Lester stabbed another Black man at a honky-tonk. The reason Carl Lee trusts Jake is that Jake earned an acquittal for Carl Lee's brother, Lester Hailey. Racial prejudice also plays a huge part in the way Jake Brigance approaches the defense of Carl Lee. Tonya, conversely, is not given that choice. These "untouchable" girls, implied to be white women by the circumstances of their casually associating with Cobb and Willard, are shown to have agency enough in the eyes of Cobb and Willard to deny sexual contact with them. Frustrated, they left the lake and were driving to no place in particular when they happened across the girl" (4). Cobb had been generous with his drugs and beer, but the girls did not reciprocate. He writes, "They had been at the lake most of the day, where Cobb had a friend with a boat and some extra girls who were supposed to be easy but turned out to be untouchable. In fact, Grisham demonstrates the clear difference in boundaries for Cobb when it comes to white women and Black women (and children).
The reason Cobb and Willard target Tonya in the first place is because she is a Black girl, and they feel that they can attack her, even kill her, with impunity, and that the community will do nothing to bring her justice. The painful legacy of the antebellum South and the Jim Crow era, and all of the residual structural and institutional obstacles that remain in the "New South" at the time of the novel's setting, constitute the central thematic material of the novel. A major theme of A Time to Killis racial prejudice.
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