Editor's Choice
Why were all the Maycomb children wearing shoes the day after Halloween in To Kill a Mockingbird?
Quick answer:
The Maycomb children wore shoes the day after Halloween because they feared being identified by bloodhounds. This followed a prank where some children moved the Barber sisters' furniture into their cellar. Sheriff Tate used hounds to track the culprits, prompting all children to wear shoes to avoid detection. This incident led to organized Halloween events to prevent such pranks, influencing the novel's storyline where Scout participates in a school pageant.
Actually, this event occurred before the Halloween which is detailed most thoroughly in the novel. The dating is important to the chronology of the story.
Some children—Scout swears she was not among them, leading us to suspect that maybe she was: "I deny having taken part in such a thing," she writes— crept barefoot into the home of the maiden sisters, Misses Tutti and Frutti Barber, who were old women and hard of hearing. These children moved all the furniture in the house into the cellar. (The Barber sisters were notable as the only people in Maycomb to have a cellar.)
When Mr. Tate is called on to take action, he sends out his dogs to sniff the feet of Maycomb's children to find the culprits. This leads every child to put on shoes. This sounds like a bit of a tall tale (why would every child put on...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
shoes if only a few were guilty?) but it serves to explain to why the adults in Maycomb felt the need to regulate Halloween for the first time:
So the Maycomb ladies said things would be different this year. The high-school auditorium would be open, there would be a pageant for the grown-ups; apple-bobbing, taffy-pulling, pinning the tail on the donkey for the children. There would also be a prize of twenty-five cents for the best Halloween costume, created by the wearer.
This organizing of Halloween events leads to Scout becoming a ham for the school pageant.
In the story, some Maycomb children broke into the house of two sisters on Halloween night. The sisters were both hard of hearing, so they did not notice when the children snuck in through an unlocked door and moved all of their furniture down to the cellar. The barefooted children then left the house without being caught.
When the sisters found out what had happened the next day, they called for the sheriff. In order to find the culprits, "Mr. Tate was obliged to go ten miles out the road, round up the county hounds, and put them on the trail" (To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 27). The guilty children found out that the bloodhounds had been sent for to sniff out the culprits of the crime. They were scared and "there was not a barefooted child to be seen in Maycomb and nobody took off his shoes until the hounds were returned." The children did not want the hounds to follow the scent from their bare feet to find them. It was never officially discovered who the children were that had hid the furniture in the basement.