In 1966, desperate to find a book to read, I snuck into my
brother’s room when no one was home and browsed through the books in his
closet. I don’t know what made me choose To
Kill a Mockingbird, but I do remember that once I began, I couldn’t put it
down. I was twelve years old.
Two years later, the movie starring Gregory Peck (and the
inimitable Robert Duvall as Boo Radley) aired on television, and all the
characters I had fallen in love with came to life in black and white. That same
year, men who had become my heroes in the Civil Rights Movement mostly because
of my reading of the novel—Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.—lost their
lives to the socio-political war that was devastating the country at that time.
To say this novel shaped my life is an understatement. I
lost my father at a young age and was raised by a non-nurturing mother. Like so
many others who’ve read this book, I both envied and longed for the type of
strong, loving relationship Scout shares with Atticus. And I yearned for the
wisdom of Atticus in my life.
When
Atticus looked down at me I saw the expression on his face that always made me
expect something. “Do you know what a compromise is?” he asked.
And I learned volumes about parenting from his example:
I
had spent most of the day climbing up and down, running errands for [Jem],
providing him with literature, nourishment and water, and was carrying him
blankets for the night when Atticus said if I paid no attention to him, Jem
would come down. Atticus was right.
This was such an important book in my life that when my own
daughter turned twelve, I bought her a copy—and I ended up re-reading the novel
from start to finish, falling in love with Atticus even more, now that I was a
parent myself.
By the time my daughter was a teenager, I had become a
teacher. In my second year of teaching high school, I was assigned freshman
English. That year we read To Kill a
Mockingbird together, and for twenty-five out of the twenty-seven years of
my teaching career, I have read it again—mostly aloud, affecting a Southern
accent, and always, always fighting back tears in certain sections:
“Miss Jean Louise, stand
up. Your father’s passin’.”
“Hey, Boo.”
“Mr. Tate was right.”
Atticus disengaged himself
and looked at me. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’d be sort of
like shootin’ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?”
Before
he went inside the house, [Atticus] stopped in front of Boo Radley. “Thank you
for my children, Arthur,” he said.
(Gregory Peck’s line in the screenplay version is, “Thank
you, Arthur. Thank you for my children,” as he extends his hand to shake Boo’s.
To my mind, it is one of the simplest yet most beautifully moving scenes in the
film.)
He
turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and
he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.
In my early years of teaching, I was sometimes criticized
for readingewwww aloud to my students. (‘They’re in high school now. They need
to learn to read and comprehend on their own.’) To my way of thinking, these
folks had it all wrong. What better way to learn to comprehend the dynamics of
literature than to hear the words come alive? Hearing someone who is familiar
with the text stream through the long sections of dialogue in the courtroom
scene has to be better than trying to parse through Tom Robinson’s style of
speech (“No suh, I’s scared I’d be in court….”) while keeping track of who was
speaking and what significance there was in the sometimes calm, sometimes
accusatory exchange of questions and answers.
Because I read the novel along with my students, I’ve read
it in excess of a hundred times. Each spring I read it with a new batch of
kids, and each time I learn something new. It took me years to figure out why
Harper Lee included the chapter on Mrs. Dubose—because as a writer, I know that
every chapter has a purpose, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how
Mrs. Dubose supported the theme of the novel. Until I realized what she stood
for. And then the epiphany came like a bolt of lightning.
“You know, she was a great
lady.”
Yes, Atticus, just as the pre-Civil War South was, and it,
too, suffered from a disease that ravaged it.
Over the years, as I’ve taught Mockingbird, I’ve thought fondly of Harper Lee. She would have been
in her sixties when I first began teaching the novel. After I’d been teaching
it for several years, I wrote her a long letter, never expecting any response,
just wanting her to know how meaningful the book had been to me as a child and
as an adult. She never answered, but this was her way, and everyone knew it. As
the years went by, I would occasionally seek out her name on the internet to
see how she was faring. Every year I’ve been able to tell my students as we
finish the novel, “So Harper Lee is still alive…” (because 1960, the year the
book came out, seems like hundreds of years ago to them). As it turns out, we
are currently reading the book in my class. Tomorrow in each class period, I
will tell them that Harper Lee has died, and we will talk about the legacy she
has left behind.
Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel helped solidify the
Civil Rights Movement in America. Since its publication, it has never been out
of print. Countless generations of readers, old and young, have found friends
and role models in Jem, Scout, Dill, Atticus, Calpurnia, Miss Maudie, Tom
Robinson and the rest of the characters. The novel will continue to influence
readers for generations to come.
Rest in peace, Harper Lee. Thank you for your life, thank
you for your work, thank you for your heart. Your words will be with us
forever.
