Unfortunately enough, the discomfort we feel with Huckleberry Finn—which has lasted now for more than a century—goes deeper than that; as a society we are still engaged, in one way or another, with the fundamental conflict of Huck himself. During his time of moral agony on the raft, when he knows he is helping Jim to escape, Huck’s head and heart are locked in a struggle. His head, of course, blithely accepts the assumptions of his time: the rectitude of slavery and the racial inferiority of his friend. But his heart understands a much deeper truth: the humanity of Jim, and thus the lie at the heart of racism. Today, I think, it may well be that we have managed to reverse it. Our heads after so many years of struggle have almost gotten it straight, and thus Huck’s dialogue with himself seems both disconcerting and foolish.
I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that noway.
Now here we are, re-reading all this in the twenty-first century—a time when an ugly xenophobia is sweeping through our national debate, and when leaders in the opposition party are demonizing our first black president—and Huckleberry Finn, so perpetually provocative, is still as unsettling to us as ever. If our heads have finally learned what’s what, if, for example, most of us know not to use the n-word, I think that today it may be our hearts—our collective heart and soul as a nation—that we’re still a little unsure of.
IV
It’s true, of course, when I first read the book that I gave little thought to these kinds of issues. The great delight in Huckleberry Finn, just as it was with Johnny Tremain, was of seeing a story come alive on the pages. There seemed to be such magic in the telling, such joy in the dangers, such admiration for the pluck of both characters, and I knew right away that I had to have more.
Because of these gifts from Mark Twain and Esther Forbes, I understood clearly by the age of ten that books would be my companions for life—sometimes the same book, read again and again through the years. That most emphatically would be the case with my next great literary encounter—another multilayered tale of discovery, this one set even closer to home.
2
Southern Voices
featuring:
To Kill a Mockingbird—Harper Lee
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—Carson McCullers
A Curtain of Green—Eudora Welty
Killers of the Dream—Lillian Smith
Also, James Agee, Charles J. Shields, Flannery O’Connor
I
I must have been thirteen when I first read the book, a first edition hardback given to me by my father. The year was 1960, and I was ripe for an adventure story—three Southern children about my age, spending idyllic summers in the delicious, seductive fear of Boo Radley. My father, I think, saw other things. He was an Alabama judge possessing some of the same qualities as Atticus Finch, a quiet and unobtrusive understanding that occasionally a person is compelled to take a stand, despite a powerful preference to the contrary.
In addition to that, my father was proud that the author of To Kill a Mockingbird came from Monroe County, Alabama. That was where his own family had put down roots, making the trek from South Carolina to a place on the bluffs of the Alabama River. It was 1832, and those were dangerous times in Alabama. President Andrew Jackson had decreed that all Indians east of the Mississippi River be removed to Oklahoma, and as the Creeks who lived in Lower Alabama began their mournful Trail of Tears, there were assorted skirmishes with renegade bands.
The Gaillards, however, made their journey safely enough, and by the early years of the twentieth century were living in the village of Purdue Hill, just a few miles from Harper Lee’s home. My father, like Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird, spent his boyhood summers there, sharing a favored swimming hole with the snakes, blissfully convinced that a moccasin would drown if it tried to bite a young boy in the water. My father’s stories, as well as my own from an active childhood, blended easily with those of Harper Lee, and the adventures of Jem and Scout and Dill were as real to me as if I had been there.
But I think I sensed even then a deeper resonance for the members of my family. The faded aristocracy of the Finches, their indifference to money, and their graceful stewardship of prominence could have described the Gaillards just as well. There was, of course, a darker underside to the story—one that divided my family, as it did many others, when To Kill a Mockingbird first appeared. Though the novel was set in the 1930s, the issues it raised were still unresolved.
Harper Lee was a child when the backdrop of Mockingbird came into focus. She was luckier than some, shielded by the relative prosperity of her family, but she had to know even so that Alabama in the ’30s was a desperate place—“a world coming apart,” in the words of historian Wayne Flynt. The Depression landed hard on the rural parts of the state, so much so that when the great American writer James Agee set out to discover the face of Southern poverty, he came to Hale County in the Alabama Black Belt.
In his iconic book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee entered the lives of white sharecroppers and offered a glimpse of grimness made even more vivid by the accompanying photographs of Walker Evans. Through Evans’s lens—and the haunted eyes of his subjects—we could see the pain, the battered dignity and despair that we later encountered in the Cunninghams and Ewells of To Kill a Mockingbird.
But among the real families of Harper Lee’s childhood, life was defined by more than the grinding misery of being poor. There was also the desperate issue of race. In the 1930s, as hard times amplified the tension, a rash of lynching and racial violence spread from the Black Belt all the way to Birmingham. On July 4, 1930, when Lee was only four years old, there was a startling case in the Sumter County town of Emelle, just a few miles northwest of Monroeville. A sharecropper by the name of Tom Robertson—a name, of course, only one syllable removed from the black hero of To Kill a Mockingbird—had argued with a white storekeeper about the price of a battery. On Independence Day, a mob appeared outside his cabin, and in self-defense Robertson opened fire with his shotgun.
