To Kill a Mockingbird- character/setting descriptions Flashcards
was no more than twenty-one. She had bright auburn hair, pink cheeks, and wore crimson fingernail polish. She also wore high-heeled pumps and a red-and-white-striped dress. She looked and smelled like a peppermint drop.” She was from “North Alabama, from Winston County.”
Miss Caroline
was something else again. She was all angles and bones; she was
nearsighted; she squinted; her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard. She
was always ordering me out of the kitchen, asking me why I couldn’t behave as
well as Jem when she knew he was older, and calling me home when I wasn’t
ready to come. Our battles were epic and one-sided. always won,
mainly because Atticus always took her side. She had been with us ever since Jem
was born, and I had felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember.
Calpurnia
“I’m Charles Baker Harris,” he said. “I can read.”
“Goin‘ on seven.”
Dill was from Meridian, Mississippi, was spending the summer with his aunt,
Miss Rachel, and would be spending every summer in Maycomb from now on.
His family was from Maycomb County originally,
Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair
was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but
I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and
darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the
center of his forehead.
Dill
The boy stood up. He was the filthiest human I had ever seen. His neck was dark
gray, the backs of his hands were rusty, and his fingernails were black deep into
the quick. He peered at Miss Caroline from a fist-sized clean space on his face.
No one had noticed him, probably, because Miss Caroline and I had entertained
the class most of the morning.
Burris Ewell
Miss Maudie hated her house: time spent indoors was time wasted. She was a
widow, a chameleon lady who worked in her flower beds in an old straw hat and
men’s coveralls, but after her five o’clock bath she would appear on the porch and
reign over the street in magisterial beauty.
She loved everything that grew in God’s earth, even the weeds. With one
exception. If she found a blade of nut grass in her yard it was like the Second
Battle of the Marne: she swooped down upon it with a tin tub and subjected it to
blasts from beneath with a poisonous substance she said was so powerful it’d kill
us all if we didn’t stand out of the way.
Her speech was crisp for a Maycomb County inhabitant. She called us by all our
names, and when she grinned she revealed two minute gold prongs clipped to her
eyeteeth. When I admired them and hoped I would have some eventually, she
said, “Look here.” With a click of her tongue she thrust out her bridgework, a
gesture of cordiality that cemented our friendship.
Miss Maudie
Mr. Avery boarded across the street from Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose’s house.
Besides making change in the collection plate every Sunday, Mr. Avery sat on the
porch every night until nine o’clock and sneezed.
Mr. Avery
Uncle Jack was a head shorter than Atticus; the baby of the
family, he was younger than Aunt Alexandra. He and Aunty looked alike, but
Uncle Jack made better use of his face: we were never wary of his sharp nose and
chin.
He was one of the few men of science who never terrified me, probably because
he never behaved like a doctor.
Uncle Jack
Mr. Heck Tate was the sheriff of Maycomb County. He was as tall as Atticus, but
thinner. He was long-nosed, wore boots with shiny metal eye-holes, boot pants
and a lumber jacket. His belt had a row of bullets sticking in it. He carried a heavy
rifle.
Heck Tate
Mrs. Dubose lived alone except for a Negro girl in constant attendance, two doors
up the street from us in a house with steep front steps and a dog-trot hall. She was
very old; she spent most of each day in bed and the rest of it in a wheelchair. It
was rumored that she kept a CSA pistol concealed among her numerous shawls
and wraps.
Jem and I hated her. If she was on the porch when we passed, we would be raked
by her wrathful gaze, subjected to ruthless interrogation regarding our behavior,
and given a melancholy prediction on what we would amount to when we grew
up, which was always nothing.
She was vicious. Once she heard Jem refer to our father as “Atticus” and her
reaction was apoplectic.
Mrs. Dubose
An oppressive odor met us when we crossed the threshold, an odor I had met
many times in rain-rotted gray houses where there are coal-oil lamps, water
dippers, and unbleached domestic sheets. It always made me afraid, expectant,
watchful.
In the corner of the room was a brass bed, and in the bed was Mrs. Dubose
Mrs. Dubose house
She was horrible. Her face was the color of a dirty pillowcase, and the corners of
her mouth glistened with wet, which inched like a glacier down the deep grooves
enclosing her chin. Old-age liver spots dotted her cheeks, and her pale eyes had
black pinpoint pupils. Her hands were knobby, and the cuticles were grown up
over her fingernails. Her bottom plate was not in, and her upper lip protruded;
from time to time she would draw her nether lip to her upper plate and carry her
chin with it. This made the wet move faster.
Mrs. Dubose close up
was in the Quarters outside the southern
town limits, across the old sawmill tracks. It was an ancient paint-peeled frame
building, the only church in Maycomb with a steeple and bell, called First
Purchase because it was paid for from the first earnings of freed slaves. Negroes
worshiped in it on Sundays and white men gambled in it on weekdays.
The churchyard was brick-hard clay, as was the cemetery beside it
First Purchase African M.E. Church
standing in the path behind us was a tall Negro woman. Her weight was on one
leg; she rested her left elbow in the curve of her hip, pointing at us with upturned
palm. She was bullet-headed with strange almond-shaped eyes, straight nose, and
an Indian-bow mouth. She seemed seven feet high.
Lula
was standing behind the pulpit staring the
congregation to silence. He was a short, stocky man in a black suit, black tie,
white shirt, and a gold watch-chain that glinted in the light from the frosted
windows
Reverend Sykes
was the most venerable and hideous of the county’s buildings.
Atticus said it was like something Cousin Joshua St. Clair might have designed. It
was certainly someone’s dream. Starkly out of place in a town of square-faced
stores and steep-roofed houses, the Maycomb jail was a miniature Gothic joke
one cell wide and two cells high, complete with tiny battlements and flying
buttresses. Its fantasy was heightened by its red brick facade and the thick steel
bars at its ecclesiastical windows. It stood on no lonely hill, but was wedged
between Tyndal’s Hardware Store and The Maycomb Tribune office. The jail was
Maycomb’s only conversation piece: its detractors said it looked like a Victorian
privy; its supporters said it gave the town a good solid respectable look, and no
stranger would ever suspect that it was full of niggers.
Maycomb County Jail
