Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

  I was born in Memphis. I wasn’t raised in the South, but I’ve spent plenty of time there. It makes me proud. It’s the perfect Southern story. This whole book is a guide to parenting, number one. And then the language, of course. The naturalness that Atticus has with his children—there isn’t this sense of modern angst about parenting. There is a beautiful intimacy between Atticus and Scout that you just want to get inside and that gives you so much feeling of love and comfort and integrity. Its beauty never ceases to amaze me and strike me. There’s just this beautiful naturalness that he has and sense of confidence in his own skill as a parent. And respect for the child, that mutual respect. I just love it so much, it just gives so much satisfaction to read it.

  It’s perfect. She created a whole world inside these pages that we get to enter in forever. It’s perfect.

  I don’t remember the act of reading it for the first time, but I remember taking that feeling of integrity and sense of conscience and the idea that the way you behaved, whether people saw you or not, was central to becoming yourself, becoming who you were going to become in the world, that you had to first carve out a central sense of conscience.

  My daughters have read it on their own. I’m looking forward to reading it to my son. He’s not quite ready, but I think very soon. These kinds of people are rare in modern life—someone with absolute integrity. Atticus is a real grown-up. He knows who he is. He knows what’s right and wrong. He acts out of compassion and personal integrity.

  Those lessons you learn from your parents, the really key, profound life lessons, they’re seared in your memory. They’re few and they’re precious, and this book makes poetry of it. If you find people like that, hold on to them; they are few and far between.

  Mark Childress

  Mark Childress was born in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1957, and grew up in Mississippi. He is the author of six novels, including Crazy in Alabama (1993), Gone for Good (1998), and One Mississippi (2006).

  The first time I read To Kill a Mockingbird I was in Monroeville, Alabama. It was two doors down from Nelle Harper Lee’s house. And I was on the porch of Miss Wanda Biggs’s house. Miss Wanda Biggs was my mother’s best friend. She was one of Monroeville’s notable busybodies. She was the Welcome Wagon lady, who chased Gregory Peck all over town to give him a welcome basket. She also operated a switchboard from her home. She got the doctors and the lawyers, and she answered phone calls for everybody. So she knew everything that was going on in town.

  I was about nine years old, and she said, “I think it’s time for you to read this.” She put it in my hands, and it was a first edition signed to her that I’m sure I spilled Coca-Cola on, and every other thing. God, I wish I had that book. Every few hours she would wander out and say, “Now you see that stump over there? That’s the tree where Boo hid the presents for the children. Did you get to the part yet about the school? If you go down this little pathway, that is where the school is.”

  That was the first adult novel that I had ever read, and I was just about the age of Scout when I read it, and I was reading it in the setting where it happened. And it’s the reason I’m a writer today—something about seeing that ugly little town, which at that point had been sort of stripped of all of its charms, transformed into this magical thing that was in my hands. I guess it would be like if you came from Reggie Jackson’s hometown, you’d want to be a baseball player.

  It became real to me that Miss Wanda knew the lady who wrote this, that this was a novel written out of this place where I was right now, and how it somehow became this magic on the page. I’ll never forget being in that swing reading it. It took me about three days. I read it about every year, just as a refresher course. It’s a really good book.

  Every time I go back, I’m impressed more by the simplicity of the prose. I think the reason that we think it’s so classic is that the prose is not adorned; it’s very plain. Although it’s plainly written from the point of view of an adult, looking back through a child’s eyes, there’s something beautifully innocent about the point of view, and yet it’s very wise. So it’s a combination of either a wise child or an innocent adult, the point of view.

  The fact that Scout is surprised by people’s racism is what was revolutionary about the book. Most little kids in little towns like that, they weren’t surprised, because racism was all around them. It was the fabric of life. When I was three years old, my grandmother and I would walk down the main street of Greeneville, which was the little town where she lived, and black men would get off the sidewalk as a sign of respect. And if I walked down the sidewalk, at five years old—by myself—they would get off the sidewalk as a sign of respect to me. And this was in the mid-sixties, after the book came out.

  We think of this book as being a post–civil rights novel, but it was published before the biggest explosions of the civil rights movement, and helped bring it along, I think. You know that famous quote Lincoln [reportedly] said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Oh, here’s the little lady whose book caused such a big war.” I think the same can be said of Harper Lee, that To Kill a Mockingbird was one of the most influential novels, not necessarily in a literary sense, but in a social sense.

  It gives white Southerners a way to understand the racism that they’ve been brought up with and to find another way. And for white Southerners at that time, there was no other way. There were either outsiders yelling at you because you were a racist cracker, or your leaders, George Wallace saying, “I’ll never be out-niggered again.” There was no middle ground. Most white people in the South were good people. Most white people in the South were not throwing bombs and causing havoc, but they had been raised in the system. I think the book really helped them come to understand what was wrong with the system in a way that any number of treatises could never do, because it was popular art, told from a child’s point of view.

  We think of it as a contemporary book, but it is set in the thirties. So it also helped the white Southerner because there was distance between the South she was writing about and the present day when it was published. That allowed them to feel, “Well, we’ve moved a little beyond that.” And because she was a white Southerner, there was something that allowed them to hear what she was trying to say.

