To Kill A Mockingbird
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EnglishVoice Age
Child (5-12)Accents
North American (US South)Transcript
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Di left us in early September to return to Meridian. We saw him off on the five o'clock bus and I was miserable without him until it occurred to me that I would be starting a school in a week. I never looked forward more to anything in my life. Hours of wintertime had found me in the treehouse looking over at the schoolyard spying on multitudes of Children through a two power telescope. Jim had given me learning their games following Jim's red jacket through wriggling circles of blind man's bluff, secretly sharing their misfortunes and minor victories. I longed to join them. Jim condescended to take me to school the first day. A job usually done by one's parents. But atticus had said Jim would be delighted to show me where my room was. I think some money changed hands in this transaction for as we trotted around the corner past the Radley place, I heard an unfamiliar jingle in Jim's pockets when we slowed to a walk at the edge of the schoolyard, Jim was careful to explain that during school hours, I was not to bother him. I was not to approach him with requests to enact a chapter of Tarzan and the ant man to embarrass him with references to his private life or tag along behind him at recess and noon. I was to stick with the first grade and he would stick with the fifth in short. I was to leave him alone. You mean we can't play anymore? I asked, we'll do like we always do at home. He said, but you'll see school is different. It certainly was before the first morning was over, Miss Caroline Fisher. Our teacher hauled me up to the front of the room and patted the palm of my hand with a ruler and then made me stand in the corner until noon. Miss Caroline was no more than 21. She had bright auburn hair, pink cheeks and wore crimson fingernail polish. She also wore high heel pumps and a red and white striped dress. She looked and smelled like a peppermint drop. She boarded across the street one door down from us in Miss Maudie Atkinson's upstairs front room. And when Miss Maudie introduced us to her, Jim was in haze for days, Miss Caroline printed her name on the blackboard and said, this says, I am Miss Caroline Fisher. I am from North Alabama from Winston County. The class murmured apprehensively, should she prove to harbor her share of the peculiarities indigenous to that region when Alabama seceded from the ***** on January 1st 18, 61 Winston County seceded from Alabama and every child in Maycomb County knew it. North Alabama was full of liquor interests, big mules, steel companies, republicans, professors and other persons of no background. Miss Caroline began the day by reading us a story about cats. The cats had long conversations with one another. They wore cunning little clothes and lived in a warm house beneath the kitchen stove. By the time Mrs cat called the Drugstore for an order of chocolate melted mass, the glass was wriggling like a bucket full of kaaba worms. Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged denim shirted and flower sack skirted. First grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk were immune to imaginative literature. Miss Caroline came to the end of the story and said, oh my, wasn't that nice. Then she went to the blackboard and printed the alphabet in enormous square capitals, turned to the class and asked, does anybody know what these are? Everybody did? Most of the first grade had failed it last year, I suppose she chose me because she knew my name as I read the alphabet. A faint line appeared between her eyebrows. And after making me read most of my first reader and the Stock Market quotations from the mobile register allowed, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me anymore. It would interfere with my reading. Teach me. I said in surprise, he hadn't taught me anything, Miss Caroline Atticus ain't got time to teach me anything. I added when Miss Caroline smiled and shook her head, why he's so tired? He just sits in the living room and reads. If he didn't teach you, who did Miss Caroline asked? Good naturedly. Somebody did. You weren't born reading the mobile register? Jim says I was, he read in a book where I was a bullfinch instead of a finch. Jim says, my name is really Jean Lee's bullfinch that I got swapped when I was born. And I'm really Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. Let's not let our imaginations run away with us dear. She said, now you tell your father not to teach you anymore. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damn it, ma'am. Your father does not know how to teach you can have a seat. Now, I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read. But somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers in the long hours of church. Was it? Then I learned, I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it. Reading was something that just came to me. I was learning to fasten the seat of my ***** suit without looking around or achieving two bows from a style of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus is moving, finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory listening to the news of the daily bills to be enacted into laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Doo, anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night until I feared I would lose it. I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.