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Valparaiso Speech Tournament
Discussion Artifacts - Word
VHS 2015 Home Speech Meet Discussion Artifacts
Profiles in Courage
Artifact 1: To Kill a Mockingbird passage excerpted from the online version found at kobobook.net including portions of pages 4250.
Artifact 2: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/parisians-use-porteauverte-to-offer-each-other-shelter-after-attacks/
Artifact 3: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175887
Artifact 4: "A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality." [p.266]
Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage. Memorial ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Print.
Artifact 1: Excerpt from “To Kill a Mockingbird”
In Harper Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Jem and Scout know their father, Atticus Finch as a
calm, thoughtful man who generally disapproves of guns—a lawyer who is defending a black man
accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town in the 1930s, despite the backlash this
draws from much of the white community.
In chapter 10 when Jem and Scout see a rabid dog roaming the neighborhood, they are surprised
when the sheriff comes to their house and asks Atticus to shoot the dog. Their confusions grows
when they learn that their father is apparently widely known in the community as an expert
marksman, as this seems to be at odds with the rest of what they know of their father. Their
neighbor, Miss Maudie, explains:
“If your father’s anything, he’s civilized in his heart. Marksmanship’s a gift of God,
a talent—oh, you have to practice to make it perfect, but shootin’s different from
playing the piano or the like. I think maybe he put his gun down when he realized
that God had given him an unfair advantage over most living things. I guess he
decided he wouldn’t shoot till he had to, and he had to today.”
Shortly thereafter, Jem and Scout have a runin with an old, reclusive, and unpleasant neighbor,
Mrs. Dubose, who, though sickly and wheelchairbound, never seems to lack the energy to insult
them whenever she sees them. On this occasion, she rants about how Atticus is “in the
courthouse lawing for niggers”. When she sees that she has struck a nerve, she continues, yelling
that their father is “no better than the niggers and trash he works for!” This so infuriates Jem that
later that day, when he sees Mrs. Dubose is not on her porch, he runs into her yard and cuts the
flowers off all of her camellia bushes.
When Atticus finds out, he has a conversation with Jem:
“Why’d you do it?”
Jem said softly, “She said you lawed for niggers and trash.”
“You did this because she said that?”
Jem’s lips moved, but his “Yes sir” was inaudible.
“Son, I have no doubt that you’ve been annoyed by your
contemporaries about me lawing for niggers, as you say, but to do
something like this to a sick old lady is inexcusable. I strongly
advise you to go down and have a talk with Mrs. Dubose,” said
Atticus. “Come straight home afterward.”
As a consequence, Jem goes to apologize to Mrs. Dubose, while Atticus has a conversation with
Scout:
“Scout,” said Atticus, “when summer comes you’ll have to keep your head about
far worse things . . . it’s not fair for you and Jem, I know that, but sometimes we
have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips
are down—well, all I can say is, when you and Jem are grown, maybe you’ll look
back on this with some compassion and some feeling that I didn’t let you down.
This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to the essence of a man’s
conscience—Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help
that man.”
“Atticus, you must be wrong. . . .”
“How’s that?”
“Well, most folks seem to think they’re right and you’re wrong. . . .”
“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their
opinions,” said Atticus, “but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with
myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
When Jem returned, he found me still in Atticus’s lap. “Well, son?” said Atticus.
He set me on my feet, and I made a secret reconnaissance of Jem. He seemed to be
all in one piece, but he had a queer look on his face. Perhaps she had given him a
dose of calomel.
“I cleaned it up for her and said I was sorry, but I ain’t, and that I’d work on ’em
ever Saturday and try to make ’em grow back out.”
“There was no point in saying you were sorry if you aren’t,” said Atticus. “Jem,
she’s old and ill. You can’t hold her responsible for what she says and does. Of
course, I’d rather she’d have said it to me than to either of you, but we can’t always
have our ’druthers.”
Jem returns and reveals that part of his pennance is going to read to Mrs. Dubose for a month.
Scout decides to join her brother and their experience is as follows:
The following Monday afternoon Jem and I climbed the steep front steps to Mrs.
