What’s in it for me? A timeless study of human behavior.
Over 18 million copies of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird have been sold since the novel was first published in 1960.
In surveys of influential books, American readers regularly rank it second only to the Bible.
So why do so many people love this book?
As we’ll see in this Blink, it goes to the heart of human behavior – and morality.
There are heroes and villains, but Lee doesn’t flatten complex ethical questions.
Justice, as she portrays it, is an ongoing struggle.
Courage is a commitment to doing the right thing even when you know you don’t stand a chance.
That, in a nutshell, is the lesson Atticus Finch, the lawyer at the heart of this story, teaches his children – and us.
Part 1: Maycomb, Alabama
Maycomb was, as locals said, a one-taxi kind of town.
It was small – there really was only one taxi to bring folks to and from the railway station.
It hadn’t exactly gone to seed, but there were signs of neglect – grass-covered sidewalks and dusty roads that turned to red slop when it rained.
Not that it rained much.
Trees budded in spring and shed their leaves in the fall, but the heat was constant.
It wilted men’s starched collars and sent pearls of sweat running down ladies’ talcumed foreheads.
Its endlessness made it feel as though time moved more slowly in Maycomb than it did in other places.
The town had a grander side, too.
It was an administrative center and the seat of the county government.
Its core was made up of wide streets lined with oaks and solid buildings with stylistic pretensions.
The courthouse was perhaps the most solid and pretentious of all – it rested on giant stone pillars more suited to a Greek temple than a county court.
Maycomb had a larger number of professional people than were usually found in towns of its size.
It was the kind of place folks had teeth pulled, hearts listened to, and contracts countersigned.
Maycomb county was rural – it was a sea of cotton fields and timberland.
But the town was an island of urbanity.
Among these professional men was a lawyer named Atticus Finch.
A tall, bespectacled man of around 45, Atticus had pleasant, square-cut features and a full head of graying black hair.
He was Maycomb through and through.
His ancestor, Simon Finch, had founded the place and there weren’t many families in town to whom Atticus wasn’t related by blood or marriage.
He was a highly regarded lawyer – the best in the county at the very least.
But he didn’t like the practice of criminal law – it was, he thought, a distasteful business.
Important, but dirty work.
He’d felt that way since his first case.
Atticus had represented two brothers who’d killed the town blacksmith in a squabble over a horse.
He instructed them to plead guilty to second-degree murder – a plea that would have saved their lives.
But they said the blacksmith was a son-of-a-bitch who’d gotten what was coming to him and pled innocent.
Atticus could do no more for them except attend their execution, which he did, dutifully and distastefully.
Part 2: Scout and Jem Finch
Atticus had two children, ten-year-old Jem and six-year-old Scout.
They liked Atticus.
He played with them, read to them, and talked with them in the frank, open way he talked with everyone.
He left them to their own devices, too, trusting that Calpurnia would be on hand when they got into trouble or made trouble of their own.
Calpurnia, the sharp-witted moralist who cooked for the Finches, was more than an employee.
She’d helped raise Jem and Finch after the death of their mother five years earlier.
She was a friend to Atticus – the only real friend he had, Scout thought, which was a little odd given that white men were not usually friends with Black women.
When they played outside, Jem and Scout were to remain within earshot of Calpurnia.
They were reluctant to go further in any case.
Two houses to the north of their own was Mrs.
Dubose’s property.
A wheelchair-bound woman with dark eyes and liver-spotted cheeks who Scout calculated to be a hundred years old, Mrs.
Dubose practically lived on her porch.
Any passing child was met with a hail of insults.
Her mean streak was notorious.
Kids happily took a mile-long detour on their way to school to avoid her.
Jem and Scout gave her a wide berth.
The residence three doors to the south of the Finch house was different: it was in equal parts repellant and fascinating.
It belonged to the Radleys.
These were pious people.
Locals called them foot-washers – a nod to their creed’s emphasis on ritual bathing.
There were two kinds of people in this world, the Radleys said.
Sinners and repenters.
Theirs was a straight and narrow path through a fallen world.
Years earlier, the Radleys’ teenage boy, Arthur “Boo,” had been hauled up in front of a judge.
