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.