To Kill a Mockingbird summary

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. 

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. 

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?  

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.