I love Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)

I'm not going to lie, I accidentally typed 'To Kill a Mockingboid' the first time.  'To Kill a Mockingboid by Hahpah Lee'... No?  Nobody else thinks it's funny?  Aw...
You may be wondering why this post has the first title of 'I love Atticus Finch'--it's probably because I do.  This is a fantastic book, but Atticus is the best human ever.  Seriously, sometimes it's hard for me to concentrate on what I'm reading because I'm just so filled with affection for him.  I would love to hang out with him.
So the story is about growing up.  I'm not sure if it would be exactly classified as a 'coming-of-age' story, but I hardly ever catch onto what makes a book that--so if somebody says it is, I'd accept it as such.  Our narrator is the young Scout (or Jean) Finch, Atticus's daughter.  It starts the summer before first grade and it ends when she's in middle school.  It's... well, it's about life in a Southern town known as Maycomb.  According to the back of the book, Harper Lee "always considered her book to be a simple love story".  Well!

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once"--Charles Lamb

"People moved slowly then.  They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything.  A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer.  There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb county.  But it was a time of vague optimism for some people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself" (6).

The thing that sets off the novel is when they first meet Dill--he is from henceforth to stay with his Aunt Rachel every summer.  At first Scout and her brother Jem are hesitant to accept him until Dill says that he's seen Dracula.  I just bring that up because... I don't know, it's awesome!?  I've never made a friend like this but I should really try it out.

And there are mysteries and idiosyncrasies about the town, of course: for one, there is the mystery of Boo Radley.  he is a reclusive boogeyman who the children of the town never have seen, but it's clear he hasn't died, for his parents haven't ever had to carry him out of the house or anything.  So Boo Radley is more a myth than man, especially in the children's minds: "Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom.  People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him.  People said he went out at night when the moon was down, and peeped in windows.  When people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them.  Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work.  Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events... although the culprit was Crazy Addie... people still looked at the Radley place, unwilling to disregard their initial suspicions... From the Radley chickenyard tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children: Radley pecans would kill you.  A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked" (11).  The real reason I actually quote this is not to give you a better picture of the mythos surrounding Boo, but because this whole passage recalls Finsterwald from Maniac Magee.  His front steps are the only "un-sat on" front steps in the whole town, they describe his backyard as being the graveyard for not only balls but Frisbees and toy airplanes and more.  And then Maniac talks to him!  Was Finsterwald inspired by Boo Radley?  Maybe.  I'd be willing to say that that book is the kid's equivalent of To Kill A Mockingbird.

So in the twenties it became a big fad to go out and sit on flagpoles.  The 'kids' were all doing it, no lie, that was a fad.  People would compete to see how long they could stay up there, it was deemed as immoral by some people--I'm not even kidding you.  This really happened.  Anyways, Jem hears about this on the radio and decides to sit up in the treehouse all Saturday.  He has Scout bringing him food and water and blankets and books until Atticus tells her that if she paid no attention to her brother, he'd just come down.  It ends with: "Atticus was right" (42).  THERE IS A LESSON HERE.  Also, I love Atticus Finch.  Wait, wait--that's not the lesson!  Pay attention to Atticus, not me!

So one of the trees in the schoolyard that are touched by the Radleys has a little hole in it.  Scout ventures around in it one day and finds gum--she eats it.  Later they find two pennies (Indian heads), a broken pocketwatch, soap dolls...
"'Indian heads--well, they come from the Indians.  They're real strong magic, they make you have good luck.  Not like fried chicken when you're not lookin' for it, but things like long life 'n' good health, 'n' passin' six-week tests... these are real valuable to somebody.  I'm gonna put 'em in my trunk'" (47).  I love Jem, he's hilarious.  This cracks me up so much, especially the bit about the fried chicken.



"'There are just some kind of men who--who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one'" (60).

