To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 26

About This Passage

The passage opens Chapter 26 with Scout walking past the Radley Place and registering, for the first time, a 'twinge of remorse' for the games she once played at Boo's expense. The catalog that follows — 'Two Indian-head pennies, chewing gum, soap dolls, a rusty medal, a broken watch and chain' — is the gift-record Boo had left in the knothole of the tree before Mr. Nathan Radley sealed it with cement. Scout's growth toward Boo arrives through her loss for Tom: the trial taught her what happens when people are treated as figures rather than persons, and the lesson reaches back to revise her relation to the recluse. Lee withholds the word 'sorry.' Scout does not apologize; she catalogs. The catalog is itself the moral act because it registers Boo's specific reaching across the distance Scout had been treating as monstrous. The closing image of the trunk 'swelling around its cement patch,' the patch itself 'turning yellow,' is Lee's quiet picture of the wound the cementing made — a wound the tree continues to register even after the gift-exchange is closed. The whole chapter's argument about how communities digest moral injury is rehearsed at small scale in this opening paragraph: the harm registers; the registration takes time; the registration takes a form that words alone cannot supply.

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct Chapter 26 by following Scout through three settings — the walk past the Radley Place where her relation to Boo has reorganized, the third-grade classroom where Miss Gates conducts the Current Events lesson on Hitler and democracy, and Jem's bedroom where Scout's question about Miss Gates detonates. Examine the structural logic that places these three movements in this order, and consider what each setting contributes to the chapter's argument about how a community digests injustice.

Discussion Questions

1. Scout opens the chapter feeling 'a twinge of remorse' for the games she once played at Boo Radley's expense, recalling the specific tokens Boo had left them — 'Two Indian-head pennies, chewing gum, soap dolls, a rusty medal, a broken watch and chain.' Examine how Tom Robinson's trial has reshaped Scout's relation to Boo, and consider what it means morally that her growth toward Boo arrives through her loss for Tom.
2. Miss Gates teaches her class that 'over here we don't believe in persecuting anybody' and writes DEMOCRACY on the blackboard, while Scout remembers her on the courthouse steps saying 'it's time somebody taught 'em a lesson.' Examine why Lee places both speeches in the same teacher's mouth and what this craft choice teaches about how prejudice survives invisibly inside ordinary people.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide