First Purchase African M.E. Church

First Purchase African M.E. Church is the spiritual and social heart of Maycomb's Black community, a paint-peeled frame building with a steeple and bell that stands across the old sawmill tracks in the Quarters outside the southern town limits. Its name memorializes its origin: it was paid for from the first earnings of freed slaves, a fact that embeds the church in the history of emancipation and self-determination. On weekdays white men gamble inside it, but on Sundays it belongs to the congregation that built it. The churchyard is brick-hard clay, and the adjacent cemetery, with its crumbling tombstones, brightly colored glass, broken Coca-Cola bottles marking newer graves, lightning rods for the uneasy dead, and stumps of burned-out candles at infant graves, is described as a happy cemetery, a place where death is met with a living, communal presence.

Interior and Worship

Inside, First Purchase is unceiled and unpainted. Unlighted kerosene lamps hang on brass brackets along the walls, and pine benches serve as pews. Behind the rough oak pulpit, a faded pink silk banner proclaims "God Is Love," the church's only decoration apart from a rotogravure print of Hunt's The Light of the World. There is no piano, organ, hymn-book, or church program—none of the familiar ecclesiastical impedimenta the Finch children see every Sunday at their own church. The air is dim and cool, slowly dispelled by the gathering congregation. At each seat is a cheap cardboard fan bearing a garish Garden of Gethsemane, courtesy of Tyndal's Hardware Co. The service is led by Reverend Sykes, a short, stocky man in a black suit, black tie, white shirt, and a gold watch-chain that glints in the light from frosted windows. The congregation sings without hymn-books, using a method called "linin'," in which Zeebo, the garbage collector and Calpurnia's eldest son, reads a line and the congregation sings it back in simple harmony. The music swells around the listeners, the last syllable held to a husky hum before Zeebo meets it with the next line. The sermon is a forthright denunciation of sin, warning against heady brews, gambling, and strange women, and Reverend Sykes uses his pulpit freely to call out individual lapses from grace—Jim Hardy absent from church for five Sundays, Constance Jackson quarreling with her neighbors and erecting the only spite fence in the history of the Quarters.

The Collection for Tom Robinson

The most striking moment of the service comes when Reverend Sykes announces that the collection taken up that day and for the next three Sundays will go to Helen Robinson, Tom Robinson's wife, to help her at home while Tom is in jail. After the congregation has filed forward and dropped nickels and dimes into a black enameled coffee can, Reverend Sykes empties the can onto the table, rakes the coins into his hand, and declares that ten dollars is needed. He orders the doors shut and says nobody leaves until the amount is raised. The church grows stuffy; fans crackle, feet shuffle, tobacco-chewers are in agony. Reverend Sykes calls out individuals by name—Carlow Richardson—and asks those with no children to sacrifice one more dime. Slowly, painfully, the ten dollars is collected, and only then is the door opened. The scene reveals a community that, despite its own poverty, is willing to be locked in and sweated for one of its own, and it underscores the economic hardship that Tom Robinson's arrest has brought upon his family. Helen cannot find work because of what people say Tom has done, and even at picking time, only Mr. Link Deas is expected to take her on.

Literacy and Language

A crucial revelation of the visit is that only about four people in First Purchase can read. Calpurnia is one of them. She learned her letters from Miss Maudie Atkinson's aunt, old Miss Buford, and taught Zeebo using a page of the Bible every day and the only book she had—Blackstone's Commentaries, given to her by Scout and Jem's grandfather. This fact astonishes Jem, who realizes that Calpurnia leads a modest double life, commanding two languages: the standard English she uses at the Finch house and the Black vernacular she speaks at church and with her neighbors. When Scout asks why she talks "nigger-talk" when she knows better, Calpurnia explains that it would be out of place to talk white-folks' talk at church—folks would think she was putting on airs. "It's not necessary to tell all you know," she says. "It's not ladylike—in the second place, folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do." The explanation gives Jem and Scout their first clear glimpse of the code-switching that governs life across the color line.

Significance

First Purchase Church serves as a counterpoint to the white churches of Maycomb and to the racial hierarchy that pervades the town. It is a place where the Black community gathers not only to worship but to organize mutual aid—the collection for Helen Robinson is a direct, practical response to the injustice that has befallen Tom. The church also provides the setting for a confrontation with Lula, a woman who objects to Calpurnia bringing white children to a Black church, and for the quiet authority of Reverend Sykes, who welcomes the Finch children and later becomes a key figure in the trial. For Scout and Jem, the visit is an education in the humanity, dignity, and struggle of a community they had only glimpsed from a distance, and it deepens their understanding of the stakes of their father's defense of Tom Robinson.