In the story Calpurnia or ‘Cal’ is presented as a very intelligent black person, she is educated (she can read) for one, and she is a good person at heart as well, and also she has Atticus’s respect. And also as we see in the book she leads an almost ‘double life’ when she is among the Finch family and other white people she speaks proper English, but when she is among her own people she speaks using a lot of slang and cuts words short. for example: sure enough, she says sho’ nuf’. She is also the mother of Zeebo; a full grown man who is married and reads out the sermons at church. She also acts as a motherly figure in (as she is always there; she cooks for the Finch family.) Scout’s life and they have a love-hate relationship, until scout starts school, and then it eases a little. In an argument with Aunt Alexandra, Atticus also insists that Calpurnia is part of the family.
Also in the story is Tom Robinson he is presented as a good person with a pure heart, he is a sharecropper on a cotton farm, and each day on his way home he passes the Ewell household, I believe he is also brave because he accepted his fate; all human beings must die sooner or later, not many people I know would accept that. He also has his wife Helen (who does not find work anywhere after he is accused, because no one wants to have anything to do with Tom Robinson’s family.) and his children to take care of. He is accused of beating and raping Mayella Ewell, the daughter of Bob Ewell, Atticus defends him, even though he knows he will lose because Tom is black, but he also knows that Tom is innocent and that he must defend him, because if he doesn’t, no one else will. Tom was only trying to help Mayella because no one else would, and he felt sorry for her, but she made advances on him and she kissed him, and her father beat her, and even though her father did it she blamed it on Tom, but there was no way he could have done it: The majority of her bruises were on the right side of her face, and tom was crippled, he had a withered left hand, a full 12 inches shorter than his right he had caught it in cotton gin as a child. Tom was sent to work in prison, and there was going to be another trial but Tom believed he would be found guilty even though he was innocent; he was shot trying to escape the prison before Atticus could come and get him.
And the last Black character in the story that I will look at is Reverend Sykes. Reverend Sykes is one of the most respected black people in Calpurnia’s church he is a preacher, and also a very good, kind man, he goes out of his way to be kind to Scout and Jem, to make them feel welcome when they accompany Calpurnia to her church and he stops Lula from picking on them. When they get to the courthouse, Reverend Sykes takes them up to the second floor to sit with him because the first floor is full.
In conclusion I think that Harper Lee shapes all her black characters to the way most of us wish to be, heroes in their own way, yet she still makes them believable, unlike the fairytales this is based in a real life situation, but she does not make all her characters like that, for example Lula, who is always picking on people and being mean, which shows a great diversity in her characters, and that is what separates this book from a fairytale or some little fable.
Before I finish I would roughly like to tell you what the Great Depression was: the Great Depression was in America when the stock market crashed and it lasted for a period of about 10 years, beginning in October 1929 during which many people lost their jobs and many companies went out of business throughout the World. People who were desperate took their families on the road to look for work. Today people who lived through the Great depression still remember the daily hardships.
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