It was a minor misdemeanor – the worst charge was cussing in front of ladies.
But the Radleys didn’t see it that way; they saw sin and everlasting shame.
After that, Boo was confined to the house.
Really, he’d been imprisoned.
He protested; at one point, he even stabbed his father in the leg with a pair of scissors.
But he continued to be kept under lock and key.
After Mr.
Radley passed, Boo’s older brother became his warden.
The longer Boo was hidden away from the world, the more gruesome he became in Maycomb gossip.
His isolation had turned him into a monster.
He couldn’t bear sunlight anymore so he came out at night to prowl people’s yards, leer into their windows, and eat their cats.
By the age of ten, Jem had absorbed this mythology and quickly passed it on to his sister.
She listened in wide-eyed horror.
And then she wondered if it were true.
Was Boo really the bloodthirsty ogre people said he was?
There was only one way to find out.
They had to make him come out of the Radley house.
That became Jem and Scout’s new favorite game.
This was the summer of 1933.
They found a ready accomplice in Dill, a boy from Mississippi who spent the summers in Maycomb with an aunt across the street.
How could they get Boo to come out?
The first attempt saw Jem run up the path and bang on the side of the house.
Nothing.
Scout said she’d heard faint but merry laughter from behind the curtains, but the boys hadn’t noticed a thing.
The next play was to deliver a note through Boo’s bedroom window inviting him out for ice cream.
Atticus caught the trio with a fishing rod trying to do just that and told them to leave their poor old Arthur alone.
The riskiest attempt came on Dill’s last night in Maycomb.
Summer was winding down and Scout would soon join Jem at school.
This was their last chance.
They crept through the Radleys’ backyard to get a peek through a rear window.
Boo’s brother heard the rustling.
He rushed out with a double-barreled shotgun, discharging one shot into the sky and hollering that he’d aim the next one low and true.
In the scramble for safety, Jem got his trousers hooked on the Radley fence.
That was bad: if the Radleys found them, the game was up.
Jem would have to return later that night.
Scout begged him not to.
Better to face Atticus’s punishment, she said, than be ripped to pieces by Mr.
Radley’s buckshot – or Boo’s teeth.
Jem, though, was determined.
But he made an odd discovery by the fence.
There was no sign of a fearsome ogre – just his neatly folded trousers with the torn pant leg sewn back up.
Part 3: The Tom Robinson case
Scout didn’t like school or her teacher, Miss Caroline.
A young woman from the next county over, she had inflexible ideas about education.
Children, Miss Caroline thought, should learn in school, not at home with their fathers or cooks.
But it was her haughtiness Scout disliked most.
She didn’t know Maycomb’s ways and she never bothered to learn them.
When a boy from a farming family turned up without lunch, Miss Caroline insisted he borrow money.
But everyone knew that the Cunninghams didn’t borrow money!
They were too proud and they couldn't afford to pay it back anyway.
Hoping to spare the boy the humiliation of spelling this out, Scout jumped in and said as much – an act of “insolence” for which Miss Caroline punished her.
Scout complained to Atticus, but he told her she’d get on a lot better in this world if she learned to climb into other people’s skin and walk around in it for a while.
From their perspective, he said, things usually made a lot more sense.
A year back, she might have accepted that advice.
The worst part of school, though, was that it tested her faith in Atticus.
Scout’s classmates teased and prodded and poked her until she exploded and settled matters with her fists.
Not that she really understood what these children were saying; they probably didn’t understand it either.
But the sentences they recycled from conversations they’d overheard around dinner tables stung all the same.
Atticus was disgracing his family’s good name in taking this new case.
Who did he think he was defending a Black man – the words they used were instead were derogatory – who’d raped a white woman?
Atticus was going against Maycomb.
He was going against his own kind.
What did it all mean?
She asked Atticus one evening.
He sighed.
The part of the day he looked forward to most was the time after dinner when he could read in peace and quiet.
But he folded his newspaper and answered her questions.
Rape was “carnal knowledge of a female by force and without consent.
” Scout didn’t quite see what he meant, but she moved on to her next question.
