The Secret Courts of Men's Hearts: Code and Law in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

THE SECRET COURTS OF MEN'S HEARTS: CODE AND LAW IN HARPER LEE'S TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD Claudia Johnson University of Alabama In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch's final hope in the defense of his black client accused of rape is that he may strike a favorable response in his summation to the south Alabama jury by appealing to the official legal code of the United States: "There is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J. P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal."1 Atticus is grieved by what he cannot at this moment say without jeopardizing his case, that the law of the land is one thing and "the secret court of men's hearts" (p. 244) quite another. To Kill A Mockingbird presents the argument that the forces that motivate society are not consonant with the democratic ideals embedded in its legal system and that the disjunction between the codes men and women profess and those they live by threatens to unravel individual lives as well as the social fabric. The novel is set in the 1930s, was written in the late 1950s, periods when the South, Alabama particularly , was a case study of that proposition.2 The three years at the end of the 1950s, when the novel was written, form one of the most turbulent periods of race relations in a state with a turbulent history, a time when a long-standing relationship between blacks and whites, maintained in refutation of the spirit of American democracy, was being tested in the courts. The novel reveals a time when rulings handed down from "the secret courts of men's hearts" became the laws they lived by openly, in defiance not only of all reason but of the laws they professed to have gone to war to uphold. The historical context of the novel is replete with actual court cases bearing on the complex issues of constitutional and personal law. The notorious precursor to Alabama's legal battles of the fifties was the Scottsboro case of the 1930s. It is significant that only a few years before the setting of Lee's novel (1933 to 1935) about a black 130Claudia Johnson man accused of raping a white woman who had made sexual advances toward him, nine black men were charged in a notorious trial with raping two white women "of easy virture." Numerous celebrated legal battles arising from the Scottsboro trial were reported in the Southern and Northern press during those years when Scout, the thinly-veiled autobiographical protagonist of the novel, was precociously reading The Montgomery Advertiser, The Mobile Register, and Time. Doubtless, the young Nell Harper Lee, daughter of a moderate Southern attorney who had encouraged her precocity in legal matters, consciously or unconsciously absorbed for later literary use the circumstances and arguments surrounding the numerous Scottsboro trials of her youth in the thirties. In the summer of 1935, Atticus and his son Jem have an extended discussion about the composition of juries after an all-male, all-white jury convicts Atticus' client, Tom Robinson, of rape. On April 2, 1935, the front page of The Montgomery Advertiser reported that new trials had been ordered by the Supreme Court for two of the Scottsboro "boys," Clarence Norris and Haywood Patterson, on the grounds that no blacks had served on their juries. The South's dual system of justice is freely acknowledged in the Advertiser's editorial: blacks are not excluded from juries technically or legally, the editors claim, but "in common practice they are, of course."3 It is reasonable to believe that the issues in To Kill a...