The Continuing Legacy of TKAM

 

Some months ago, my dear friend, poet and author Mary Langer Thompson, sent me a copy of the book pictured above, Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters. I am deeply indebted, as reading Tom Santopietro’s fascinating review of the writing of the novel and the making of the film reminded me once again how much I love this book.

 

Ten years old and starved for books that were slightly more advanced than the Bobbsey Twins and Little House on the Prairie series my friend Cathy had offered, I snuck into the closet where some of my older brother’s books were stored, hoping to find a science fiction or fantasy novel I could get lost in. Instead, I pulled out a tattered paperback with the picture of a bird on the cover. To Kill a Mockingbird. I was a birdwatcher. Why on earth would anyone want to kill a mockingbird?

In Harper Lee’s words, “Thus began our longest journey together.”

Reading it then, at age ten, I didn’t fully understand all the nuances of race relations. I was a young white girl living in a predominantly white community in Southern California. That particular summer was a quiet, lazy one. The fiery tumult of the Watts uprising was still a year away.

What did resonate with me the first time I read TKAM—and every time since—was the story of a girl who was as like me as she was unlike me.

Like me, Scout was a tomboy. (With my first read, I was ever-so-envious of Scout’s overalls; It would be another ten years before I finally had the buying power to purchase my first pair at age twenty. I’m nearly seventy now, and I still wear them often.)

Unlike me, Scout had a comfortable and close relationship with her father (something else I was envious of).

But what a story! Bored of a summer, Scout, Jem, and Dill spent their days imagining life inside the Radley home, in the same way my brother, sister, and I would wonder and speculate about the weird neighbors who’d moved in next door, bringing with them a live monkey that roamed freely about the house and regularly attacked and bit the girl our age who lived there.

In my initial read, the trial of Tom Robinson seemed to interrupt the flow of the book, and I didn’t understand most of it, or the chapters about the well-intentioned but clearly racist (although not to me at the time) missionary society or Scout’s very racist third-grade teacher. Happily, the novel returned to the mysterious figure of Boo Radley in its final pages.

At some point in my childhood or adolescence, I saw the movie based on the book. I have no memory of how I saw it for the first time; it must have been shown on television. But my emotional memory recalls the tenderness that Atticus extended to his young daughter.

Some years later, when my own daughter turned ten, I gave her a copy of TKAM for her birthday. It occurred to me then—since my kid would be reading it—that I should read it again, review it from an adult perspective. My, how differently—how much more heavily—the story landed on my heart. Now that I had more fully experienced the Civil Rights Movement. Now that I had been caught up in race riots at my high school. Now that I had Black friends. Now that I had children of my own, some of them racially mixed.

If I had loved the novel before, I revered it now.

So I count myself most fortunate and blessed that, nearly as soon as I began teaching high school, I was privileged to teach To Kill a Mockingbird as part of the curriculum. I taught ninth grade for 25 of the 27 years of my teaching career, with multiple sections of ninth grade in any given year. How many times now have I read aloud these words, affecting a Southern accent, “Folks call me Dill” or “Scout, let’s get us a baby” or “Hey, Boo”? I have no idea. How many times have I watched my students as they watched the big reveal of Boo Radley in the movie? I have no idea of that number, either. But I can tell you that, despite having read and seen it over a hundred times now, that scene—whether in the book or in the film—still brings me to tears.

In recent years, TKAM has had its detractors. In my humble opinion, the critics who focus solely on the plot thread of Tom Robinson miss the mark of Harper Lee’s great American novel. As much as we may agonize over the stark truth of his situation, the book is not “about” Tom. It’s Scout’s story, one hundred percent. It’s a coming-of-age tale—albeit based on the harsh realities of Southern issues—of a young girl who is, initially, blissfully ignorant of the ignorance in her community. She is six and innocent as the story begins, nine when it closes, her eyes now having been opened to see some of those things that Atticus would have kept her from seeing, if only he could have.

