Chapter 18-21 Director.

During these few chapters I found myself thinking about how people like Scout and tom Robinson are judged by their looks, size, age, and color. No one thought about not judging a book by its cover. One passage that I found interesting in this section is on page 174. "There has been a request, Judge Taylor said, that this courtroom be cleared of spectators, or at least of women and children, a request that will be denied for the time being. People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for, and they have the right to subject their children to it, but I can assure you of one thing: you will receive what you see and hear in silence or you will leave this courtroom, but you won’t leave it until the whole boiling of you come before me on contempt charges. Mr. Ewell, you will keep your testimony within the confines of Christian English usage, if that is possible. Precede, Mr. Gilmer." I picked this passage because it shows how women and children are treated during this time period and how their opinions did not matter. The judge sent them away as if their presence wasn't welcomed or needed in anyway probably to avoid bias. What he doesn’t know is that women can voice their opinions and give a different view on the subject than just men can.

The second passage that I picked is on page 177. “I was becoming nervous. Atticus seemed to know what he was doing-but it seemed to me that he’d gone frog-sticking without a light. Never, never, never, on cross examination ask a witness a question you don’t already know the answer to, was a tenet I absorbed with my baby-food. Do it, and you will often get an answer you don’t want, an answer that might wreck your case. I chose this passage because it uses phrases from that time period including “frog-sticking without a light” and “was a tenet I absorbed with my baby-food”. Statements like these give the book character and make it interesting. Also, I learned that lawyers never ask questions that they don’t already know the answers to which I found interesting. Atticus was sly and cunning and knew never to ask a question he didn’t know the answer to.

If Harper Lee was in my literature circle, I would ask her if it was difficult to create a courtroom setting in a story. How she was able to come up with rolls for each character and know what each is going to say to lead to someone’s conviction and what happens to Mr. Ewell and Tom Robinson now?

My literature circle discussed how Tom’s gimpy arm prevents him from hitting Mayella and the possibility that Mr. Ewell had beaten her while he was drunk. We also talked about the code that white women and black men shouldn’t marry and vice versa because it they would be shunned if they did so because black men were considered violent and dirty. My group discussed how an all white jury on minimal evidence convicted Tom Robinson. Our last discussion point was why Dolphus Raymond wanted people to think he was a crazy drunk by drinking Coca-Cola out of a paper bag when it was easy to convince the population of Maycomb that he wasn’t.

It was unfair that the jury deemed Tom guilty based off of him being black. Black people are stereotyped as being violent lawbreakers that are uneducated and unsophisticated. Because of this stereotype, even though the evidence points to Mr. Ewell, he goes free. The city of Maycomb is biased and was assuming Atticus would purposely lose the trial to frame Tom or not put any effort into defending him. If Mayella knows the truth she should come clean and tell the jury otherwise her father will continue to beat her. Someone needs to speak out about the wrongness of prejudice in this town before it is too late.