, she saw white folks. She raised me, and she doesn’t care.
It was not always like this, I swear it wasn’t. People used to trust each other for some reason, I’ve forgotten why. They didn’t watch each other like hawks then. I wouldn’t get looks like that going up those steps ten years ago. She never wore her company manners with one of us … when Jem died, her precious Jem, it nearly killed her….
Jean Louise remembered going to Calpurnia’s house late one afternoon two years ago. She was sitting in her room, as she was today, her glasses down on her nose. She had been crying. “Always so easy to fix for,” Calpurnia said. “Never a day’s trouble in his life, my boy. He brought me a present home from the war, he brought me an electric coat.” When she smiled Calpurnia’s face broke into its million wrinkles. She went to the bed, and from under it pulled out a wide box. She opened the box and held up an enormous expanse of black leather. It was a German flying officer’s coat. “See?” she said. “It turns on.” Jean Louise examined the coat and found tiny wires running through it. There was a pocket containing batteries. “Mr. Jem said it’d keep my bones warm in the wintertime. He said for me not to be scared of it, but to be careful when it was lightning.” Calpurnia in her electric coat was the envy of her friends and neighbors. “Cal,” Jean Louise had said. “Please come back. I can’t go back to New York easy in my mind if you aren’t there.” That seemed to help: Calpurnia straightened up and nodded. “Yes ma’am,” she said. “I’m coming back. Don’t you worry.”
Jean Louise pressed the drive button and the car moved slowly down the road. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Catch a nigger by his toe. When he hollers let him go … God help me.
PART V
13
ALEXANDRA WAS AT the kitchen table absorbed in culinary rites. Jean Louise tiptoed past her to no avail.
“Come look here.”
Alexandra stepped back from the table and revealed several cut-glass platters stacked three-deep with delicate sandwiches.
“Is that Atticus’s dinner?”
“No, he’s going to try to eat downtown today. You know how he hates barging in on a bunch of women.”
Holy Moses King of the Jews. The Coffee.
“Sweet, why don’t you get the livingroom ready. They’ll be here in an hour.”
“Who’ve you invited?”
Alexandra called out a guest list so preposterous that Jean Louise sighed heavily. Half the women were younger than she, half were older; they had shared no experience that she could recall, except one female with whom she had quarreled steadily all through grammar school. “Where’s everybody in my class?” she said.
“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….