  It’s just a child trying to understand, trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make any sense, trying to organize it. I guess I’ve spent my whole writing career trying to do the same thing, laboring in the shadow of making sense of what race meant in the South. How do you grow up having come from that system? It’s a lot of interesting problems.

  I don’t think that kids today read it with the same edge that we did as children, because the segregation was still very real when I was reading that book. When I went to the swimming pool, there were no colored children allowed. The signs said WHITE and COLORED. When we went to the Dairy Queen, there were two lines: There was a white window, and there was a black window. So, it was a radical book at that time in the South. It might not have been that way in the rest of the country, but it said radical things.

  There are a lot of people in the novel who are not quite what they seem, and there’s a few people who are what they seem, and they’re the heroes of the book—Miss Maudie, and Atticus, and old Boo, too.

  Scout was about half boy. Scout’s a real tomboy, you know, and Dill was about half girl. The two of them, they were both odd birds in their town, which is sort of the other theme that runs through the book. They’re not like the other kids either. If you notice any time that other kids are seen in the book, it’s always in opposition; our little group is never playing with them. And I think there’s one moment where she talks about it, because she was the daughter of the lawyer, people thought she was above them. There’s some stuff about the social stratification of the town too, that is really interesting. There’s just a lot in the book. And that’s why I keep rereading it, because I always find something new.

  I was looking at the movie recently and realizing how much Gregory Peck
made the movie Atticus’s movie. And the book is really Scout’s book. It’s Scout and Jem’s book. It’s really about the children’s learning; the whole town teaches them a little bit at a time.

  I don’t really remember Dill from my first reading of the book. It’s kind of that weird little kid in the movie made a bigger impression on me. So that’s one of the elements of the book I find hard to separate from the movie, because I saw the movie four or five years after I read the book.

  It’s really well done. Scout’s entrance is one of the greatest entrances in movie history. She swings into the frame on the tire swing and drops. It’s just so Scout, it’s perfect. And it’s a beautiful script. I think probably Miss Nelle would be the first to say that Horton Foote adapted that with infinite care and it’s one of those rare cases where the movie’s not as good as the book but it’s right up there and doesn’t take away from the book.

  Atticus—what can you say about him? When you were a kid, you wanted to have a dad like that. There’s something a little bit idealized about him. And I’m sure that’s the way with all great heroes of fiction. He’s a little bit too good to be true, but in the book he’s got more bumps than he’s allowed to have in the movie. So I like him a little better in the book. He’s more recognizable to me.

  Whenever people talk to me because I was born there, they say, “What’s in the water in Monroeville?” Well, there’s nothing in the water, but it’s like I said, the most famous person in Alabama was Harper Lee. She was a novelist. I think most kids never meet a novelist.

  Miss Wanda was pointing out to me the parts of it that were physically real. I think she was doing that to keep me going through the book. She didn’t realize that I was completely hooked on it. It’s something that really fascinates readers, like which part’s true, which part is made up. And I’ve never quite understood that. To me, everything in a novel’s real, and I really don’t care where the author got it. But for readers that is important. They love to know how much of it was autobiographical.

  Any writer who says he doesn’t write out of his own life is lying. Of course he does—all your writing is based on your own life. But it’s “Do you transform the material?” And I think that’s what she did, and put such magic on it. But yeah, her life was probably something like the life in there, but it wasn’t so beautifully dramatically shaped, and there wasn’t one moment that pulled it all together. That’s the beauty of fiction, that’s what fiction can do: give shape to narrative.

  I have absolutely no idea why she never published another book. But I don’t blame her, and I think in a way it was probably the right decision, although I sure would love to have had the other books. When you bat the ball out [of] the park the very first time you ever step up, why would you ever pick up the bat again? I think she was very wise to stay away from it. She’s probably had a much happier life because she did that. I think, for some people, publicity’s just like poison. I think she had just enough of it, just enough fame right there at the beginning that, one day, she probably woke up and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” It might also have been knowing Truman and watching what it was doing to him at that point in their lives. Even though he was wildly famous and successful, he wasn’t very happy. I think she probably saw that.

  It takes a kind of courage that almost nobody has in this country, where celebrity is our religion; it’s replaced religion for a lot of people. To turn away from the church of publicity and say, “I’m not going to pray there. I’m not going to appear there. I don’t want my picture.” It’s a kind of blasphemy in this society that she commits by refusing to participate in the publicity machine. I certainly understand that impulse she had, to close the door and go back to her private life.

  Of course, she had the great freedom of being able to live off the proceeds of her book, which most writers don’t have. So, you know, that liberated her to be able to do that. If the book had sold four thousand copies, I bet you there would have been a second novel, and I bet you she’d have been out there hustling just like the rest of us!

