Tuesday, December 23, 2014

A Christmas visit to the racist poor in Harper Lee's 'Mockingbird'

In Harper Lee's 1960 novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," the lawyer Atticus Finch takes his two children, Scout and Jem, to visit the Ewell family at Christmas. The novel is set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Ala., and the Ewells, who live behind the town garbage dump, are Maycomb's poorest family. Bob Ewell is a white racist, who has falsely accused the innocent Tom Robinson, a black man, of raping his daughter. As Scout tells it:

 "Nobody was quite sure how many people were on the (Ewell) place. Some people said six, others said nine; there were always several dirty-faced ones at the windows when anyone passed by. Nobody had any occasion to pass by except at Christmas, when the churches delivered baskets, and when the mayor of Maycomb asked us to please help the garbage collector by dumping our own trees and trash.
...A dirt road ran from the highway past the dump, down to a small Negro settlement some five hundred yards beyond the Ewells'. ...In the frosty December dusk, their cabins looked neat and snug with pale blue smoke rising from the chimneys and doorways glowing amber from the fires inside. There were delicious smells about: chicken, bacon frying crisp as the twilight air. Jem and I detected squirrel cooking, but it took an old countryman like Atticus to identify possum and rabbit, aromas that vanished when we rode back past the Ewell residence."

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice excerpt, Dannye!

Anonymous said...

Geesh .. Poor negro? Such ignorance and hate filled fiction by some liberal community organizer racist no doubt. Who would read such liberal lies and trash?

Was that movie about Bill Cosby by any chance ?

Unknown said...

Thanks, Maria!

Anonymous said...

And your point in posting this two days before Christmas is...?

Perhaps you just had to jump on the media bandwagon and use the word "racist" in an article or whatever this is?

I remember when you used to be a fairly decent writer, and your writing often had a point. But this is just meaningless, a non sequitur bit of drivel.

Schreven Valle said...

Black: Good
White: Bad
Any questions?

Anonymous said...

From reading that passage, it sounds like the "Negro settlement" wasn't all that bad compared to where the "white racist" lived behind the dump.

I doubt that's the point trying to be made here with that title, though...

Anonymous said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/sports/ncaafootball/transcript-of-jameis-winston-hearing-reveals-accusers-words-and-florida-states-complicity.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0

and poor innocent big time black quarterbacks dont rape white college females either

even the new york times barfs at this pc garbage


x long island native