Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (37 page)

Other tacks were employed. Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a prominent physician and member of Jefferson Davis' Confederate cabinet, identified “diseases” peculiar to slaves.
Dysaethesia aethiopica
, a respiratory ailment, revealed itself symptomatically in sloppy, careless labor habits and was best treated, according to Cartwright, by oiling the skin, slapping it in “with a broad leather strap,” then “put[ting] the patient to some hard kind of work” (Gould 71).
Draeptomania
, on the other hand, was a mental illness that irrationally compelled its sufferers to
run away
, caused by masters who “had made themselves too familiar with” their slaves, interfering with the African's natural desire to be subservient, as “written in the physical structure of his knees, being more flexed or bent, than any other kind of man” (Baynton 38). With the abolition of slavery, the pernicious arguments of scientific racism were restaged from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth. The potential of inferior black blood mingling with and corrupting the white race led to the passage of strict anti-miscegenation statutes in nearly two dozen states; “‘one drop of negro blood makes the negro' is no longer a theory,” warned the Anglo-Saxon Club of Virginia, “but a logically induced scientific fact” that in the absence of restrictive marriage laws threatened white supremacy (Black 166).
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Neither freedom nor education offered hope to African Americans in the eyes of those swayed by racist theories of biological determinism. Dr. John Van Evrie opined that “an ‘educated' negro, like a ‘free' negro, is a social monstrosity” (Baynton 38), whose body would be further damaged by intellectual activity. Moreover, Dr. J. F. Miller claimed that freed blacks, constitutionally unsuitable for liberty, had higher incidences of tuberculosis, mental illness, and congenital defects (Baynton 38–39).

To view the underlying nature of racism historically as a kind of disability construct is valuable in coming to a fuller understanding of “Maycomb's usual disease.” In its most extreme form, the contagion triggers an outbreak of unabashed hatred from Bob Ewell, the simmering violence of the Old Sarum mob that threatens to lynch Tom, and the sputtering, dyspeptic rage of Miss Dubose. It also infects the Missionary Circle, whose purported interest in the salvation of the Mrunas in Africa stands in stark contrast with its intolerance for black folk in its own town, as well as the hypocritical Miss Gates, who guides her class through a lesson on the evils of Nazi Germany (and its campaign to exterminate those literally and figuratively disabled) and then is overheard by Scout wishing another sort of lesson could be visited on uppity Negroes.

It is a malady from which no member of the community is truly immune, even its best citizens. Maudie bemoans the fact that there are only a “handful of people with enough humility to think, when they look at a Negro, there but for the Lord's kindness am I” (
TKAM
270), a phrase replete with the sort of degrading pity (masquerading as enlightened empathy) that is all too familiar to people with disabilities. Even Atticus himself is not without fault. His sense of history is naïve (or disingenuous) when he dismisses the Ku Klux Klan as a mere “political organization” (
TKAM
167). He is frankly paternalistic, too. According to Scout, for example, “Atticus says cheatin' a colored man is ten times worse than cheatin' a white man” (
TKAM
229); in addition, he esteems Tom for being a “quiet, respectable, humble Negro” (
TKAM
231); and he despises “a low-grade white man who'll take advantage of a Negro's ignorance” (
TKAM
252). In characterizing stereotypes about black men as “a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin” (231), he indulges in a stigmatizing metaphor that adds linguistic weight to that very stereotype. And when he chastises Scout for using the word “nigger,” he does so not because the term is hateful and degrading, but because “that's common” (
TKAM
85), a mere breach of etiquette reflecting poorly upon the speaker's social status. Given his moral stature in the novel, Atticus' parental correction is surprising for it both lacks moral force and fails to provide insight for his child; “I ain't very sure what it means,” to be a “nigger-lover” she admits later to Uncle Jack (
TKAM
98).

Which is why, perhaps, Scout
does not
stop using the word, most egregiously employing it when she asks Calpurnia why she sometimes uses “nigger-talk” (
TKAM
143). It is not just a word she must struggle to free herself from using, but the disabling representations of a collective past of which that word is token. Just as she learns to reject false community narratives about Boo (and mental illness), Scout must unlearn the burden of deeply embedded, false narratives about Tom (and race-as-biological-defect) that are also part of her legacy. And as a descendant of Simon Finch—the doctor-turned-enslaver—she must do so not simply through firsthand encounter, but by discovering a new historical model to replace the one created and sustained, in large measure, by medical men in the service of scientific racism.

The most visceral, personal experience that alters Scout's view of both race and disability is the revelation at trial of Tom's withered left arm, a cathartic event that Ato Quayson has called “disability as epiphany” (45). At one level, Tom's impairment encodes his unique status. It is a cotton gin, that critical engine of the slave economy, that disables Tom; the singular cripple brings into sharper relief the more generalized, historical damage inflicted on the black body, and vice versa, each marker signifying and fusing with the other. At a second level, Quayson notes, “the sudden disclosure of the disability is meant not to raise doubts about the moral stature of the disabled character, but to dispel them” (45). While Boo Radley attains stature by coming out at a moment of crisis and belying his purported disability, the conviction and fatal shooting of Tom Robinson after he comes out tragically clarifies for the Finch children the consequences of the community's persistent impulse to eradicate culturally discredited difference from the social body.

The other event, which moves Scout to an even broader reevaluation of racial identity, occurs before the trial when she meets Dolphus Raymond. Raymond, a white man, is reviled by most of Maycomb because, as Jem says, “he's got a colored woman and all sorts of mixed chillun” (
TKAM
183), in violation of established taboo, if not law. What puzzles Scout most is Jem's insistence that “mixed chillun” are readily identifiable, even if they appear to be black. How can Jem tell?

“You can't sometimes, not unless you know who they are. But he's half Raymond, all right.”

