To Kill a Mockingbird Ch. 16: Trial Day Begins

Summary

The next morning Maycomb fills as if it were fair day. Wagons, food, and shade turn the square into a picnic ground for a spectacle with nothing festive in it. People have come to watch a Black man tried for the rape of a white woman. Miss Maudie refuses to go. She stays in her yard and says the hunger to stare is morbid. Breakfast has already turned the jail night into talk. Atticus will not call the men monsters. He says a mob is always made of people, and Mr Cunningham is still a neighbour. The children try to hold the friendly farmer and the man in the dark circle at once.

Among the arrivals they see Mr Dolphus Raymond, who sits with Black people and is said to drink from morning to night. A paper sack hides the bottle. The town uses the drinking to explain a white man of standing who lives with a Black woman and their children. Raymond does not perform shame. He simply takes his place on the outskirts and waits. The children file the sight away without knowing how much of the rumour is costume.

The courthouse is packed. Downstairs there is no room. Reverend Sykes finds the children and takes them up to the balcony, where the Black community sits, and makes space for them there. Sitting with the people who collected for Helen Robinson changes the angle of the day. Scout is a guest in a section of her own courthouse she has never occupied. Judge John Taylor presides, looking half asleep; those who know him say he misses nothing. Mr Gilmer is at the prosecution table. Atticus is at the defence. Tom Robinson is brought in. The room settles into the quiet of a trial about to start. The county is about to put its charge, its mob, and its caste lessons into sworn testimony.

In this chapter: Terms Characters Modern Story

Why This Matters

Refusing the Carnival Seat

A crowd can pack a lunch for a catastrophe and still call the day civic. Miss Maudie stays in her yard and will not help make a carnival of Tom Robinson's ruin, while Reverend Sykes later seats the children in the balcony that already collected for Helen.

When an event is selling shade and a view, choose the yard or the section that has something to lose.

Coming Up in Chapter 17

Sheriff Heck Tate will be the first witness, and the gaps will become the point: no doctor, bruises on the right side of a girl's face, and then Bob Ewell on the stand, writing his name with his left hand.

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Chapter overview

315 wordsexcerpt

Chapter 16

Trial Day Begins

Critical Thinking Exercise

10 minutes

Choose Yard, Balcony, or Picnic

Pick a current public trouble people are treating as an outing: a trial, a firing, a viral humiliation. Write three columns. In the first, describe the picnic version, food, shade, refresh. In the second, write Maudie's reason for staying in the yard. In the third, write what it would mean to take Sykes's balcony seat among those already paying.

Consider:

•What leftover fear from a previous night, like the jail, is the crowd converting into excitement?
•Which neighbour from a past mob are you tempted to refile as a monster so you do not have to greet them in the square?
•If you sit downstairs because that is where your people always sit, what angle of the day have you already refused?

Journaling Prompt

Write about a time you packed a lunch, literal or social, for someone else's ruin. What would staying in the yard have cost you, and what did going cost the person on display?

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Trial Day Begins

Summary