Fable & Plot Summary

Fable
Scout is asked to wash up by Calpurnia. She refuses and discusses things with her neighbor Miss Maude, and gets cat called by the Cunningham boy offstage. Jem, her brother, comes on stage with a football and gets lectured by another neighbor about skipping school, even though it is Saturday, and breaking Miss Maude’s arbour. Scout and Jem meet Dill, a young boy visiting his Aunt. They talk of Boo Radley and how they want to see him eventually. Reverend Sykes comes by and tells Scout that they are taking up a collection to help Tom Robinson’s wife. This is where we learn that Tom is on trial for attacking Mayella Ewell and also of the Ewell’s living arrangements by the garbage dump that seems to match their character’s morals. Atticus comes home and Mr. Cunningham stops by to pay his debt with farm produce. Then Scout questions Atticus about why he defends black people in trial when they are not going to ever win. Next, Scout, Jem, and Dill go over to see if they can peek into the Radley’s house and Scout finds a piece of gum in the hole of the Radley’s tree. We find out that Dill has run away to Maycomb.
The town sheriff, Heck Tate, comes by to warn Atticus about the trial and the uproar he will face. Atticus does not care. The trial runs and Mayella gives her false testimony, Scout and Jem watch from the upper level. Tom gives his. We find out after the trial that Tom Robinson was shot and killed for ‘trying to escape’. Mr. Ewell attacks Jem and Scout, but they are rescued by Boo Radley. Mr. Ewell is stabbed to death, but the act is covered up by the local sheriff saying he fell on his knife.

Plot Summary
To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story of Scout Finch and her brother, Jem, in 1930's Alabama. Through their neighborhood meanderings and the example of their father, they grow to understand that the world isn't always fair and that prejudice is a very real aspect of their world no matter how subtle it seems.

The summer when Scout was six and Jem was ten, they met Dill, a little boy who spent the summer with his aunt who lived next door to the Finches. Dill and Jem become obsessed with the idea of making Boo Radley, the neighborhood recluse, come out of his home. They go through plan after plan, but nothing draws him out. However, these brushes with the neighborhood ghost result in a tentative friendship over time and soon the Finch children realize that Boo Radley deserves to live in peace, so they leave him alone.

Scout and Jem's God-like father, Atticus, is a respected and upstanding lawyer in small Maycomb County. When he takes on a case that pits innocent, black Tom Robinson against two dishonest white people, Atticus knows that he will lose, but he has to defend the man or he can't live with himself. The case is the biggest thing to hit Maycomb County in years and it turns the whole town against Atticus, or so it seems. Scout and Jem are forced to bear the slurs against their father and watch with shock and disillusionment as their fellow townspeople convict an obviously innocent man because of his race. The only real enemy that Atticus made during the case was Bob Ewell, the trashy white man who accused Tom Robinson of raping his daughter. Despite Ewell's vow to avenge himself against Atticus, Atticus doesn't view Ewell as any real threat.

Tom Robinson is sent to a work prison to await another trial, but before Atticus can get him to court again, Tom is shot for trying to escape the prison. It seems that the case is finally over and life returns to normal until Halloween night. On the way home from a pageant, Bob Ewell attacks Jem and Scout in the darkness. After Jem's arm is badly broken, their ghostly neighbor, Boo Radley, rescues Scout and her brother. In order to protect Boo's privacy, the sheriff decides that Bob Ewell fell on his own knife while he was struggling with Jem. Boo Radley returns home never to be seen again.
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