To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 12-15
Episode 12
This week Professor Pipes is discussing Chapters 12-15 of To Kill a Mockingbird, which are leading up to the court case. This episode features a new segment titled "Horrible History" because, well, *gestures at everything*
TRIGGER WARNINGS: Death, Hate Crimes, Murder, Lynching
Transcript
Introduction:
Hello and welcome to Piper’s Paraphrases. I’m Professor Pipes, and today I’m starting Part 2 of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Let’s get right into it and discuss chapters 12-15.
Summary:
In Chapter 12, the kids learn that Dill isn’t coming to Maycomb this summer because his mom has gotten married, and his step dad wants to spend time with him. Bummer. Then Atticus is called away to the state legislature, leaving Scout feeling pretty sad and lonely. One Sunday, Calpurnia decides to take the kids to church with her instead of sending them alone to their church, since they can’t necessarily be trusted… What are you talking about, Cal? They’re perfect angel children who never do -- Hahaha, yeah I couldn’t even make it through that. Well, if you’re not familiar with how horrible our country’s history is, at this time, churches were segregated, so the kids are going to attend an all Black church service. And not everyone is a fan of this. Lula, a woman from Calpurnia’s church, points out that Calpurnia would not be welcomed at Scout and Jem’s church, so why should they be welcomed here? Umm.. she’s got a dang good point! Fortunately for the kids, most of the other congregants don’t feel the same way and are happy to welcome them, mainly because they appreciate what Atticus is doing for Tom Robinson, and, symbolically, for the whole Black community. Reverend Sykes talks about how the collection taken up today will go to Helen Robinson, Tom’s wife. He even closes the doors and won’t let anyone leave until they have a full $10 for her. Awkward. But helpful! After church, Scout finds out that Tom Robinson was accused of raping Bob Ewell’s daughter, though she doesn’t know what that actually means. The chapter ends with the trio arriving back at the house, and their beloved Aunt Alexandra waiting on the porch for them.
In Chapter 13, we learn that Aunt Alexandra is there to stay indefinitely because Scout needs some “feminine influence.” She quickly fits right into the social circle of Maycomb, and she starts to tell the kids about all the problems all the other families in town have. This one has a drinking streak. This whole family gambles. This family doesn’t feed enough treats to their dog. Wait a minute - Cooper, you added that one in! Aunt Alexandra and the kids disagree on what makes people “fine” or good. And unsurprisingly, the kids seem to be much wiser, and nicer, than their aunt. Eventually, Aunt Alexandra’s incessant pestering leads to an uncomfortable scene where Atticus tries to tell the kids that, because they are members of the respectable Finch family, they must behave like the young lady and gentleman that they are so they can live up to their family name. Quickly, though, Atticus snaps out of it and says they should forget that lesson.
In Chapter 14, Scout learns what rape is! According to Atticus, it is “carnal knowledge of a person by force and without consent.” Not a lie, but also not something Scout will understand and be traumatized by. Atticus Finch, parenting pro. Atticus and Aunt Alexandra then get into a fight about Calpurnia, with Aunt Alexandra saying she’s a bad influence and should be fired and Atticus saying that she’s a member of the family and will not be leaving until she wants to. After witnessing this fight, Jem puts on his big brother voice and tells Scout not to bother Aunt Alexandra, which leads to another fight, this time between the kids. Whoops. When they eventually make up and go to bed, Scout steps on a snake, which escapes under her bed!! Jem gets the broom to scare the snake away, but it turns out it wasn’t a snake. It was Dill! Yeah, he’d make a pretty weird looking snake. Dill had secretly run away from home, aaaaand Jem tells Atticus. What a tattletale. Thankfully, Atticus doesn’t get mad, and Dill’s Aunt Rachel is too relieved to be mad, so Dill gets to spend the night with them. That night, Dill sneaks into Scout’s room. Oh get your heads out of the gutter! They’re little kids having a sleep over! Anyway, he explains that he ran away because he felt lonely at home. His newlywed parents were so preoccupied by each other that they didn’t spend much time with him. Poor Dill. Then he has a super awkward, out of the blue idea and says, “Scout, let’s get us a baby!” Ok, I know your heads went straight back into the gutter, but, again, they’re little kids who clearly don’t know where babies come from. He just wants someone he can love who will love him. So. Dang. Sad! This brings Scout’s mind to the other loneliest person she can think of, Boo Radley, and she asks why HE didn’t run away. Dill shows some true child wisdom when he ends the chapter, saying, “maybe he doesn’t have anywhere to run off to…”
