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lot.”
“She can’t help that. When people are sick they don’t look nice sometimes.”
“She scared me,” I said.
Atticus looked at me over his glasses. “You don’t have to go with Jem, you
know.”
The next afternoon at Mrs. Dubose’s was the same as the first, and so was the
next, until gradually a pattern emerged: everything would begin normally—that
is, Mrs. Dubose would hound Jem for a while on her favorite subjects, her
camellias and our father’s nigger-loving propensities; she would grow
increasingly silent, then go away from us. The alarm clock would ring, Jessie
would shoo us out, and the rest of the day was ours.
“Atticus,” I said one evening, “what exactly is a nigger-lover?”
Atticus’s face was grave. “Has somebody been calling you that?”
“No sir, Mrs. Dubose calls you that. She warms up every afternoon calling
you that. Francis called me that last Christmas, that’s where I first heard it.”
“Is that the reason you jumped on him?” asked Atticus.
“Yes sir . . .”
“Then why are you asking me what it means?”
I tried to explain to Atticus that it wasn’t so much what Francis said that had
infuriated me as the way he had said it. “It was like he’d said snot-nose or
somethin‘.”
“Scout,” said Atticus, “nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don’t mean
anything—like snot-nose. It’s hard to explain—ignorant, trashy people use it
when they think somebody’s favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It’s
slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common,
ugly term to label somebody.”
“You aren’t really a nigger-lover, then, are you?”
“I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody . . . I’m hard put, sometimes—
baby, it’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just
shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you. So don’t let Mrs. Dubose
get you down. She has enough troubles of her own.”
One afternoon a month later Jem was ploughing his way through Sir Walter
Scout, as Jem called him, and Mrs. Dubose was correcting him at every turn,
when there was a knock on the door. “Come in!” she screamed.