The story is told by Scout – aka Jean Louise Finch. It revolves around scout, her brother Jem (Jerome), and her father Atticus Finch, who live in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930s. It’s a time of segregation and profound prejudice. When Atticus gets assigned a case, defending a black man accused of raping a young white woman, and decides he’s going to give it his best effort because it’s the right thing to do, the town becomes upset and their prejudice kicks in to high gear. The adults call Atticus all kinds of derogatory names, which gets imitated in the school yard by Scout and Jem’s classmates. The situation heats up with threats of physical harm against the accused and fear of reprisals against Atticus and his two children.
Atticus is challenged to explain the ways of the world to his kids, the nature of prejudice, and why people should be kind toward others even when the others have been cruel towards them.
About a third of the way into the book, Atticus tells his son, Jem, that he's supposed to use the air gun he got for Christmas only for shooting tin cans off the fence. Yet he knows Jem won't be able to resist the temptation to shoot birds. If the urge hits him, he can shoot all the blue jays he wants because they are pesky birds, but it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. Mockingbirds don't bother people, they don't build nests in the corn crib, they don't do anything but sing for people.
Later in the story, one of the town’s people tried to harm Jem and Scout, and in the scuffle ended up dead from a knife wound, possibly at the cause of another neighbor who never harmed anyone in his life. The sheriff won’t arrest him though, saying that his report will show that the man fell on his knife. As Scout sums it up, to arrest this particular neighbor would have been the same as killing a mockingbird.
This is a great read because it gives a great historical perspective on prejudice in this country – the prejudice against African Americans, the Hatred of Nazis and Hitler for hating the Jews, the hatred of the mean old lady down the street who picked on the kids (due to an addiction to drugs), the prejudice of the church ladies led by a mission preacher in Africa who was trying to convert the African’s to Christianity and impart his own version of “family values” on them. It can also provoke discussions about the various forms of prejudice and how to counteract it.
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