In Chapter 15, Dill’s parents decide to let him stay in Maycomb for the summer. Yay! But then some very non-yay stuff happens. It seems that some townsfolk are worried something bad will happen because Tom Robinson is going to be moved to the Maycomb jail the day before his trial. Jem starts getting really anxious, worrying that someone might hurt Atticus. On Sunday night, Atticus leaves the house after supper and takes an extension cord with a lightbulb. Weird, but, you do you, Atticus. Jem’s worried, so he, Scout, and Dill sneak out and find Atticus sitting in the town square in front of the door to the jail. Just when the kids are about to go back home, several cars arrive and the kids sneak closer to see what happens. When a group of people get out of the cars and approach Atticus, Scout jumps into the crowd, and is surprised to find that these men are strangers. Atticus is visibly frightened, even more so when Jem and Dill arrive, too. The crowd tries to get Atticus to send his kids away, but Jem won’t leave. When someone grabs Jem, Scout tries to kick him in the shin, but misses and... hits something else. Ooh painful. While Jem and Atticus keep arguing, Scout gets bored and starts to make friendly conversation with someone in the crowd she recognizes, Walter Cunningham. The dad, not the kid, Cooper! It’s not a big mob of adults and one little ten year old! Thank you. She keeps chatting about his son, Walter, and his legal troubles that Atticus has been helping with, but he doesn’t respond. Eventually, she realizes that everyone’s staring at her, and then Walter says he’ll tell his son she said hi, and he tells the whole group of men to clear out. And they do. Afterwards, Tom asks if they’re gone, and Atticus reassures him. Mr. Underwood, who runs the newspaper, shouts down from his window that he had Atticus covered the whole time with his shotgun. Then the Finches, and Dill, head home.
Horrible History:
Ok, that was pretty intense. You know what, this is too much to just fit in the social inequality theme part, so I’ve just got to start a new segment for this video. I’ll call it Horrible History.
So the United States, like pretty much every country, has some nasy stuff in its history. And reading a book without a sense of its context is just not doing it justice, so we’ve got to talk about some of the deeply embedded racism that is being discussed in these chapters.
On the way home from church, Scout and Jem fault Calpurnia for talking differently with her friends at church than she does with them at home. They ask her why she doesn’t talk “right” when she’s at church, even though she “knows better.” Dude, that’s pretty insensitive. Language shifts and changes over time, which is groovy, or the bomb, or lit, fam. But who decides what’s right and wrong in language? The ones in charge. And, historically, who’s that been? White men. White guys who specifically did not give Black Americans access to education, which is made abundantly clear when we see that only 4 members of Calpurnia’s whole church can read and write. Remember, this is about 70 years after the end of the Civil War, when all people were supposed to be considered equal, and yet there’s still no education available for Black Southerners. So of course the kids see the way they speak as “right,” and the way Calpurnia’s church speaks as “wrong” even though that’s not how language works.
Phew. This next bit is even harder to talk about. At the time in which this story was set, and actually still for a long while afterwards, Black men accused of crimes were often not given the opportunity for a trial at all, fair or not. Instead, a lynch mob would form, whose sole purpose was to kill the man, whom they automatically assumed was guilty. I know I usually keep things pretty light on here, so I feel like I have to warn you that I’m about to read you some newspaper article titles that you probably don’t want to hear: “Negro’s body torn by mob. He had been lynched but was exhumed and burned.” “Mob hangs Negro while jury deliberates fate.” “John Hartfield will be lynched by Ellisville mob at 5 o'clock this afternoon.” And that’s what was about to happen to Tom Robinson. It was a lynch mob gathered outside the jail, ready to pull him out and kill him before his trial even began.
Characterization:
This week, I want to talk about the characters of Jem and Calpurnia. Jem is clearly growing up and maturing in these chapters. We see this when Scout says that he broke the code of childhood by telling Atticus that Dill had run away from home. Even just last summer, Jem might have gone along with this secret and hidden Dill with the help of Scout, but now he says that Dill shouldn’t have run away without telling his parents, so he does the mature thing and tells their dad. It is a little sad to see Jem leaving childhood, but with the trial coming up and the town at odds with the family, it makes sense that he would have to learn to grow up pretty fast.
Next, I want to talk about Calpurnia because it is in these chapters that we see more of who she is as a person. There’s a lot of controversy that surrounds Calpurnia, and much of it revolves around whether or not she is a classic Mammy. The Mammy is something that would also fit in the Horrible History section, because it is a Jim Crow era caricature that has really endured. The stereotype of the Mammy was a Black woman happily and loyally serving a white family. She was motherly, content, happy, and usually illiterate and had very little else to her personality. Mammy was another way of suggesting that the proper place for Black people was in service to white people. It’s the same idea behind happy slave propaganda. Now, Calpurnia does fit the stereotype of a Mammy, to an extent. She happily serves Atticus, never questions him, cares for the children, and calls Jem, a young child, “Mister,” which is a sign of respect that usually children show to adults, not the other way around. Calpurnia isn’t even given a last name, and her family life is barely discussed. However, she also doesn’t fit the stereotype in some ways. Calpurnia is not illiterate, and she even taught her son to read and taught Scout to write. She’s also not portrayed as happy all the time, and Scout even calls her a tyrant at the start of the story because she was tough and firm and because she would readily spank the kids if they needed discipline, something that might be dangerous for a Black servant to do in lots of white households at the time. I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to this controversy, which fits right in with so many of Harper Lee’s characters who both follow and break free of various stereotypes, showing the complexities and contradictions that are just part of being human.
