To Kill a Mockingbird

In the "What Took You So Long?" department, I finally got around to reading Harper Lee's classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its publications this summer. Of course I have seen the film a few times, but it was great to get a chance to read the source, which is a kind of child adventure layered with dark overtones.

The book, published in 1960, but set in 1930s Alabama, is about many things, but mostly about courage and race. Narrated by Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, the story took place when she was six to nine years old. She and her older brother, Jem, live with their widowed father, Atticus, who is an attorney. They have a Tom Sawyer-like existence, playing with their friend Dill, mostly fascinated by boogie-man stories about a recluse, Boo Radley, who lives in a house down the street but is never seen.

Scout is a tomboy with a lot of sass. She gets in trouble quite a bit--her first day of school finds the teacher telling her to stop reading with her father, as it will throw off her teaching methods. She's quick to fight other kids who she feels are slighting her, but her father's most persistent lesson is that a person has to try to understand what it's like to be that other person, to walk around in their shoes a bit. The other big lesson is that of the title--it's a sin to kill a mockingbird, because they don't harm anyone. All they do is bring pleasure to folks with their singing.

This lesson will resonate with the Boo Radley subplot, but also with what ends to be the main plot--Atticus has been asked to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, who has been charged with raping a white woman. The trial simmers throughout the book, as the children come to be affected by it when townsfolk give them dirty looks, or when one woman out and out calls their father a "nigger-lover." They end up watching the trial from the balcony with the black folks, and though the man is clearly innocent he is convicted, which Atticus knew he would be from the start.

The book is much beloved, but has also caused controversy through the years. Some have tried to ban it for the oft-used "N" word, but it seems to me that to not use it would be dishonest. Certainly white people used that word in the deep south (and almost everywhere else) in the 1930s. The criticism of the depiction of black characters in the book has a little more weight, as they are either the noble, stoic Tom Robinson, or the stereotypical Calpurnia, who is the Finch's cook, a kind of twentieth-century version of the contented house slave. Those criticisms certainly are accurate with the benefit of hindsight, but I have a hard time imagining black people of Alabama of the time to behave any differently--there was no black power back then. This is stressed in the fact that Atticus knows he has no chance with Tom's case, that no jury of white men will ever take the word of a black man over a white woman, even in the evidence is overwhelming.

It's not only race that divides the characters. Aunt Alexandra, Atticus' sister who comes to live with them, is constantly pointing out how even whites have their caste. When Scout wants to play with Walter Cunningham, she is disallowed by her aunt, because he is from a lower status. This rigid conformity to these roles permeate the book.

The character of Atticus Finch has gone on to have one of the great legacies of American letters, amplified by Gregory Peck's performance in the film. He is a patient man with his children, but has also come to represent the ideals of the legal profession, as many lawyers today say they entered the profession because of him. His speech, in which he idealistically posits that the courts are the "great levelers" is one of the greatest courtroom speeches ever written. But beyond that, his simple decency shines through, although he is really a secondary character of the book--he sort of hovers around the periphery of Scout's world, entering when she needs him, but mostly either reading the newspaper or attending the state legislature. His words are austere but powerful, such as when Jem asks him, after the verdict, "How could they do it, how could they?" and Atticus replies, "I don't know, but they did it. They've done if before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it--seems that only children weep."

It is his quiet courage that is held up for admiration in the book. His children have never known him to fire a gun, so they are therefore astonished when he is called upon to shoot a rabid dog--it turns out he was a great shot as a youth, but prefers not to shoot anymore. When confronted by an angry white man who spits on him, he turns the other cheek, and when the man asks him if he's too proud to fight, Atticus says no, he's too old. He represents the form of non-violent protest that was started by Gandhi and then carried on by Martin Luther King.

Lee's style is honeyed Southern syntax. One falls into the rhythms early, such as when Scout describes her hometown of Maycomb: "Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

Throughout the book are many wry observations by Scout, surely formed by the years that have passed since the book's event. My favorite was when she mentions a character named Braxton Bragg Underwood: "Atticus said naming people after Confederate generals made slow steady drinkers."

Harper Lee never wrote another book, and makes few public appearances. She was a character in two different movies recently, both concerning her association with Truman Capote, who was a childhood friend (and the basis for the character of Dill). The book has never gone out of print, and was recently proclaimed by British librarians as the one book everyone should read before they die, even ahead of the Bible. Not everyone loved it--fellow Southern writers Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers were hesitant in their praise--O'Connor said it was really a children's book. And yes, it is a children's book, in the sense that an ugly situation like racial prejudice is seen through the eyes of a child, and when it is it becomes even more ridiculous, sad, and tragic.