Maycomb, the Finches, and the Radley Place

TL;DR: The narrator opens the book by remembering Jem's broken arm, then backs into the long, sticky summer of 1933 — introducing Maycomb, her widowed lawyer father Atticus, her older brother Jem, a small visiting boy named Dill, and the closed-up gray house three doors down that the children cannot stop thinking about.

Spoilers through Chapter 1.

Chapter in one sentence

Three children dare each other up to the porch of a house no one in Maycomb has seen the inside of in fifteen years, and one of them runs up and slaps the wall.

What happens

Scout opens the book by reaching back to Jem's broken arm — the injury the rest of the novel has been about getting to. From there she pans out to Maycomb itself: a tired old town in Depression Alabama where ladies bathed by midday and were "soft teacakes" by nightfall. She sketches her father Atticus, a fifty-year-old widowed lawyer with terrible eyesight who reads on the porch in the evenings; her brother Jem, four years older; and Calpurnia, the Black housekeeper who has effectively raised them since their mother's death. Into this household, in the summer of 1933, drops Charles Baker Harris — call him Dill — who has appeared in Miss Rachel's collard patch next door for the summer. Dill is small, sharp-witted, and a born storyteller. The three children become inseparable almost immediately, and almost immediately they fixate on the Radley Place. Atticus's old neighbor Arthur "Boo" Radley is rumored to be inside the house, chained to a bed by his father after a teenage scrape with the law. The town has not seen him in years; the children have grown up on the rumors. Dill, dazzled, dares Jem to touch the wall. After three days of buildup, Jem does it — sprinting up to the house, slapping it, and running. A shutter twitches inside as they scatter.

Key moments

• The novel's frame opens with Jem's broken arm — the injury we will not get back to until Chapter 28
• The full sketch of Maycomb, the Finch household, and Calpurnia's authority
• Dill's arrival in the collard patch and his immediate enrollment in the children's pack
• The children's first inventory of Boo Radley legends — chained to the bed, eating raw squirrels, drove the scissors into his father's leg
• Jem's wall-slap and the shutter that twitches as the children scatter

Character shifts

This is establishing terrain rather than character motion, but two small things move. Jem stops being able to refuse a dare from Dill on the second day; the social order of the pack, with Dill as instigator and Jem as executor, is set. And Scout, narrating, makes one of the only adult interventions she will make for chapters: she tells us that "I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that." The argument the rest of the book quietly carries on is announced in the first paragraph.

Why it matters

The opening is doing about six things at once and is the most efficient first chapter in American fiction. It sets the narrator's voice (adult Scout looking back, with a child's perception flowing underneath); the frame (the broken arm, returned to at the end); the cast (Atticus, Jem, Scout, Calpurnia, Dill, Boo Radley by reputation); the setting (1933 Maycomb in summer light); and the moral question the whole book will keep returning to (the children's mythology about a man they have never met). The shutter that twitches on the last page of the chapter is the book's first quiet promise that there is something behind it.

Themes to notice

• Childhood mythology as the form prejudice takes before it has a name for itself
• The closed-up gray house as the visible shape of a town's quiet refusal to look
• The opening frame as a way of telling the reader: everything that follows is being told by someone who knows how it ends

Book club questions

• The novel opens with the adult Jean Louise narrating and then settles into child-Scout's perception almost immediately. Where in this chapter do you feel the two voices laid over each other?
• The children's account of Boo Radley is third- and fourth-hand gossip — none of them have seen him. Why does the book give us the legend first and the man last, instead of the other way around?
• Lee chooses to start with Maycomb's geography before her cast. What does the town as a setting teach us before any character speaks?
• Dill is introduced as a near-stranger and is, by the end of the chapter, a full member of the pack. What does the speed of his integration tell us about the children — or about Maycomb?

Visual memory hook

A gray-painted, shuttered house in the late-summer dusk. The black silhouette of a gnarled oak with a green-leaf canopy. Three small figures sprinting back into the rust-red dirt street as a single upstairs shutter twitches half open.

What's next

The summer ends, school starts, and Scout discovers that being able to read three years ahead of her grade is a problem in Miss Caroline Fisher's first-grade classroom.