Silent Cries The cries of help often go unheard, due to terror deafening the words of an indivdual. In Harper Lee’s To kill a Mockingbird, Mayella Ewell’s cries go unheard by every character in the novel and she decides to abandon her only opportunity to have her cries heard, during the Tom Robinson trial. Mayella is an abused, poor, lonely young adult for whom Lee has sympathy. Although she is rude, ignorant and stubborn during the Tom Robinson trial, she is also terrified of her father Bob Ewell and the consequences from him if she tells the truth. Lee expresses her sympathy for Mayella by creating vivid details of her cruel home life, hope of living a better life, and her ignorance. Through the use of delicate strokes of the pen, Harper Lee creates a cruel home life, which has the reader feeling deeply pitied for Mayella. Lee portrays her feelings towards a tough situation with the unbearable home, in which Mayella is held captive. The Ewell's are the poorest of the poor in Maycomb, Alabama with very little to no income. The income that does come in was usually useless since, “[t]he relief check was far from enough to feed the family and there was strong suspicion that [Mr. Ewell] drank it up anyway” (Lee 183). With being extremely poor, having an alcoholic father and serving as a mother figure, Mayella is essentially a slave in her own home, being abused by Papa and having to care for her siblings. The horrid living conditions don’t stop there, her dismal home is located near a dump. Keeping clean was a rarity since, “it was everybody for themselves as far as keeping clean went: if you wanted to wash you hauled your own water” (183). This filthy water was runoff from the dump near the Ewell home.

Lee also feels sympathetic understanding the efforts Mayella works toward not being defined by her last name. The Ewell name in Maycomb is closely related to poor, filthy, lazy and uneducated. Mayella however is striving to change this for herself. Although a small effort, the “row of red geraniums in the Ewell yard” that she maintains is the only sign of beauty in the dismal yard. This simple row of flowers represents her aspirations for a much more