Dill eventually dares Jem to go in the Radleys' yard at night.  Dill does so, but Boo's father thinks he's a thief and takes potshots at him.  Jem escapes unharmed, but his pants get stuck in the fence and he abandons them.  There's a commotion and the townsfolk gather outside the house--Jem is stuck there.  Dill says he won Jem's pants during a game of strip poker, and Atticus asks if he was playing with cards, and Jem says just with matches.  (How would you play poker with matches?)  But Scout is all impressed, and her comment is: "Matches were dangerous, but cards were fatal" (73).  I don't know, something about it struck me--no pun intended.  (Obviously it's spiritual health over bodily health.)

"[Jem] went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me--he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one arm in back of him, putting one foot behind the other.  He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't?  Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts" (79).

So one day it snows, obviously a rarity in a Southern town.  Scout has never seen snow before, nor does she know what it is, and she screams that the world is ending--and she does the cutest thing ever, she begs Atticus to do something.  I mean, it makes sense, Atticus is her father after all, but still.  Adorable.  If anybody can put off Judgment Day, it'd be Atticus Finch.
The kids end up playing in the snow and they make a gender ambiguous snowman.  Miss Maudie gets agitated by it and calls it a Morphodite (hermaphrodite).  Later, when talking to Miss Maudie, she refers to the snowman as "the Morphodite" and Miss Maudie cracks up.  Later, when Scout gets mad at somebody she calls them a Morphodite.  (I want to say that it's Dill...?)  I don't know.  I just think it's cute.  Adorable.  Good times with Scout.  Looooove.

Oh, and Atticus is a lawyer.  The biggest event in the book is the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of rape and assault.  Of course, being in the South in thirties, Atticus is ridiculed for being Tom's defense lawyer.  "'Atticus, are we going to win [the case]?'  'No, honey.'  'Then why--'  'Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,' Atticus said" (101).  Ring ring--it's for you, Atticus.  I LOVE YOU.
And--the title is explained.  To kill a mockingbird is what Atticus deems a sin, because they don't mess up gardens or homes or anything, all they do is sing.  Because they don't do anybody harm and only please people with their music it is a sin to kill them.  What does this refer to?  Well, considering Tom was unjustly accused and other things that would be huge spoilers... I think it could even apply to Scout's mind... To kill a mockingbird--to destroy childhood's sweet innocence--is a sin.  Perhaps?

"'People in their right minds never take pride in their talents,' said Miss Maudie" (130).

Okay, back to loving Atticus.  Atticus is taking a lot of abuse for his defending of Tom--and it's not even Atticus, really.  Most people don't even have the guts to abuse him to his face about it anyways--they're mocking Scout and Jem.  Jem finally retaliates against Mrs Dubose--he destroys her prized camellia flowers.  Of course, Atticus sends him to speak to Mrs Dubose, and when Scout asks Atticus why he's staying with the case even at the hands of all this abuse, Atticus answers: "'Scout, I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man'" (139).  Scout says he must be wrong, if so many people in the town disagree with him, but he says that they're entitled to their own opinions, and "'before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.  The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience'" (140).  Um.  Atticus Finch.  I love you.  FYI.
Jem's punishment for messing with Mrs Dubose's garden is that he has to read to her six days a week--I believe six days--for the next few months.  After Mrs Dubose dies, it is revealed that she was a morphine addict and she was trying to die clean, which she succeeded in doing.  Her gift from the beyond to Jem is a camellia.  Atticus explains his reasoning for making Jem's punishment what it was: "'I wanted you to see something about her--I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.  Mrs Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her" (149).  Um.  Atticus.  Stop me if this is getting old, but...

Preparing for the case, Atticus is obviously busy, so one day he has the cook Calpurnia take the kids to church.  Obviously Calpurnia can't go to the white church, so Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to her church.  Some of the members of the church are angry because the kids--white people--have their own church.  This scene exists, I imagine, to show that racial tension existed on both sides of the fence, that black folk weren't just sambos, you know, eager to please the white man and all.  I think it's a pretty important scene for that purpose (for the kids too, to see that black folk are just regular folk, though they never seem to carry and prejudices or doubts to that fact).

