The Caste System of Maycomb
The country of India functions with a caste system. It includes four classes: priests, warriors, merchants and farmers, and laborers. And then they have the “untouchables”, the people not even counted in the caste system; the people that others cannot even talk to. In chapter thirteen of the book To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, Scout mentions Maycomb’s caste system. Everybody has an idea of what every person in each particular family should act like, and expects them to be that way. They sort everyone into their own social classes. And, just like in India, they have their untouchables; people they choose never to associate with. The theme of social class shows in the book To Kill a Mockingbird through the way people treat Tom, Boo, and Mayella as untouchables.
Tom, along with all the other black people in the town, often struggle with the white people’s racial discrimination against them. Often others treat them unjustly, although not everyone in the town treats them that way. When Mr. Gilmer asks Tom why he ran, Tom’s answer was that he was, “scared he’d hafta face up to what he didn’t do” (265). He knew that he would lose the trial, not because of guiltiness, but because of the ideas that the jury had. The color of his skin
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Handicapped, he has been kept inside by his brother to keep him, and others, safe. The people of Maycomb have made him into a horror story, spinning tales about a monster who sneaks out at night to commit crimes. At first, Scout listens, fascinated by these stories, even acting them out with her brother in a “melancholy little drama, woven from bits and scraps if gossip and legend” (52). However, in the second-to-last chapter of the book, Scout meets him, and finds him not a monster, but a quiet, reticent person who saved her life. He was one more “mockingbird” of the many in Maycomb; one more victim of the caste