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.