To Kill a Mocking Bird

Jean Louise nee Finch, nicknamed Scout, recalls one year in her growing up period when she, a tomboy, was a young adolescent in Maycomb County, AL from the summer of 1932 to the fall of 1933 with her older preteen brother Jem Finch and their widowed attorney father Atticus Finch. While Atticus had to juggle his time between work and raising them on his own, albeit with the help of their housekeeper Calpurnia, he raised them with love and a proverbial firm hand, she feeling he having had a way of explaining anything she needed to know in a way she could understand. At the time, she, Jem and their sometimes companion Dill, who would stay with his Aunt Stephanie, the Finches' next-door neighbor, in the summer, had a fixation on who they considered the scariest man in town, Boo Radley, that fear primarily on rumors in never having seen him despite he only living a few houses away from them. She and Jem grew up quickly that year in Atticus, who believed in justice for all, being assigned by the court the case of Tom Robinson, a black man, accused of rape and sexual assault of Mayella Ewell, a white woman from a poor family. The case brought up the worst racial impulses in many of the white townsfolk who were quick to convict Tom solely in being black regardless of whether he actually committed the crime he was accused of committing.