5H GSAW Chapter 8

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GSAW Chapter 8

Summary

After Sunday dinner, Hank and Atticus go to a meeting at the courthouse. Jean Louise discovers a pamphlet in the living room titled “The Black Plague” bearing a drawing of an African cannibal. The pamphlet argues that black people are genetically inferior to white people and that non-white races ought to be always under the leadership of whites. Disgusted by the pamphlet, Jean Louise asks Alexandra where it came from, and Alexandra says it belongs to Atticus. Jean Louise assumes that Alexandra doesn’t know what the pamphlet says and shockingly learns that Alexandra has not only read it but agrees with it.

Jean Louise learns from her aunt that her father and Hank are active members of the Maycomb County Citizens’ Council, a group dedicated to preserving whites’ authority. Convinced that her aunt must be mistaken, Jean Louise walks into town to the council meeting currently in session at the courthouse.

She slips into the Colored balcony of the courtroom and sees Atticus and Hank in the company of men she knows to be deep-rooted racists, men she is sure her father despises. Grady O’Hanlon, a travelling speaker, begins to lecture the group on the importance of segregation. While O’Hanlon makes highly offensive statements about blacks, Jean Louise remembers a trial during her childhood when Atticus won an acquittal for a black man accused of rape. The incongruity of seeing her father and Hank now sitting in silence during O’Hanlon’s racist invective is too much for Jean Louise to bear.

Dazedly leaving the courthouse, she wanders automatically to the place where her childhood home used to stand. In its place is an ice cream shop. She purchases a dish of ice cream from the man at the window, who recognizes her although she doesn’t recognize him. He offers to give her a second helping of ice cream if she can remember him. She sits at a table in her former backyard and tries to fight back nausea.

Short questions

What is the Black Plague?

What is the Maycomb Citizen Council?

Jean Louise's old house is no longer there; it has been changed into...

1. a shop
2. an icecream parlor
3. a courthouse
4. a home for black people

Questions to discuss

Based on the discussion that Jean Louise has with her aunt, what do you think the pamphlet that she found was about? Why
would Jean Louise compare it to the work of Nazi propagandist Goebbels?

When Jean Louise finds out that Atticus and Hank are at a citizens’ council meeting, what does she initially believe they are
doing there?

What is significant about the front row of the balcony of the courthouse?

When Jean Louise is at the courthouse, she remembers Atticus once telling her: "Gentlemen, if there's ons slogan in this world I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special priviligers for none." Do you think Atticus still believes in this slogan?