Somehow, in the raging battle that followed, Robertson managed to escape. But four members of his family were lynched, and Robertson himself was captured two months later. On January 2, 1931, he died in the Alabama electric chair.
If it was a terrifying moment in southern Alabama, it was quickly overshadowed by events further north. In the town of Scottsboro near the Tennessee line, one of the most celebrated cases in Alabama history became a topic of conversation all over the state, and certainly in the home of young Harper Lee. On March 25, 1931, barely three months after the execution of Tom Robertson, a posse of whites arrested nine black hoboes on a freight train passing through the town of Paint Rock. Initially, the Negroes were wanted for assault—for fighting with a group of white boys on the train—but when the engine pulled into the Paint Rock station, two white women emerged from a boxcar and announced to the posse that they had been raped.
The doctors who examined the women weren’t convinced. Victoria Price and Ruby Bates were neither battered nor bloody, as they should have been if they had been attacked by nine young men; and though there was evidence of sexual intercourse, the doctors found no vaginal tearing and no living sperm—strange if the rape had happened less than two hours earlier, as Bates and Price both insisted that it had. When one of the physicians, Dr. Marvin Lynch, suggested to the women that they were lying, he reported later that they simply laughed.
Nevertheless, the doomed defendants were hauled off to jail, the nearest of which was in the town of Scottsboro. As newspapers around Alabama trumpeted the story of “Nine Black Fiends,” only the heroism of the local sheriff managed to keep a lynch mob at bay.
The trial that followed was quick and efficient. All n
ine defendants were convicted of rape, and eight were sentenced to death. Only Roy Wright, barely thirteen, was spared because of his tender years. On appeal, however, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction, ruling that “the Scottsboro Boys,” as they were by then known, had been denied adequate legal representation. The drunken real estate attorney assigned to their defense, who had met his clients on the morning of the trial, offered no closing arguments in their behalf.
But if the original trial had been a caricature of Southern justice, the next one was not. It landed on the docket of Judge James Horton, who could well have been the model for Atticus Finch. To lawyers, juries, and even to defendants who came through his court, Horton was known for his informality and fairness, his commitment to equality in the eyes of the law. Like most white Alabamians, he entered the trial believing that the Scottsboro Boys were guilty. But as the testimony unfolded, he began to have his doubts.
Victoria Price, the Boys’ chief accuser, struck him as shrill and evasive on the stand, but even more telling was the testimony of Dr. R. R. Bridges, one of the two physicians. Bridges testified that the sperm he found in Mrs. Price were “non-motile,” which was nearly impossible if she had just been raped. And then came a decisive, off-the-record moment. During a break in the trial, the other doctor, Marvin Lynch, asked to speak to the judge in private. In the men’s room, with the court bailiff standing guard near the door, Lynch told Horton that in his opinion there had been no rape. The medical evidence was simply not there.
The judge, who had spent a year in medical school before he entered the study of law, understood the importance of that kind of evidence. He urged Lynch to take the witness stand, but decided not to compel his testimony. He knew it could ruin the young doctor’s career. But when the jury came in with a verdict of guilty, Horton decided he had to overturn it. Though it was within the power of a judge to do so, it was not a step to be taken lightly. For one thing, Horton believed in juries, believed in the ability of men duly sworn (all of them white, in those days) to deliver the most impartial verdict that they could. But he also knew that passions inflamed by the issue of race could lead them astray—and this, he concluded, was one of those times.
On June 22, 1933, citing contradictions in Price’s testimony and the medical evidence casting doubt on the crime, Horton issued a ruling that stunned and enraged many white Alabamians:
“Deliberate injustice is more fatal to the one who imposes it than to the one on whom it is imposed,” he declared. “The victim may die quickly and his suffering cease, but the teachings of Christianity and the uniform lesson of all history illustrate without exception that its perpetrators not only pay the penalty themselves, but their children through endless generations . . .
“It is therefore ordered and adjudged by the Court . . . that the verdict of the jury in this case and the judgment of the Court sentencing this defendant to death be set aside and that a new trial is hereby ordered.”
Horton understood as he said it that his political career had come to an end. He would never be reelected as judge. But he also knew that even in Alabama, there were people who would understand what he did. And indeed there were. The members of the bar in his hometown of Athens wrote him a letter, signed by every lawyer in the town, declaring him to be “a judge of unimpeachable character and integrity.”
The lawyers may not have put it this way, but on some level they must have regarded the judge as an archetype of Southern manhood. He had never wanted the Scottsboro case, never sought the fame or notoriety that it brought him. But when duty called, he remembered the Latin teachings of his mother: “Justitia fiat coelum ruat—Let justice be done though the Heavens may fall.”
All of this made sense to Harper Lee. Coming of age at the time of the Scottsboro case, she understood the passions of her place, as well as the strength it took to resist them. And she thought she saw some of that strength in her father.