...And from there I skip one hell of a chunk of pages, about fifty.  Atticus is threatened by a group of men from town because he is defending Tom.  The appearance of the Finch children make them ease up and not rough him up--and Jem gets agitated, he says his father would have died at their hand had they not shown up. Atticus's response: "'He might have hurt me a little... but son, you'll understand folks a little better when you're older.  A mob's always made up of people, no matter what.  Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man.  Every mob in every little Southern town is made up of people you know--doesn't say much for them, does it? ...So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their sense, did it? ...That proves something--that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.  Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children... you children last night made Walter Cunningham stand in my shoes for a minute.  That was enough'" (210).  I'M NOT GOING TO SAY IT I PROMISE.

The persecutor is Bob Ewell, a snake in the grass if ever there was one.  He lives in a filthy little shack in the back of the woods near where the black people have their own sort of commune, procreating constantly and making more just as diseased and dirty children--"All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbors was, that if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white" (229).

"'I try to give 'em a reason [to dislike me], you see.  It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.  When I come to town, which is seldom, if I weave a little and drink out of this sack, folks can say Dolphus Raymond's in the clutches of whiskey--and that's why he won't change his ways.  He can't help himself, that's why he lives the way he does... I ain't honest but it's mighty helpful to folks'" (269).  Dolphus Raymond is a white man married to a black woman, they have kids too.  He drinks coca-cola out of a sack, the way a wino would drink wine from a bottle in a bag.

I was thinking about not doing this, but--I think I'm going to include most of Atticus's closing statement.  It's so amazing.  I can't help it.  It's revealed that Tom didn't do a thing to Mayella, she came onto him, and her father beat her up and claimed Tom did it.  So... Yeah.  I'll start a little bit down:
"'What was the evidence of her offense?  Tom Robinson, a human being... Tom Robinson was her daily reminder of what she did.  What did she do?  She tempted a Negro.  She was white, and she tempted a Negro.  She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man... A strong young Negro man.  No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards... And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to "feel sorry" for a white woman has had to put his word against two white people's... The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption--the evil assumption--that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber.  Which, gentlemen, is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you.  You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women--black or white.  But this is a truth that applies to the human race and no particular race of men.  There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire'" (272-273).
Please look me in the eye and say honestly you were not heartened by Atticus speech, and enthralled--I'd be amazed.  You'd be the first.  This, this above all else, is why I love Atticus Finch.  He is a first-class human being.  I love Atticus Finch.


I don't think there's much more to write after this.  I could gladly end this here and post it.  I could gladly never write again and let that be my final statement forever.  But the book isn't over--and good God, it's heartbreaking, the end of this section--there's no question of what the jury says, regardless of Atticus's speech.  You must know.
"It was like watching Atticus walk into the street, raise a rifle to his shoulder and pull the trigger, but watching all the time knowing that the gun was empty" (282).
And when they get home--"'Atticus--' said Jem bleakly.  He turned in the doorway.  'What, son?'  'How could they do it, how could they?'  'I don't know, but they did it.  They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it--seems that only children weep.  Good night'" (285).  Harper Lee is a damned amazing author.  She heartened me so well naught ten pages before, and has so effectively broken my heart hardly ten pages later.  Poor, poor Atticus, poor Jem, poor Tom, poor world--

