Atticus Finch has lost his case. Tom Robinson has died.
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s masterpiece novel, is winding down. Several of the book’s central conflicts have resolved, but there are lessons yet to learn.
That’s part of what keeps me coming back to this Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Like many Southerners, I first encountered the book as assigned reading in high school. I was raised in Jacksonville, Fla., but the book held special significance for me as an Alabama native. I’ve reread it many times since that freshman-year writing assignment, and I’m always taken aback by Lee’s storytelling and frank look at prejudice toward anyone who is different.
Race relations are a key theme, it’s true, and that was especially timely when the book was published in 1960. But Lee’s insight into how people treat one another extends beyond skin color and into differences in socioeconomic status and accepted behavior, as well.
As chapter 27 opens, Scout offers an update on several of Maycomb’s residents. Bob Ewell, whose daughter accused Tom Robinson of rape, took a job and almost as quickly lost it. “(He) probably made himself unique in the annals of the nineteen-thirties: he was the only man I ever heard of who was fired from the WPA for laziness,” Lee writes (evidence of the wit that made her editor of the humor magazine Rammer Jammer while she was a law student at the University of Alabama).
Judge Taylor, on the other hand, was startled one night by an unseen intruder’s visit to his house. The intruder got away, but Taylor was on guard.
And Tom Robinson’s widow began working in her husband’s place. Ewell hassled Helen Robinson during her walks to work, but her employer wouldn’t stand for it. Ewell may have won the trial, but his popularity in the community didn’t improve a bit, and he seems to hold a grudge against all associated with the case.
Thanks in part to past mischief and to these recent developments, Maycomb organizes a school fair in place of the typically less-formal Halloween activities. With half the students involved in a pageant celebrating the town’s history, they’ll be unable to get into trouble. Scout is assigned the role of pork, one of the county’s agricultural products. She proudly dons a costume that transforms her into the likeness of a cured ham. It’s hard to see out of the chicken-wire-and-fabric concoction, and Scout misses her cue, but the pageant is a success.
Mischief seems to have been evaded—until Jem and Scout’s walk home, when they’re ambushed. Scout can barely see what’s happening, as she’s still in costume. But she hears a man defending the Finch children from their attacker, and is able to make out that man carrying her unconscious brother home.
It takes Atticus, Aunt Alexandra and Dr. Reynolds to convince Scout that Jem isn’t dead, merely hurt. Once she has calmed down, Scout realizes the countryman who saved the children is lurking in a corner of the room. She briefly considers who he might be, but is distracted by Sheriff Heck Tate’s questioning about the assault—and his revelation that Bob Ewell is dead.
What were your impressions of chapters 27 and 28? Did I miss anything? If you're reading it again, are you learning anything new? Share in the comments below.