64 pages • 2 hours read
Lynda RutledgeMockingbird Summer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 21-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary: “Summer 2020”
In the summer of 2020, Kate Corcoran is a retired journalist and in quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are hopes of reopening during the summer, the Tokyo Olympics rescheduled for 2021, and Black Lives Matter protests in cities around the country.
While in quarantine, Kate begins writing a novel. She sees the old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and recalls the summer of 1964. She decides to do what she should have done earlier: Search for America and start a novel that tells their story. She types America’s name into an internet search but there are no results. She resolves to make deeper search but hesitates, knowing that she cannot meet up with America because of the pandemic. She still has America’s old letter and decides to write one of her own.
In the letter, Kate catches America up on her family’s story after America’s departure from High Cotton. Kate’s parents have passed and Mack, who could not be drafted into the American War in Vietnam because of his injury, reunited with his first love, Lorelei, received a history degree, and coached the school’s baseball team. Lorelei became a lawyer. Cal made Belle a partner at the drugstore. Belle also started piano lessons. Kate went to college, became a journalist, and participated in the women’s rights movement. After graduation she worked as an intern for the reporter that interviewed her during the sit-in—eventually the internship became a permanent position at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She married a football coach. High Cotton’s high school and softball teams were integrated. Kate says that although the past few decades have had many tragic events, she remains hopeful for the future. She notes that she remembers America because their relationship shaped her and she hopes to learn America’s story too.
Kate writes that she thought of America and her mother often after they left and kept searching for her in vain but this time, she feels determined to find her. Kate resolves to reunite with America in person and announce her intention to write a novel about their story. As a novelist and a journalist, Kate believes she can “create a world in which you’d want to live” (282).
Kate ends the letter and starts her Internet search.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Summer 2021”
Kate reads news that the COVID-19 vaccinations will make a full end to quarantine possible.
One day in June as Kate works on her novel, her husband announces a visitor. When she asks who it is, her husband calls her “Corky,” which he never usually does. At the door, she sees a “slyly smiling woman with graying hair” and “long, intricate braids” holding her letter (285). Kate weeps and hugs America “savoring the small miracle of that moment” (285).
Chapters 21-22 Analysis
Rutledge’s structure includes a 56-year jump in time to provide the conclusion of Corky and America’s friendship arc, and drawing parallels between the past and the present that emphasize the story’s hopeful resolution. Rutledge connects the summer of 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and Corky’s “life-changing summer” of 1964—evoking the long history of social justice activism against racialized violence and discrimination in the United States (271). Kate’s reference to her old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird underscores the novel’s thematic interest in Developing Consciousness Through Friendship and Literature. Kate’s letter to America completes the narrative gap in the years after America’s departure. The letter affirms the impact that her friendship with America had on Corky’s life: “[T]he people you come to love early, the ones who help shape you into the person you become, never truly leave you” (273).
The changes in Corky’s family in the years following her summer of friendship with America highlight the intersection of activism around Racial Justice and Women’s Rights in the 1960s. Corky explains the shift in her father’s perspective after the sit-in protest at the drugstore and Mack’s assault—events that helped him develop a more expansive social consciousness, motivating him to embrace Belle’s desire to work and make her his partner in the drugstore. Belle took Evangeline’s advice and started piano lessons to begin living a fuller life. The socio-historical context of the summer of 1964 deeply influenced Corky, who went on to participate in the “women’s rights movement” (279). Rutledge illustrates Corky’s adult perspective, juxtaposing painful historical events in the years following the 1960s, such as the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, the Watergate Scandal, and nuclear disasters, with events she views as hopeful—such as the Women’s Liberation movement, Woodstock, and the fall of the Berlin wall.
The deep social unrest during the summer of 2020 reminds Corky of the constant presence of racism in American society, inspiring a desire to use her gifts to continue to fight injustice. Rutledge’s conclusion establishes a hopeful tone for her narrative: “evil wins sometimes and in some ways, although not forever” (280). To counter the devastation of the times, Corky announces her decision to write a novel about her relationship with America. This final reference to literature advances the text’s intertextuality and highlights the importance of storytelling in the narrative. Kate demonstrates her intention to add to the narrative of To Kill a Mockingbird with the story of her own experience in the 1960s.
With the two childhood friends’ reunion in 2021, Rutledge suggests that their bond survived all those years of separation, emphasizing a belief that friendship offers powerful hope against life’s challenges and the evils of the world. However, despite Corky’s expressed desire to hear America’s story, Rutledge doesn’t provide it in their final meeting, centering the perspective of her protagonist in the narrative’s resolution.
