Atticus begins his testimony by asking many questions about mayella’s life. why might he do this?

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• Mayella Ewell is called to the witness stand.
• Unlike her father, who looked like he had prepared for his appearance in court by bathing for the first time in months if not years, Mayella looks like she actually has an ongoing acquaintance with soap and water.
• Mr. Gilman asks Mayella to describe what happened that night in her own words, but she doesn't answer, so he switches to more specific questions.
• Her answers are still minimal, so the judge asks her to just tell the court what happened, and she bursts into tears.
• Judge Taylor tells her that she has no cause for shame or fear, so long as she tells the truth.
• The judge asks Mayella what she's scared of, and she points to Atticus.
• When the judge asks Mayella how old she is, she says nineteen and a half.
• The judge tells Mayella that Mr. Finch isn't going to scare her, and that his job as judge is to stop him if he tries.
• Mayella, soothed, finally gets going on her testimony.
• What she says: she was on the porch when Tom Robinson came by, she asked him to chop up an old piece of furniture for kindling, and when she went inside to get a nickel to pay him he attacked her from behind.
• Did she scream and fight back? Yes.
• What happened next? She can't really remember, but eventually her father and Mr. Tate were there.
• Mr. Gilmer asks again if Mayella tried to fight off her attacker, and if he took "full advantage" (18.38) of her, and she answers yes to both questions.
• Now it's Atticus's turn.
• Mayella takes offense to Atticus's calling her "ma'am" (she thinks he's making fun of her), and Scout wonders what her life is like that she thinks normal courtesy is rudeness.
• Some facts about Mayella: she's the eldest of seven kids, her mom's been dead for a while, she can read and write but she only went to school for two or three years.
• Does she have any friends? Again, she thinks Atticus is making fun, since the idea seems so absurd.
• Atticus asks Mayella about her father (who's still in the room), whether he's ever beaten her, and she says, after a hesitation, that he's never touched her.
• Yeah, we're not so sure we believe that.
• Finally Atticus's questions turn to the day of the alleged crime. Mayella says that Tom passed the house every day, but this was the first time she had asked him to come into the yard (though she jumped when he asked that question), but she might have asked him to do odd jobs before, she can't remember.
• We're getting the picture that this testimony isn't exactly going to hold up.
• Atticus quotes Mayella's previous testimony and asks her whether the defendant hit her face; she says no, then yes, then that she can't remember, then cries.
• When asked to identify the man who raped her, Mayella indicates Tom, but Atticus tells him to stand up so that Mayella can have a good look at him.
• Tom stands up, revealing that his left arm is a foot shorter than his right and his left hand is shriveled.
• Booyah!
• Up in the balcony, Reverend Sykes tells Jem and Scout that Tom caught his hand in a cotton gin when he was a boy.
• Atticus asks how this man could have raped her, and she says she doesn't know how it happened but it did.
• Mr. Gilmer objects that Atticus is browbeating the witness.
• Judge Taylor replies that if anyone's doing any browbeating it's Mayella, but he's the only one laughing at his joke.
• Does Mayella want to reconsider any of her testimony? Nope. She even adds some new details to try to make it make more sense.
• Atticus asks a series of questions that Mayella simply refuses to answer: why the other children didn't hear her screams, if she screamed when she saw her father in the window instead of at Tom, if her father was the one who beat her up.
• After meeting all these questions with silence, Mayella makes her final statement: "That nigger yonder took advantage of me an' if you fine fancy gentlemen don't wanta do nothin' about it then you're all yellow stinkin' cowards" (18.167).
• After that Mayella bursts into tears and refuses to answer any more questions, whether from Atticus, from Mr. Gilmer, or from Judge Taylor himself.
• Scout thinks that somehow Atticus had wounded Mayella in a way Scout doesn't understand, and that it made Atticus sick to do it.
• Mayella leaves the witness stand, directing a dagger-look of hatred at Atticus on the way.
• Time for a break.
• Scout wonders what nuances of the case she might be missing, since it all seems fairly straightforward to her, and remembers that Atticus told her that Judge Taylor is a good judge.
• The judge and the lawyers return to restart the case.
• Jem, Scout, and Dill are pleased to see that the Judge has brought a cigar with him, which he proceed to begin eating, spitting out the bits once he chews them up.
• It's now almost 4 p.m., and Judge Taylor asks Atticus if they can finish the case up this afternoon.
• Atticus says he thinks they can, and he has just one witness to call.

To catch up on Blogging To Kill a Mockingbird, click here!

As we’ve discussed, everything I know about the judicial system comes from Law & Order: SVU, Legally Blonde, and that one episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Which is to say I know very little about the judicial system, other than it involves a no-nonsense judge, attorneys objecting to things left, right, and center, and a big Eureka moment towards the end that unequivocally settles the case in the hearts and minds of the jury. These next few chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird have just about all of those things. Let’s get into it.

