704 Lessing, Doris
her with the same disdain Mayella Ewell shows
Tom Robinson, for example. Rather, Scout has an
appreciation for Calpurnia’s authority, confessing,
“On my part, I went to much trouble, sometimes,
not to provoke her.”
Racist attitudes are not found solely within
the white community of Maycomb. One Sunday
morning while Atticus is away, Calpurnia brings
the Finch children with her to church, the First
Purchase African M.E. Church, so called “because
it was paid for from the first earnings of freed
slaves.” It is at First Purchase that Scout feels the
sting of racism herself when a woman named Lula
chastises Calpurnia for toting white children into
a black church. Scout agrees with Jem’s suggestion
that they leave a place where they are not wanted,
but Calpurnia’s invocation of hospitality prevails,
proclaiming, “They’s my comp’ny.” Calpurnia’s
adherence to the law of hospitality is a great equal-
izer of sorts, for it is the exact rationale she uses
to excoriate Scout after she ridicules Walter Cun-
ningham at the dinner table earlier in the novel.
Scout is stunned to realize that Calpurnia resides
in two worlds and must be essentially two differ-
ent people depending on where she is. During her
visit to First Purchase, Scout learns not only about
Calpurnia’s duality but of the unfortunate Tom
Robinson, who stands accused of raping Mayella
Ewell, a young white girl.
Atticus is given the task of defending Tom,
knowing full well the chances of winning are almost
nonexistent. The Finch children see firsthand the
malignity of the community when a lynch mob
(which Atticus calmly diffuses) attempts to murder
Tom. During the trial, Scout, Jem, and Dill sit in
the balcony with members of the black community,
a physical manifestation of their ability to transcend
race. Despite clearly demonstrating that Tom was
incapable of raping Mayella with only one arm—the
left one having been obliterated in a cotton gin years
before—Tom is found guilty and sentenced to death.
Scout discovers that in her world it is not fact that
matters within a situation but the color of one’s skin;
truth is on Tom’s side, but the inexorable power of
racism is on Mayella’s. The Ewells, a disgrace irre-
spective of their skin color, who live near the city
garbage dump and literally exist off of its trash, still
wield more power than the likes of a hardwork-
ing black man such as Tom Robinson. During the
cross-examination of Tom, Dill can no longer stand
how Tom is degraded and must be escorted out of
the courthouse by Scout. It is Dill who intuits the
perverseness of the situation, the debasement of a
man because of the color of his skin. Additionally,
Dolphus Raymond, a white man whom all of May-
comb believes to be a drunk, explains to Dill and
Scout that he puts on an act in order to give people
a rationale that explains why he prefers to spend his
time in the black community. Racism is so pervasive
in Maycomb that people cannot believe a white
man would carry on as Dolphus does through his
own volition. He, like Calpurnia, must lead a dual
existence.
So much of To Kill a Mockingbird is about
Scout’s education in a world riddled with flaws.
Scout, as her name indicates, is someone who gath-
ers information and examines it diligently. She
represents the potential of the South, if it only has
the courage to face its shameful legacy of slavery and
racism, the type of courage people such as Atticus
and Tom display in Lee’s novel.
Chris GonzalezLESSing, DoriS The Golden Notebook
(1962)
The underlying plot of Doris Lessing’s The Golden
Notebook is the story of Anna Wulf ’s life, which is
told in the five different parts of the novel called
Free Women. Anna is a writer who lives with her
young daughter, Janet, and her best friend Molly
who, like Anna, is divorced and has a child, but
Tommy lives with his father.
Anna suffers from a writer’s block, but under-
takes to document different areas of her life in five
different diaries: “a black notebook which is to do
with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, con-
cerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which
[she makes] stories out of [her] experience; and a
blue notebook which tries to be a diary.” The novel
alternates among these different narratives, and we
do not get to know about events in a chronological
order but need to put together different pieces of
information to get a fuller view of Anna’s life.