A. C. Lee, like Atticus Finch, was a pillar of the community in which he lived. In 1926, he was elected by the citizens of Monroeville to serve them in the state legislature, and as a lawyer and local newspaper editor, he was widely regarded by his friends and neighbors as a man of integrity. One of Harper Lee’s biographers, Charles J. Shields, argues persuasively that Mr. Lee almost certainly played a role in the case of Walter Lett, a black man convicted of rape in Monroe County.
Since Lett’s accuser was a white woman, nobody was surprised by the guilty verdict, or the sentence of death in the electric chair. But before the sentence could be carried out, on May 11, 1934, some of Monroeville’s leading citizens, apparently including Lee, petitioned the governor on Lett’s behalf. There was doubt, they said, about his guilt, for it was not uncommon for some white women—particularly those of a certain class—to cry rape in defense of their own reputations.
At the urging of such upright citizens, the governor commuted Lett’s sentence to life in prison, but Lett by then had been driven insane. His cell in Alabama’s Kilby Prison was only a few feet from the electric chair, and he had heard the sounds of other executions—the rush of the current, the screams of the dying—and he had simply snapped. “He now lies in a state of catalepsy,” wrote the prison physician at Kilby, “and demonstrates fairly definite features of schizophrenia.”
On July 30, 1934, Lett was moved to the Searcy Hospital for the Insane, an all-black facility in Mt. Vernon, Alabama, where he died three years later of tuberculosis.
It is impossible to say—and Harper Lee never has—exactly which pieces of this troubled history served as a model for To Kill a Mockingbird. Certainly, it’s true that the Scottsboro case was more complex than the story of Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson. In Scottsboro, there were nine defendants, multiple appeals and stays of execution, four paroles, four dropped charges, and a daring escape. None of that happens in Harper Lee’s story. But there was the inspirational story of Judge Horton, and the obstreperous example of Victoria Price—her dogged evasions on the witness stand and the wounded defiance that Mayella Ewell would exhibit in the novel.
More broadly, there was also the fact, as Miss Lee said later, that the Scottsboro case “will more than do as an example . . . of deep-South attitudes on race.” But such examples abounded in the 1930s, many of them close to Harper Lee’s home, and for a writer with an eye as keen as hers the leap was really not very large to the characters that began to take shape in her novel.
The transitions, however, did not come easily. Many readers were startled to learn later on, given the grace and certainty of her prose, that Miss Lee had struggled with her story for years. In his unauthorized biography, Mockingbird, Charles Shields offers a dramatic account of her writing—a young author living in a coldwater flat, working with her editor, Tay Hohoff, month after month, draft after draft, becoming so frustrated that at one point she threw her manuscript out the window. Fortunately, she thought better of it and retrieved the pages from the Manhattan snow.
But little by little, the narrative finally took on a shape, and the end result was one of the greatest triumphs in American letters. Miss Lee was thirty-four years old on July 11, 1960, when her novel was released to international acclaim. It was an immediate best seller for J. B. Lippincott & Co., won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and a half century later, had sold an astonishing thirty million copies.
All of which raises the question of why. What was it about this particular book that touched the hearts of so many people? And why does it remain, after all this time, as popular as on the day of its release?
Every reader has his or her own answer, but I was struck first of all by the voice. Even as a boy, when I first read the book, I was captivated by the telling of the story—the sense almost of a double narrator, of a woman looking back on her childhood days with the wit and wisdom such perspective might imply; but also of a tomboy child caught entirely in the moment she was living. It struck me as quite a literary feat, for here was
young Scout describing the house where Boo Radley lived, or the scene at the Maycomb County Jail, or the petty torments of certain members of her family.
Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants. Aunt Alexandra’s vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year. She hurt my feelings and set my teeth permanently on edge, but when I asked Atticus about it, he said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go on about my business, he didn’t mind me much the way I was.
Every time I’ve ever read the story—and the count by now is closing in on a dozen—I’ve been struck by the singularity of that voice, the distinctiveness in the writing itself, that among other things should have put to rest the odd speculation that Truman Capote actually wrote Lee’s book. It is true that Capote was the model for Dill, and true also that he read a draft of the novel and made suggestions on how to improve it. But the irony and wry humor that give an edge to the story, tempering its generosity of spirit, are pure Harper Lee. All of her letters, all the testimonials of her friends, confirm the originality of her voice, her view of the world that shines so brilliantly from the pages.
This is not Mayberry that she has created. Maycomb, Alabama, is a warts-and-all village full of characters familiar to us all. My own Aunt Alexandra, for example, was a family elder whom I loved very much, a prim school teacher who did her job well and spent her spare time marveling at the heroism of her family. In my aunt’s telling, Southern history would not have been the same without the Gaillards, and that glorious history was marred only by injury inflicted from the North. She had little patience with critics of the South, especially those who should have known better, and in that category she most emphatically included Harper Lee.
The Books That Mattered Page 3