Describing the day in which the trial begins, Scout
relates how the people arrive with Miss Maudie calling out to the "footwashers," and the
Idlers' Club commenting that Atticus means to actually defend Tom Robinson. As Scout
gives the spatial relationship of the jury and Judge Taylor at the bench, she remarks
upon the acumen of the venerable judge. However, there was one time when Judge Taylor
came to "a dead standstill in open court." This was the time when their was a land
controversy between the Cunninghams and the Coninghams, two families who had
intermarried for generations and had even mingled their names to just
Cunningham:
During a controversy of this character, Jeems
Cunningham testified that his mother spelled it Cunningham on deeds and things, but she
was really a Coningham, she was an uncertain speller, a seldom reader, and was given to
looking far away sometimes when she sat on the front gallery in the
evening.
Apparently, the
Cunninghams and the Coninghams are rather inbred, as they were probably distant cousins
to begin with. The mother who looks off into the distance from the porch in the
evening has probably very little going on mentally. She may, in fact, have dementia
from age, or she may have been mentally challenged from the beginning. At any rate, she
is ill-educated and of diminished intelligence.
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