Summary
howard: What’re
yuh skeered of? You was a worm once!
melinda: (Shocked) I wasn’t
neither.
howard: You was so! When
the whole world was covered with water, there was nothin’ but worms
and blobs of jelly. And you and your whole family was worms!
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Outside the courthouse in the small Southern town of Hillsboro,
a boy named Howard carries a fishing pole and scours the ground
for worms. A girl, Melinda, calls out to him. Howard holds up a
worm, and Melinda expresses disgust, but Howard tells her she shouldn’t be
scared because she herself was once a worm—in fact, her whole family
was once worms or blobs of jelly. Melinda threatens to tell her
father what Howard has said and warns him that he’ll get his mouth
washed out with soap. Howard calls Melinda’s father a monkey, and
Melinda runs away.
Rachel, the Hillsboro minister’s daughter, enters. She
watches Howard hold up a worm and ask it what it wants to be when
it grows up. Mr. Meeker, the bailiff, comes out of the courthouse
and greets Rachel. Rachel asks Meeker not to tell her father that
she visited the courthouse. She asks to see Bert Cates. Meeker comments that
Cates, a schoolteacher, is a more dignified guest than most people
usually held in the town jail. Meeker brings Cates up to the courthouse
to talk to Rachel.
Cates reminds Rachel that he told her not to
visit him. She gives him some clothes from his room at his boarding
house. She pleads with him to tell the authorities that his alleged
crime—teaching evolution in the local school—was meant as a joke
and to promise them he’ll never break that law again. Cates changes
the subject and speaks about Matthew Harrison Brady, a famous political
figure who is due to arrive in Hillsboro to act as a prosecutor
in Cates’s trial.
Rachel asks Cates why he can’t admit he was wrong. Cates
says he merely taught his biology class straight from a textbook
about Charles Darwin’s On theOrigin of
Species. Rachel points out that what Cates did was illegal
and that everyone thinks he is wrong. Cates admits that he broke
the law but says that his actions are more complicated than simple
good and evil. Rachel scolds him for trying to stir things up and
asks him why he can’t do the right thing. Cates asks whether she
means she wants him to do things her father’s way. Upset, Rachel
runs away. Cates catches up to her and they embrace. When
Meeker enters, Rachel breaks the embrace and departs. Meeker marvels
at Brady’s imminent arrival and asks Cates about his lawyer. Cates
explains that a Baltimore newspaper is sending a lawyer to represent
him. After joking for a bit, Meeker and Cates exit.
At the general store, the storekeeper opens up for business.
He and a woman from town discuss the heat. Rachel’s father, the
stern Reverend Brown, enters. Two workmen arrive to put up a banner welcoming
Brady to town. Reverend Brown says that he wants Brady to know how
faithful the community is as soon as he arrives. The workmen start
to raise the banner. A local man rushes in and says that Brady’s
train has arrived. The workmen unfurl the banner, which displays
the words “Read Your Bible!” The crowd applauds.
E. K. Hornbeck, a journalist, enters. Townspeople approach
him and try to sell him things, but he rebuffs them with sarcastic
jokes. Elijah, an illiterate mountain man hawking Bibles, asks Hornbeck whether
he is an evolutionist. Hornbeck identifies himself as a journalist
from the Baltimore Herald. Hornbeck spots an organ-grinder carrying
a monkey. In jest, he asks the monkey if it has come to town to
act as a witness in the trial. Melinda hands the monkey a penny, and
Hornbeck points out that the monkey’s greed is the best evidence
yet that it is the ancestor of the human race.
