Why are liberals trying to ban my aunt Harper Lee’s classic – as racists did in the 1960s?
OF THE many books seeking to expose the wickedness of racial prejudice, there are few more influential or insightful than To Kill A Mockingbird. The novel, first published in 1960, is a classic of modern literature, routinely cited as one of the most moving books of all time, its reputation further enhanced by the Oscar-winning film that followed shortly afterwards.
And what a story it is, mixing gentle observation and humour with suspense. Set in the cauldron of ignorance and hatred of small-town Alabama, white lawyer Atticus Finch dares to defend a black
man, Tom Robinson, who has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Not only does Finch fail in his mission, his children are left in mortal danger from the mob.
I have a particular interest in the novel, not just because it is a powerful denunciation of fear and prejudice, but because To Kill A Mockingbird was written by my aunt, Harper Lee, known as Nelle to our family. So I am all the more disappointed to learn that a prominent school in Scotland has banned the book. According to James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh, To Kill A Mockingbird is ‘dated and problematic’ and plays to an outdated idea of the ‘white saviour’.
I know that my aunt would have viewed all such accusations as nonsensical and rather tragic. It is children who will be deprived of Mockingbird and who will suffer.
Remember that, in many cases, especially for young white children, To Kill A Mockingbird might be their first exposure to the idea that racism exists beyond a world of news reels – and how it can seep into the fabric of everyday lives, even those of children like the narrator,
Finch’s daughter, Scout. Yes it’s set in the 1930s, but the novel prompts the question: has anything changed?
TODAY we live with the terrible illusion that, because racial integration is more common, racism is a thing of the past. It is not. There is a context to this and other attempts to proscribe the book, of course. Questions of racial identity have been inflamed, particularly in the United States. The words we use – that we are allowed to use – are coming under intense scrutiny, much of it aggressive.
Critics are now saying, for example, that Harper Lee too faithfully depicted the American South of the 1930s, using language that would have been used widely and frequently. They essentially wish she had written a novel in which the gruff racists making false accusations of rape against a young black man did not, for example, use the N-word. Yet the language is what the characters would have used if they were real people – people my aunt would have been familiar with growing up in 1930s Alabama.
Language which is now taboo was appropriate to those who used it in Mockingbird. I would argue the novel is ahead of its time in showing there is power in language and the words we use can be very hurtful. It tells the truth about those people.
My aunt can hardly be blamed for writing about the world she knew.
Life in a small Southern town in the 1930s was dominated by white people – at whom To Kill A Mockingbird was primarily aimed. She did not presume to write from an African-American point of view.
What of the accusation made in Scotland and elsewhere [including Ireland where there were calls to Education Minister Norma Foley to remove it from the curriculum. She didn’t rule it out but committed to a review of the booklist to ensure it was ‘broadly balanced’]? I’m afraid it doesn’t wash. Atticus Finch is not a white saviour. Far from it.
Instead, the novel is about the failure of a white community to overcome racism. There is a tremendous sadness to it. Tom Robinson, wrongly accused and wrongly convicted, is shot dead in prison. Atticus fails to protect Tom. He isn’t much of a saviour.
The claim is all the more perverse as the true villains in the book are the Ewell family – white trash of the most stereotypical kind. Nelle was unsparing in her description of their ‘congenital defects, various worms and diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings’.
Harper Lee would have respected, as I do, the prerogative of teachers to decide what is taught in their classrooms. She was clear that she wrote the book for adults, not children, but was delighted whenever teachers chose to teach Mockingbird to their classes.
She didn’t like the idea of schools banning books, of putting decisions in the hands of bureaucracies which can be driven by misguided political ideologies. She would have been shocked to find her book withdrawn by any school in Britain.
AS IT happens, my aunt was an Anglophile and would spend months at a time in the UK. She would talk about her glorious summers in Oxford and cycling around the UK. She felt a sense of freedom and acceptance there. This is not the first time To Kill A Mockingbird has been targeted. The book has recently been blacklisted in several Left-wing US states, including California. They first tried to ban the novel in Richmond, Virginia, in 1963, three years after publication. Then a school board deemed the book too radical, too pro-black, too anti-racist. Now we have gone 180 degrees – it’s not the Right but the Left who have it in their crosshairs.
My aunt wasn’t surprised by condemnation from the Southern racist Right. However, I think she would have been caught off-guard by criticism from the Left.
She wanted the book to be seen as what she had intended – a story about love as the basis of a wellfunctioning and humane society.
To Kill A Mockingbird was deeply personal in its inspiration. Its hero, Atticus, was based on an idealised view of my grandfather, Amasa Coleman Lee, known as AC, who died in 1962 when I was 15. He was a good man.
As a child, my aunt idolised AC and, in part, the novel is about the love between father and daughter. Yet being from the South, Nelle faced the dilemma all white Southerners face – of how to acknowledge the racism in their heritage.
AC’s own father had been a veteran of the American Civil War and fought for the Southern confederacy, a cause that would have kept blacks enslaved.
If you grow up in a loving family, if you love your parents and your grandparents, how do you handle a heritage like that?
Harper Lee’s answer was to write a great novel about the failure to overcome the evils of racism. And about how love has the potential to overcome those evils.
It was a book she said she’d felt ‘compelled’ to write. There came a point in about 1964 – and I’m not sure what triggered it – when she decided she would give no more interviews and had nothing more to say. She had become the centre of attention, more so than the book, and she had no interest in that.
The book, she said, spoke for itself. Moreover, she was an introvert, like me.
Today the novel speaks as powerfully as it ever did. And it is needed now more than ever, especially in America, where the past five years have demonstrated that racism and bigotry are as pervasive as they ever were.
The Black Lives Matter movement had started when my aunt died five years ago, although it had not yet gained worldwide coverage. I am in no doubt she would have said: ‘Of course black lives matter.’ She would have had no problem with the essential message of the movement or its initial application to police brutality and the killing of black people. But Nelle didn’t like attempts to judge her novel using the criteria of any particular political ideology, whether of the Right or the Left. And To Kill A Mockingbird is not a political novel.
Although she had spent most of her working life in New York, she returned to Alabama for her final days. At first, there was almost nothing in the spartan room she occupied in a care home. Before too long, however, it was overflowing with books.
Nelle had little use for the money she’d made from the novel, other than to buy more books. That is one reason why she would have found attempts to ban her novel so disturbing. Books were her life. Books have something to say.
And we all need to read Mockingbird today just as much as ever.