Dubose’s house and padded down the open hallway. Jem, armed with Ivanhoe and
full of superior knowledge, knocked at the second door on the left.
“Mrs. Dubose?” he called.
Jessie opened the wood door and unlatched the screen door.
“Is that you, Jem Finch?” she said. “You got your sister with you. I don’t know—”
“Let ’em both in, Jessie,” said Mrs. Dubose. Jessie admitted us and went off to the
kitchen.
An oppressive odor met us when we crossed the threshold, an odor I had met many
times in rainrotted gray houses where there are coaloil lamps, water dippers, and
unbleached domestic sheets. It always made me afraid, expectant, watchful.
In the corner of the room was a brass bed, and in the bed was Mrs. Dubose. I
wondered if Jem’s activities had put her there, and for a moment I felt sorry for her.
She was lying under a pile of quilts and looked almost friendly.
There was a marbletopped washstand by her bed; on it were a glass with a
teaspoon in it, a red ear syringe, a box of absorbent cotton, and a steel alarm clock
standing on three tiny legs.
“So you brought that dirty little sister of yours, did you?” was her greeting.
Jem said quietly, “My sister ain’t dirty and I ain’t scared of you,” although I noticed
his knees shaking.
I was expecting a tirade, but all she said was, “You may commence reading,
Jeremy.”
Jem sat down in a canebottom chair and opened Ivanhoe. I pulled up another one
and sat beside him.
“Come closer,” said Mrs. Dubose. “Come to the side of the bed.”
We moved our chairs forward. This was the nearest I had ever been to her, and the
thing I wanted most to do was move my chair back again.
She was horrible. Her face was the color of a dirty pillowcase, and the corners of
her mouth glistened with wet, which inched like a glacier down the deep grooves
enclosing her chin. Oldage liver spots dotted her cheeks, and her pale eyes had
black pinpoint pupils. Her hands were knobby, and the cuticles were grown up over
her fingernails. Her bottom plate was not in, and her upper lip protruded; from time
to time she would draw her nether lip to her upper plate and carry her chin with it.
This made the wet move faster.
I didn’t look any more than I had to. Jem reopened Ivanhoe and began reading. I
tried to keep up with him, but he read too fast. When Jem came to a word he didn’t
know, he skipped it, but Mrs. Dubose would catch him and make him spell it out.
Jem read for perhaps twenty minutes, during which time I looked at the sootstained
mantelpiece, out the window, anywhere to keep from looking at her. As he read
along, I noticed that Mrs. Dubose’s corrections grew fewer and farther between,
that Jem had even left one sentence dangling in midair. She was not listening.
I looked toward the bed.
Something had happened to her. She lay on her back, with the quilts up to her chin.
Only her head and shoulders were visible. Her head moved slowly from side to
side. From time to time she would open her mouth wide, and I could see her tongue
undulate faintly. Cords of saliva would collect on her lips; she would draw them in,
then open her mouth again. Her mouth seemed to have a private existence of its
own. It worked separate and apart from the rest of her, out and in, like a clam hole
at low tide. Occasionally it would say, “Pt,” like some vicious substance coming to
a boil.
I pulled Jem’s sleeve.
He looked at me, then at the bed. Her head made its regular sweep toward us, and
Jem said, “Mrs. Dubose, are you all right?” She did not hear him.
The alarm clock went off and scared us stiff. A minute later, nerves still tingling,
Jem and I were on the sidewalk headed for home. We did not run away, Jessie sent
us: before the clock wound down she was in the room pushing Jim and me out of it.
“Shoo,” she said, “you all go home.”
Jem hesitated at the door.
“It’s time for her medicine,” Jessie said. As the door swung shut behind us I saw
Jessie walking quickly toward Mrs. Dubose’s bed.
It was only three fortyfive when we got home, so Jem and I dropkicked in the
back yard until it was time to meet Atticus. Atticus had two yellow pencils for me
and a football magazine for Jem, which I suppose was a silent reward for our first
day’s session with Mrs. Dubose. Jem told him what happened.
“Did she frighten you?” asked Atticus.
“No sir,” said Jem, “but she’s so nasty. She has fits or somethin’. She spits a lot.”
“She can’t help that. When people are sick they don’t look nice sometimes.”
“She scared me,” I said.
Atticus looked at me over his glasses. “You don’t have to go with Jem, you know.”
The next afternoon at Mrs. Dubose’s was the same as the first, and so was the next,
until gradually a pattern emerged: everything would begin normally—that is, Mrs.
Dubose would hound Jem for a while on her favorite subjects, her camellias and our
father’s niggerloving propensities; she would grow increasingly silent, then go
away from us. The alarm clock would ring, Jessie would shoo us out, and the rest of
the day was ours.
“Atticus,” I said one evening, “what exactly is a niggerlover?”
Atticus’s face was grave. “Has somebody been calling you that?”
“No sir, Mrs. Dubose calls you that. She warms up every afternoon calling you that.
Francis called me that last Christmas, that’s where I first heard it.”
“Is that the reason you jumped on him?” asked Atticus.
“Yes sir . . .”
“Then why are you asking me what it means?”
I tried to explain to Atticus that it wasn’t so much what Francis said that had
infuriated me as the way he had said it. “It was like he’d said snotnose or
somethin’.”
“Scout,” said Atticus, “niggerlover is just one of those terms that don’t mean
anything—like snotnose. It’s hard to explain—ignorant, trashy people use it when
they think somebody’s favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It’s slipped
into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term
to label somebody.”
“You aren’t really a niggerlover, then, are you?”
“I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody . . . I’m hard put, sometimes—baby,
it’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows
you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you. So don’t let Mrs. Dubose get you
down. She has enough troubles of her own.”
One afternoon a month later Jem was ploughing his way through Sir Walter Scout,
as Jem called him, and Mrs. Dubose was correcting him at every turn, when there
was a knock on the door. “Come in!” she screamed.
Atticus came in. He went to the bed and took Mrs. Dubose’s hand. “I was coming
from the office and didn’t see the children,” he said. “I thought they might still be
here.”
Mrs. Dubose smiled at him. For the life of me I could not figure out how she could
bring herself to speak to him when she seemed to hate him so. “Do you know what
time it is, Atticus?” she said. “Exactly fourteen minutes past five. The alarm clock’s
set for fivethirty. I want you to know that.”
It suddenly came to me that each day we had been staying a little longer at Mrs.
Dubose’s, that the alarm clock went off a few minutes later every day, and that she
was well into one of her fits by the time it sounded. Today she had antagonized Jem
for nearly two hours with no intention of having a fit, and I felt hopelessly trapped.
The alarm clock was the signal for our release; if one day it did not ring, what
would we do?
“I have a feeling that Jem’s reading days are numbered,” said Atticus.
“Only a week longer, I think,” she said, “just to make sure . . .”
Jem rose. “But—”
Atticus put out his hand and Jem was silent. On the way home, Jem said he had to
do it just for a month and the month was up and it wasn’t fair.
“Just one more week, son,” said Atticus.
“No,” said Jem.
“Yes,” said Atticus.
The following week found us back at Mrs. Dubose’s. The alarm clock had ceased
sounding, but Mrs. Dubose would release us with, “That’ll do,” so late in the
afternoon Atticus would be home reading the paper when we returned. Although
her fits had passed off, she was in every other way her old self: when Sir Walter
Scott became involved in lengthy descriptions of moats and castles, Mrs. Dubose
would become bored and pick on us:
“Jeremy Finch, I told you you’d live to regret tearing up my camellias. You regret it
now, don’t you?”
Jem would say he certainly did.
“Thought you could kill my SnowontheMountain, did you? Well, Jessie says the
top’s growing back out. Next time you’ll know how to do it right, won’t you?
You’ll pull it up by the roots, won’t you?”
Jem would say he certainly would.
“Don’t you mutter at me, boy! You hold up your head and say yes ma’am. Don’t
guess you feel like holding it up, though, with your father what he is.”