Jem and Dill and Scout go to Miss Maudie's the next day, after Atticus discovers a kitchen full of food brought as thanks by Tom's friends and family.
"'It's like bein' a caterpillar in a cocoon, that's what it is,' [Jem] said.  'Like somethin' asleep wrapped up in a warm place.  I always thought Maycomb folks were the best folks in the world, least that's what they seemed like.'  'We're the safest folks in the world,' said Miss Maudie.  'We're so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we've got men like Atticus Finch to go for us.'  Jem grinned ruefully.  'Wish the rest of the county thought that.'  'You'd be surprised how many of us do.'  'Who?' Jem's voice rose.  'Who in this town did one thing to help Tom Robinson, just who?'  'His colored friends for one thing, and people like us.  People like Judge Taylor.  People like Mr. Heck Tate.  Stop eating and start thinking, Jem.  Did it ever strike you that Judge Taylor naming Atticus to defend that boy was no accident?  That Judge Taylor might have had his reasons for naming him?'  This was a thought.  Court-appointed defenses were usually given to Maxwell Green, Maycomb's latest addition to the bar, who needed the experience.  Maxwell Green should have had Tom Robinson's case" (288-289).

"'Can't any Christian judges an' lawyers make up for heathen juries,' Jem muttered" (289).

"'As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it--whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash'" (295).  Atticus.

"'Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks.  Folks.' ...'That's what I thought, too,' he said at last, 'when I was your age.  If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other?  If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?  Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something.  I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time... it's because he wants to stay inside'" (304).

Ooh!  And their Aunt Alexandra's missionary circle makes me so mad!  They're dirty hypocrites, they bash Atticus for what he's done in his own home--they positively enrage me.  I don't want to quote them here.  They're a sad sort.
Now one of these ladies, Miss Grit, is Scout's teacher.  A kid brings in a current event about what Hitler is doing in Germany to the Jewish people--she teaches the kids about prejudice and how it's wrong.  Hah!  A laugh!  Not at the idea that prejudice is wrong--but that she would say it's wrong.  She who is so clearly prejudiced against black folks--and the way she writes off the Holocaust gets my goat too.  She just says that Jews have been persecuted since the beginning of history without really answering the question of why they'd be so--so she makes it sound like it's okay, because it's historical!  And then she just abruptly changes the subject for the sake of math.  Ugh!  She gets me riled, she does.

And later, Halloween time, the kids go to a party at the school, then walk back home at night... Just Jem and Scout together.  Now, Bob Ewell has threatened Atticus's life several times, but is such a worm that he attacks the children--but Boo Radley saves them, and kills Bob.  After they meet him and thank him and he goes back home, Scout says that she never saw him again.
Scout imagining: "It was still summertime, and the children came closer.  A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishingpole behind him.  A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips.  Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention.  It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose's.  The boy helped his sister to his feet, and they made their way home.  Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woes and triumphs on their faces.  They stopped at an old oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive.  Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house.  Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog.  Summer, and he watched the children's heart break.  Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him.  Atticus was right.  One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.  Just standing on the Radley porch was enough" (374).

MLA citation information: Lee, Harper.  To Kill a Mockingbird.  Grand Central Publishing: New York, 2010.


So.  This book.  This book is so amazing.  It's the only book Harper Lee ever wrote--but my God, what a book.  It's no surprise she never wrote another book, this book is so much.  It has the heart of twenty books--it's just so good.  There couldn't have been anything left.  I'm simultaneously gladdened and saddened that (most) schools have it as a mandatory part of the curriculum--glad because everyone should read this book at least once.  I can't imagine how somebody could ever hate another person after reading this book... But, saddened because I imagine most people are like me and hate it when they're forced into reading something, regardless of the book's quality (I'm willing to reconsider The Great Gatsby, but definitely not The Scarlet Letter).  Even the quality of your teacher can affect your perception of a book... What I mean is, some people will take this, or Sparknote it, and treat it like a raw egg swallowed.  And that's a damned shame.  I'm not going to say it's the most important piece of literature ever written, but at least of the last century.  Maybe even the last two centuries.  Read it.

Answer to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies's cryptic song lyrics: Re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton
This post's cryptic song lyrics: We like to watch you laughing, you pick the insects off plants, no time to think of consequences