“But how can you
tell
?” I asked.

“I told you, Scout, you just hafta know who they are.”

“Well how do you know we ain't Negroes?”

“Uncle Jack says we really don't know . . . for all he knows we mighta
come straight out
of Ethiopia durin' the Old Testament.”

“Well if we
came out
durin' the Old Testament, it's too long ago to matter.” (
TKAM
184, my emphasis)

“The vision of the novel,” Gerald Early has argued, “is ultimately a miscegenated one” (103); put another way, it is a vision that contests the prevailing and disabling discourse about racial distinctiveness. The possibility that the Finches—or all white people, for that matter—could trace their lineage to black ancestry is more than mere revelation to Scout. It is another in a series of coming-out moments in the story, one that ultimately leads Scout to challenge the historical model of scientific racism and replace it with a new model that abolishes imputed racial difference as a rationale for human disqualification.
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Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are both figures who first appear beyond Maycomb's horizon of the normal that Scout reads into normalcy through active disconstruction of their alleged differences.
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Inoculation against one strain of Maycomb's usual disease, however, does not provide immunity against all. Scout must similarly be exposed to another insidious pathogen, the alienating tribal suppositions about kith and kin that reside comfortably and largely unchallenged in the community's core. These troubling assumptions about the nature of families found ready support from a controversial new “science” that emerged on the cusp of the twentieth century.

Eugenics, a term coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, arose as a conflicted social response to Darwin's theory of evolution. On the one hand, “the prevailing ideology—that those who achieved social dominance were biologically superior—seemed to fit remarkably well with Darwin's theory of natural selection in the animal kingdom” (Wray 69). The notion that economic hierarchies operated in accordance with natural law seemed particularly reassuring to those privileged with capital in America. On the other hand, there was a gnawing anxiety over the proliferation of prisons, hospitals, and asylums, as well as an increasing number of unconfined homeless, unemployed and impoverished people. A permanent working underclass was necessary, perhaps, for capitalism to function in optimal fashion, but a growing population of unproductive and institutionalized citizens was an onerous economic and social burden. If evolution promised improvement for humanity, its workings seemed frustratingly slow at best in such an environment, or gone terribly awry at worst.

Eugenics offered the promise of exerting human control over evolution to hasten its pace. Though Galton was neither a scientist nor a doctor (his special interest was statistics), he and those who followed in his steps developed a hypothesis with the trappings of both science and medicine. Human heredity, they theorized, did not simply play out in the transmission of physical characteristics like eye color or height. Superior blood lines, or “germ plasm” (as the biological unit of heritable transmission was popularly called), produced offspring of superior intelligence, industriousness, moral character, emotional soundness, and social fitness; conversely, inferior, “dysgenic” blood lines produced feeblemindedness, shiftlessness, delinquency, poverty, and social unfitness. As a matter of social policy, eugenicists urged, histories of families should be collected and analyzed to determine their biological fitness. Those of superior breeding might then be incentivized, or even required, to marry others with superior germ plasm; those with inferior germ plasm could be de-incentivized (or legally compelled through sterilization) from continuing their blood line, since in Galton's words, “a stop should be put to the production of families of children likely to include degenerates” (Black 18).

As a practical matter, the eugenic dream did not reach full flower until it was put to earnest use in Nazi Germany to exterminate disabled people and “degenerate” Jewish stock— what Cecil Jacobs artlessly calls “washin' all the feeble-minded” (
TKAM
280). Its application in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was less brutal, but the involuntary sterilization of seventy thousand Americans in the twentieth century (Black 398) hardly qualifies as benign.
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While the campaign to eliminate the reproductive capacity of unfit Americans spanned all regions of the country, much of its attention focused on the South, an area of the nation viewed as peculiarly diseased. And the particular situation of a young white Virginian woman, Carrie Buck, served, in the 1927 Supreme Court case of
Buck v. Bell
, as a constitutional test of involuntary, state-mandated sterilization as eugenic policy. Virginia's decision to sterilize Buck and members of her family was couched in terms of her alleged mental retardation, but was actually a more broadly targeted attack on a type of citizen deemed “socially inadequate,” those culturally located as
white trash
, who “belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South” (Wray 92).

Popular objects of derision as human refuse in antebellum literary works by authors like John Pendleton Kennedy and Daniel Hundley, white trash were pathologically characterized. In his novel
Horseshoe Robinson
(1835), for example, Kennedy called readers' attention to “the corporeal stigma marks—sinewy, distorted, asymmetrical bodies, for example—that suggested lineal degeneracy and biological inferiority were the root of the poor white trash problem” (Wray 56). Anticipating eugenic rhetoric, Hundley's sociological tract
Social Relations in Our Southern States
(1860), located trash at the lowest level of hierarchical whiteness, permanently consigned to such station as the product of tainted bloodlines (Wray 60–61), with a reputed penchant for sexual immorality in general and incest in particular. The conflation of class, disability, and hereditary defect constituted the enduring image of poor Southern whites into the twentieth century, reasserting itself most famously in the Supreme Court's decision upholding the constitutionality of Virginia's sterilization of Carrie Buck when Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Wray 93).

Inhabiting the villainous fringe of Lee's novel, “the Ewells had been the disgrace of Maycomb for three generations” (
TKAM
33). Etymologically, “ewell” trickles down from an Old English word meaning
river source
or
spring
;
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in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, the Ewells are both the wellspring of figured contamination that flows through Maycomb's social blood and among those most explicitly contaminated by its waters. In her classic examination of the cultural phenomenon of “Africanism” in white America, Toni Morrison interrogates the “disabling virus” (7) of racism, not simply for its pathological impact on black identity, but for its concomitant and consequential effects on the host body, “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it” (11).