To Kill a Mockingbird opens on a summer of innocence in Maycomb, a lazy town in northern Alabama. Scout and
Jem Finch are devising a plan with Dill Harris, in town from Meridian, Mississippi, visiting his aunt, Miss Rachel, to lure a mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley, out of the house he has not left for many years. Boo allegedly has stayed inside because he became violent once in the murky past and stabbed his
father with scissors. It was agreed then that his family would keep him inside. The narrator is Scout, who, although she does not deviate from her six-year-old’s point of view, has shrewd insights into life and people. Harper Lee does not confine Scout’s narration to a six-year-old’s vocabulary.
The Finch
children are being reared by their father, Atticus, a lawyer with a strong social conscience and a zeal for unpopular causes. Their mother died of a sudden heart attack when Scout was two. Calpurnia, the Finches’ black cook, helps to raise the children and mediates their frequent squabbles, infusing her admonitions with folk wisdom and unstinting love.
The arrival of Dill Harris provides Lee with the opportunity to apprise her readers of much background information as Scout babbles on introducing herself, her family, and her neighborhood to the new arrival. The Finch children have imbibed some of their father’s spirit, characterized by trust, service, and a strong sense of justice. Atticus is the small-town lawyer who knows everyone in Maycomb, serves those who need him, and trusts them to pay him when they can—as most of them eventually do. The children, who call their father by his first name, have long, serious discussions with him about such social issues as the treatment of blacks in their town.
When Tom Robinson, a black man, is accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell, Atticus takes his case, and Tom Robinson is barely saved from an angry lynch mob by the unwitting intervention of Scout and Jem. Meanwhile, many townsfolk turn against Atticus for taking on this unpopular case. In the months before the trial occurs, Scout and Jem are badgered by their schoolmates because of their father’s association with Tom Robinson.
The beginning of the trial evokes a carnival atmosphere. Scout and Jem watch the proceedings from the gallery, generally reserved for blacks, fearful that their father might see them and not approve of their attending. Predictably, although Atticus proves that Tom could not have committed the rape, community prejudices surface; Tom is adjudged guilty. This miscarriage of justice is highly and troublingly instructive to the Finch children, who have inherited much of their father’s sense of right.
After the trial, Tom tries to escape from prison and is killed in the attempt. When Tom Ewell attacks the Finch children in a drunken rage, furious over their father’s defense of Tom Robinson, it is Boo Radley who rescues them and teaches them the all-important lesson that appearances can be deceiving, a pervasive theme throughout the narrative.