Analysis:
While there are a lot of themes at play in these chapters, much of the focus really centers around two of them, so that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Why waste our time, am I right?
First, let’s discuss the coexistence of Good and Evil within an individual. Harper Lee does a good job of showing the complexities of characters, and while people may have some good beliefs, they act terribly, or vice versa. Aunt Alexandra is one of those people. Now, she’s pretty awful in a lot of ways, but there is a little layer of good beneath the surface. She tells Atticus that he has “a daughter to think of. A daughter who’s growing up.” So Aunt Alexandra isn’t just concerned about the family’s status because she’s stuck up; she has a very realistic rationale for pushing gender norms onto her niece. In the 1930’s, while men could be bachelors and have jobs, women didn’t have that luxury very often. For most women, their only option to secure their future was to secure a husband, so Aunt Alexandra is worried that Atticus’ rocking the boat and taking on Tom Robinson’s case might mean that Scout will become a social outcast who won’t get a husband down the line. So while she’s mean and rude and doesn’t want Calpurnia around and doesn’t accept Scout for who she is, all of which could be considered her “evil” side, she has some good intentions. Harper Lee also shows that even people who seem completely evil can change for the better, and she shows this through Walter Cunningham Senior. The lynch mob is one of the most evil things that happens in this whole story, and it’s made worse when you realize that this type of thing happened All. The. Time. This group of drunken men has gathered to kill a man simply because of the color of his skin. However, the pure kindness and innocence of a child reminded Walter of his humanity and made him turn away from his evil intentions and turn the rest of the mob away, too. And we’re actually going to see some more effects of this good act down the line, but I’ll leave that for another day.
Ok, I know I already talked a lot about Social Inequality in our Horrible History segment and in characterization, but I have a couple more things to say. Surprise surprise, I know. First, we see racism in the appearance of First Purchase African M. E. Church. Obviously, this is evidence of segregation, and Scout quickly notices that there is very little decoration in the church, and no hymn books, piano, or even paint on the walls. She is too young and naive to really understand the significance of this, but as readers, we can see the utter poverty of Calpurnia’s community. There’s also a fair amount of classism shown through the character of Aunt Alexandra, who sees the flaws in every family in town but her own. Finally, we see sexism in church. Scout mentions that she’s heard in her church the “Impurity of Women” doctrine. It seems to her that a lot of clergy focus on how terrible and dangerous women are, so she’s not surprised to hear these same ideas expressed at First Purchase. However, Jem’s opinion about being a girl has clearly changed. In earlier chapters, if he was in need of a good insult for Scout, he could just call her a girl and be done with it. Problem solved. But now he tells Scout that it’s about time she “started bein’ a girl and acting right.” So being a girl is now a good thing? Well, kind of. I mean, it does suggest that a woman’s job is to be well behaved and mannerly, but I think that Jem really sees it the same way he sees being a gentleman. It means being more mature and behaving more like a grown up, and less like a child.
Food for Thought:
We’ve almost reached the end, so it’s time for - you guessed it - food for thought. Consider these questions as you reflect on Chapters 12-15 and as you continue reading.
First, now that you’ve seen a lot more of her, what are your thoughts on Aunt Alexandra?
Second, what do you think about the Calpurnia Mammy idea? Do you think Harper Lee did enough to round out her character, or do you think she’s basically a stereotype?
Third, in chapter 12, Scout mentions that, by watching Calpurnia, she has realized that there is some skill involved in being a girl. What skills do you think she has recognized in Calpurnia, or what skills does she think are necessary in women?
Fourth, at the end of Chapter 12, Scout, Jem, and Calpurnia talk about how people speak. In what ways are language and culture related? Why do we speak differently around different people?
Finally, why do you think it’s necessary to be aware of the bad things in our country’s history? Why is it important not to just ignore them because they’re in the past?
And that’s it for chapters 12-15. We hit on some seriously tough stuff in these chapters, so give yourselves a round of applause or a pat on the back. As always, thanks for watching this episode of Piper’s Paraphrases. Go forth, read a bunch, and be good people.
