When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it
healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom
self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when h
e stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb paralle
l to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt. When enou
gh years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events
leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four
years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came t
o us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out. I said if he wanted
to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackso
n 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 argument with a fist
-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right. Being Southerners, i
t 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 Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothec
ary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess. In England, Simon was i
rritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of thei
r 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 Steph
ens. Mindful of John Wesley’s strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, S
imon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempte
d into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and cost
ly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten his teacher’s dictum on the possession of human cha
ttels, bought 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 on
ce, to find a wife, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters. Simon live
d to an impressive age and died rich. It was customary for the men in the family to remai
n on Simon’s homestead, Finch’s Landing, and make their living from cotton. The place was
self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless
produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clo
thing, supplied by riverboats from Mobile. Simon would have regarded with impotent fury
the disturbance between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of ev
erything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until w
ell into the twentieth century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read
law, and his younger brother went to Boston to study medicine. Their sister Alexandra was
the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most of his ti
me lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full. When my father
was admitted to the bar, he returned to Maycomb and began his practice. Maycomb, some twen
ty miles east of Finch’s Landing, 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 Alabama. His first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the
Maycomb County jail. Atticus had urged them to accept the state’s generosity in allowing t
hem to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Hav
erfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched M
aycomb’s leading