The September Sisters by Jillian Cantor

Author:Jillian Cantor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061972102
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 16

IT SNOWED SIX more times between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and by Christmas break we had ended up using a total of five snow days, which was almost our district’s whole allotment for the entire school year.

After the day when Harry told us about the police not searching the field anymore till spring, the snow began to depress me. If Becky’s body really was buried in Morrow’s field the way the police thought, I knew the ground there must be terribly cold, and I wondered if she could feel it, if she knew cold the way neither one of us had known it before. This made me so sad; I couldn’t bear to watch the snow fall anymore, and I ended up spending most of the days off up in my room, reading the second half of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Despite my own miserable failure with Mr. Barnesworth, I began to like the book as I read more. In particular, I was affected by Tom Robinson, the black man who gets convicted for a crime he didn’t commit just because he was black. As I read, I thought about Tommy and how my mother had commented on his race and how James Harper had called him Brownie on his first day of school. It made me sad for him.

One snowy day, as I was reading and I’d just gotten to the part where Tom gets convicted, I told my mother about what was going on in the book. We were lying in the living room together. She was reading a book that her doctor had suggested during therapy, something about grieving, when she looked up and asked me how my book was.

“It’s good,” I said. “It really is.” And I meant it. I really felt for Scout, for the way the adults didn’t understand her. “It’s kind of like a mystery,” I told her. And then I told her all about the whole case, about how Mayella Ewell was raped and everyone thought Tom did it just because he was black. “Even though Scout’s father proved at the trial that it would’ve been impossible for Tom to be the rapist, the jury still just convicted him,” I told her.

“Well, that’s terrible,” my mother said. “That’s just a shame.”

I was surprised by her response. I’d pictured my mother as one of those members of the jury who might deliberate and say, Well, jeez, the evidence does make it look like he’s innocent, but still, look at him, he’s b-l-a-c-k. “I thought you didn’t like black people,” I said.

“Abby, what are you talking about? Why would you say that?”

“Well, the way you talked about Tommy’s father, I thought—”

“What a terrible thing to say. Do you really hate me that much?”

I didn’t hate her at all, but I was trying to understand her, and I realized I had failed horribly, that I’d suddenly turned our quiet relationship into something ugly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You think you’re so smart,” she said.

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