Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch Quotes

Overnight, it seemed, Jem had acquired an alien set of values and was trying to impose them on me: several times he went so far as to tell me what to do. After one altercation when Jem hollered, “It’s time you started bein’ a girl and acting right!” I burst into tears and fled to Calpurnia.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 12. Scout observes that Jem is growing up and appears to have gained wisdom overnight. As the two siblings develop, a rift is opening up between them, with Jem adopting a patriarchal role rather than seeing his sister as an equal.

Lula stopped, but she said, “You ain’t got no business bringin’ white chillun here – they got their church, we got our’n. It is our church, ain’t it, Miss Cal?”
…When I looked down the pathway again, Lula was gone. In her place was a solid mass of colored people.
One of them stepped from the crowd. It was Zeebo, the garbage collector. “Mister Jem,” he said, “we’re mighty glad to have you all here. Don’t pay no ‘tention to Lula, she’s contentious because Reverend Sykes threatened to church her. She’s a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas an’ haughty ways – we’re mighty glad to have you all.”

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 12. Lula, a member of Calpurnia’s church, is being racist and hypocritical because she doesn’t want Scout and Jem to attend the all-black church on account of their differences. This is the first time the children experience racism first-hand. Maycomb, like many other Southern cities in the 1930s, has a deep racial, social and historical divide that dates back to the days of slavery. But not everyone feels like Lula, and Scout and Jem are welcomed into the church by Zeebo, the garbage collector.

“…what’s rape, Cal?”
“It’s somethin’ you’ll have to ask Mr. Finch about,” she said. “He can explain it better than I can.”

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 12. Scout’s question to Calpurnia is in reference to Tom Robinson being accused of raping Mayella Ewell. Calpurnia feels it is more appropriate for a parent to discuss a matter such as the violent crime of rape. Scout does in fact ask her father later on and he gives her a straight-forward explanation, another example of Atticus’s honest parenting in action.

“It’s right hard to say,” she said. “Suppose you and Scout talked colored-folks’ talk at home it’d be out of place, wouldn’t it? Now what if I talked white-folks’ talk at church, and with my neighbors? They’d think I was puttin’ on airs to beat Moses.”
“But Cal, you know better,” I said.
“It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not ladylike – in the second place, folks don’t like to have someone around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ’em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.”

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 12. The Finch’s black cook Calpurnia is trying to tell the children that you have to speak the language that people understand and you can’t go round acting like you are better than anyone else. An educated woman, she speaks proper English in the Finch home, but when she is with the black people in her community and at her church she speaks the way they do. Here, she is telling Scout what it means to be ladylike.

Today was Sunday, and Aunt Alexandra was positively irritable on the Lord’s Day. I guess it was her Sunday corset. She was not fat, but solid, and she chose protective garments that drew up her bosom to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear, and managed to suggest that Aunt Alexandra’s was once an hour glass figure. From any angle, it was formidable.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 13. Scout’s description of Aunt Alexandra after she arrives to the Finch household in Maycomb, announcing that she plans to stay for a while. She is particularly irritable on Sundays because of her corset. Austere, cold and disapproving of Scout’s unlady-like, tomboyish ways, she does care deeply for the family and has come to help out with the children during Atticus’s involvement in the Robinson trial.

I never understood her preoccupation with heredity. Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 13. Scout mocks Aunt Alexandra’s snobbish attitudes about family bloodlines making people high class, and that if a family had deep roots in an area it meant they were important. Scout believes what you do with your life is what makes you a fine person.

There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson’s shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it’s nothing unusual – her mother did the same.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 13. Scout observes that in Maycomb you are defined and controlled by whatever family you are born into. If you are attached to a certain name, then it means you act in a certain way. People behave in a way that is expected of them, based largely upon their family background. One example being “No Crawford Minds His Own Business” – a swipe at town busybody Stephenie Crawford.

“That’s because you can’t hold something in your mind but a little while,” said Jem. “It’s different with grown folks, we – ”
His maddening superiority was unbearable these days. He did not want to do anything but read and go off by himself.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 14. Jem believes Scout can’t understand about Atticus having a lot on his mind with the Tom Robinson case because her mind doesn’t hold on to things for long. Jem does understand because he is one of the “grown folks.” As he gets older, he starts to treat Scout like a little kid.

Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lighting, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 14. Dill Harris has run away from home to be with his friends Scout and Jem. Highly intelligent, creative and sensitive, as revealed in this insightful description by Scout, he is also lonely. He dreams of a twilight world where children like him will be hugged and coddled and greatly loved, like the world he shares with the Finch childen.

I pushed my way through dark smelly bodies and burst into the circle of light.
“H-ey, Atticus!”
I thought he would have a fine surprise, but his face killed my joy. A flash of plain fear was going out of his eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light. There was a smell of pigpen about, and when I glanced around I discovered that these men were strangers. They were not the people I saw last night. Hot embarrassment shot through me: I had leaped triumphantly into a ring of people I had had never seen before.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 15. Atticus is not happy that Scout, Jem and Dill have come to see him at the jail house. This is evident from the flash of fear in his eyes on seeing them. A lynch mob has sent the sheriff off on a wild goose chase and wants to administer street justice to jailed Tom Robinson. The only thing standing between them and Tom is a courageous Atticus who refuses to move.

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 15. Scout uses this tactic to distract and calm the angry mob confronting Atticus, determined to take “justice” into their own hands by breaking Tom Robinson out of jail and lynching him. She calls out to mob leader Walter Cunningham, a former client of Atticus, and talks about Mr. Cunningham’s legal entailments problem and his nice son who is a classmate of hers. Cunningham then ends the confrontation. Scout shows a special kind of courage here.

“Well, Atticus, I was just sayin’ to Mr. Cunningham that entailments are bad an’ all that, but you said not to worry, it take a long time sometimes…that you all’d ride it out together…” I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed all right enough for livingroom talk.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 15. By talking in a very personal way to Walter Cunningham during a tense confrontation, Scout manages to humanize the mob intent on killing Tom Robinson, of which Cunningham is leader. She shows great courage here.

I looked around and up at Mr. Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.
“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.
Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 15. Walter Cunningham calls off the mob that is intent on lynching Tom Robinson, when Scout cleverly and courageously engages in small talk about Cunningham’s son being a good boy – “Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?” Scout saves Tom Robinson’s life by this.

“So it took an eight-year-old child to bring ’em to their senses, didn’t it,” said Atticus. “That proves something – that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children…you children last night made Walter Cunningham stand in my shoes for a minute. That was enough.”

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 16. An admiring Atticus Finch on how his courageous young daughter, with her innocent wisdom, managed to turn back the carloads of men who arrived in a mob to lunch Tom Robinson. And did it with some simple personal words to mob leader Mr. Cunningham about his son.

“Well how do you know we ain’t Negroes?”
“Uncle Jack Finch says we really don’t know. He says as far as he can trace back the Finches we ain’t, but for all he knows we mighta come straight out of Ethiopia durin’ the Old Testament.”
“Well if we came out durin’ the Old Testament it’s too long ago to matter.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Jem, “but around here once you have a drop of Negro blood, that makes you all black.”

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 16. Scout wonders about her family history and whether they have negro blood in them. Jem in his answers shows growing maturity and understanding of the issue of racism.

“Lemme tell you somethin’ now, Billy,” a third said, “you know the court appointed him to defend this n*****.”
“Yeah, but Atticus aims to defend him. That’s what I don’t like about it.”
This was news, news that put a different light on things: Atticus had to, whether he wanted to or not. I thought it odd that he hadn’t said anything to us about it – we could have used it many times in defending him and ourselves. He had to, that’s why he was doing it, equaled fewer fights and less fussing. But did that explain the town’s attitude? The court appointed Atticus to defend him. Atticus aimed to defend him. That’s what they didn’t like about it. It was confusing.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 16. Scout hears the chatter from court spectators that Atticus had to defend Tom Robinson because he was appointed by Judge Taylor. But he hadn’t told his children that. She is further confused when the chatterers say Atticus aims to put on a defense for Tom and they don’t like this. Atticus wanted to take on Tom’s case because he wants justice to be served and wants to protect people’s rights, and he needs his children to understand how deeply he cares about this. Always the morally principled and excellent father who teaches by example.

