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Part One

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When he was nearly thirteen, ot his arm badly broken at the elbow When it healed, and Jeed, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury His left arht; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thu as he could pass and punt

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on the to his accident I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Je before that He said it began the suave us the idea ofBoo Radley come out

I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn’t? We were far too old to settle an arguht, so we consulted Atticus Our father said ere both right

Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings All we had was Si apothecary froiness In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens Mindful of John Wesley’s strictures on the use ofmedicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be telory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel So Siotten his teacher’s dictuht three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens He returned to Saint Stephens only once, to find a wife, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters Sie and died rich

It was customary for the men in the fa, andfrom cotton The place was self-sufficient:nevertheless produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile

Siarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when oer brother went to Boston to study medicine Their sister Alexandra was the Finch who re: shein a ha if his trot-lines were full

When my father was adan his practice Mayco, was the county seat of Maycomb County Atticus’s office in the courthouse contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabaed in the Maycoenerosity in allowing theree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass The Haverfords had dispatched Mayco froful detention of a h to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coh defense for anybody They persisted in pleading Not Guilty to first-degreemuch Atticus could do for his clients except be present at their departure, an occasion that was probably the beginning of my father’s profound distaste for the practice of criminal law

During his first five years in Mayco; for several years thereafter he invested his earnings in his brother’s education John Hale Finch was ten years younger than my father, and chose to study ; but after getting Uncle Jack started, Atticus derived a reasonable income from the law He liked Maycomb, he was Maycomb County born and bred; he knew his people, they knew him, and because of Sie to nearly every family in the town