Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (38 page)

The racial status of the Ewells, as victimizers and victims, is repeatedly problematized in the story. Only a “fist-sized clean space” (
TKAM
29) in a blackened face identifies Burris Ewell as white; Bob Ewell's whiteness is revealed only by a soap scrubbing (
TKAM
195); Mayella reminds Scout of a mixed-race child (
TKAM
218). Concurrently, the most explicit images of degradation, disease, and disability in the story are reserved for the Ewells. Not only is Burris Ewell “the filthiest human I had ever seen” (
TKAM
29), but his body is infected with lice, signifiers of “the parasitical nature of white freedom” (Morrison 57). The family's violent incestuousness marks its blood as dysgenically stained. Their property abuts the town's literal garbage dump and looks “like the playhouse of an insane child” (
TKAM
194). Bob Ewell on the witness stand has the appearance of a “deaf-mute” (
TKAM
198). Creating collateral damage at the site where externalized and internalized oppression meet, racism and constructions of disability collide. “One supposes,” Morrison writes, “that if Africans all had three eyes or one ear, the significance of that difference from the smaller but conquering European invaders would also have been found to have meaning” (49). Not without companion meaning is the depiction of Bob Ewell, that little rooster of a man, as a “three-legged chicken or a square egg” (
TKAM
287). The disconstructive significance of the Ewells within the larger presentation of disability in the novel is a subject to which I will return later in this inquiry.

Relentlessly engaged in field work to compile family pedigrees (largely those of poor, rural “tribes,” a term widely applied in eugenic texts and
Mockingbird
alike), eugenic researchers were most drawn, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to dysgenic white subjects like the Ewells. The biological inferiority of African Americans was already considered an irrefutable fact; a comforting conviction that pervasive social segregation and antimiscegenation laws would protect white America from black contagion made study of the latter less compelling than an inquiry into aspects of purported white degeneracy. Nicole Hahn Rafter recounts in
White Trash
that examinations of clans like the Jukes, the Ishmaels, and the Smoky Pilgrims were rife with lurid narratives of criminal, feebleminded, incestuous vagabonds who lurked throughout rural America and reproduced their kind in alarming numbers, leading to an increasingly dangerous, degenerate, and pervasive social underclass. As scientific inquiries, many of these studies were suspected at the time (and revealed with more certainty later) to be profoundly unscientific, deeply flawed methodologically, and driven by class bias—outing eugenics as an instrument of social Darwinism. The researchers effectively found what they came to find—a new model of biological determinism and scientifically constructed disability. As Rafter explains, the authors of these narratives invariably

assume that the distribution of social power can be explained in hereditarian terms. The poor are destitute, the criminal wicked, and the feeble-minded retarded owing to unfortunate heredity; conversely, members of the middle-class are thrifty, law-abiding, and intellectually superior thanks to genetic virtue. After the early twentieth century rediscovery of Mendel's laws of inheritance, the authors used this model to map social worth. In their works heritable unit charac
teristics
become codes for social hierarchy. Genetic and social worth coincided exactly. (6–7)

But in their quest to find a biological basis for human value, eugenicists did not limit themselves to investigations of the degenerate poor. They engaged in a vigorous program to educate the public about the perfectability of the species and to identify the best and brightest that the American gene pool had to offer. Fittingly, they found a popular venue to pursue both impulses at an iconic American ritual—the annual county fair. County fairs served as rural meccas of both agricultural accomplishment and popular entertainment. Along the fairs' midways, spectators could gaze at spectacles of human prowess in the selective breeding of produce and livestock, while diverting themselves at sideshows that might display examples of
lusus naturae
every bit as wondrous as three-eared Africans and three-legged chickens. And beginning in 1920 at the Kansas State Fair, spectators would witness a new sort of exhibit that combined both these traditional presentations. This exhibit staged a competition not between pumpkins or pigs, but between human families, who would submit an “Abridged Record of Family Traits” for the review of eugenically minded doctors, psychologists, and scientists. Each family was judged on its presented quality of eugenic health and vied for prized recognition, medals that proclaimed, “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.” This contest in human breeding, known as Fitter Families for Future Firesides, was the brainchild of Mary Watts and Florence Sherbon—not, as the good folks in Maycomb might have guessed, Alexandra Finch.
10

