Ms. Graham
ENG2D
May 23 2013
The Mockingbirds of Maycomb County
To Kill A Mockingbird, a novel by Harper Lee, is the story of a young girl named Scout, growing up in Maycomb County, Alabama, in the 1930’s. Scout is forced to mature quickly when she father takes on a job defending Tom Robinson, a black man accused of rape, in court. As a result, Scout is mocked and discriminated against by a society that believes a black man is always guilty. Scout comes to realize that her small, safe town is not the tranquil place she had thought, but is full of racists who let their passion run away with their common sense. The ever present symbol of innocents, the mockingbird can be seen in Scouts childish ways, Boo’s simple good heartedness …show more content…
In the novel Scout is first and farthermost a child and every child starts out as a mockingbird trying to understand the cruel world they live in, for example Scout asking her Uncle Jack “What’s a whore-lady?” (Lee 115) Scout asks many questions like this threw out the novel demonstrating her lack of worldly knowledge and innocents. Scouts innocents shines through when she assumes “… if everyone in Maycomb knows what kind of folks the Ewells are [absolute trash] they’d be glad to hire Helen…” (Lee 164 and 165) though she dose not understand and can not accept that it dose not matter to the people of Maycomb how bad the Ewells are because they are white and Tom and Helen are black and in Maycombs eyes white will always triumph over black. Scout is a good person, and she believes “neighbours give in return. [Jem and I] never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad" (Lee 373) she dose not understand that she gave him a view into a childhood that was taken from him and that is worth more then any other small treasure she could