To Kill a Mockingbird
“Mockingbirds don’t do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat people’ gardens, don’t nest in the corncribs, they don’t do one thing but just sing their hearts out to us,” Atticus said to Scout (148). Indeed, Atticus’s word was extremely true in the situation of Tom Robinson, one of the characters in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird”, which was written by Harper Lee. This story took place in 1930’s in Southern Alabama when the injustice between black people and white people was very deep. In this period, the black people were considered as the Mockingbirds, the innocuous birds for people’s lives. However, these birds often were killed without any guilt just like the black people were shot and lynched by the white people even though they were innocent. It was the fate for the black people in the South who lived in the 1930’s. Especially, through the court scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” which was about the trial of Tom Robinson, a married black man, who was sentenced for raping Mayella, a white woman, Harper Lee emphasized deeply the injustice for the black people. Indeed, the black people did not have any justice in the South in 1930’s. Tom Robinson was the defendant who was accused of raping Mayella on the night of August 21st. The truth was that Tom did not do anything bad to Mayella. On that day, he only passed by Mayella’s house and came in to her house to help her as she requested. Suddenly, she hugged him around the waist and kissed his face. She made him so embarrassed and afraid that he had to run away. Although Tom did not commit a crime, he was still accused of raping Mayella by her father, Bob Ewell, just because he was black. In fact, Tom only wanted to help Mayella and he also knew where the black and the white people stood; so he always tried to keep himself in the right position in the society. He never had