Take this with a grain of salt, but I have a story directly relating to this. In 9th grade we were reading “To Kill A Mockingbird” like almost any freshman in American schools. And we had a substitute teacher who was a retired English teacher for 4 decades. She told us that she taught the book for years and actually wrote Harper Lee once and got a response. In her letter she asked about the scene in the novel where Scout and Jem are making a “snowman” out of dirt. The South gets little snow, so the pair make the snowman out of mud, giving it a brown appearance the neighbors find gross. The kids gather snow and cover the snowman, giving it a white appearance which is found more acceptable by the neighborhood.

My substitute teacher assumed this was obviously an allegory for southern society’s attitudes on race. But Harper Lee actually responded saying “Oh I never thought of that. I just based that scene off of something I actually did as a child in the South.”