To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 22

Narration Prompt

Recount Chapter 22 as a sequence of five enacted refusals: Atticus refuses bitterness at the doorway; Aunt Alexandra refuses the children's continued exposure ('wallow in it'); the Black community refuses public speech (food on the back steps before dawn, Atticus's 'they must never do this again'); Miss Maudie refuses Jem's totalizing despair (the big cake, the docket revelation); and Mr. Bob Ewell refuses Maycomb's truce (the spitting on the post-office corner). Argue what Lee proposes about a community that organizes its moral life around what its members refuse to say.

Discussion Questions

1. Atticus's doorway sentence — 'they did it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep' — converts the verdict from aberration into recurrence. Read against the legal-realist tradition (Holmes's 'The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,' Jerome Frank's Law and the Modern Mind, Karl Llewellyn's distinction between paper rules and real rules), how does Lee's narrative argument differ from the academic legal realism of the same decade — and what does her insistence that 'only children weep' add that Holmes's 'experience' does not capture?
2. The kitchen tribute — chicken from Tom Robinson's father, salt pork, scuppernongs, pickled pigs' knuckles, rolls from Estelle — arrives anonymously and pre-dawn, and Atticus's response is 'tell them they must never do this again. Times are too hard…' Reading the scene through James Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance (the distinction between hidden and public transcripts) and through the moral economy literature (E.P. Thompson, Karen Sayer's rural studies), what kind of moral document is the back-step tribute, and why does Atticus's refusal of further offerings preserve rather than reject what the gift accomplishes?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide