To Kill a Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

We lived on the main residential street in town – Atticus, Jem and I, plus Calpurnia our cook. Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment.

‘Are we poor, Atticus?’ Atticus nodded. ‘We are indeed.’ Jem’s nose wrinkled. ‘Are we as poor as the Cunninghams?’ ‘Not exactly. The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest.’

‘First of all,’ he said, ‘if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view –’ ‘Sir?’ ‘– until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’

There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one,

But I was worrying another bone. ‘Do all lawyers defend n-Negroes, Atticus?’ ‘Of course they do, Scout.’ ‘Then why did Cecil say you defended niggers? He made it sound like you were runnin’ a still.’ Atticus sighed. ‘I’m simply defending a Negro – his name’s Tom Robinson.

Aunt Alexandra’s vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year.

‘Just what I said. Grandma says it’s bad enough he lets you all run wild, but now he’s turned out a nigger-lover we’ll never be able to walk the streets of Maycomb again. He’s ruinin’ the family, that’s what he’s doin’.’

my father mused, ‘you had the right answer this afternoon, but the wrong reasons. Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time, when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it. Hot-headedness isn’t. Scout’s got to learn to keep her head and learn soon, with what’s in store for her these next few months.

anger issues addressal by Atticus for Scout .

‘It couldn’t be worse, Jack. The only thing we’ve got is a black man’s word against the Ewells’. The evidence boils down to you did, I didn’t. The jury couldn’t possibly be expected to take Tom Robinson’s word against the Ewells’ – are you acquainted with the Ewells?’

Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’

‘Your father’s right,’ she said. ‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’

he’s civilized in his heart. Marksmanship’s a gift of God, a talent – oh, you have to practise to make it perfect, but shootin’s different from playing the piano or the like. I think maybe he put his gun down when he realized that God had given him an unfair advantage over most living things. I guess he decided he wouldn’t shoot till he had to, and he had to today.’

This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience – Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.’

wanted you to see something about her – I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

protective garments that drew up her bosom to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear, and managed to suggest that Aunt Alexandra’s was once an hour-glass figure. From any angle, it was formidable.

Aunt's description ...

‘Don’t you remember me, Mr Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?’ I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.

Every town the size of Maycomb had families like the Ewells. No economic fluctuations changed their status – people like the Ewells lived as guests of the county in prosperity as well as in the depths of a depression.

Never, never, never, on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don’t already know the answer to, was a tenet I absorbed with my baby-food. Do it, and you’ll often get an answer you don’t want, an answer that might wreck your case.

‘She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable:

‘Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women – black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.

Atticus last speech before the judgement .

‘But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal – there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.

It was Miss Stephanie’s pleasure to tell us: this morning Mr Bob Ewell stopped Atticus on the post-office corner, spat in his face, and told him he’d get him if it took the rest of his life.

In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins. They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life.’

There was one odd thing, though, that I never understood: in spite of Atticus’s shortcomings as a parent, people were content to re-elect him to the state legislature that year, as usual, without opposition. I came to the conclusion that people were just peculiar.

Our company shuffled and dragged his feet, as if wearing heavy shoes. Whoever it was wore thick cotton pants; what I thought were trees rustling was the soft swish of cotton on cotton, wheek, wheek, with every step.

The chase by Ewell againts the Finch Kids .

Mr Tate found his neck and rubbed it. ‘Bob Ewell’s lyin’ on the ground under that tree down yonder with a kitchen knife stuck up under his ribs. He’s dead, Mr Finch.’

‘Mr Finch,’ Mr Tate said stolidly, ‘Bob Ewell fell on his knife. He killed himself.’

There’s a black boy dead for no reason, and the man responsible for it’s dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr Finch. Let the dead bury the dead.’

Boo and I walked up the steps to the porch. His fingers found the door knob. He gently released my hand, opened the door, went inside, and shut the door behind him. I never saw him again.

Boo radley who saves the day for the FInch kids and is an introvert and an extinct person in the county itself .

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.