Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

Tom Brokaw

  Tom Brokaw was born in 1940 in Webster, South Dakota. He is an NBC News special correspondent and the author of The Greatest Generation (1998), A Long Way Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland (2002), and Boom! Voices of the Sixties (2006).

  I was still in college when To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out. The sixties were very ripe. We were reading a lot about race, and we were reading what they call literary fiction now. William Styron was writing, James Baldwin was writing essays, and then this book just ricocheted around the country.

  I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away. Because I lived in construction towns, we had a lot of workers who came from the South. They were all white, and, sorry to say, a number of them were pretty redneck. It just didn’t comport with my family’s view of how Negroes should be treated. But I did have all this curiosity about it.

  And when I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I was so struck by the universality of small towns. I had lived in small towns in South Dakota, and I knew then, reading about Atticus, not just the pressures that he was under, but the magnifying glass that he lived in—he was the upstanding legislator and lawyer but also was part of the fabric of that town—and then the complexity of the issues that came before him and the way it divided the community. All this takes place in a very small environment. People who live in big cities, I don’t think, have any idea of what the pressures can be like in a small town when there’s something as controversial as that going on. It’s tough. So it stuck with me for a long time.

  Later, of course, it was hard for me to separate the book from the movie, because you’d see the movie a lot, and then you’d remember passages and go back and look at the book again.

  But it was one of those memorable pieces of literary fiction that came along at an impressionable time in my life, and also in the country’s life. Dr. King had already started the movement at that point, we were paying attention on national television every night on the network news to what was going on in the South, and this book spoke to us.

  I knew people like that, who were willing to stand up in these kinds of communities against the conventional wisdom of the time. Racism didn’t stop at the Mason-Dixon Line. A lot of those same attitudes were in the communities where I lived, way north, on the Great Plains. And yet there were brave people, men and women, who would speak out against them, in churches, in the business community, or wherever. But for Harper Lee to be there in the epicenter, if you will, of all this, to be so eloquent in how she described it, it shows such great courage in how she describes it. She was in that pantheon, I think, of people who helped us get liberated from racism in this country. I’ve been doing some work on the anniversary of Dr. King’s death, and one of the most telling lines that I hear from early pioneers in the movement is: “We had liberated not just black people, we liberated white people.” I think that Harper Lee helped liberate white people with that book.

  Scout is irresistible, she’s just irresistible. And later I became the father of daughters, and I had those kinds of conversations with my own children—they had great curiosity and their kind of tomboy attitudes, and they were tough on me. They would come to me, just like Scout did. “Why are you doing this? Have you thought this through?” I think that they could identify with her. I still have letters that my daughters wrote to me about things that I thought they should do, and they had their own minds made up about why they were going to do it. And they were good lawyer’s briefs. I like to think that as Scout grew older, that she would have evolved in the same way as a teenager. We hear her voice, obviously. I think there is a really distinct relationship between fathers and daughters, and one of the things that happens, if there’s a mother around, is that when the girls get to be around thirteen, they go to war with their mothers, and then the fathers are sanctuaries in some ways or the intermediaries.

  So Scout will always be in my mind when I think about this book, about the whole idea of this little towheaded kid running around, sitting up in the balcony of the courthouse with the Negroes as they watch the trial unfold, questioning her father about why he was representing the defendant in this case, and the kind of taunting that she received at school.

  What I thought, when I went back and read those passages again, there was this absence of piety, which I think makes the book really honest. There was self-doubt. Atticus knew that he wasn’t a perfect man. He tried as best he could to give Scout the big context of what he was doing and why he was doing it. In her youthful innocence, she was asking all the right questions. So it’s no wonder to me why it’s so popular as a book and it will be for a long time.

  I was particularly taken with when Scout went to him after she’d been taunted at school that her daddy was just nothing but an n-lover, and she asked him why he was doing this, and I still have the same reaction: I think, Oh well, oh, now here it comes, because this is what I must do. And it wasn’t that. It was more complicated than that. You can see him working his way through why he was going to take this case, and he couldn’t hold his head up unless he took this case. And he knew that there would be consequences for him, and that conversation, the dialogue between the two of them, is sophisticated in its own way, and yet it’s still between a father and a daughter. I’ve always loved that, for all those reasons: the personal relationships, the meaning of being a lawyer, what it’s like to be in a small town. Then, of course, when you have a black defendant wrongly accused in the 1930s in the white South, there was no more explosive issue than that one.

  Another one of my very favorite passages in the book is a small one, but I’ve always loved the literary construct of it. We have the mysterious figure, Boo, who’s living next door. And then of course there’s the climactic episode: Jem is in bed, he’s been hurt, beaten up. What’s going to happen to him? And Scout goes in to see her brother. And there standing in the shadows is this mysterious neighbor. And she turns and says, “Hey, Boo.” I just love that moment. It’s such a personal connection, and she’s absolutely unafraid of him, which is what I love. And again, to go back to the small-town culture, every town has a Boo. People don’t know how to approach Boo in those small towns, in most instances. Scout did. I have used that phrase countless times in my own life; when I want to get someone’s attention, I’ll say, “Hey, Boo.”

