Summary
It is very dark on the way to the school, and Cecil Jacobs jumps out and frightens them. Scout and Cecil go together around the crowded school, visiting the “haunted house” (in a 7th grade classroom) and buying homemade candy. The pageant looms, and all the children go backstage. Unfortunately, Scout falls asleep, misses her entrance, and runs onstage at the end, prompting Judge Taylor and many others to burst out laughing. The lady in charge of the pageant accuses Scout of ruining it, and Scout is so ashamed that she and Jem wait backstage until the crowd is gone before they make their way home.
On their walk back, Jem hears noises behind them. They think it must be Cecil Jacobs, trying to frighten them again, but when they call out to him, they hear no reply. They walk faster, and have almost reached the road when their pursuer begins running after them. Jem screams for Scout to run, but in the dark, hampered by her costume, she loses her balance and falls. Something tears at the metal mesh, and she hears struggling behind her. Then Jem breaks free and drags her to the road before their assailant pulls him back. Scout hears a crunching sound and Jem screams; she runs toward him and is grabbed and slowly squeezed. Suddenly her attacker is pulled away, and then she realizes that there are four people under the tree. Once the noise of struggling has ceased, Scout feels on the ground for Jem, finding only the prone figure of an unshaven man who smells of whiskey. She stumbles toward home, and in the light of the streetlight she sees a man carrying Jem toward her house.
When she reaches home, Aunt Alexandra is already calling Dr. Reynolds. Atticus calls Heck Tate, telling him that someone has attacked his children. Aunt Alexandra removes Scout’s costume, and Atticus tells her that Jem is only unconscious, not dead. Then Dr. Reynolds arrives and goes into Jem’s room; when the doctor emerges he says that Jem’s arm is broken, and he has a bump on his head, but will be all right. Scout goes in to see her brother; the man who carried him home is in the room, but she does not recognize him. Then Heck Tate appears and tells Atticus that Bob Ewell is lying down in the street, dead, with a knife in his chest.
Scout tells them what she heard and saw, and Heck Tate shows her costume with a mark on it where a knife slashed and was stopped by the wire. When she gets to the point in the story where Jem was picked up and carried home, she turns to the man in the corner and really looks at him for the first time. He is pale, with torn clothes and a thin, pinched face and colorless eyes, and Scout realizes that it is Boo Radley.
She takes Boo–”Mr. Arthur”–down to the porch, and they sit on the swing and listen to Atticus and Heck Tate argue. Heck insists on calling the death an accident, and Atticus, thinking that Jem killed Bob Ewell, does not want his son protected. The sheriff corrects him–Boo killed Ewell, not Jem, and Boo does not need the attention of the neighborhood brought to his door. Tom Robinson died for no reason, Heck says, and now the man responsible is dead: “let the dead bury the dead.”
Scout takes Boo up to say goodnight to Jem, and then she walks him home. He goes inside his house, and she never sees him again, but for a moment she imagines the world from his perspective. Then she goes home, and finds Atticus sitting in Jem’s room, and he reads one of Jem’s books to her until she falls asleep.
Commentary
The night of the pageant is laden with foreshadowing, from the pitch darkness, to Cecil Jacobs’ attempt to scare them, to the sense of foreboding that grips Aunt Alexandra just before they leave. The pageant itself is an amusing depiction of small- town pride, as the lady in charge spends thirty-nine minutes describing the exploits of Colonel Maycomb, the town’s founder, and the reader can visualize the parade of meats and vegetables crossing the stage, with Scout, just awake, hurrying after them as the audience roars with laughter.
After this scene, the children’s walk home is taken in a mood of mounting suspense, as the noise of their pursuer is first heard and assumed to be Cecil Jacobs, only to have it rapidly become clear that they lie in mortal danger. The attack is all the more terrifying because it takes place so close to their home, in a place assumed to be safe, and because Scout (in her costume) has no idea what is happening.
Boo Radley’s entrance takes place in the thick of the scuffle, and Scout does not realize that her reclusive neighbor has saved them until she has reached home; even then she assumes him to be “some countryman.” When she finally realizes who has saved her, the childhood phantom has become a human being: “His lips parted into a timid smile, and out neighbor’s image blurred with my sudden tears. ‘Hey, Boo,’ I said.”
After Boo’s unveiling, all that remains of the story is Heck Tate’s decision to say that Bob Ewell fell on his knife, sparing Boo the horror of publicity. The title of the book and its central theme are invoked, as Scout says that exposing Boo to the public eye would “sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird.” Then she takes him home, and Atticus’ admonition to step into someone else’s shoes is also invoked, as Scout suddenly sees the world through Boo’s eyes. The novel ends here, and the reader is offered no details of Scout’s future, except that Boo is never seen again. We have a sense, however, that the story has embraced her entire childhood, and Scout thinks that they have not much more to learn, “except possibly algebra.”