![]() The question is asked to jurors, witnesses, and acquaintances to assess the appropriate response to Carl Lee's actions. "What would you do if someone raped Hanna?” (112), "What would you do to the rapist?" (127), "If it was your little girl, and if it was two niggers, and you could get your hands on them, what would you do?” (44). PerspectiveĪ major question that is asked throughout the book is "What would you do?" The question comes in many variations, but always refers to the situation of a young daughter being raped by grown men. The only scene that suggests that white people don't have the right to utter slurs against Black people occurs at the end, during final jury deliberations, and even that scene resorts to a gratuitous use of slurs (465). In other words, the use of slurs seems to evade any further discussion and is taken for granted as part of life in the South however, this portrayal fails to address the fact that at this point in time, slurs had already been undergoing a process of criticism. The use of racial slurs in this novel, set in the mid-1980s, feels gratuitous and unreflective. It would be impossible to talk about racism in A Time to Kill without addressing the frequent use of racial slurs in the novel by seemingly every white character, not just the characters that Grisham poses as virulent racists. Then, when they were finished, they would collect themselves and all march quietly from the courtroom" (64). ![]() He could just see the fat nigger women stomping up and down while their men carved on the boys with switchblades and machetes. He considers the possibility of handing Cobb and Willard over to the Black attendees of the hearing, and thinks, "That would be fun to watch, and justice would be served. As Judge Bullard presides over a preliminary hearing, his internal monologue is revealed to be extremely racist and prejudicial. It's also the white politicians and authority figures, like the judges. So the double standard is clear.īut it's not only the white juries that maintain this unjust atmosphere. ![]() Jake explains to Carl Lee that his case is different because he shot two white men, and an all-white jury will surely feel threatened by a Black man who kills white men. Grisham writes that "Jake enjoyed the stabbings because acquittals were possible just get an all-white jury full of rednecks who could care less if all niggers stabbed each other" (183). Lester stabbed another Black man at a honky-tonk. The reason Carl Lee trusts Jake is that Jake earned an acquittal for Carl Lee's brother, Lester Hailey. Racial prejudice also plays a huge part in the way Jake Brigance approaches the defense of Carl Lee. Tonya, conversely, is not given that choice. These "untouchable" girls, implied to be white women by the circumstances of their casually associating with Cobb and Willard, are shown to have agency enough in the eyes of Cobb and Willard to deny sexual contact with them. Frustrated, they left the lake and were driving to no place in particular when they happened across the girl" (4). Cobb had been generous with his drugs and beer, but the girls did not reciprocate. ![]() He writes, "They had been at the lake most of the day, where Cobb had a friend with a boat and some extra girls who were supposed to be easy but turned out to be untouchable. In fact, Grisham demonstrates the clear difference in boundaries for Cobb when it comes to white women and Black women (and children). The reason Cobb and Willard target Tonya in the first place is because she is a Black girl, and they feel that they can attack her, even kill her, with impunity, and that the community will do nothing to bring her justice. The painful legacy of the antebellum South and the Jim Crow era, and all of the residual structural and institutional obstacles that remain in the "New South" at the time of the novel's setting, constitute the central thematic material of the novel. A major theme of A Time to Killis racial prejudice.
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