  The Reverend Thomas Lane Butts

  The Reverend Thomas Lane Butts was born in Bermuda, Alabama, in 1930. He is the pastor emeritus of the First Methodist Church in Monroeville, Alabama, attended by the Lee family. He is the author of Tigers in the Dark (1994), a collection of his sermons.

  I was in Mobile as a pastor of the Michigan Avenue Methodist Church. I had gone through an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan. They were after me because I’d signed a petition to integrate the buses there. This was in 1960 when To Kill a Mockingbird came out, and it was a great comfort to those of us who had taken some stand on this particular issue.

  The book was written in a way that it could not be refuted. It was a soft opposition to people who were against civil rights. It was just a great comfort to those of us who had been involved in the civil rights movement that somebody from the Deep South had given us a book that gave some comfort to us in what we had done. That was my first encounter with To Kill a Mockingbird.

  It was great encouragement—and still is great encouragement to anybody who’s involved in the civil rights movement. It made a tremendous difference in the civil rights movement, and it continues to make a difference. You would think that a novel would play out after a while. There are still civil rights issues, and the concept in this book is large enough to include other civil rights causes. It’s still read with interest because of that. Plus, it’s a real interesting story, wonderfully told, with a lot of good humor in it, along with the serious moments. I
t is obviously a well-loved book, not only in this country but around the world.

  There are aspects of the book that were interesting to me that were not a part of the central drama. For instance, in that book you can see where a child learns values: at home. And you don’t worry so much anymore about children not listening to you. You worry because they’re watching you.

  Here a single parent bringing up children is able to instill values in them that are far ahead of their time. This is one of my favorite aspects of the book.

  Harper Lee refers to it as a love story. And she said, “I don’t mean romantic love, but it is a love story.” How love flows beyond the boundaries of affection for one person or even one family, but caring for everybody. It’s love in its finest understanding of the meaning of the word.

  Harper Lee developed her characters in such a marvelous way. Naturally, everybody would identify with Atticus; I like that character. But I like the sheriff. The sheriff was caught in between the people who voted for him and the issue at hand. And he handled it wonderfully well, with great thoughtfulness. When he came to the part about Boo Radley having killed a man, his decision about what to do about that was overriding what Atticus thought should be done. And he said, “You know, I may not be much, but I am the sheriff.” So I liked that part too.

  The book is not supposed to be autobiographical, but all novels have some autobiography in them, and all autobiographies have some fiction in them too.

  I was born and reared ten miles from where the author and her family lived. We did not know their family personally because we were in another county, but Harper Lee’s older sister Alice was a mentor to me as a young minister. She was always advocating my ministry and pushing me and helping me every way that she could.

  I didn’t meet Harper Lee until twenty-five or thirty years ago. She was able to attend the church with great regularity when she was in town. I was her pastor for five years, and still her ministerial friend to this good day.

  I understood the context in which the book was written, because that’s how I grew up. It was a rural, poverty-stricken situation during the Depression, where people did not have much. It was hardscrabble for most people to make a living. It was a time in which black people were treated terribly and people took in racism with their mother’s milk. Here in this novel, you have a person bucking the tradition in order to advocate the rights of a person without regard to color. But it also was the farming aspect of it, people coming to town with their mules and wagons, the streets being muddy. I remember all of that and the little towns that surrounded the rural area in which I grew up during the Great Depression.

  People were provincial. They cared about one another. They were stuck with certain customs they were unwilling to give up. And in fact, in the Deep South, we’ve never stopped fighting the Civil War; it’s still going on in the minds of some people, and it’s hard to get them beyond that. But basically the people in the South are very loving and caring people. People in the South are storytellers. That’s how they pass on tradition from one generation to the other, by storytelling. That’s how I grew up.

  Everybody suffered during the Depression. It was just a matter of degree. But the Lee household was a household that espoused values that were ahead of the times in which they lived. That was obvious. Miss Alice, ever since I can remember her, has been very much associated with the church and espousing the kind of values which she learned at home. She’s one of my idols, by the way. She’s a great lady.

  Miss Alice is very thoughtful and slow moving, very wise in her counsel and would not take any risks. She is a good guide. Nelle Harper is a more impulsive person and more expressive of her thoughts and ideas. They’re both brilliant people, but they have different temperaments. Nelle Harper tends to sparkle, whereas Alice is very quiet and reserved. Nelle Harper loves to travel and to go to the exciting places. Miss Alice would not do that, but she enjoys knowing that Nelle Harper’s doing it. She vicariously enjoys the things that Nelle Harper enjoys.

