To Kill a Mockingbird: where Maycomb draws its lines

Maycomb is a town that sorts people. Before a single crime has been committed, everybody in it already knows where everybody else belongs: which families are ‘fine’, which are trash, who sits upstairs in the courthouse, and who sits downstairs. To Kill a Mockingbird is, among other things, a novel about those lines, who draws them, who polices them, and what it costs a person to step across one.

It is worth remembering who is telling us all this. The voice is Scout Finch’s, but it is Scout grown up, looking back on three years of her childhood in the 1930s. That double perspective is the novel’s first division, and one of its most useful: the child sees what happens, the adult understands what it meant, and the gap between the two is where much of the book’s irony lives.

A town that sorts people

The most obvious line in Maycomb is race, and the novel never lets us forget it. But Lee is careful to show that it is not the only one. Aunt Alexandra arrives with a theory of ‘background’, a belief that families carry fixed qualities down the generations, and she wants Scout to behave like a Finch. The Cunninghams are poor but proud; the Ewells live behind the town dump and are despised by nearly everybody. Jem, trying to make sense of it all, works out a whole ranking of Maycomb’s ‘kinds of folks’.

Scout’s answer is one of the quiet turning points of the novel:

Naw, Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird

It is a child’s answer, and Jem is not convinced by it. If there is only one kind of folks, he asks, why can’t they get along with each other? The novel does not answer him. That is the point. Scout has found the moral truth; the town has not, and the rest of the book shows what happens in the space between.

The courtroom, and the balcony

The trial of Tom Robinson is where every line in Maycomb becomes visible at once, and Lee stages it almost architecturally. White spectators fill the floor of the courtroom; Black spectators are confined to the balcony. Jem, Scout, and Dill, arriving late, end up watching the trial from the balcony beside Reverend Sykes. Without quite meaning to, the children have crossed the line the adults keep, and they see the trial from the side of it that the town ignores.

The evidence itself is a study in how little facts can do against a line that is already drawn. Mayella Ewell’s injuries are on the right side of her face, which points to a left-handed attacker. Tom Robinson’s left arm was crippled in an accident years before; Bob Ewell, as Atticus quietly establishes, is left-handed. The jury convicts Tom anyway. As Atticus tells his children afterwards, the verdict was decided long before anybody spoke.

Atticus’s own principle is set out earlier, when Scout asks why he is defending Tom when most of Maycomb thinks he is wrong:

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Atticus Finch

Divisions inside people, not just between them

Some of the most interesting characters in the novel carry the division inside themselves. Calpurnia speaks one way in the Finch kitchen and another at First Purchase church, and when Scout asks her why, she explains that she lives two lives. Dolphus Raymond lets the town believe he is a drunk, carrying Coca-Cola in a paper bag, because it gives Maycomb a reason it can accept for the way he chooses to live. Mrs Dubose, cruel and frightening to the children, is fighting a private battle with addiction that Atticus calls a kind of courage.

Each of them shows the same thing from a different angle: the lines Maycomb draws are so strong that people have to divide themselves in order to live with them.

Boo Radley: the division the children invent

Not every line in the novel is drawn by the adults. The children build one of their own around Boo Radley, the neighbour nobody sees, and fill the space behind it with gossip and horror stories. Much of the first half of the book is their game of daring each other up to the Radley house.

The novel’s great lesson on this is Atticus’s, given in the first chapters and repeated, in effect, at the very end:

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

Atticus Finch

In the final chapter Scout walks Boo home and stands on the Radley porch, and for the first time she sees the street as he must have seen it for years: the children playing, the seasons turning, the whole of the story we have just read. It is the literal version of Atticus’s advice. She has climbed into his skin. When the sheriff decides to protect Boo from the attention of the town, Scout understands why without being told: exposing him would be, as she puts it, sort of like shooting a mockingbird.

The mockingbird

The title’s image joins all of this together. When the children are given air rifles, Atticus tells them they may shoot at bluejays, but that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, and Miss Maudie explains why: mockingbirds do nothing but make music for people to enjoy. Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are the novel’s two mockingbirds, harmless people destroyed, or nearly destroyed, by a town’s need to put everybody in their place.

What the novel does not see

A good reading of To Kill a Mockingbird now has to take account of its critics, and a strong essay will. The story of a Black man falsely accused is told entirely through a white family, and Tom Robinson himself has very little voice or inner life on the page. Critics such as Isaac Saney have argued that this pushes the Black characters to the margins of their own story. Malcolm Gladwell, writing in The New Yorker in 2009, argued that Atticus represents the limits of a gentle Southern liberalism that works within the system rather than challenging it.

Lee’s other novel sharpens the question. Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015 but written before Mockingbird, shows an older Atticus holding segregationist views. Whatever you make of that book, it is a useful reminder that the Atticus of Mockingbird is seen through the eyes of a daughter who adores him.

None of this means the novel should not be read. It means it should be read as a book written in 1960, about the 1930s, by a white Southern author, and argued with accordingly, which is exactly what we do here.

If you are writing about it

The novel left most English GCSE specifications with the 2015 reforms, but it is still widely taught, at Key Stage 3 and in many international schools. If you are writing about it, division makes an excellent spine for an essay, because it lets you move from the small scale to the large: from the children’s game at the Radley house to the courtroom and back again.

• —Build an argument, not a list: ‘Lee shows that Maycomb’s divisions are learned, and the children’s story is the story of how they are unlearned’ is a claim someone could disagree with.
• —Use the narrator. Adult Scout knows more than child Scout, and noticing the gap between them is a sophisticated point.
• —Treat context as evidence. The Scottsboro trials of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s both sit behind this novel; use them to explain a choice Lee makes, not as a separate paragraph of history.
• —Know the critics. One sentence acknowledging the critique of Atticus, and answering it, lifts an essay a band.

Over to you

Three questions for the comments. Which character, for you, lives most divided? Is Scout’s ‘just one kind of folks’ the moral of the novel, or is it Jem’s question that the book actually leaves us with? And does knowing Go Set a Watchman change how you read Atticus?

October’s Book Club novel is chosen by readers. Suggest one in the comments and we will put the most popular choices to a vote.

Leah