There is also Boo Radley who is shut behind the ‘closed doors’ of the Radley’s house and ‘kept out of sight’ by his abusive parents. When he could have had a chance of normal life, and could have attended ‘the industrial school and received the best secondary education to be had in the state’. But Mr. Radley took this opportunity away from him due to his prejudice; he didn’t want his son to be associated with people like the Cunninghams who were thought to be below their social status.
Social divisions played a big part in the ‘hell’ people give each other. The professionals like Atticus and Miss Maudie are at the top of the social hierarchy, followed by the ‘ignorant’ farmers like the Cunninghams and then comes the Ewells who are considered as ‘white trash’. This is why Mayella never had any friends; she ‘must have been the loneliest person in the world’. But not only she has been cut of by social divisions, she had never received a bit of family love, motherless, having to look after all the children and living with a drunken father who ‘spends his relief cheques on green whiskey’. Her terrible life is what let her to ‘tempt a negro’ as Tom was the only one who has ever been friendly to her.
Respectable people like the Cunninghams, who ‘never took anything they can’t pay back’, are looked down upon. Scout wanted to have Walter Cunningham around but was forbidden by Aunt Alexandra as they are people with ‘backgrounds’ where the Cunninghams are ‘trash’.
All the black people also suffered hell from the long rooted racism. While ‘Negros worshipped’ in their church on Sundays, ‘white men gambled in it on weekdays’. Tom who is innocent, who did nothing but help Mayella was condemned just because he is black, ‘when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s the white man always wins’.
But among all the pessimistic sides of dark and depressing themes Harper Lee explores, there is also hope.
Although in the trial Tom Robinson was found guilty, the jury was out for a long time, proving that people are starting to think beyond the trapped racism, “This may be the shadow of a beginning”.
There are people in Maycomb who “say that fair play is not marked white only”, like Atticus, Miss Maudie, Judge Taylor…all these professionals are aware of and unwilling to collude in the racist atmosphere of the time.
At the end of the novel Scout learns to accept and treat people equally, ‘I think there’s just one kind of folks, folks’, and she understood turning Boo in would sort of be like ‘shooting a mockingbird’. Lee portrays children, the future generations as simply good, ‘seems that only children weep’ at the injustice of society. We are left satisfied that even though the adults in society may not change at that present time, the children will change society when they become adults.
