Bert, the court reporter, was chain-smoking: he sat back with his feet on the table.
But the officers of the court, the ones present—Atticus, Mr. Gilmer, Judge Taylor sound asleep,
and Bert, were the only ones whose behavior seemed normal. I had never seen a packed courtroom so still.
Sometimes a baby would cry out fretfully, and a child would scurry out, but the grown people sat as if they were in church.
In the balcony, the Negroes sat and stood around us with biblical patience.
The old courthouse clock suffered its preliminary strain and struck the hour, eight deafening bongs that shook our bones.
When it bonged eleven times I was past feeling: tired from fighting sleep,
I allowed myself a short nap against Reverend Sykes’s comfortable arm and shoulder.
I jerked awake and made an honest effort to remain so, by looking down and concentrating on the heads below:
there were sixteen bald ones, fourteen men that could pass for redheads, forty heads varying between brown and black, and—
I remembered something Jem had once explained to me when he went through a brief period of psychical research:
he said if enough people—a stadium full, maybe—were to concentrate on one thing,
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