The jury sat to the left, under long windows. Sunburned, lanky, they seemed to be all farmers, but this was natural: townsfolk rarely sat on juries, they were either struck or excused.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 16. Scout describes the jury. It is made up of the country folk of Maycomb, farmers, since the townspeople were usually able to get out of jury duty. The all male, all white jury, with no women or minorities on it, is not representative of Maycomb County. Straight away a black accused is at a disadvantage.

So far, things were utterly dull: nobody had thundered, there were no arguments between opposing counsel, there was no drama; a grave disappointment to all present, it seemed. Atticus was proceeding amiably, as if he were involved in a title dispute. With his infinite capacity for calming turbulent seas, he could make a rape case as dry as a sermon.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 17. Atticus’s calm and reasonable demeanour at the trial makes her feel safe. After all of the drama, chaos and harsh criticism of Atticus leading up to it, she begins to feel better once it starts. But things are far from right at this trial, as she will soon learn.

Gone was the terror in my mind of stale whiskey and barnyard smells, of sleepy-eyed sullen men, of a husky voice calling in the night, “Mr. Finch? They gone?” Our nightmare had gone with daylight, everything would come out all right.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 17. In the controlled environment of the courtroom, Scout no longer feels afraid. She recalls the nightmare of the mob that threatened Atticus and Tom Robinson, when she stood up for her father, began talking to the mob, and her courage saved the lives of Tom and possibly her father.

White people wouldn’t have anything to do with her because she lived among pigs; Negroes wouldn’t have anything to do with her because she was white. She couldn’t live like Mr. Dolphus Raymond, who preferred the company of Negroes, because she didn’t own a riverbank and she wasn’t from a fine old family. Nobody said, “That’s just their way,” about the Ewells. Maycomb gave them Christmas baskets, welfare money, and the back of its hand.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 19. Scout is talking about Mayella Ewell and the kind of lonely and abandoned life she had as a young woman who was poor and lived with an abusive father.

Until my father explained it to me later, I did not understand the subtlety of Tom’s predicament: he would not have dared strike a white woman under any circumstances and expect to live long, so he took the first opportunity to run – a sure sign of guilt.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 19. Scout realized that Tom Robinson had no choice, one option was as bad as the other, because being a black man weighed against him in the legal system. Had he defended himself against Mayella Ewell he would likely have been killed, but running away made him look guilty.

“Well, Mr. Finch didn’t act that way to Mayella and old man Ewell when he cross-examined them. The way that man called him ‘boy’ all the time an’ sneered at him, an’ looked around at the jury every time he answered – ”
“Well, Dill, after all he’s just a negro.”
“I don’t care one speck. It ain’t right, somehow it ain’t right to do ’em that way. Hasn’t anybody got any business talkin’ like that – it just makes me sick.”

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 19. Dill Harris complains to Scout about the way prosecutor Mr. Gilmer questioned Tom Robinson in court. Dill is not like a lot of the children in Maycomb, who are products of their parents racist teaching. Rather he is sensitive to the unjust treatment meted out to a black man in the judicial system.

I must have been reasonably awake, or I would not have received the impression that was creeping into me. It was not unlike one I had last winter, and I shivered, though the night was hot. The feeling grew until the atmosphere in the courtroom was exactly the same as a cold February morning, when the mockingbirds were still.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 21. If Jem is optimistic about Tom Robinson’s acquittal, his sister Scout is not. She describes the gloomy, pessimistic atmosphere in the courtroom as the verdict is awaited.

What happened after that had a dreamlike quality: in a dream I saw the jury return, moving like underwater swimmers, and Judge Taylor’s voice came from far away, and was tiny. I saw something only a lawyer’s child could be expected to see, could be expected to watch for, and it was like watching Atticus walk into the street, raise a rifle to his shoulder and pull the trigger, but watching all the time knowing that the gun was empty.
A jury never looks at a defendant it has convicted, and when this jury came in, not one of them looked at Tom Robinson.

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 21. Scout describes the return of the Tom Robinson trial jury from their deliberations and the voice of Judge Taylor like as if she was in a trance-type state. She knows it will be a guilty verdict, especially when none of the jurors look at Tom Robinson.
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