Not the first time you've sent me to the Google dictionary! Same root as stylus, maybe?

Atticus kept us in fits that evening, gravely reading columns of print about a man
who sat on a flagpole for no discernible reason, which was reason enough for Jem
to spend the following Saturday aloft in the treehouse. Jem sat from after
breakfast until sunset and would have remained overnight had not Atticus severed
his supply lines. I had spent most of the day climbing up and down, running
errands for him, providing him with literature, nourishment and water, and was
carrying him blankets for the night when Atticus said if I paid no attention to him,
Jem would come down. Atticus was right.

A stylite is a hermit who sits on a pillar, a moderately well known pastime in the ancient world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylite

She says that Calpurnia considers Jem's talk about ghosts and spirits to be "nigger talk."

Sometimes I wonder about how teachers present this book in classes. It's very popular still, I believe, in middle schools and grades 9 and 10. I wonder about the experience of the two or three black kids in an otherwise white classroom. Do they welcome discussing the book, or might they feel singled out and uncomfortable? I don't know.

As for Calpurnia's remark, assuming that Lee is reflecting how some black people actually talked in Lee's day, what could be said to explain a black woman's use of the term for her people so pejorative today? Is Calpurnia herself prejudiced? I wonder whether young students have the perspective to be able to understand the social structure that existed in the segregated South, in which a woman like Calpurnia, restricted herself in what she could hope to become, nevertheless might grab ahold of whatever self-esteem she could, look down on others of her color, and perhaps not even consider them to be like herself. I'm imagining a world in which Calpurnia isn't even conscious of prejudice against black people; she might have once wondered about the reasons for white supremacy, but she would have come to accept that as the way the world is. Maybe?

I think it is meant to be a way of saying the notions are "low" or "ignorant" in a way that Jem will respond to. Obviously White people also had such talk, though perhaps not as much or as vigorously. Calpurnia understands that she is standing in, to some extent, for their mother, and wants to "raise them right."

I am curious, too. I have a sense that the recommended way of dealing with it is to have a discussion, attempting to put this sort of usage on the same level one might with other ethnic slurs and allowing those who are the targets to reflect on how they are affected, to create some empathy among others. But I have only heard about it third hand, never engaged in a discussion with an English teacher who confronted the matter.

I cannot imagine that Calpurnia was not aware of the social structures and the way they limited her and oppressed her kin and community. I suspect that in 1960 there would not have been any other honest way to represent such a comment.

Iand how can we get our heads around the damage done to self-esteem by a system so pervasive and violent that there was no realistic alternative to accepting it?