To Kill a Mockingbird

Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930s

To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in the fictional small Southern town of Maycomb in the 1930s (Tom’s trial takes place in 1935). Slavery and the Civil War of the 1860s still loom large in the rearview mirror, but the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is just a speck on the future horizon.

Maycomb, despite its civic importance as the county seat, is a small and stagnant town. It’s a place where time seems to stand still.

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. (1.10)

Maycomb is its own little world that doesn’t know what’s happening elsewhere and doesn’t care. Few people move there (not much reason to) and few people leave (why bother). This stagnation means that the same families have been around for generations, and family reputations have entered into the local lore as immovable facts.

Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual – her mother did the same. (13.32)

It’s unclear whether these stereotypes are accurate descriptions of family traits, passed down through inheritance or parenting, or self-fulfilling prophecies – either because people act the way others expect them to, or others see what they expect to see. But the differences between the various town families, whether real or imagined, pale when the town is set against the groups haunting its margins. Jem comes up with his own classification of the various species of Homo Maycombis:

"There's four kinds of folks in the world. There's the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there's the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes." (23.103)

Neither system leaves much room for individuality and independent thought, let alone breaking with the past and striking off in a new direction. The way things are in Maycomb is the way things have always been, and there’s not much anyone can do about it.

And the way things have always been is racially segregated. Racism, as Atticus says after he loses the Robinson case, is "just as much Maycomb County as missionary teas" (22.11), and it’s displayed even in the geography of the town. The African-Americans have their own settlement on the outskirts of white Maycomb, and their own church and cemetery outside the city limits. At Tom’s trial the African-Americans sit on one side of the town square, and the whites on the other. Inside the courtroom, the whites have the good seats on the floor while the African-Americans are up in the balcony. It’s like the town is one big middle school dance, except that one side has all the power of teachers and then some, and the other has even more limitations than students. Other than a few border-crosses like Mr. Dolph Raymond, whites and blacks in Maycomb don’t live together, pray together, eat together, or even die together.

So in this town where separate is definitely not equal, for Atticus to act as if Tom Robinson as just as much right to a fair trial as if his skin were white makes some people angrily upset at having to share their rights with people they think don’t deserve it, as if human rights were a cake with a limited number of slices. Others are more disturbed that Bob Ewell is able to make the court enforce his false accusation. While the anti-Tom Maycomb is the dominant one, the tiny pro-Tom faction refuses to be erased from the town community.

"The handful of people in this town who say that fair play is not marked White Only; the handful of people who say a fair trial is for everybody, not just us; the handful of people with enough humility to think, when they look at a Negro, there but for the Lord's kindness am I." Miss Maudie's old crispness was returning: "The handful of people in this town with background, that's who they are." (24.81)

This "handful of people" can’t save Tom Robinson, but perhaps they can put Maycomb a little farther forward on the road to the civil rights era.