So in Chapter 18, Mayella Ewell is called to the stand. Mr. Gilmer, the prosecutor, is only able to ask her a handful of questions before she bursts into tears because she’s afraid of Atticus tricking her the way he tricked her dad.

(I think we can all agree that revealing a person to be left-handed isn’t exactly trickery. If Atticus wanted to trick Bob Ewell, he would’ve said “a loser says what” and Bob Ewell would’ve been like “what” and Judge Taylor would have had to call for order in the courtroom from the sheer magnitude of people shouting “GOT ‘EM.”)

Anyway, Mayella alleges that she was on the porch when Tom Robinson passed by the house. She asked him to come inside and break up a chifforobe for her (it’s like a wardrobe or an armoire), at which point he attacked her. Her dad showed up, Tom Robinson ran, and the sheriff arrived not long after.

When Atticus gets up to question her, Mayella is not having it. She is not even in the general vicinity of having it. He addresses her as “ma’am” and “Miss Mayella,” to which she takes great offense, assuming Atticus is mocking her. I’m the same way. No one calls me “ma’am” unless I’m making a scene because I’ve never had crème brûlée this good and they want me to leave the restaurant lest I scare off the other patrons.

The judge assures Mayella that Atticus is simply being polite. He says, “Let the record show that the witness has not been sassed, her views to the contrary.” That’s a real line from the book and not something that would definitely only happen if I were on the witness stand in real life.

Atticus asks a few questions. In doing so, he paints a picture of the Ewells’ home life. They’re extremely poor, and Bob Ewell drinks away what little money they do have. The children are constantly sick and covered in dirt, and Mayella is the oldest of eight.

He asks her if she has any friends, and she doesn’t appear to know what he means, which is super sad. He asks if she loves her father. She says he’s tolerable, except when he drinks. Yikes. When asked if her father has ever hit her, she says, “My paw’s never touched a hair o’ my head in my life.”

Now, onto the reason we’re all here. Mayella claims this was the first time she’d ever invited Tom Robinson inside the fence. She claims Tom immediately choked her and hit her. She describes a violent attack that resulted in (as we know) much bruising on the right side of her face, most likely the work of a left-handed person. Her story begins to fall apart when she makes contradictory statements, when she can’t explain why her siblings (who she claims were nearby) didn’t hear the commotion, and when (drumroll) Tom Robinson stands up to reveal he has a physical disability. His left arm is a foot shorter than his right, and his hand is small and shriveled, rendering Mayella’s claim that Tom was the one who beat her pretty unlikely, if not impossible.

Guys, Atticus just dropped an Elle Woodsian bomb on these proceedings.

Atticus then hits Mayella with an uncomfortable line of questioning. Why didn’t she run? Did she scream? “You’re a strong girl, what were you doing all the time, just standing there?” Did she only scream when she saw her father in the window, not before? Was it Tom Robinson who beat her, or her father?

Mayella makes one final claim—that Tom Robinson took advantage of her—and refuses to say anything more. This seems like as good a time as any to take a break, so they do. After ten minutes, they begin again. Atticus says he only has one witness to call: Tom Robinson.

NOTABLE QUOTES

“Somehow, Atticus had hit her hard in a way that was not clear to me, but it gave him no pleasure to do so. He sat with his head down, and I never saw anybody glare at anyone with the hatred Mayella showed when she left the stand and walked by Atticus’s table.”

THIS AND THAT

• Whew. Okay. This was a thorny, thorny chapter, and there’s lots to talk down here in the margins. We’re living in a time when women are finally coming forward about rape and sexual assault after being systematically silenced for decades, so it makes sense that Atticus’s questions come off sounding like the worst sort of victim-blaming. And boy, do they. Let’s be clear: just because someone doesn’t fight back doesn’t mean they weren’t raped. Whether or not they scream or call for help has no bearing on whether or not the assault occurred.
• What we’re dealing with here is an intersection of race and gender politics. On the one hand, women saying they’ve been raped and being met with disbelief is a Big Deal, historically and currently. On the other, white people accusing black people of crimes they didn’t commit is also a Big Deal historically and currently (see: Emmett Till). Both of these things are important. Both are the result of power imbalances and societal inequalities, which is, I think, the sticking point.
• Mayella is a woman in a world where being a woman comes with expectations, limitations, and misogyny on the daily, but she’s also a white woman in 1935 and will therefore always be prioritized above a person of color. She possesses privilege and power that Tom Robinson does not. Do I like that Atticus asked these things of her, made these implications? Of course not. Neither did he. See “notable quotes.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Thoughts on the above? My word isn’t gospel. I’m just spitballing here and would like to say, for the record, that I don’t actually know a single thing about anything.

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