mockingbird

There is a good reason for the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird has been listed second only to the Bible in surveys asking which piece of literature is most important for every civilized person to read. Initially, I was drawn in because I identified with the feisty, precocious six-year-old tomboy scamp named Jean Louise. She sounded just like me at six, only I was Jean Marie and my nicknames were more unfortunate than Scout. However, before I reached the end of the first chapter I knew I was reading something special, and that I’d love this book forever. 

I reread it once a year or so; I’ve read it aloud to my children. It still has the power to make me laugh and cry. Its message is passionate, relevant for all, and timeless. How did author Nelle Harper Lee achieve this singular masterpiece? What qualified her to write about basic human rights which should extend to all, regardless of their skin color or social standing; to so skillfully expose the penchant for ignorant prejudices inherent in human nature, and make us want to abandon them?  

Lee descended from Civil War General Robert E. Lee. She grew up in a small southern town which served as the model for Maycomb, Alabama, the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird. Her father was a lawyer and was in some ways the inspiration for Atticus. Mockingbird is somewhat autobiographic, as far as the author drew from real life places and people to enrich her story, and in my opinion the human experience behind the pen is one secret of its power. However, Lee was able to reach beyond her own experiences and observations and deliver universal truths about human nature and human rights that encompass all of humanity. For example, the trial of Tom Robinson, according to Lee, “was a composite of all the trials in the world”—not just a fictionalized version of the Scottsboro Boys’ trial which occurred in 1931, roughly the same era of Mockingbird’s setting. 

Mockingbird was published in 1960, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. I think it is fair to say, then, that Lee’s audience was a society in upheaval and ripe for a work addressing the monumental civil rights issues affecting everyone. I think it was a stroke of pure genius to address these issues by way of a story told through the eyes of a child. As you watch the events unfold for Scout, her family, her town—her civilization—you are swept right into the saga with her. You look afresh at the adult world through a child’s honest perspective, and identify with the puzzlement which you, too, felt by it as a child; you experience the growing pains she is enduring. 

The way Lee elicits emotion is unexpected: you’re cruising along to Scout’s pragmatic voice, and suddenly emotion reaches out and grabs you by the throat, like this: "With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable"; or this: “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'”; or this: “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad”; and--no matter how many times I read it--this: “His lips parted in a timid smile, and our neighbor’s image blurred with my sudden tears. ‘Hey, Boo,’ I said." It’s raw emotion without sappiness, something for which relatively few authors have a gift. 

Though the story is set in the 1930s, the beliefs held by the townspeople of Maycomb were still held by many thirty years later when it was published, as articulated by Mrs. Dubose: “What has this world come to when a Finch goes against his raising?...your father is no better than the niggers and trash he works for.” However, instead of a lone Atticus against a whole community of prejudice, the sixties had a rising movement of people sharing Atticus’ attitude: “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.” Civilization in the sixties could identify with and was inspired by Lee’s Mockingbird. Hence, it enjoyed eighty-eight consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. 

To Kill a Mockingbird begins with flashback: “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow”--hooking the reader in with a touch of tenseness, a little mystery about how the arm was broken. It follows a chronological sequence of events thereafter, spanning about three years, until the climax, which includes the tragedy that involved the breaking of the arm. Because it is a flashback, you experience the events as the innocent child Scout, but with the subtle and skillful application of the adult Scout’s knowledge. The resulting effect is powerful and gripping.

 Lee makes the claim that discriminating between people based on things beyond their control, such as skin color, is reprehensible. I believe she makes this claim with force, and in many ways. Near the beginning of the story, she depicts a scene in school where a boy from a poor family has no lunch and Scout’s brother invites him home for dinner. Scout reflects the prejudice of her surroundings when she defends insulting him: “He ain’t company, Cal, he’s just a Cunningham”. The black cook teaches Scout a valuable lesson in reply: “Don’t matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house’s yo’ comp’ny, and don’t you let me catch you remarkin’ on their ways like you was so high and mighty! Yo’ folks might be better’n the Cunninghams but it don’t count for nothin’ the way you’re disgracin’ ‘em”. This theme is carried out, largely by Calpurnia and Atticus, throughout the book: “As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.” It is even evident in the way Atticus forbids his children from playing the “Boo Radley” game, teaching them that everyone, no matter the popular opinion of him, deserves respect. 

Lee uses imagery, the most obvious being the mockingbird as the harmlessness and innocence of Boo Radley, and Atticus shooting the mad dog as his lone stand against blind prejudice. She also employs figurative language: “… summer was Dill by the fish pool smoking string, Dill’s eyes alive with complicated plans to make Boo Radley emerge; summer was the swiftness with which Dill would reach up and kiss me when Jem was not looking…”; “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum”; “When Miss Maudie was angry her brevity was icy. Something had made her deeply angry, and her gray eyes were as cold as her voice”. The vividness of Lee’s descriptions put you right in the scenes. 

