Mockingbird Summer

“That summer, the last of her childhood, forever marked a moment in between as plainly as the railroad track running through her Texas town separated its citizens. It would change her in ways she wouldn’t fully understand until she’d lived a long lifetime…And, as life-changing stories sometimes do, it all began with a book.”

In the prologue, the omniscient third-person narrator establishes the protagonist’s transformational arc and alludes to her future life beyond the summer of 1964, emphasizing the life-long impact of her experience and foreshadowing Lynda Rutledge’s jump forward in time during the novel’s conclusion. Rutledge emphasizes the central importance of the narrative setting through the narrator’s description of Corky’s environment, a small, segregated town in the South at the height of the Civil Rights movement. The prologue also establishes the intertextual dimension of Rutledge’s novel, stressing that To Kill a Mockingbird plays a crucial role in Corky’s coming-of-age arc.

“It was part of the deal her parents had made with her after she’d begged incessantly to work behind the store’s soda fountain. Dresses were still expected for female outings, even for tomboys. Although, to feel better about the deal, Corky was secretly wearing her shorts underneath.”

Rutledge describes Corky’s character as a “tomboy” to emphasize the ways in which she already pushes back against conventional norms of traditional white femininity in the American South. Corky’s parents encourage her to wear dresses and be “ladylike,” but Corky defies social standards of femininity while also manifesting a desire to enter the workplace at early age. Corky’s perspective differs from that of her mother’s generation, signaling the socio-political shifts around Racial Justice and Women’s Rights in the 1960s.