To Kill a Mockingbird Summary & ending explained

Jem was almost thirteen the night his arm got broken. It mended a little crooked, so the left one hung shorter than the right, and he never cared much. Years later we argued about when it all started. I blamed the Ewells. Jem said no, it started the summer Dill turned up and wanted to see Boo Radley.

Maycomb, Alabama, in 1933 was a slow, hot, worn-out town. Nobody had any money, so nobody hurried.

We lived on the main street of houses: my father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer; Jem, four years older than me; Calpurnia, our cook, who ran the house and us with a firm hand; and me, Scout, six years old. Our mother had died when I was two. I didn't remember her enough to miss her. Jem did.

One morning a small boy was sitting in the collards next door, in Miss Rachel's garden. He was her nephew, he told us, staying the summer, from Meridian, Mississippi, and he could read. His name was Charles Baker Harris. We called him Dill.

Dill wanted to know about the house down the street. Everybody always did.

The Radley Place sat back behind a dying yard, its shutters always closed. Inside lived a man the town called Boo. As a teenager, the story went, Arthur Radley had run with a rowdy crowd, and his father had locked him in the house for good. Years later, cutting things out of the paper, he'd stabbed his father in the leg with the scissors, then calmly gone back to his clippings. Nobody had laid eyes on him since.

Jem described him for Dill: enormous, scarred, rotten-toothed, living on raw squirrels. Jem had never seen him. He was certain anyway.

"Bet you won't go touch the house," Dill said.

Jem stalled as long as he could. A Finch couldn't be called a coward, though, so in the end he raced through the gate, slapped the house with his palm, and came flying back past us, and we ran all the way home.

From our porch we turned and looked. The Radley Place sat as dead as always.

Then a shutter inside moved, just a crack, and went still.