Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird #2)(82)

Jean Louise was mesmerized.

“I said, do you have a match?”

“Have you gone nuts? You beat hell out of me when you caught me at it … you old bastard!”

He had, unceremoniously, one Christmas when he found her under the house with stolen cigarettes.

“This should prove to you there’s no justice in this world. I smoke sometimes, now. It’s my one concession to old age. I find myself becoming anxious sometimes … it gives me something to do with my hands.”

Jean Louise found a match flip on the table by her chair. She struck one and held it to her uncle’s cigarette. Something to do with his hands, she thought. She wondered how many times his hands in rubber gloves, impersonal and omnipotent, had set some child on its feet. He’s crazy, all right.

Dr. Finch held his cigarette with his thumb and two fingers. He looked at it pensively. “You’re color blind, Jean Louise,” he said. “You always have been, you always will be. The only differences you see between one human and another are differences in looks and intelligence and character and the like. You’ve never been prodded to look at people as a race, and now that race is the burning issue of the day, you’re still unable to think racially. You see only people.”

“But, Uncle Jack, I don’t especially want to run out and marry a Negro or something.”

“You know, I practiced medicine for nearly twenty years, and I’m afraid I regard human beings mostly on a basis of relative suffering, but I’ll risk a small pronouncement. There’s nothing under the sun that says because you go to school with one Negro, or go to school with them in droves, you’ll want to marry one. That’s one of the tom-toms the white supremacists beat. How many mixed marriages have you seen in New York?”

“Come to think of it, darn few. Relatively, that is.”

“There’s your answer. The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they can’t scare us with the essential inferiority line, they’ll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that’s the one thing they know is feared in our fundamentalist hearts down here. They try to strike terror in Southern mothers, lest their children grow up to fall in love with Negroes. If they didn’t make an issue of it, the issue would rarely arise. If the issue arose, it would be met on private ground. The NAACP has a great deal to answer for in that department, too. But the white supremacists fear reason, because they know cold reason beats them. Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

“That’s odd, isn’t it?”

“It’s one of the oddities of this world.” Dr. Finch got up from the sofa and extinguished his cigarette in an ashtray on the table beside her. “Now, young lady, take me home. It’s nearly five. It’s almost time for you to fetch your father.”

Jean Louise surfaced. “Get Atticus? I’ll never be able to look him in the eye again!”

“Listen, girl. You’ve got to shake off a twenty-year-old habit and shake it off fast. You will begin now. Do you think Atticus is going to hurl a thunderbolt at you?”

“After what I said to him? After the—”

Dr. Finch jabbed the floor with his walking stick. “Jean Louise, have you ever met your father?”

No. She had not. She was terrified.

“I think you’ll have a surprise coming,” said her uncle.

“Uncle Jack, I can’t.”

“Don’t you tell me you can’t, girl! Say that again and I’ll take this stick to you, I mean that!”

They walked to the car.

“Jean Louise, have you ever thought about coming home?”

“Home?”

“If you will refrain from echoing either the last clause or the last word of everything I say to you, I will be much obliged. Home. Yes, home.”

Jean Louise grinned. He was becoming Uncle Jack again. “No sir,” she said.

“Well, at the risk of overloading you, could you possibly give an undertaking to think about it? You may not know it, but there’s room for you down here.”

“You mean Atticus needs me?”

“Not altogether. I was thinking of Maycomb.”

“That’d be great, with me on one side and everybody else on the other. If life’s an endless flow of the kind of talk I heard this morning, I don’t think I’d exactly fit in.”

“That’s the one thing about here, the South, you’ve missed. You’d be amazed if you knew how many people are on your side, if side’s the right word. You’re no special case. The woods are full of people like you, but we need some more of you.”