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| Writer | Harper Lee |
| Category | Novel |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | McIntosh and Otis |
| Publish Date | 1960 |
| Pages | 285 |
| File Size | 1 MB |
| File Type |
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right. When he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.
To Kill a Mockingbird PDF – Harper Lee
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first suggested we make Boo Radley come out.
I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn’t? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus.
As Southerners, some members of the family found it a source of shame that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess.
In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren. And as Simon called himself a Methodist. He worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens.
To Kill a Mockingbird PDF – Harper Lee
Mindful of John Wesley’s strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine. So Simon, having forgotten his teacher’s dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and, with their aid, established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens. He returned to Saint Stephen’s only once, to find a wife.
And with her established a line that ran high to her daughters. Simon lived to an impressive age and died rich. It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Simon’s homestead, Finch’s Landing, and make their living from cotton. The place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by riverboats from Mobile.
Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger brother went to Boston to study medicine.
To Kill a Mockingbird PDF – Harper Lee
Their sister Alexandra was the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river, wondering if his trot-lines were full. When my father was admitted to the bar, he returned to Maycomb and began his practice.
Maycomb, some twenty miles east of Finch’s Landing, was the county seat of Maycomb County. Atticus’s office in the courthouse contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard, and an unsullied Code of Alabama.
His first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail. Atticus had urged them to accept the state’s generosity in allowing them to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives. But they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County, a name synonymous with jackass.
To Kill a Mockingbird PDF
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