Overview

Students will review and analyze Harper Lee's descriptions of Maycomb and then review and analyze John Dollard's sociological description of a typical town in the deep South in the 1930s. Students will be asked to contrast Lee's description of Maycomb with Dollard's description of "Southerntown." Students will then use both descriptions to draw a composite map of a southern town and a southern county. Students will understand that the South was very rural during the 1930s.

Student Objectives

Students will:

• Analyze and interpret quotations
• Construct two maps that will help them understand local southern geography

Skills attained:

• Close reading of literature
• Close reading of sociological literature
• Individual analysis and understanding of place in southern literature
• Constructing maps that reflect imagined and objective realities

Materials Needed

• To Kill a Mockingbird, pp.9-10 for description of Maycomb
• John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, 1937), pp. 2-6 for a sociological description of a typical southern town.
• A Tale of Two Towns handout
• White computer paper for finished maps.

Anticipatory Set

• Write a paragraph description of the town or city where you live. Do your best to use adjectives that describe the feel of the place.
• Have students read their paragraphs to lead into a discussion of how authors attempt to capture the essence of a place and why establishing a sense of place is important, especially in southern literature.

Procedures

1. Have students read the passage that begins with, "Maycomb was an old town..." That begins on page 9 of Mockingbird.
2. Students should complete questions 1 and 2 on the handout below.
3. Discuss student responses to questions 1 and 2.
4. Introduce the selection from Dollard's Class and Caste in a Southern Town. Explain what Sociology is and how Dollard has studied several southern towns in the 1930s and is attempting to describe a composite or typical town in the Deep South in the passage that students will read.
5. Students read the passage from Dollard.
6. Students respond to question 3 on the handout.
7. Discussion of question 3.
8. Next, direct the students to begin drawing two maps as described on the handout.
9. Students should complete final sketches of the maps at home and be prepared to present them to the class at the beginning of the next class meeting.

Assessment

Questions on the handout completed correctly in complete sentences (10pts.)
Realistic and neat county map containing all of the required elements (10pts.)
Realistic and neat town map containing all of the required elements (10pts.)

Literary Connections

This assignment can be supplemented with descriptions of southern towns that can be found, for example, in William Faulkner's, The Town and in Zora Neale Hurston's descriptions of Maitland, Florida, in Dust Tracks On the Road and Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Paul Horton teaches history at Malcolm Price Laboratory School in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

"Southerntown" By John Dollard

In order to share the shock of contact with a strange situation, I should like to wipe my vision clean of the effect of wont and habit and to see Southerntown again afresh as I first visited it. It is a small town, just about large enough to qualify under the census as an urban area. It is flat as a tennis court but with a bit of a tilt, the white people living on the upper half. Should floods come, the Negro quarter would be first under water. Southerntown is bisected by a railroad, and its tracks divide people according to color, the whites living on one side and the Negroes on the other. Some exceptions to this rule occur; there are a few Negro cabins behind the homes of white persons for whom they work, and there are two Negro families with houses boldly fronting on a respectable street on the white side. A yellow bayou filled with turtlebacks curls through the town and separates the business and residential districts on the white side.

On the white side of the town the houses are, in general, commodious, well painted, shrubbed, and neat. Fans buzz in them during the summer months. They are screened and as cool as they can be in this climate. There seem to be few houses of poorer grade on the white side, and one does not in fact see many unkempt white people in the town. The streets are paved in the white area and telephone wires run through the trees. There is a cleared play-space for children around most of the houses.

The other side of the tracks, sometimes called "nigger town," yields a different picture. Here the houses are small and cheap. Walking along the street, one sees the flash of a big white bed in most of the rooms and comes later to realize that is not from choice but from necessity that most rooms must do duty as bedrooms in addition to some other function. A well-cropped lawn is a rarity, as is a well-built house. At night one sees kerosene lamps gleaming through the windows; in a few of the houses, electric bulbs. Only two paved streets traverse this area where fifteen hundred people live. In the evening groups of people sit on their front porches to keep cool, lacking the fans and electric refrigeration which are so useful in combating summer heat. Behind the houses the frequent privies testify to the fact that these people are not wholly included in our modern technology, as are those on the other side of the railroad tracks.

Another feature of life on the two sides of the tracks is immediately striking. In general the white side is quieter, especially at night; there a fewer people moving on the streets, although the number of whites and Negroes in town is about the same. A sense of discipline and order is more apparent. People are more likely to move about in cars. There is less walking, loitering, and laughing than on the Negro side. It is not true by any means that the Negroes are riotous in their behavior, but they seem to be more on foot, more in motion, and a carefree tone pervades their laughing and joking.