Family geography in Maycomb County is mapped by long-standing contours of ascribed social worth; the farther we stray from the center of town, the less trustworthy and valued those ascriptions become. “Fine Folks” and “Old Families” enjoy the privileges of a proper noun, landed status, and knit neighborhoods; the relatively uncapitalized “common folk” occupy more uncertain physical and cultural terrain. The “enormous and confusing tribe” (
TKAM
10) of Cunninghams live on the northern fringe of the county, where they intermingle with Coninghams and branch into honest dirt farmers, a delinquent class of “gangs,” or a hybrid of both. The Ewell “tribe” (
TKAM
147) lives beyond, near the town dump, in a degenerate, semi-human form that garners attention as both a persistent social burden and resident freak show. And on the furthest inhabited margin live the black people of Maycomb, reduced in much serious white thinking to a separate, subordinate species. Human value spreads not just horizontally along the land, but vertically along a eugenic-dysgenic axis.

The boundaries appear clear, as they usually do at first glance. In
Not Quite White
, Matt Wray suggests the uses of “boundary theory” in an examination of cultural issues like the one at play here in
Mockingbird
.
11
This theory “begins by asking how categories shape our perception of the world. . . . [T]o state that two things belong to different categories is to assert that they have nothing in common. To state that two things belong to the same category is to assert that they share a common identity” (7). Thus, the markers we place to define boundary placement “offer cognitive shortcuts . . . quick understanding without having to expend much thought” (Wray 8). Boundaries assume symbolic shape “to differentiate things that might otherwise appear similar and to render discontinuous what would otherwise be continuous” (9). Most particularly for my purpose here, he adds that “symbolic boundaries have a distinctly moral dimension.
. . . Boundaries are normative in that they are routinely used to establish basic distinctions between good and bad people, distinctions used to determine who belongs where in social space” (16).

The process of dividing and arranging population tracks not simply along socioeconomic lines in Maycomb, but more significantly (in a disconstructive reading) across a sociobiological spectrum that adheres to fundamental eugenic principles. In the eugenic worldview, “good and bad” largely signified the absence or presence of heritable defect, and the quality of trait distribution governed social outcomes. In this sense, boundary-making is a disabling cultural enterprise.

Such identity markers are repeatedly linked to heritable “tribal traits” in Scout's earliest readings of her world. The Haverfords, whom Atticus unsuccessfully defends early in his career, bear “a name synonymous with jackass” (
TKAM
5). Miss Caroline comes from Winston County and is suspected to be a carrier of the “peculiarities indigenous to that region” (
TKAM
18). Scout's own uncanny ability to read at an early age suggests to Jem that his sister is not a Finch, but a Bullfinch (
TKAM
19)—a “changeling” figure whose presence, in folklore, was intimately associated with disability and “often implied a closely related panic about neighboring peoples” (Silver 86–87).
12
Her effort to explain to Miss Caroline the behavior of Walter Cunningham—“he's a Cunningham” (
TKAM
22)—seems perfectly satisfactory to Scout; it appears equally reasonable to shame Walter at the Finch dinner table because “he ain't company, Cal, he's just a Cunningham” (
TKAM
27). Foot-washing Baptists, she learns, think “women are a sin by definition” (
TKAM
50), just as women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were widely viewed as
disabled
by definition, their “social position . . . treated as a medical problem that necessitated separate and special care” (Baynton 43).
13
Atticus appears “feeble,” his partial blindness “the tribal curse of the Finches” (
TKAM
102). Miss Dubose's verbal attack on the Finches' “moral degeneration” is an assault on “the family's mental hygiene” (
TKAM
117), both popular catchphrases in eugenic texts.

