matching tracksuits

Students today finished working on the enigmatic twenty-fourth chapter of Mockingbird, which includes this passage that stumps all the kids every year:

Mrs. Merriweather nodded wisely. Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties. “Gertrude,” she said, “I tell you there are some good but misguided people in this town. Good, but misguided. Folks in this town who think they’re doing right, I mean. Now far be it from me to say who, but some of ‘em in this town thought they were doing the right thing a while back, but all they did was stir ’em up. That’s all they did. Might’ve looked like the right thing to do at the time, I’m sure I don’t know, I’m not read in that field, but sulky… dissatisfied… I tell you if my Sophy’d kept it up another day I’d have let her go. It’s never entered that [head] of hers that the only reason I keep her is because this depression’s on and she needs her dollar and a quarter every week she can get it.”

“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”

That last line — “His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?” — always leaves students flummoxed, and this year was no exception.

What makes this passage so tricky is the intentional pronoun/antecedent that those in the conversation are employing. Like good, genteel Southern ladies, they can’t be said to be gossiping since they’re not naming names, and no true lady would gossip. But that is of course what they’re doing, and though they’re not using anyone’s name,

Few chapters are as initially bewildering as the tea party scene in chapter 24 of Mockingbird. It makes little sense because the women are all intentionally being somewhat obtuse, and while they all understand what they’re talking about, Scout is completely lost — as are most of the students.

Our first task was to break it into manageable sections. Afterward, we focused on chunk 1, which is about some previously unknown character named J. Grimes Everett and someone or something known as “those poor Mrunas.”

It’s all a mystery to them, and they work through it meticulously, discovering things here and there with me walking around offering a bit of guidance.

“Mrs. Merriweather says, ‘Not a white person’ll go near ’em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.’ What is the antecedent of ’em in that sentence?” I ask one group.

“Mrs. Merriweather says, ‘Not a white person’ll go near ’em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.’ What two important inferences can we make from this statement?” I ask another group.

We’ll finish up the work tomorrow.