  I hope she kept writing, because she’s a beautiful writer. I used to hear those rumors Truman helped her write it, or Truman wrote it for her. There’s a kind of hostility in that that always took me aback. In the first place, it’s a sexist assumption that somehow she couldn’t do it without his help. I think the reverse is probably truer, that he couldn’t have done In Cold Blood [without her], because a lot of those people in Kansas wouldn’t talk to him. I bet you he helped her with To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ll bet he gave it a read. I bet he went through it with his pencil. That’s what friends do for each other.

  Maybe it’s just because she never published another book that people assume that she had to have had some help, that she couldn’t do it over again the second time. I got a letter from her one time that absolutely proved to me that she wrote every word of To Kill a Mockingbird, ’cause the voice is completely the voice of the book. It’s the most beautifully, eloquently written letter. So I know that people are lying when they say that.

  To be honest, I think she’s probably enjoyed playing the recluse. She has a great sense of humor—just read the book. I think it probably gives her pleasure to watch people chase after her. I think that’s probably kind of fun.

  She goes out and lives her life. Luckily, even the most famous writer in America can be anonymous. I guess Truman couldn’t have gone much of anywhere without being recognized. But most writers can. And I think that’s probably why she’s kept her hand in, staying in Monroeville. People leave her alone there. And when she lives in New York, people leave her alone. So it’s a pretty good life she’s got going.

  I’ve had some friends who’ve had huge success with their first book and have spent the rest of their careers where every review begins with “the author of the previous book” and this one doesn’t ever quite measure up. The reviews were bound to be bad in comparison to To Kill a Mockingbird.

  I wouldn’t have wanted that kind of success, though, on my first book. No way. It would have killed my career the way it did hers. I would love to have had her as a functioning writer, writing ten novels so that I could sit down, read, and wait for the new Harper Lee novel to come out, but I think the success of the book took that away from us. I think the success was just too much, and she just didn’t want to go there, she didn’t want to wade into that. I don’t blame her.

  Jane Ellen Clark

  Jane Ellen Clark was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1948. She is the executive director of the Monroe County Heritage Museum in Monroeville, Alabama.

  The first time I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird was in 1996, when I started working here. I got calls from teachers who wanted to know things about the book that were real. They would call and ask about a character. The first question I got that I didn’t know the answer to was, “Who in the town was Mister Avery?” I didn’t even know who Mister Avery was. So I had to quickly get the book and look that up. He’s the boarder at Miss Maudie’s.

  What I discovered that year was how multilayered this book is. And now, I like to listen to it. I really hear things when it’s being read to me. Many of the teachers who come here tell me that they read this book aloud to their students every year—the whole book—because they love to read it.

  As I learn more about Monroe County history, I hear things in the book that I relate to something. I think the last thing was Barker’s Eddy in the book. I thought that’s an interesting way to describe the creek. ’Cause I know what an eddy is in a river. So I thought, Hmm, in a creek, would that be the same thing?

  So I started asking around, and just by accident found out that all the kids in Monroeville in the thirties and forties went to a Parker’s Eddy to learn to swim. I said, “Why do you call it an eddy?” It’s a creek that is really close to the Alabama River and when the river’s high, the water does come back in. So that’s why they call it an eddy. The people I asked would say “Gosh, I need to go back down there and see i
f that’s still a good swimming hole.”

  Everything that I see or hear in the book I can relate to something. There’s a passage about the chapel at Finch’s Landing, the organ in the chapel. I live up in the north part of the county in Old Bell’s Landing, and our little Methodist church has a pump organ. We grew up singing hymns as my aunt played the pump organ.

  I think the town in the book is really close to the town of Monroeville in the thirties. I do also hear, though, from people all over the country who say, “It’s a lot like my little town.” I love to hear that, because it makes me feel good that there are towns like that out there, that we’re not the only one. We have a lot of history here, and we care about it, so I’m glad that there are other people who relate to it like I do. But I do think that she was talking about her town, and her family, and all the people that she knew here, situations here. George Thomas Jones [a town historian] said to me the other day, “Well, you know, we were here. We knew all those people, all those situations that she’s writing about. But could we write a Pulitzer Prize–winning book about it that has never been out of print? No. That’s her genius.”

  My mother was in the same room at school with Harper Lee. I grew up coming here from Pensacola, up to the family land. We’d go right by the school, the site of the house of the recluse that becomes Boo Radley [in the book], that’s the neighborhood of Monroeville that I think Harper Lee made into Maycomb. Mama would say things as we would come by. She told about Son Boulware, who was the boy who was put into the house, and how scared they were of him, how spooky the house was. Some people in town remember the incident. [After Son Boulware was caught breaking into a store,] his father took him home and said, “My son won’t go to reform school.” Some say that the boys in his class would go visit and he would help them with their algebra. But the next year, he didn’t come back to school, and then those boys left. By the time my mother was ten, around 1936, nobody had seen him. All the legends had built up, and by then the kids were scared to even ride their bikes by the front of the house. I went to the cemetery to try to find his grave and found out his full name. It’s Alfred Boulware. The epitaph is so wonderful: “To live in hearts left behind is not to die.” [Boo] really is the hero in the end. He saves the children’s life. So Harper Lee saw something else about that boy that my mother and the rest of the kids didn’t.