One is sorely tempted, in fact, after we have encountered Aunt Alexandra, to conclude that Scout's extreme trait consciousness—which serves, in part to create new boundaries of difference within old ones—is itself inherited. “Cold and there,” a compulsive trait monger, and high priestess of the religion known as What's Best for the Family, Alexandra bears an uncanny resemblance to Charles Benedict Davenport—a solitary, aloof man who in his role as head of the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in the first decades of the twentieth century devoted himself to the collection and interpretation of data on human pedigrees—America's high priest in the eugenic movement's mission to ensure What's Best for Mankind.

Unlike the Finches, Davenport's father traced his Anglo-Saxon roots to within twenty years of the Battle of Hastings (Black 33). Heredity and worth were inextricably linked concepts for the younger Davenport; heritable traits influenced the entire human character. “Each ‘family' will be seen to be stamped with a peculiar set of traits depending on the nature of its germ plasm,” he wrote in
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics
. In his opinion, academic achievement, professional success, political prowess, artistic creativity, insanity, epilepsy, sexual licentiousness, suicide, and criminality were all predictable narratives told by bloodline (Black 73). So too were “participation in church activities . . . interest in world events or neighborhood gossip . . . modesty,” the inclination to “hold a grudge,” as well as the capacity for “optimism, patriotism, and car[ing] for the good opinion of others” (Black 106). Davenport and his staff, between 1904 and 1917, painstakingly gathered data from American families (organized into “family trait booklets”), the record of which “proved” these assertions. In all, the Eugenics Record Office compiled over fifty thousand pages of family data and index cards on more than five hundred thousand individuals, “each card offer[ing] lines for forty personal traits” (Black 105).

Even if Alexandra's research is less exhaustive, her famous maxims for evaluating the “streaks” in Maycomb's families seem eerily similar and rooted in her own version of pseudo-science.

She never let a chance escape her to point out the shortcomings of other tribal groups to the greater glory of our own . . . the old citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another; they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That . . . (
TKAM
147, 149)
14

Alexandra's “royal prerogative” (her very name is imperial) relocates boundary-making in
Mockingbird
from outside the world of “Fine Folk” to its interior, as a kind of policing activity to enforce disabling distinctions among Maycomb's relatively privileged citizens and confine the limits of their cultural space. Born of the same belief in biological determinism that facilitates the formation of local boundaries separating races and classes, her activity shares the same viral characteristics—an attachment to a faith in stigmatized difference that is historically constructed and eugenically propelled.

But boundaries are not just formed and maintained; they may be transformed as well (Wray 14). Just as Scout learns to read against the grain of the dominant discourse surrounding Boo and Tom, she learns how unstable boundaries can be in Maycomb, the multiple ways in which they may be transgressed, and the normalizing power that is ultimately seen to attend disability.

At each margin of tribal fencing they erect and defend, Aunt Alexandra and like-minded people of Maycomb attempt to define what they are
not
as much as what they
are
in the interests of a time-honored hierarchy wobbling under the strain of economic hardship, racial tension, and uncertain personal identity. Yet, significantly, there are several examples of literal and symbolic boundaries crossed as the story progresses, most of which involve contact with a culturally (and biologically) discredited Otherness.

Fine Folks and common folks alike straddle familiar and alien spaces. Sam Levy and his family retain their privileged status though implicitly stigmatized by their Jewish identity. Dolphus Raymond lives with black people and fathers mixed children, but is not reduced to “trash” because “he owns all one side of the riverbank down there, and he's from a real old family to boot” (
TKAM
183). Calpurnia lives a double life, moving with a sense of moral command in white and black worlds alike and “having command of two languages” (
TKAM
143). Mayella Ewell violates taboo by kissing Tom Robinson. And it is one of the Cunninghams who holds out, albeit briefly, for Tom's acquittal.