Mayella Ewell

• “Won’t answer a word you say long as you keep on mockin’ me.”…”Long’s he keeps on callin’ me ma’am an sayin’ Miss Mayella. I don’t hafta take his sass, I ain’t called upon to take it.”
• “Miss Mayella,” said Atticus, in spite of himself, “a nineteen-year-old girl like you must have friends. Who are your friends?”The witness frowned as if puzzled. “Friends?”“Yes, don’t you know anyone near your age, or older, or younger? Boys and girls? Just ordinary friends?”Mayella’s hostility, which had subsided to grudging neutrality flared again. “You makin’ fun o’ me agin Mr. Finch?”Atticus let her question answer his.
• “It’s not an easy question Miss Mayella, so I’ll try again. Do you remember him beating you about the face?” Atticus’s voice had lost its comfortableness; he was speaking in his arid, detached professional voice. “Do you remember him beating you about the face?”“I don’t recollect if he hit me. I mean yes I do, he hit me.”
• Suddenly Mayella became articulate. “I got somethin’ to say,” she said.Atticus raised his head. “Do you want to tell us what happened?” But she did not hear the compassion in his invitation. “I got somethin’ to say an’ then I ain’t gonna say no more. That n***** 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, stinkin’ cowards, the lot of you. Your fancy airs don’t come to nothin – your ma’amin’ and Miss Mayellerin’ don’t come to nothin’, Mr. Finch – ”Then she burst into real tears. Her shoulders shook with angry sobs. She was as good as her word.
• It came to me that Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world.
• “She reached up an’ kissed me ‘side of th’ face. She says she never kissed a grown man before an’ she might as well kiss a n*****. She says what her papa do to her don’t count. She says, ‘Kiss me back, n*****.’ I say Miss Mayella lemme outa here an’ tried to run but she got her back to the door an’ I’da had to push her. I didn’t wanta harm her, Mr. Finch, an’ I say lemme pass, but just when I say it Mr. Ewell yonder hollered through th’ window.”
• “She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.”
• “She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.”
• Mr. Finch is always courteous to everybody.