Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (24 page)

The episode in which Dill, Jem, and Scout discuss the ability to smell death is typical of a child's tendency to believe in supernatural events that cannot be substantiated. Jem describes his belief in a type of ghost called a Hot Steam who “wallows around on lonesome roads and you walk through him when you are you'll be one too, and you'll go around at night suckin' people's breath” (
TKAM
41). This childish belief in monsters is Lee's way of telling her readers how foolish and unfounded fear often is. She then proceeds to apply this conclusion to still other “fearful” characters and to illustrate how unfair and unwarranted our hated misgivings are of people whose masks we cannot or choose not to penetrate. Instead of seeing behind the façade, the outside cover, we choose rather to exaggerate strangeness, suggest deformities of character and personality, and continue to isolate ourselves from what is unknown and therefore frightening.

While a good number of characters in the novel wear distorting masks, so to speak, examining only a few in detail will illustrate Lee's interest in seeing beyond outward appearances. For example, both Mrs. Dubose and Mr. Dolphus
Raymond
illustrate how inaccurate initial perceptions of people may be.

Mrs. Dubose is portrayed as a cantankerous and ill old lady who Jem decides to punish after she calls Atticus a “nigger-lover” and asserts that he is “no better than the niggers and trash he works for' (
TKAM
116–118). Jem then strikes back by cutting the tops off of the old lady's camellia bushes.
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His revenge, however, fails to take into account either her illness or her age. He only sees her mask of anger and frustration and does not look beyond it to discover the causes of such emotions. Readers discover later that Mrs. Dubose is a morphine addict and that her struggle to overcome her addiction is a major factor in her negative emotional state. Frustrated by her problems, she strikes out at others instead. Atticus forces Jem to look beyond retribution for her supposed crime of slander by ordering him to fulfill the old woman's request that he read to her for a month. When the children arrive to carry out their “punishment,” they discover that her house is like the Radley Place, “dark and creepy [with] shadows and things on the ceiling” (
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121). It is an ominous home, which Scout describe as “having an oppressive odor . . . I had met many times in rain rotted gray houses. It always made me afraid, expectant, watchful” (
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121). Moreover the physical description of the old woman accentuates Jem and Scout's fear of their task. Her appearance is rather reminiscent of a ghoul or a witch. Lee's portrait follows:

She was horrible. Her face was the color of a dirty pillowcase and the corners of her mouth glistened with wet which inched like a glacier down the deep grooves enclosing her chin. Old age liver spots dotted her cheeks, and her pale eyes had black pin-point pupils. Her hands were knobby, and the cuticles were grown up over her fingernails. Her bottom plate was not in, and her upper lip protruded; from time to time she would draw her nether lips to her upper plate and carry her chin with it. . . . Cords of saliva would collect on her lips; she would draw them in then open her mouth again. Her mouth seemed to have a private existence of its own. It worked separate and apart from the rest of her, like a clam hole at low tide. Occasionally it would say “Pt,” like some vicious substance coming to a boil. (
TKAM
123)

Yet despite the fact that the house and its occupant frighten them, as time passes Jem and Scout learn to quell their fears and accept the locale and its owner.

Similarly, Mr. Dolphus Raymond has a negative image in the town. His reputation as a lower-class town drunk is established (
TKAM
182–183), and his close association with black people (he has a “colored” mistress and several mulatto children) make him someone to be feared and avoided. Later in the novel, however, readers discover that Raymond's trashy reputation is merely a sham as he confesses to Scout that his paper bag—which Maycomb residents mistakenly believe contains a bottle of whiskey—in reality just contains a bottle of Coca-Cola (
TKAM
227–228). Raymond explains his deception in this way: “Why do I pretend? Well it's very simple. . . . I try to give 'em a reason you see. It helps folks if they can latch on to a reason . . . folks can say Dolphus Raymond's in the clutches of whiskey—that's why he won't change his ways. He can't help himself” (
TKAM
228). Raymond removes his mask or fake identity only to the children, however, knowing that adults could not cope with the truth that his so-called negative actions (hanging with Negroes and drinking) are simply motivated by personal choice: “I live like I do because that's the way I want to live” (
TKAM
228). Once more, readers can see Lee's message that after probing behind the obvious, we may discover that the frightening and disturbing may only be façade, concealing an inner truth. In this case, the readers discover the fact that Raymond is an insightful observer of the world rather than the trashy drunk he is assumed to be by the townspeople of Maycomb.

