Journal #1

Journal #1
Chapters 1-3
Perspective of Jem

A few years ago, one hot summer day, my sister Jean Louise (I call her Scout) and I were playing in our back yard when we heard a strange noise coming from. We looked over our fence into Miss Rachel Haverford's collard patch. We thought we would see puppies, since Miss Haverford's dog was expecting, but instead we saw a boy. He was very short, a little shorter than Scout, and he was sitting next to the collards looking at us. We looked back at him until he broke the silence.

"Hey," he said to us. I was excited to meet our town's new citizen. Maycomb County was not very big back then, and I knew the names of almost everybody indigenous to that area. It was nice to see a new face for a change. The boy told us his name: Charles Baker Harris, or Dill. He also threw in the fact that he could read, although Scout wasn't too impressed by this. I wouldn't blame her, Scout's been reading since she was a baby. Nevertheless, her attempts at intimidation were useless.

Judging by the boy's size, I figured he was between four and five years old. I asked him just to be sure.
"Goin' on seven," he said,"I'm little but I'm old." It irked me to hear this. You don't usually expect somebody shorter than a six-year-old girl to be that old.
As it turns out, Miss Rachel was Dill's aunt, and he was just visiting for the summer. Dill came from Meridian, Mississippi, but his family was originally from Maycomb County. His mother worked for a photographer in Meridian, but Dill said he didn't have a father.

After this first meeting, Dill, Scout, and I were together almost every day that summer. We acted out every single story we knew, and soon we became bored of playing the same roles time and time again. Then one day Dill gave us the idea of trying to make Boo Radley come out of his house.
Boo was the nickname we gave Arthur Radley, one of the two occupants of the Radley Place (the other being his brother Nathan), the old house across the street from mine. Boo Radley's life was filled with mystery, and there were lots of rumors about him flying around town. Some people said that Boo went around town at night and looked through people's windows when they were asleep. Others said that he hunts squirrels for food. I heard that when he was thirty-three years old, he was cutting up the Maycomb Tribune for his scrapbook when his father walked into the living room. When Mr. Radley walked next to his son, Arthur picked up the scissors and stabbed his father in the leg.