Atticus's Closing Argument — To Kill a Mockingbird

Outside, Dill is still sick from Gilmer's voice. Mr Dolphus Raymond offers him a sip from the paper sack the town calls a bottle. It is Coca-Cola. Raymond pretends to be drunk so Maycomb can rest. If people can say he lives as he does because he is a sot, they do not have to face a sober white man who prefers Black company and a Black family. The sack is a gift that keeps their categories intact. He tells the children that they can still cry at cruelty, and that adults learn to call the same cruelty normal. The children go back inside for the end of the argument.

Atticus takes off his coat and speaks to the jury as if they were men on a porch. The case is simple, he says. There is no medical evidence that a rape occurred. The state has a bruised girl, a father who writes with his left hand, and a defendant whose left arm cannot have made those bruises. Mayella broke a rigid code. She reached for a Black man in her loneliness. In Maycomb that reaching is unthinkable, so she must destroy the evidence by turning the moment into Tom's crime. Bob, who saw enough to explode at his daughter, beat her and will sacrifice Tom to cover the shame in his house. The jury has been asked to accept that cover because it is the story they already like.

Atticus asks them to do their duty instead of their custom. Custom says a white accusation ends the matter. Duty says a court looks at what was proven. A person's conscience, he tells them, is the one thing that does not take orders from the majority. They may share pews and ballots. They may not, if they are honest, hand their judgement to the crowd when a man's life is in the scales. He names the habit: that a Black man lies and a white woman does not. He asks twelve men to set that habit down for the length of a verdict. As he finishes, Calpurnia comes into the aisle with a note from home. Atticus accepts the paper as the last words of the defence settle. For a moment the trial is a man in his waistcoat, a cook with a message, and a balcony that has already paid toward Helen Robinson's survival.