While other characters—including Walter Cunningham, Judge Taylor, Link Deas, and Mr. Underwood—might be examined as having similar deceptive character traits that belie their true identity, I merely suggest the possibility here and move on to a more primal use of fear that Lee incorporates into the novel: a childhood fear of the dark. Specifically, Lee relies on the fact that several psychological analysts such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have probed this specific fear in their writing. For example, speaking of Infantile Anxiety, Freud writes,

Anxiety in children is in reality nothing else than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they love. It is for that reason that they are afraid of every stranger. They are afraid in the dark because they cannot see the face of the person they love, and their fear is soothed if they can hold of that person's hand in the dark.
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(289)

Lee then proceeds to employ such psychological speculation in a variety of ways.

As we have seen previously, Mrs. Dubose's house is described as dark and creepy, and the encounter with Boo Radley in chapter 6 is heightened by the fact that it occurs in the night and involves a frightening shadow silhouetted by the back porch and a disturbing jolt of a shotgun blast as the children scatter in an attempt to escape from what they assume must be innate evil (
TKAM
59–60). A few pages later, Scout recounts the exaggerated apprehension this event caused:

Every night sound I heard from my cot on the back porch was magnified three-fold; every scratch of feet on gravel was Boo Radley seeking revenge, every passing Negro laughing in the night was Boo Radley loose and after us; insects splashing against the screen were Boo Radley's insane finger picking the wire to pieces; the chinaberry trees were malignant, hovering alive. (
TKAM
62)

Thus, early in the novel, Lee places the fear of the dark as an integral image, and, of course, she continues to develop it by tying external darkness (lack of light) to the dark-skinned characters of the novel, including Calpurnia, Rev. Sykes, and, of course,
t
om and Helen Robinson. Significantly, critic John Carlos Rowe describes Mayella Ewell's reactions to Robinson as evidence of “racial demonization” (14), suggesting once more the position of dark men and women as othered, perhaps even supernatural and thus to be feared. The fear of the male of the Negro race is particularly linked to the unfounded childish fears of dark places, to the need for night-lights and the apprehension of monsters that live in dark closets or beneath beds waiting to prey on unsuspecting children once they have fallen asleep.

As Judge
t
aylor notes, people generally see what they look for and hear what they listen for (
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198). And the fear of the dark seems to be passed down through generations. Thus, as Atticus assesses the trial's outcome in a conversation with Jem (
TKAM
253), he attributes the verdict to fear: fear that by acquitting Tom the jury may find themselves changing the rules of their society where black men are always threats to white women—hypersexual and powerful masculine symbols who must be kept under control and restricted. Rowe points out that the fear of the dark is also mentioned in passing when the Misses Tutti and Frutti Barber suggest that their furniture (actually hidden by childish pranksters) must have been stolen (13) by “those traveling fur sellers who cam through town two days ago. . . . Da-rk they were . . . Syrians” (
TKAM
289), thus suggesting anyone with dark skin, not just Negroes, may elicit apprehension and mistrust.

