To Kill a Mockingbird resonates after Charleston attack
I had just finished rereading To Kill A Mockingbird when I began hearing the horrific details about the Charleston church massacre. Nine African-Americans, shot dead at a church Bible study meeting, allegedly by a white kid intent on starting “a race war.” “You rape our women,” the shooter purportedly told his victims.
How could America still be stuck in the same desolate place that Harper Lee captured in her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novel so many years ago?
She gave us Bob Ewell, the ignorant white racist of the 1930s, who maliciously accuses an innocent black man of raping his daughter. Now he’s come to hellish new life as the alleged shooter, an unemployed, undereducated millennial, mouthing the same hateful rhetoric.
To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my — and millions of others’ — favourite novels, one that a 1991 reader survey ranked, according to Charles J. Shields, Harper Lee’s biographer, second only to the Bible “as making a difference in people’s lives.” He estimates that a million readers come to it every year.
Released in 1960, To Kill A Mockingbird was turned into an Oscarwinning movie in 1962 staring Gregory Peck as everyone’s favourite father figure, Atticus Finch.
Set in Depression-era Alabama, the novel unfolds vividly through the eyes of an unconventional young girl, Scout, who watches her morally upright lawyer father Atticus defend, to the town’s deep disgust, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.
With its black citizens fearful of their physical safety, its emphasis on human dignity and its exploration of “real courage” instead of, as Atticus puts it, “getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand,” the book has proven its timelessness.
Up to now, Lee, who is 89 and frail, famously never published another book. But next month will see the publication, amid many questions, of Go Set a Watchman, a previously unknown other novel, written before her debut bestseller and recently “discovered” by her lawyer.
The new book deals with some of the same characters, and is coming out to nervous fanfare. Preceding it was allegedly a brief Alabama state agency investigation that determined Lee was of sound mind and agreed to its release. Lee said through her lawyer she was “happy as hell,” with the initial reaction to her new book, one of the few phrases she has uttered publicly in five decades of living an extremely private life.
Like so many others, I feel protective of the legacy of To Kill A Mockingbird. That isn’t to say, seen through our now diversity-focused eyes, it doesn’t have its contemporary challenges.
It condemns racism, but in Atticus Finch, after all, it celebrates the best of white patriarchal values. It is sometimes patronizing of its black characters, and relatively conservative in its approach to righting racial wrongs.
But I still choose to marvel at the wonder of its story, which has always been about more than racist hate. It’s about a feisty little girl trying to break out of the “pink cotton penitentiary” of Southern femalehood. It’s about the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill, and the pale, house-imprisoned Boo Radley, who becomes a shy hero. Most of all, it’s about a universal yearning for an inspiring, strong and morally true father.
Fifty-five years after the book’s publication, racism is still regarded as “America’s original sin,” black citizens are disproportionately imprisoned and killed by cops, and millions of African-Americans still despair of a fair future.
But America today also has a strong African-American middle class, and a first black president, albeit one whose critics, mired in the past, have tried repeatedly to render invisible and illegitimate even though he resoundingly won two presidential elections.
Every generation gets the racists it deserves, so we get a goofy-looking kid who apparently was able to spout his racist invective with social impunity. Yet people deeply fear those like him. On one image of the suspect posing with a gun and a Confederate flag, someone tweeted: “This is my ISIS. And for me, he might live down the road.”
The devastated parishioners at “Mother” Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church were not in search of a father figure. They had their own heavenly “Daddy” to guide them, according to the Rev. Norvell Goff, who spoke during a sweltering and moving two-hour church service last Sunday.
Goff urged the congregation who filled the historic church with song and prayer and — unfathomable to many — forgiveness, to work not only for justice “but for those who are still living in the margin of life, those who are less fortunate than ourselves, that we stay on the battlefield until there is no more fight to be fought.”
No one so far has come up with a cure for what comedian Jon Stewart so memorably called “a gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist.”
But something Atticus Finch said in To Kill A Mockingbird still holds sway. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
The problem is that that seems almost impossible for most of us to do.
That pretty much sums up not only the battle from the distant past — but the one still ahead. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.