To Kill A Mocking Bird Journal #4 Chapters 10-11

Journal #4
Chapters 10, 11, & 12
Perspective: Scout

Oh, how I hated her! That old woman, Mrs. Dubose. She was so mean, but now I understand it all. You probably don’t know what I’m talking about do you? Well then I’ll start at the beginning.

Hmm, well it all started on that one day. Me an’ Jem were wonderin’ what Atticus ever did besides readin’ his magazines, an’ go to work. It never looked like he did do anything. So I asked Miss Maudie ‘cause she’s seems to know everything ‘bout the folk ‘round here. So I went and skipped across the street over to Miss Maudie’s house. She was sayin’ that he was the best at checkers an’ also played the harp. Disappointed I decided to join Jem in playing. We heard something, but we didn’t know what it was ‘till we looked down the street ‘an saw the rough shape of a dog. Jem was squintin’ ‘an trying to look at whose dog it is. To our surprise it was ‘ol Tim Johnson! We ran back home ‘an told Cal ‘bout it. Few minutes later, Mr. Heck Tate ‘an Atticus was on the scene. We didn’t hear anything. But we heard Mr. Tate say something about shooting, and handed Atticus the gun. To our surprise we learned that Atticus was the most doggone shot in Maycomb. His nickname One-Shot Finch gained our respect, and we never doubted our dad never did anything again.

The next thing that happened was about another person in our neighborhood. Her name was Mrs. Dubose. I think she was married, but now she was a nasty old woman. Everyday, when we would pass her house, she shouted at us an’ ridiculed anyone who passed by. It seemed that being isolated was pretty harsh to her. One time I just tried to say “Hey” and she shouted at me. Then Jem got outraged with the perplexity of her ridiculing and smashed all the camellia bushes in her yard. Jem had to read to Mrs. Dubose for a month, ‘an we started to get acquainted with her. There was always a clock adjacent to where we sat though. We thought she was really weird because she would move ‘an squirm when the timer ran out of time. She one day died. We were sad, but understood what happened. She was a morphine fanatic. She took it too much, and it caused here to die. She died, but entrusted Jem with a camellia. At the sight of this, my brother Jem, the one I thought would never cry, wailed. He shouted, throwing the beautifully waxed camellia on the floor. The perplexity of the subject boggled my mind as I remembered. He was looking at that flower for hours while Atticus read to me the Mobile Reader. And slowly the house returned to normal.