The “dark” stereotype established in Maycomb is also evident in the scene with Aunt Alexandra's Missionary Circle where the ladies discuss the poor Mrunas, African residents who are compared to jungle animals and who are consid
ered “savages” by this “Christian” community, avoided by everyone except the saintly missionary J. Grimes Everett, who is the only white person who will go near them. This concept of the Dark Continent of Africa suggests an inferior people (“you have no conception, no conception of what we are fighting over there—” [
TKAM
263]) and anticipates a resultant misunderstanding of African Americans that relies on similar stereotyping rather than on firsthand experience. Lee suggests that ladies of the Missionary Circle, in obvious contradiction to Christian tenets, work to alleviate the pain and deprivation experienced by an African tribe from the Dark Continent but fail to offer emotional assistance or material help to the black citizens of their own town, whom they consider unworthy of their aid and lacking the potential to develop positive character traits. These local Others are more qualified for discrimination and hate than equality and love.

As the scene develops, it becomes more and more ironic for it seems as if Christianity fosters such misinterpretation of cultural difference and sees all “strange” black cultural activities as frightful practices. Similarly, the dissatisfaction of the racial Others is also seen as scary; as Mrs. Merriweather pronounces, “There is nothing more distracting than a sulky darky” (
TKAM
264). Indeed, in the social class battle, the search for equality seems warlike (
TKAM
265), and no matter what the “devout” white elite do to placate African American citizens, “no lady is safe in her bed” (
TKAM
265) when male members of the black race are around. Goodness and thoughtfulness, usually seen as positive traits, are now perceived as misguided acts of the citizenry that rile up the dark race rather than placate them (
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265). Rather then interact with what they fear, these individuals find it preferable to hold people at bay, to isolate them, and to refuse to recognize that blacks are as good and respectable as their white neighbors. Like a child who refuses to enter a dark bedroom, these women of the missionary circle prefer to be safe in the white light rather than take the risk of what they may discover about the dark people of Africa, besides the fact that their presence stimulates an unwarranted fear of the unknown. The native Africans are eligible for the ladies' pity and compassion because they are safely distant, rather than an imminent threat, as are the blacks of Maycomb.

Other childhood fears also are subtly insinuated into the novel's pages. For example, though Scout seems immune to both of these episodes, fear of insects is mentioned in the cootie episode discussed previously and then repeated in the roly-poly (centipede) episode that begins chapter 25. Even the gifts given by Boo Radley suggest childhood superstitions, albeit of a positive nature, as the Indian head pennies are described by Jem in this manner: “They come from Indians. They're real strong magic, they make you have good luck” (
TKAM
40). Another fear that receives prominence is seen in the Tim Johnson episode in chapter 10. A snarling dog threatening to bite can certainly make a child run in fright, and a rabid one is an even more serious threat. Last of all, Lee suggests a potential fear of isolation in an enclosed space or imprisonment. Of course, this fear is present in Jem's unwillingness to be confined in Mrs. Dubose's house as we have seen earlier. Moreover, it is further developed in the details of Boo's childhood incarceration, first in the jail and then in his own home. Citing Malin, Johnson notes that the Radley home is “a site of terror” for Boo, “a place of danger and imprisonment where some are shut in and some are shut out” (Malin qtd. in Johnson 51). We might further see such isolation and fear of enclosed space in the “cage” of race constructed for Tom Robinson and that of class that constricts the social movement and acceptance of the Cunninghams and the Ewells.

The question that seems to be posed in all these episodes is whether the children deal with fear in ways that suggest they are more wise than adults. Darkness, insects, and angry animals can be faced with courage and be seen as irrational and capable of being conquered. Given the tight structural emphasis on fear and the frequent repetition of words such as
scary
,
scared
,
frightened
,
frightening
,
terrifying
,
fearful
, and
afraid
, it is no wonder then that Lee returns full circle to the image as the novel draws to a close.

As chapter 1 introduces a character named Boo and suggests a Halloween figure who has white and ghostlike skin, so the final three chapters return to that same holiday celebration and to a pageant that suggests that many individuals are in disguises and/or are those who have an outward appearance that belies their inner identity: the outside (real skin color) is not an accurate prediction of reality just as a Halloween costume is merely a ruse worn by the wearer who is not really scary at all.