Sixty years on—even after all those years of reading it over and over again to sweet but squirrely freshmen, even after my lofty graduate classes in Faulkner and O’Neill and the many women writers like Toni Morrison who have brilliantly shifted the landscape in modern literature—TKAM is still my favorite book. In nine years and four months, my great-granddaughter will turn ten. I know exactly what gift I will give her for that birthday.

A Cascade of Nostalgia

 

Forest Falls, named in part for a very tall, very beautiful cascading waterfall (called "Big Falls") at the east end of town, is a small village in the foothills below Mt. San Gorgonio in Southern California. I made my first sojourn there when I was in high school when a group of “Jesus freak” young people like myself car caravanned there from Riverside. I still have photos and many fond memories from that day.

A half dozen years after that first trip, I returned to Forest Falls to attend my very first writers conference at Forest Home, the beautiful conference center there. At the age of 21, I had entered a national writing contest, won third place, and the person who called to make that announcement told me, “I see that you live in Southern California. In addition to everything else you’ve won [publication in a national magazine with a readership of six million, plus books on writing AND the entire Chronicles of Narnia series, just for fun], we’d like to send you to a writers conference.”

Did those lovely folks have any idea how attending that conference would catapult me into my dream of writing and publishing? I don’t know, but it sure did.

When my children were old enough, we returned for a day of hiking, picnicking, blackberry picking—and, at the end of it, a trip to the ER for stitches after my eldest son stepped on a piece of broken glass while wading barefoot in the stream.

I can assure you, when I returned many years later with three young grandkids in tow, I made sure all of us kept our shoes on.

At some point in my adult life, I picked up a friend who was trying to decide whether or not to leave her abusive husband. I took her up to Forest Falls in my beloved VW bug. While we rock-hopped over rough terrain to get to the falls, we also attempted to navigate the equally challenging topics of “commitment” and “self-esteem.” Good talk. Good walk. But when we returned to the car—the only one at the trailhead on a weekday—we discovered it had a flat tire. In the hours previous, I had been trying to convince my friend that she was stronger than she realized. When she saw the flat, she began to wring her hands and cry. (Mind you, this was decades before the convenience of cell phones.) She was not reassured when I told her not to worry, we would, together, fix the flat ourselves. But we did, handily. At some point, a young man with a six-pack of beer pulled into the parking area on a motorcycle. He took a seat under a tree and watched us do the work—and I was grateful that he never offered to help, just sat and downed his beer, one after another. Because when we triumphantly finished and climbed into the car to leave, my friend told me how empowered she felt. Booyah.

In the past, the trip to Forest Falls required some planning, as it was some distance from where I lived. Moving to Calimesa, however, put me much closer, so that now I can get up there in just over half an hour, traffic permitting.

So of course, I had to take Maya. Here’s what happened when I did:

As soon as we left the car and hit the trail, we saw the giant sign erected by the Forest Service: The area around the waterfall was “closed,” for all intents and purposes. Why? Because in order to get to the falls, you have to cross Mill Creek, and (as mentioned in my previous post), the water in the creek is running so high and so fast, it’s treacherous. Plus someone dies every year by trying to climb the falls, and I think USFS is simply tired of calling Search and Rescue to pack out another dead body. Seriously.

However—we could still walk along the creek, which we did. (Click here to see a bit of that.) Until she saw people. Too many people. There may have been a total of five or six at various points along the stream. But for her, one human (besides me) is too many. So she panicked. Where to escape?? Into the water. She headed straight into the stream and would have paddled to the far side had I not reeled her back in. (When we hike, she’s on a fifteen-foot lead, so she really did get pretty far before I wrangled her closer to shore.)

 

When I wouldn’t let her retreat, she did what I have taught her to do when she’s fearful, which is to sit down and take a breath. (Okay, I know you can’t really teach a dog to take a nice deep breath, but she sits, and I do the deep breathing.) Yep, she sat her little bottom right down in that ice-cold water. Silly dog.