Atticus said he was defending a Black man who had been accused of rape.
He was called Tom Robinson.
People were entitled to their own views about that, but he believed in the equality of all men before the law and their right to a fair trial.
Would he win the case, then?
Atticus sighed again.
No, he replied – we were licked a hundred years before this case even started.
That, though, was no reason not to see it through and try to win anyway.
Scout could see the shape of the thing Atticus was talking about.
She sensed that the harsh words she heard at school and the angry way in which townsfolk talked about her father somehow went to the heart of something big and important.
Atticus’s way of putting it was that it went to the heart of a man’s conscience.
Before a man can live with other folks, he said one evening to his brother after the children had gone to bed, he has to live with himself.
If he left Tom Robinson to his fate, he continued, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.
Scout thought she’d overheard the conversation by chance.
She’d been spying, truth be told.
Years later, she realized that Atticus had sensed her inquisitive presence behind the door and chosen his words for her ears.
At the time, she chalked it up to her father’s eccentricity.
Atticus, she and Jem regretted, wasn’t like other Maycomb men.
He didn’t hunt or fish or drink or smoke or play poker.
The more the name “Tom Robinson” was heard in town, the more cryptic he became.
When he finally relented and bought Jem and Scout the air rifles they’d been pestering him for, he refused to teach them to shoot.
Their uncle would have to do that.
All he said was that he’d rather they shot tin cans, but he knew they’d go after birds.
Fine – they could shoot as many blue jays as they could hit, but he insisted that it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Scout couldn’t remember him ever saying something was a sin.
That was foot-washer talk.
She had to ask Miss Maudie what he’d meant.
Miss Maudie lived across the street and had known Atticus since they’d been kids Scout’s age.
She put it down to the fact that mockingbirds are pleasant, innocent creatures.
They didn’t eat up people’s gardens or nest in corncribs – all they did was sing their hearts out for us.
That was why it was a sin to kill them.
Part 4: The mob
It was summer again.
Boo had been temporarily forgotten – there was too much going on.
Maycomb’s attention was fixed on the upcoming trial.
The verdict wasn’t in doubt.
It was Atticus people talked about.
They couldn’t understand his stubborn insistence on fighting the case.
Why cause so much trouble over a foregone conclusion?
Why fight friends and neighbors over the fate of a man everyone knew was guilty?
Tom Robinson was moved to the Maycomb County jail the evening before the first day of the trial.
Atticus sensed there’d be trouble and spent the night in town.
Jem had a bad feeling about that.
Scout and Dill wouldn’t let him go out alone, though, so all three of them followed him.
Spying on him from behind a large oak tree in the square, they found Atticus looking the same way he did on any other evening.
He was sitting in a chair, his spectacles on his nose, his waistcoat neatly buttoned, and a book in his lap.
As usual, he was unarmed.
The sound of approaching cars shattered the silence.
Atticus put his book down and got up.
A convoy of vehicles roared into the square and pulled up in front of the jail.
Burly men in beaten-up overalls got out.
Their leader stated their business: they were here for Tom Robinson.
Atticus said he couldn’t let them take him.
They had no issue with Atticus, came the reply, but they would be leaving with Tom Robinson.
There was no anger in the voice that had spoken the threat – it was announced in an icily matter-of-fact way.
Scout couldn’t bear the mounting tension.
She ran toward the men; Jem and Dill followed.
Atticus had been calmness personified but now a look of real fear entered his eyes.
He ordered the children home.
Scout refused to budge.
She didn’t know what to do so she started talking.
Atticus had always said it was a sound bet to talk with people about things that interested them.
Recognizing the group’s leader as Walter Cunningham, the father of the lunchless boy in her class, she did just that.
How was his son getting on?
Walter ignored her.
Scout said she’d be grateful if he could pass her regards on and tell him he was welcome to come round for dinner at the Finch residence anytime he liked.
Walter finally acknowledged her.
His face softened.
He knelt, placed his hands on Scout’s shoulders, and promised to pass on those regards.
Then he got up, waved his hand, and got into his car.
The other men followed him.
They started their engines and the convoy disappeared into the dark night just as swiftly as it had appeared.
Part 5: The trial
The entire county turned out to see the Tom Robinson trial.
Atticus told Jem and Scout to stay home, but there was no way they were going to miss the show.
Accompanied by Dill, they snuck into the courthouse and found seats on the balcony overlooking the room.
The prosecutor’s case went like this.
Tom Robinson, a Black farmhand, lived in the so-called “Negro settlement” near the town dump.
On his way to work every day, he passed the house of a white family – the Ewells.
One day, 19-year-old Mayella Ewell had been heard screaming.
Her father, Bob, came running back to the house and found Tom beating Mayella.
He chased him off and called for the sheriff, Mr.
Tate.
Tate examined Mayella, who was badly beaten around the face, and listened to her account of that afternoon.
Tom, she said, hadn’t walked by like normal; he’d seen she was alone (that wasn’t often the case given the number of children in the Ewell household) and had forced himself on her.
When she fought back, he beat her up.
Atticus’s defense of Robinson picked holes in every part of that account.
Under cross-examination, Heck Tate admitted he hadn’t called a doctor to examine Mayella.
Why not, given the severity of the injuries?
The sheriff didn’t have a good answer.
Tate also confirmed that it was the right side of Mayella’s face that was most badly bruised, suggesting that the culprit was left-handed.
When Bob Ewell took the stand, Atticus began questioning his literacy.
Offended, Bob agreed to prove he could write and signed his name on a piece of paper – with his left hand.
Then Mayella’s turn to take the stand.
Atticus asked her to repeat her account of that afternoon.
That, too, was riddled with inconsistencies.
Finally, Atticus asked Tom to stand up.
He was a tall, strong, and handsome man, but when he got up it became clear that he was disabled: his left arm was severely shortened and hung limply at his side, the result of an accident with a threshing machine many years earlier.
What did Tom have to say?
Mayella knew him well, he said, and not just from sight as she claimed.
When he passed her house, she always had little tasks for him – hanging a door on new hinges or busting up old furniture for firewood.
He never took money for those jobs; he did them because he figured Mayella was lonely.
One day she asked him to kiss her.
He refused.
When Bob Ewell came back, he didn’t know what to do so he ran away.
He had never laid a finger on Mayella.
Neither Tom nor Atticus said it aloud, but it was clear that they both believed Bob Ewell had beaten his own daughter black and blue.
Part 6: The verdict
There was, Atticus concluded, no corroborative evidence to support the case against Tom Robinson.
Mayella Ewell had lied to cover her own shame over the failed seduction of a Black man.
Bob Ewell had lied in an attempt to preserve what little credibility his family had left.
Worse, they had both displayed a cynical confidence that their lies would be accepted because of the color of their skin.
The law, though, doesn’t distinguish between black and white.
He knew the jury was made up of reasonable men and he trusted they would do the only reasonable thing: they would acquit Tom Robinson.
But when the jury finally returned after hours of deliberation, it had reached the verdict that Atticus had known was all but inevitable: it found the defendant guilty.
It was an ugly fact of life, he said to Jem and Scout after the trial, that a white man’s word will always beat a Black man’s word in a Southern court.
Reasonable men lost their heads when it came to that deep-seated prejudice against men with darker skin than themselves.
But there was a silver lining.
It had taken the jury hours to reach that verdict; Atticus had expected it to take minutes.
That was progress – the jury had obviously found it hard to be unreasonable.
And it also meant that Tom Robinson had a good chance at an appeal.
Scout and Jem didn’t share their father’s optimism.
They had grown up thinking that Maycomb folks were the best in the world and now something rotten had suddenly hatched from the town like a caterpillar from a cocoon.
Miss Maudie tried to reassure them.
Maycomb folks, she said, were the safest people in the world: they were so rarely called on to be Christians that they struggled in moments like these.
That’s why they had to call on a man like Atticus to do the right thing for them.
It wasn’t by chance, she added, that Atticus, not some junior lawyer from out of town, was chosen to represent Tom Robinson.
Deep down, Maycomb folk knew what was right and what was wrong; they just had a hard time getting there.
