Mockingbird (46 page)

“Now then, Scout,” said her uncle. “Now, at this very minute, a political philosophy foreign to it is being pressed on the South, and the South's not ready for it—we're finding ourselves in the same deep waters. As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he'll look for his lessons. I hope to God it'll be a comparatively bloodless Reconstruction this time.”

And, “It seems quixotic today, with jet airplanes and overdoses of Nembutal, that a man would go through a war for something so insignificant as his state.”

The school population of this county is five black to one white, and since not a cent of the money has gone into Negro schools.… Negro children, meanwhile, continue to sardine themselves, a hundred and a hundred and twenty strong, into stove-heated one-room pine shacks which might comfortably accommodate a fifth of their number if the walls, roof, and windows were tight.

James Agee,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(Mariner Books, 2001), 220.

7. T
AY
H
OHOFF
E
DITS
G
O
S
ET A
W
ATCHMAN

“She and Miss Lucy Tompkins and my new boss, Eunice Blake, were the first women I actually knew (as opposed to actresses and people like that) who kept their maiden names after they were married. [Hohoff was married to Arthur Torrey, a literary agent.] When I got married after three years at Lippincott, Miss Hohoff let me know how much she disapproved of my changing my name. I was polite, of course, but I thought she was nuts.”

Neely Tucker, “How ‘To Kill a Mockingbird' Came to Be: More Evidence,”
The Washington Post
, 18 February 2015.

8. “S
EE
NL'
S
N
OTES
”