Saturday, June 1, 2013

What happened on Halloween night the previous year to Miss Tutti and Miss Frutti?Chapter 27 in To Kill a Mockingbird

Miss Tutti and Miss Frutti are two very minor characters in Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, their inclusion being primarily as a humorous sidebar to explain Maycomb's insistence on ending the town's "completely unorganized affair" known as Halloween.


Sarah (Tutti) and Frances (Frutti) were the eccentric Barber sisters. Both were unmarried Republicans from Northern Alabama whose "Yankee ways" included having a cellar dug under their house--the only one in all of Maycomb.



... why they wanted a cellar dug nobody knew... and they spent the rest of their lives chasing generations of children out of it.



They were also both deaf. So, on the previous Halloween, a group of Maycomb kids sneaked into the sisters' living room, took every piece of furniture, and hid it in the cellar. Added Scout,



... I deny having taken part in such a thing.



Miss Tutti was sure it was "fur sellers" who had passed through town just days before. "Syrians," she said. Sheriff Heck Tate determined it was a "local job," and rounded up the local bloodhounds to seek out the culprits. After the hounds circled the house three times and howled at the cellar door on each occasion, Sheriff Tate "finally guessed the truth."



So the Maycomb ladies said things would be different this year.


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