Summary: Chapter 12
By this time, Jem has reached the age of twelve, and he
begins to demand that Scout “stop pestering him” and act more like
a girl. Scout becomes upset and looks forward desperately to Dill’s
arrival in the summer. To Scout’s disappointment, however, Dill
does not come to Maycomb this year. He sends a letter saying that
he has a new father (presumably, his mother has remarried) and will
stay with his family in Meridian. To make matters worse, the state
legislature, of which Atticus is a member, is called into session,
forcing Atticus to travel to the state capital every day for two
weeks.
Calpurnia decides to take the children to her church,
a “colored” church, that Sunday. Maycomb’s black church is an old
building, called First Purchase because it was bought with the first
earnings of freed slaves. One woman, Lula, criticizes Calpurnia
for bringing white children to church, but the congregation is generally
friendly, and Reverend Sykes welcomes them, saying that everyone
knows their father. The church has no money for hymnals, and few
of the parishioners can read, so they sing by echoing the words
that Zeebo, Calpurnia’s eldest son and the town garbage collector,
reads from their only hymnal. During the service, Reverend Sykes
takes up a collection for Tom Robinson’s wife, Helen, who cannot
find work now that her husband has been accused of rape. After
the service, Scout learns that Tom Robinson has been accused by
Bob Ewell and cannot understand why anyone would believe the Ewells’
word. When the children return home, they find Aunt Alexandra waiting
for them.
Summary: Chapter 13
Aunt Alexandra explains that she should stay with the
children for a while, to give them a “feminine influence.” Maycomb
gives her a fine welcome: various ladies in the town bake her cakes
and have her over for coffee, and she soon becomes an integral part
of the town’s social life. Alexandra is extremely proud of the Finches
and spends much of her time discussing the characteristics of the
various families in Maycomb. This “family consciousness” is an integral
part of life in Maycomb, an old town where the same families have
lived for generations, where every family has its quirks and eccentricities. However,
Jem and Scout lack the pride that Aunt Alexandra considers commensurate
with being a Finch. She orders Atticus to lecture them on the subject
of their ancestry. He makes a valiant attempt but succeeds only
in making Scout cry.
Analysis: Chapters 12–13
Dill’s absence from Maycomb coincides appropriately with
the continued encroachment of the adult world upon Scout’s childhood,
as Dill has represented the perspective of childhood throughout
the novel. Scout’s journey to Calpurnia’s church is the reader’s
first glimpse of the black community in Maycomb, which is portrayed
in an overwhelmingly positive light. An air of desperate poverty
hangs over the church—the building is unpainted, they cannot afford hymnals,
and the congregation is illiterate—yet the adversity seems to bring
the people closer together and creates a stronger sense of community
than is found in Scout’s own church. The devotion of the black church
contrasts starkly with the hypocrisy of the white ladies’ missionary
circle that Scout attends in Chapter 24.
There, one of the missionary ladies, Mrs. Merriweather, bemoans
the plight of the oppressed indigenous people of Africa at the same
time that she complains about how moody Maycomb’s blacks are.
In addition, Lee introduces the black community at a crucial moment
in the narrative—just as race relations in Maycomb are thrown into
crisis by the trial of Tom Robinson. By emphasizing the goodness
and solidarity of the black community, Lee casts the racism rampant
among Maycomb’s whites in an extremely harsh and ugly light. One
of the main moral themes of the novel is that of sympathy and understanding,
Atticus’s tenet that Scout should always try to put herself in someone
else’s shoes before she judges them. Lee enables us to identify
with the black community in a way that makes the townspeople’s unwillingness
to do so seem mean-spirited and stubborn. Simply because of their
racial prejudice, the townspeople are prepared to accept the word
of the cruel, ignorant Bob Ewell over that of a decent black man.
If the novel’s main theme involves the threat that evil and hatred
pose to innocence and goodness, it becomes clear that ignorant,
unsympathetic racial prejudice will be the predominant incarnation
of evil and hatred, as the childhood innocence of Scout and Jem
is thrown into crisis by the circumstances of the trial.
The visit to the church brings Calpurnia to center stage
in the novel. Her character serves as the bridge between two worlds,
and the reader develops a sense of her double life, which is split
between the Finch household and the black community. When she goes
to church, her language changes; she speaks in a “colored” dialect rather
than the proper, precise language that she uses in Atticus’s household.
Jem asks her why, and she explains that the churchgoers would think
she was “puttin’ on airs fit to beat Moses” if she spoke “white”
in church. This speech demonstrates the gulf between blacks and
whites in Maycomb: not only do class distinctions and bigotry divide
the two races, but language does as well.
