Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

  Well, when he’d been in Miami for six weeks, they picked him up and sent him to Harvard. He didn’t finish his OTS [officer training school]. He was to go to Harvard for six weeks and be trained as a statistical officer, then go back to Miami and finish his OTS. Well, they didn’t let him go back. When he got through at Harvard, they gave him his commission as a second lieutenant, shipped him over to San Francisco, presumably to go to the Pacific. He had been at sea about three days. They called the ship back, and it put in at Seattle. They removed about four young men from the ship, and my brother was one of those. The ship went on the way it was headed. My brother was shipped back to New York to sail for England. He had literally covered the four corners of the United States in the process of getting his commission.

  Well, a statistical officer did not fly. He was not a pilot, but he could fly if there was space on anything. He got to England, and he had ways of letting us know where he was through the censor. He wrote one letter and made reference to Chaucer, so of course we knew where he was in England. I remember one time when he was in France, in his letter he said, “Do you remember that little redheaded Fleming girl in Monroeville? That was Nancy.” There were ways that he could communicate with us and let us know where he was. He was with the Mustang group, the 158th fighter pilot outfit that flew the Mustangs. Mustangs wiped themselves out of business. They were the fastest things that could go with the bombers for protection. Eventually, as the war went on, and after D-day, and the bombers could get closer and closer to Berlin, they did not need the protection. So they wiped themselves out of a job, literally. So when the war was over in England, Ed expected to be shipped to the West, to the Pacific, but VJ Day came quicker than they could get him over there. So he finally got out of [the] service, came home, finished college, married, had two children and then died of an aneurism in his sleep. He had been called back up into service when the Korean thing was on the way. He was in Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery waiting to see where he was going to be shipped when he died of the aneurism. His daughter was three years old and his son was nine months old. His son is a local dentist now. And his daughter lives in Alexander City.

  Nelle Harper had a vivid imagination all of her life, and early on she would compose stories. Daddy gave her an old beat-up typewriter, and she typed that way [gesturing hunt-and-peck method] the rest of her life. She never knew anything but the hunt-and-peck system, but she could go quite well with that.

  I think in the back of her mind the idea [to be a writer] was there, not necessarily expressed. But in college she went to law school because she thought the disciplines of law were good training for somebody writing. She never intended to practice law.

  I read the manuscript and OK’d it. I thought it was very good but was surprised by the reception it got. [I don’t have a favorite part]; I just look at the book as a whole.

  After the manuscript had gone for publication, my father had a heart attack, and Nelle Harper was down here. Then after that, she went to Kansas with Truman Capote to help him research the Clutter murders out there, and that was just on the eve of the publication. Mockingbird had not hit the stands when she was out there the first time. When they went back the second time, Mockingbird was beginning to do quite well.

  Here was this little boy next door, here was this little girl next door, and they played together a lot. I’ve known Truman Capote’s mother’s side of the family, not his father’s side.

  When [Truman’s grandparents] married, they had five children. The youngest of the children fell off a horse, took pneumonia, and died. The young mother grieved herself to death, and there was nobody to take these children, so a bunch of cousins, three old-maid sisters and one brother, unmarried, who were living at the house next door to us in the neighborhood, took all of those children and reared them and educated them. The oldest of all of them was Truman’s mother [Lillie Mae Faulk]. She went to Troy State University Normal School and met Archie Persons and married him.

  Archie Persons was very highly educated and very smart, but did not use his mind to make his living. Then Lillie Mae eventually went to New York and met Joe Capote, and once she married him, they took Truman to New York permanently.

  Some of the other descendants of Truman’s cousins still live around here, and they have tried to promote Truman and his ancestry. They had as much imagination as Truman. You’d get the strangest ideas about how they grew up over the years. Nelle and I have had hysterics over how they said the Faulks lived.

  Truman became very jealous because Nelle Harper got a Pulitzer and he did not. He expected In Cold Blood to bring him one, and he got involved with the drugs and heavy drinking and all. And that was it. It was not Nelle Harper dropping him. It was Truman going away from her.

  My father lived until April of 1962, so he was here when it came out and when she won the Pulitzer. He knew about that. He was a very proud father, a very proud father.

  Nelle Harper says that everybody around Monroeville was determined to see themselves in the book. They would go do anything—come up to her and say, “I’m so-and-so in the book.” One day, for instance, a lady in town said to me, “I am so glad Nelle Harper put my aunt Clara in the book.” And I thought to myself, Who could be Aunt Clara in the book? And I said, “Verna, what makes you think that?”

  “Because one of her characters used the same expression that my aunt used.” That was typical. People wanted to be in the book.

  But wherever people read it, we learned that wherever they were, they placed the book setting where they lived. Early on, she got a letter from a young woman in Chicago who was a doctor, and she said, “I’m interested to know when you spent so much time in Greensborough.” Now Greensborough is not too far from Tuscaloosa, and the only time Nelle Harper had ever been to Greensborough was when she passed through to go to school.

  In New York, Nelle could move around without being recognized. Her attitude was, the kind of recognition that was coming out was the kind that was placed on entertainers who wanted to be recognized—who promoted it for their business reasons. She did not think that a writer needed to be recognized in person, and it bothered her when she got too familiar.

  When she was in New York, right after the publication, she granted some interviews. But as time went on, she said that reporters began to take too many liberties with what she said. And what they would print would be apparently what they wanted rather than what she said. So she just wanted out. And she started that and did not break her rule. She felt like she’d given enough.

  You know, when wrong things get in print, they circulate forever. No way to retract them successfully.

