Chapter 2
Dill left us early in 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 to 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 Jem
had given me, learning their games, following Jem’s red jacket through wrigglingcircles of blind man’s buff, secretly sharing their misfortunes and minor victories.
I longed to join them.
Jem condescended to take me to school the first day, a job usually done by one’s
parents, but Atticus had said Jem 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 Jem’s
pockets. When we slowed to a walk at the edge of the schoolyard, Jem 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 Men, 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 any more?” I asked.
“We’ll do like we always do at home,” he said, “but you’ll see—school’s
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, then made me stand in the corner until noon.
Miss Caroline was no more than twenty-one. She had bright auburn hair, pink
cheeks, and wore crimson fingernail polish. She also wore high-heeled 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, Jem was in a
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 Union
on January 11, 1861, 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 a kitchen stove. By the time Mrs. Cat called the drugstore for
an order of chocolate malted mice the class was wriggling like a bucketful of
catawba worms. Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted
and floursack-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 aloud, 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 any more, it would interfere
with my reading.
“Teach me?” I said in surprise. “He hasn’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 at night he just sits in the livingroom 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.”
“Jem says I was. He read in a book where I was a Bullfinch instead of a Finch.
Jem says my name’s really Jean Louise Bullfinch, that I got swapped when I was
born and I’m really a-”
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 any
more. It’s best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from
here and try to undo the damage-”
“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, as learning to fasten the seat of
my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of
shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger
separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory,
listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of
Lorenzo Dow—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.
I knew I had annoyed Miss Caroline, so I let well enough alone and stared out the
window until recess when Jem cut me from the covey of first-graders in the
schoolyard. He asked how I was getting along. I told him.
“If I didn’t have to stay I’d leave. Jem, that damn lady says Atticus’s been
teaching me to read and for him to stop it-”
“Don’t worry, Scout,” Jem comforted me. “Our teacher says Miss Caroline’s
introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. It’ll be in all
the grades soon. You don’t have to learn much out of books that way—it’s like if
you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one, see?”
“Yeah Jem, but I don’t wanta study cows, I-”
“Sure you do. You hafta know about cows, they’re a big part of life in Maycomb
County.”
I contented myself with asking Jem if he’d lost his mind.
“I’m just trying to tell you the new way they’re teachin‘ the first grade, stubborn.
It’s the Dewey Decimal System.”
Having never questioned Jem’s pronouncements, I saw no reason to begin now.
The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Caroline waving cards at
us on which were printed “the,” “cat,” “rat,” “man,” and “you.” No comment