The small industrial section devoted to ginning cotton and pressing cottonseed is isolated at one end of the town more or less in the Negro quarter. A square block of buildings and the four streets around it make up the business district. One street has six or seven department stores, owned and run almost exclusively by Jews. The thirsty traveler may stop and honk before one of the three drugstores and receive courteous curb service, although the polite northerner is frequently a little abashed at delivering a vulgar toot to a southern white man. He gets used to it, however, and is glad to feel the cool shock of a "coke" in the throat while still sitting in his automobile. There is a small and very hot hotel with an adjoining restaurant. The number of lawyers in Southerntown is amazing until one remembers the important role of the lawyer-politician. One of the streets is lined with stores serving Negroes, though very few are owned by Negroes. A single floor of one building is reserved for the few Negro professional persons in the town.

Adjacent to the business block a domed courthouse is set in a little park-like space, a spigot for administrative services to the county, for Southerntown is the county seat. On the cool side of the building, on a summer's afternoon, a few white men lounge and talk.

Downtown of an evening, one of the streets is densely lined with cars. The center of this activity is the movie theater, white downstairs and colored in the gallery, with separate entrances. People are great moviegoers and discussers in this town. "Bank Night" in particular is memorable with the excitement of the drawing and a very bad picture to identify it. On Saturday the movie is invariably a Western picture, for then, we are told, the rural people come to town and they like "Westerns."

Saturday is by all odds the big day of the week. In the summer the stores are open all afternoon and evening (though closed on Thursday afternoons). The country Negroes mill through the streets and talk excitedly, buying, and enjoying the stimulation of the town crowds. The country whites are paler and less vivacious; there are not so many of them, but still a considerable number. "Rednecks" they are called, and their necks, it is true, are red, due to open shirts and daily exposure to the sun.

Sunday is a quiet day on the white side. Through open church windows one hears organ and choir music. The Negroes take Sunday solemnly, too, but there seems a little more activity on their side of the town.

The other days of the week are much alike during the summer; but in September the high-sided cotton wagons begin to rumble into the gin, drawn usually by poor and wiry mules. On the average day, between six and seven in the morning, a little tide of traffic laps from the Negro to the white side of town. The Negro women are going to work as maids and cooks in white houses. An hour later the white businessmen go to work, and still later their wives go out to do their shopping. The men usually come home for dinner at noon, and it is a big meal. Between two and three o'clock, in the dead heat of the afternoon, the black tide reverses itself, and the Negro women go home to get the main meal of the day for their own families. They return around five and go back home again at dusk after the whites have finished supper and the dishes are done.

If the summer is hot, expectant, and marked by steady work for both whites and Negroes, the fall is the season of intense activity. It is the time of the settlement on the plantations when the Negro cropper becomes an independent buyer. During the three fall months Southerntown does most of its retail business and lives its most exciting life. During January and February comes the dullest season, when people work in anticipation of the next cotton crop, whose cultivation polarizes all activity in this area. Then again the hopeful spring, the summer of steady work, and the exhilaration of money to spend and good business in the fall.

Summer days seem long, still, and intensely hot. Well-to-do white people--they are but a few--leave for the coast, the North, or the Carolina mountains. Occasionally thunderheads appear in the great bowl of sky above the sweeping flat lands and a sudden passionate shower falls through the bright sunlight; or a tumultuous storm lashes the sky with lightning, bends the trees, and fills the lower roads ankle-deep with water. Winter is the season of heavy rains and it does occasionally snow. The rainfall is fairly heavy, forty to fifty inches; and the growing season is long, over two hundred and ten days.

Stretching out from the town in various directions are gravel roads. Now and then, surprisingly, a few miles of concrete will appear and disappear without seeming reason unless one knows where county lines begin. Through the car windows one sees flat cotton fields, an occasional puff of woodland against the horizon, rain-blackened Negro cabins in great numbers along the road, and, in the fields, the cotton crop in some stage of its growth or decay. Huddled store buildings and gas stations appear every few miles, and here and there, but less frequently than the sentimental northerner would imagine, a plantation mansion. On a summer night after rainless weeks a mantle of dust hangs over the gravel roads, choking the driver and discouraging speed. If one feels the lure of more concentrated town life, there are cities thirty or forty miles away. If a car owner, one frequently drives there for a cold drink, a movie, or just for the ride.

John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, 1937), 2-6.

A Tale of Two Towns
Activity Handout

1. List three adjectives used to describe Maycomb. How do these adjectives attempt to capture the feel of the town? Do you think that Harper Lee successfully conveys a sense of place?



2. When is the novel set? What clues are provided to tip the reader off about when the narrative takes place?



3. Contrast the description of Dollard's "Southerntown" with Lee's description of Maycomb. How are the descriptions similar?



4. Using both descriptions, draw a composite map of the town and a map of the county on separate sheets of paper. Each map must include a compass rose, a scale, a key, and a title. You may give your town any name you wish. Your town should be located near the center of your county. Your maps must include the following elements:
   
   County Map: a river; bottom land in the river's flood plain; a railroad that runs through the town; woods, hills, and marshes; farm houses (your key should distinguish between independently owned farms and tenant farms that are not owned by the farmers who work the land); and four smaller towns.
   
   Town Map: white part of town, African-American part of town, town square with courthouse in the middle of the square, residential streets, a cotton gin and warehouse, churches, and cemeteries.


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