Jem and Scout weren’t convinced by that either.
As Jem said, it was getting easier to understand why Boo never came out – it was much nicer inside than it was out here.
Part 7: Boo comes out
Tom Robinson never got an appeal.
He didn’t trust a white jury to do the right thing so he decided his own fate: he ran at the prison wall and started climbing.
He almost made it, too – the guards who shot him down said he would have if it hadn’t been for his left arm.
An editorial in a liberal local paper said it was a death as senseless as the slaughtering of songbirds.
Life in Maycomb returned to normal.
Most people were happy to forget the trial.
As Miss Maudie said, it hadn’t been Maycomb’s proudest moment.
One person couldn’t let go of it, though – Bob Ewell.
When he finally bumped into Atticus in the post office, he spat in his face and swore that he’d have his revenge on the lawyer.
Atticus brushed it off.
He’d destroyed whatever credibility Ewell had left at the trial.
Spitting and making threats was what men of his kind did to restore a little pride.
Chances are, if Ewell hadn’t run into Atticus that day, he’d have taken his anger out on poor Mayella.
Atticus was a shrewd judge of character, but he was wrong about Ewell.
He really was set on revenge.
He got his chance that fall.
It was Halloween and Jem and Scout were walking home from the school pageant.
As they were crossing the dark schoolyard next the Radley house, someone suddenly leapt on Scout.
She felt a crushing force on her chest and she heard Jem shouting.
Everything went black.
When she came to, she was at home.
Atticus and the sheriff were there; so was the doctor.
And another man – a man Scout had never seen before but whom she now recognized.
It was Boo.
Scout watched in a daze as the doctor carried Jem upstairs.
It must have been minutes later, but it felt like seconds.
The doctor came back down the stairs and said Jem had broken his arm but would recover just fine.
He left.
Then Atticus and the sheriff were talking.
Ewell was dead –he was still in the schoolyard with a knife in his back.
Atticus said it must have been Jem who stabbed him.
The sheriff sniffed.
As far he was concerned Ewell had fallen on his own knife.
Atticus thanked him for what he was trying to do but he couldn’t go alonge with it.
The truth must out.
He’d always believed that – the sheriff knew that.
He didn’t want Jem growing up with a rumor going round town that he’d killed Bob Ewell and gotten away with it because his daddy was a lawyer who was friends with the sheriff.
The sheriff looked at Atticus long and hard.
It was the only time, he said, that he could remember Atticus putting two and two together and failing to get four.
It wasn’t Jem he was trying to protect – it was Boo.
Jem hadn’t stabbed Ewell – it was Boo who’d heard the scuffle and come running out of the house with a kitchen knife in his hands.
He had saved Jem and Scout.
Atticus could raise hell about it and insist on the truth coming out, but the sheriff would call him a liar to his face in court if he needed to.
Tom Robinson was dead for no reason, and now the man responsible for that was dead too; it was time to let the dead bury the dead.
To drag a shy man like Boo Radley into the limelight and expose him to all of Maycomb’s prying eyes and gossip would destroy him.
He wasn’t a good man, the sheriff said, but that was a sin he wouldn't have on his head.
There was nothing more to add, so he wished the Finches and Boo a good night.
Atticus sat down and stared at the wisteria growing up the porch for a long time.
Finally, he turned to Scout.
Did she understand it all?
Scout thought Atticus looked like he needed cheering up so she ran over and hugged him.
She figured she did understand it, she said.
Mr.
Tate was right – his way of telling the story was the best way.
Atticus wanted to know why she thought so.
Well, she replied, it would be like shooting a mockingbird to tell it the other way, wouldn’t it?
Atticus put his face in her hair for a while.
When he got up again, his step was lighter.
Before going into the house, he stopped in front of Boo.
“Thank you for my children, Arthur,” he said.
Final Summary
Doing the right thing is a matter of conviction.
It’s an intensely personal thing.
If we want to live with others, Atticus Finch reminds us, we have to first learn to live with ourselves.
That, often enough, means going against the consensus of a community.
The people who do that may not be thanked for it, but they represent the best version of that community and its conscience.