I have never watched the film—I have wanted to, but have held back because I don’t want to be disappointed. The pictures Harper Lee painted with her pen are more than good enough for me. The diction used in Mockingbird is a complex mix of the vernacular of the economically depressed small-town south and the educated Atticus. Overall, the language employed creates layers of richness you can savor with every rereading. It is not too difficult for a ten-year-old to read, but yet it never gets stale. The tone is informal because it is narrated by a child, but it, too, is an intricate mosaic of shadow and light. I agree with those who name To Kill a Mockingbird as one of the most important books anyone can read. It is truly a classic.

Specter Speculation

Do you laugh in derision at the idea of sharing our world with other-worldly spirits who once inhabited physical forms? Or do you smile nervously during campfire ghost stories, not believing, and yet uncomfortably unable to definitively dispute the existence of spooks? Perhaps you have felt the cold eddy of air stirred by a passing phantom yourself, and need little convincing to acknowledge the possibility of paranormal visitors. Whichever the case, I intend to turn your laughter into apprehensive ambivalence, your dubious denial into conviction, or substantiate your shadows.

First of all, a most compelling indication that the naysayers are mistaken is that, in spite of centuries of skepticism, there is yet to be a single person who can irrefutably prove that unearthly wanderers do not exist. Certainly, much “evidence” assigned to ghosts has been explained under the harsh light of scientific knowledge; but absolute proof against spectral visitation has not been made. Considering the highly advanced scientific and technological age in which we live, this factor carries more than a whisper of credibility.

Secondly, for the significant number of people worldwide who already believe in an afterlife, it can hardly stretch the belief system very much to also believe in guests from beyond the grave. Having already accepted the idea of immaterial spirits which can survive death, as roughly half of the world’s population has, how can one convincingly deny that those spirits may walk the earth on occasion?

Furthermore, I raise the question of why ghosts have been such an enduring part of human legend, literature, and lore if there is no substance to the claims. Like the specters they are, they have haunted our prose and poetry as far back as fifteen centuries. This seems preposterous if they do not haunt our world in fact.

Of course, there are also the inexplicable photos, taken before technology allowed for manipulation, depicting people who were actually already dead at the time the photo was taken, or apparitions otherwise unexplained; numberless personal anecdotes of seeing, speaking with, and being touched by ghosts; reports of animals sensing spirits unseen by humans. Much of that type of “evidence” may be explained or discarded as you sift through it, but there will always remain some which stubbornly refuse to be discredited or disproved. What then? If it is impossible to disprove or discredit something, would you just deny it exists when it clearly does?

What does all of this mean for you? Ghosts do not have a direct impact on our lives, for the most part, so why should it matter whether you believe in them or not? Well, I think it only matters as much as you value having an open mind. If science cannot disprove ghosts entirely, a compelling number of people have no trouble accepting the philosophy of an afterlife, people have included haunts in their culture for many centuries, and countless people have stories or other phenomenon which can’t be explained without the actual existence of ghosts, how can one deny that existence and still claim to have an open mind?

I understand that you may have valid concerns with what I have laid out here. To begin with, you may argue that although no one has ever disproved the existence of ghosts, neither has anyone proved it beyond any doubt. This is true, but I go back to the point that until disproved it cannot validly be completely disregarded. Some people take issue with it because of religious beliefs which dictate a soul goes directly to heaven or directly to hell upon death, no dilly-dallying or in-between. While I understand that, and personally, I believe most of them do, I have found no religious edict which forbids the possibility of an occasional visit to our world from a soul who has gone beyond. Perhaps you struggle with the thought that we would be bumping into ghosts left and right if they exist, because there would be far too many of them when you think of all the people who have lived and died to date. But to believe that ghosts exist does not mean you must believe that all of them choose to return to haunt their former hangouts. Most of them probably prefer to rest in peace, something sadly lacking on earth. Yet another protest may arise from the fact that far more specters are seen or felt during the night as opposed to any time of day, and skeptics conclude that that fact raises the chances of the encounters being merely part and parcel of dreams. I would reply that it would be far harder to distinguish the ethereal from the earthy in broad daylight, with all the noise and bustle of daily life surrounding you; there is very likely as many phantoms during the day, which simply go unrecognized.

I will leave you with one last unsettling fact. My name is Mary Amelia St. Clair. Perhaps my pen name, May Sinclair, is more familiar to you. I died in 1946. It feels good to write again.