  Alice comes to work at age ninety-eight dressed in the kind of clothing that you might have expected a woman to be wearing in 1940. The only difference now is she wears tennis shoes with them. But they are different. They complement each other. And it has always been very interesting to me to be with both of them.

  For a long time, my wife, Hilda, and I would go with Nelle Harper and Alice out to Daily’s Catfish every Saturday for lunch. We’d sit in the same place, order the same thing. And the conversation that would go on between the two of them and around the table was just a wonderful enlightened conversation about the times. Both of them [are] grounded in great values. They hold on to old values, which is the tradition of this town and of this area.

  I once referred to Nelle Harper as being conservative, and she corrected me. She said, “I’m not conservative. I’m independent.”

  Today, the Monroeville town square—it looks like the book. You walk up on the square and look at the storefronts around it and the old courthouse. You can close your eyes and imagine that you are back in the days of that book. Monroeville has changed a lot, but it still holds a lot of the traditions and understandings of reality that were extant in [the thirties]. In other ways, it is a modern town. People are very highly educated. In the church where I was the pastor, I had a very highly educated congregation.

  People around here keep up with Nelle Harper, but they’re also very protective of her. If an outsider comes in and tries to find where Harper Lee is, nobody will tell them. Many people who are looking for Harper Lee end up in my office, because a few stories have gotten out about my being a friend of hers, but the people in this town are protective of her. They care about her a great deal.

  A lot of people think that she’s a recluse, which is absolutely untrue. She’s a person who enjoys her privacy like any other citizen would. She’s not reclusive; it’s very different from that. She’s open, she loves to be around people and associate with people. She does not like to be exploited by people. And she does not like to have her works exploited for profit by people.

  For instance, for many years she would come to the book-shops here in town and autograph books for them to sell. And she wanted them to be sold for the same price they would ordinarily be sold for. She quit doing that when she discovered that people started taking signed books of hers and selling them on eBay for several hundred dollars. She quit signing books because she did not want people using her signature to exploit people in any way.

  She has to be careful about how she relates to people, because she will get exploited. Any person who is a famous person, a celebrity, ends up in a situation where they are exploited by people trying to get their signature, have their picture made with them, or have a little bit of the reflected glory of that person in their own life. It happens. It happens.

  But she is a real good person. She’d give you the shirt off her back.

  She’s just a common ordinary person with a brilliant mind who knows how to put a sentence together and a paragraph in an unusual way. If you were to read letters that she’s written, it’s almost like a chapter in a book.

  She’s funny in a smart way, in a brilliant sort of way. Her humor is not crass but a classical kind of humor, describing things, and describing people and situations in which she has found herself from time to time. Her storytelling is almost like the writing of To Kill a Mockingbird.

  She’s the sort of a friend that I’d say anything to. You don’t have to pretend to be somebody you’re not around her simply because she’s a celebrity. We argue about issues and argue about the meaning of things almost like a brother and a sister would discuss things with each other. We are very close friends.

  Being famous and a celebrity is probably a lot of fun the first two or three months, but after you’ve been a celebrity for fifty years, I’m quite sure it gets old, when you have people look at you not for who you are but for the image that they have of you. And there are a lot of mythologies that get developed about her an
d about her relationship to Truman Capote. There are people who ask me, “Are you sure that Nelle Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, or did Truman Capote write it?”

  Well, if you read the two authors, it’s very obvious that Truman Capote did not write To Kill a Mockingbird. But Nelle Harper did help him write and do the research for In Cold Blood and went to Kansas and helped him. But there are a lot of mythologies that developed, and it’s hard to disabuse people of the thought that maybe she didn’t write that entire book, that maybe Truman did help her, which really isn’t true.

  We would like to think that she would write something else. But one book’s been enough for her. It’s been enough. She has controlled her own destiny. She doesn’t have a PR person. She doesn’t need one. The fact that she doesn’t give interviews makes everybody all the more interested in her and in her life and in her book. I think she has led a happier life and certainly more contented life because she has chosen how she has related to the public. It’s been with care and great caution that she’s done so. She is a proud but a humble person. She loves people; she does a lot of good that nobody ever knows about. She does a lot of good through the church.

  You read that book and you see how you ought to rear children; you see how you ought to relate to your fellow citizens. You see what your attitude should be toward people who are different. And that is an issue in every age.

  The persons may differ, but the issues are still there. And this book addresses those issues in an interesting and gentle way. It doesn’t push them on you, but you can’t read the book without seeing those values.

  Rosanne Cash

  Rosanne Cash was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1955. Her fourteen albums include Seven Year Ache (1981), The Wheel (1993), Black Cadillac (2006), and The List (2009). She is the author of Bodies of Water (1996), a short story collection; Penelope Jane (2000), a children’s book; and Composed (2010), a memoir.