Jem’s chin would come up, and he would gaze at Mrs. Dubose with a face devoid
of resentment. Through the weeks he had cultivated an expression of polite and
detached interest, which he would present to her in answer to her most blood-
curdling inventions.
At last the day came. When Mrs. Dubose said, “That’ll do,” one afternoon, she
added, “And that’s all. Goodday to you.”
It was over. We bounded down the sidewalk on a spree of sheer relief, leaping and
howling.
That spring was a good one: the days grew longer and gave us more playing time.
Jem’s mind was occupied mostly with the vital statistics of every college football
player in the nation. Every night Atticus would read us the sports pages of the
newspapers. Alabama might go to the Rose Bowl again this year, judging from its
prospects, not one of whose names we could pronounce. Atticus was in the middle
of Windy Seaton’s column one evening when the telephone rang.
He answered it, then went to the hat rack in the hall. “I’m going down to Mrs.
Dubose’s for a while,” he said. “I won’t be long.”
But Atticus stayed away until long past my bedtime. When he returned he was
carrying a candy box. Atticus sat down in the livingroom and put the box on the
floor beside his chair.
“What’d she want?” asked Jem.
We had not seen Mrs. Dubose for over a month. She was never on the porch any
more when we passed.
“She’s dead, son,” said Atticus. “She died a few minutes ago.”
“Oh,” said Jem. “Well.”
“Well is right,” said Atticus. “She’s not suffering any more. She was sick for a long
time. Son, didn’t you know what her fits were?”
Jem shook his head.
“Mrs. Dubose was a morphine addict,” said Atticus. “She took it as a painkiller for
years. The doctor put her on it. She’d have spent the rest of her life on it and died
without so much agony, but she was too contrary—”
“Sir?” said Jem.
Atticus said, “Just before your escapade she called me to make her will. Dr.
Reynolds told her she had only a few months left. Her business affairs were in
perfect order but she said, ‘There’s still one thing out of order.’ ”
“What was that?” Jem was perplexed.
“She said she was going to leave this world beholden to nothing and nobody. Jem,
when you’re sick as she was, it’s all right to take anything to make it easier, but it
wasn’t all right for her. She said she meant to break herself of it before she died,
and that’s what she did.”
Jem said, “You mean that’s what her fits were?”
“Yes, that’s what they were. Most of the time you were reading to her I doubt if she
heard a word you said. Her whole mind and body were concentrated on that alarm
clock. If you hadn’t fallen into her hands, I’d have made you go read to her anyway.
It may have been some distraction. There was another reason—”
“Did she die free?” asked Jem.
“As the mountain air,” said Atticus. “She was conscious to the last, almost.
Conscious,” he smiled, “and cantankerous. She still disapproved heartily of my
doings, and said I’d probably spend the rest of my life bailing you out of jail. She
had Jessie fix you this box—”
Atticus reached down and picked up the candy box. He handed it to Jem.
Jem opened the box. Inside, surrounded by wads of damp cotton, was a white,
waxy, perfect camellia. It was a SnowontheMountain.
Jem’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Old helldevil, old helldevil!” he
screamed, flinging it down. “Why can’t she leave me alone?”
In a flash Atticus was up and standing over him. Jem buried his face in Atticus’s
shirt front. “Shh,” he said. “I think that was her way of telling you—everything’s
all right now, Jem, everything’s all right. You know, she was a great lady.”
“A lady?” Jem raised his head. His face was scarlet. “After all those things she said
about you, a lady?”
“She was. She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe . .
son, I told you that if you hadn’t lost your head I’d have made you go read to her. I
wanted you to see something about her—I wanted you to see what real courage is,
instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when
you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it
through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won,
all ninetyeight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing
and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
Jem picked up the candy box and threw it in the fire. He picked up the camellia,and
when I went off to bed I saw him fingering the wide petals. Atticus was reading the
paper.
Artifact 3: The New Colossus
By Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our seawashed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beaconhand
Glows worldwide welcome; her mild eyes command
The airbridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempesttost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
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