 

We didn’t stay much longer; I had things to do at home. But I did stop to take pictures, and realized (shout out to all my Baldy friends!) from a certain point, you can see all the way from Forest Falls to Mt. Baldy. And yes, of course I waved when I realized that. You never know who might be waving back.

 

Rising Out of the Gloom

 

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been kissed, and it finally happened today! Details to follow….

If you live in Southern California, you know that we’ve been having day after day after day of first “May Gray” and then “June Gloom,” those mornings in which the marine layer from the Pacific Ocean has drifted far enough inland to cover everyone in light to heavy fog. Yesterday was no different, the damp and tangy layer so thick I had to use my windshield wipers as I drove Miss Maya Angelou Murphy up to a hiking spot that, while quite familiar to me, had been previously undiscovered by her.

Thurman Flats is located off Hwy 38, a mile or two to the east of the Hwy 38 and Bryant Street junction. There is a small brown Forest Service sign for it that indicates “Picnic Area, ¼ mile.” You can't miss it if you drive slower than the 70mph most locals want to drive on that stretch of highway.

And there is indeed a beautiful, tree-shaded picnic area there, but I wasn’t intending to have a picnic. I just needed to rise above the gray gloom that had been hovering physically outside my house but also mentally inside my head. I know, I know; we writers live inside our heads. I try to come out and play from time to time… but… a lot has been going on that I’ve had to… ruminate upon. We’ll just leave it at that.

The photo above was taken from the parking lot at Thurman Flats. Note the pretty blue sky, the low cloud cover in the valley below. Yes! I could feel my spirits lifting as I called Maya out of the car.

Challenge #1: Would Maya be willing to cross water and boulder hop with me to get to Mill Creek? We had to pick our way over places like this:

But that girl was ready and willing, as she always is when we hit the trail, and across she went, stopping only when I asked her to so I could get a picture. Then on we went.

Through the trees and blackberry brambles, keeping an eye out for both bears and snakes, we carefully, cautiously traversed the trail and found Mill Creek gushing madly with water pouring over and around boulders at a level I’ve never seen it, and I’ve been going there for decades. Hooray for snow melt!

Challenge #2: Would Maya come willingly to the edge of the roaring stream? Or would she fear it?

Challenge accepted, of course. She trotted right up. I held her back from the edge. I didn’t want her to take a dip in the icy water then have the current drag her in (and me along with her). There is a very short video of her coming through the woods to find the water, which you can view by clicking here.

We walked along the edge of the stream for a bit, but it had broadened so much, the trail was obliterated in some spots. It was early when we went, and my car had been the only one in the parking lot, so I was surprised to find a pair of men’s shoes by the shore. Did he walk back along the trail barefoot?  Did he realize when he arrived home where he’d left them? Who knows. I left them where I found them.

 

We headed back—which was when my kiss was finally bestowed. We had almost reached the narrow trail leading to the parking area when I heard a commotion and looked up through the foliage, half expecting to see a bear. Nope. It was a bounding dog, a large coonhound, followed by an even larger German shepherd. They barreled straight for us.

Challenge #3: Would Maya completely freak out? Or allow the over-excited doggos to greet her?

Turns out, she didn’t do either, really. She sat down, which is what I’ve taught her to do when she’s frightened. The dogs ran up and sniffed her, but she remained sitting quietly, not trying to run. I could hear the dogs’ person trying to call them back from yards away, shouting as loud as he could to be heard above the roaring stream. I looked up to see him moving down the trail—a man about my age, backpack on his shoulder, two smaller terrier mixes following at his heels. He called to me, something by way of apology, I assume. I laughed and shrugged because I couldn’t hear him, then turned my attention back to the dogs just as the coonhound leapt up and kissed me right on the cheek!

Wait. You didn’t think the kiss was offered by a man, did you? Nah. Just a sweet dog saying hello—and leaving huge muddy paw prints down my sleeve and all over the front of my jacket. Closer now, the man called once more to his rambunctious boys, and both galloped off, leaping over boulders and kicking up sand. I’m guessing they had a great day. Maya and I left them to return home, driving back down into the drizzle, but not minding it one bit.