In addition to the idea of protecting "the mockingbird,"
Boo Radley, Heck Tate, sherriff in Harper Lee's To Kill a
Mockingbird, seems reluctant to subject frail and mentally delicate
Boo to the rigors of another court case that could easily end in travesty as did that of
Tom Robinson. At any rate, Boo's trial could be, as Scout remarked of Tom's "a
carnival."
Like Tom Robinson's trial, the interrogation of
Boo--not to mention his father--would become an event that would bring out the curious
and the cruel. As Mr. Tate himself tells Atticus,
To my way of thinkin', Mr. Finch, taking the one
man who's done you and this town a great service an' draggin' him with his shy ways into
the limelight--to me, that's a sin. It's a sin and I'm not about to have it on my
head. If it was any other man, it'd be different. But not this man, Mr.
Finch.
Here is Mr. Heck
Tate's statement is another motif of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The
greater good is always the most important."
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