How Does Money Figure in A Time To Kill by John Grisham

                  Money controls everything. Now I know what you’re going to say, “No it doesn’t”. Well newsflash it does, especially in the book A Time to Kill by John Grisham. In this book, money figures as a way to maintain life, without it we would be dead. Grisham shows this very well by making the main character Carl Lee Hailey’s life lay in the hands of money.

                A Time to Kill by John Grisham takes place in Ford County, Mississippi where seventy three percent of the population is white and racist but at the time most of the south was racist toward African Americans. In the book these two white males around their mid-thirties raped a ten year old black girl. “A man’s supposed to protect his family” (Grisham 60), knowing that the men would get loose without being charged, Carl Lee Hailey the father of the little raped girl killed the two men in cold blood as they were leaving the courtroom to avenge his daughters rape. Now Hailey has been indicted with manslaughter and might face the gas chamber.

                The only way Hailey has a chance of not dying by the gas chamber is if he has a great lawyer that can prove him innocent and keep him alive, but to have a good lawyer, you need the money to pay for one. Hailey, being in jail until the trial, can’t make the money he needs because he’s the one with the income in his family and he lost his job because he is in jail. Jake, Hailey’s lawyer was explaining to Hailey that he needs to gather up the money to pay for all these fees for the trial, “You’ve got to have cash, Carl Lee. Not for me but for the psychiatrists. Why? Because I’d like to keep you away from the gas chamber which is only a hundred miles away. And to that, we need them to believe you were crazy when shooting those boys and we need an expert, a doctor to do so and they don't work for free.” (Grisham 208). The thing is if Hailey had the money he would’ve given it to Jake but he doesn’t have the money. His family barely has enough money to put food on the table.

                What I think was really cool was that Grisham showed that money affects everyone not just Hailey. Most of the African American people in Ford County live in poverty and don’t have jobs and barely have enough money to even scratch up a dollar for a good cause. The author shows this by having the local church have a fundraiser to help Hailey’s case, but they only made a couple thousand dollars because most of the people could only scratch up the few dollars they had.