  She didn’t put herself under the burden of writing like she did when she was doing Mockingbird. But she continued to write something. I think she was just working on maybe short things with an idea of incorporating them into something. She didn’t talk too much about it. She says you couldn’t top what she had done. She told one of our cousins who asked her: “I haven’t anywhere to go but down.”

  We are not very much alike, except we are both old. We both love to read. Nelle Harper loves British literature; I’ve stuck more with American. More biography and history. It is so intriguing in biography to put things together.

  James McBride

  James McBride was born in New York in 1957. He is the author of a memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996), and two novels, Miracle at St. Anna (2003) and Song Yet Sung (2008). He is the screenwriter of Miracle at St. Anna, a film directed by Spike Lee. McBride is a composer, plays the tenor saxophone, and performs in jazz clubs.

  I first read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. I read a tattered copy in my house, in New York, in Jamaica, Queens. It was just beat-up, it had no cover. The page that says what edition it was, it was all ripped. It was dog-eared and it was yellowed and in my house. When I say dog-eared, that meant a dog might have had a go at it. My brothers and sisters and I read books
all the time; we weren’t allowed to watch that much television anyway. I thought it was an extraordinary book. I related to a lot of the characters, and it was the first time I read a book by a white writer who really discussed the issues of racism in any way that was complicated and sophisticated. Although I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand all of the issues that were discussed, the characters were so strong and the story was so strong that I related to the characters and to the story. It was a great book. It was a book I’ve read many times since that tattered edition that I found in my house.

  I read a lot of it in one sitting. In my house there was no peace. I grew up with eleven brothers and sisters. A lot of the reading that I did, I did in the closet or in a corner somewhere, or late at night when everyone else was asleep. It wasn’t a school assignment. It was just a book that I found on my brother David’s bookshelf. He had all these odd books there that would make their way around. In my house, if you had a book, you had to hold on to it, because you could get to page 175 and then it would vanish, and you wouldn’t get it back, ever. So I held on to it tight until I was done.

  Honesty and truth last. My initial response was more or less the same as how I read it now professionally. The writer was very forthright and spoke with great clarity about issues that I think we have a hard time discussing even today. Later, when I penned my own book, the whole business of a child looking at racism and socioeconomic classism from the prism of that child’s innocence is something that I adapted for The Color of Water. That child’s innocence is important in terms of allowing us to see the world from behind the child’s eyeballs. One nice thing for me is that often people compare The Color of Water to To Kill a Mockingbird. That’s great. That to me is the highest compliment.

  The character description and construction in To Kill a Mockingbird is really the ceiling against which great character writing will forever bump, in a lot of ways. The characters are so strong and definitive, yet they have a great deal of ambiguity, and they have a great deal of innocence and then soiled innocence. They have a great deal of obvious depth and they are swept by the events of their time. Which brings to mind one thing that I’ve always found odd about the description of Harper Lee by other writers. They describe her as a very brave writer because she wrote about these subjects. I think she’s a brilliant writer. I think Martin Luther King was brave; Malcolm X was brave; James Baldwin, who was gay and black in America and who had to move to France was brave. I think that by calling Harper Lee brave you kind of absolve yourself of your own racism. What writers are standing up now at this time when we’ve attacked Iraq, killed thousands and thousands of people, not to mention thousands of our own? I don’t recall any great sweep of fiction writers other than maybe E. L Doctorow and Paul Auster, a couple of others, who, when it counted, stood up and said, I’m a writer, this is who I represent, this is what I feel, this is what’s right. So, by calling her brave, we kind of absolve ourselves of our own responsibility. She certainly set the standard in terms of how some of these issues need to be discussed, but in many ways I feel the bar’s been lowered, the moral bar’s been lowered. And that is really distressing. We need a thousand Atticus Finches.

  As an adult, it occurs to me that the black characters in the book, heroic as they are, they don’t survive. The societal violence that takes place to Tom Robinson affects his family for generations, at least fictionally. In real life, my wife’s great-grandfather was shot while he was standing in line to get feed, because a white guy just told him to move and he wouldn’t move. That murder just goes on and on; it’s told to generations of people in my wife’s family. And similarly in Harper Lee’s book, that part of the story was something that for me has never been quite resolved in the manner that I would like to have seen it resolve. That wasn’t her purpose, to tell Tom Robinson’s story, but that’s partially my purpose as a writer.

  I think the challenge that she laid out for us, the writers who follow in her wake, is to make sure that the various dimensions of these stories are told properly, and that we stand up in our own time to talk about issues that count now. It’s easy to poke fun and say, “I would have done this,” or “What a brave women she was,” and so on and so forth, but when it counted, Harper Lee did what was necessary. And how many of us now are doing what’s necessary in terms of standing up for the good and for the just?

  She wrote about what she knew, but that doesn’t absolve her of the responsibility of handling the character Tom better. Look, I wish I’d written the book, so let that be said. I’m not criticizing her work. She’s a great writer. She’s an American treasure, there’s no question about it. But just like anything else, when the imprint of racism lays its hand on you, you have to be conscious as to how that affects you and your work. I think she did the best she could, given how she was raised. That still doesn’t absolve the book or this country of the whole business of racism.

  I love Calpurnia as a character, but what’s her daughter’s name? I think she was a wonderful character, but you always live in that tight space when you’re black. Harper Lee’s approach gave Calpurnia some dimension. Calpurnia had a deep understanding of these issues, although she was restricted in terms of what she could do about a lot of these things.

  I met Kurt Vonnegut before he died, and I was asking him, because his black characters were like Harper Lee’s in the sense that they were really magnetic and very powerfully written and multidimensional, at least to a degree. And I said, “How do you write with such authority about black people?” And he said, “Well, my parents weren’t always around, and so I was raised by a black woman who was very near and dear to me.” So he took that into his work. I don’t know that Harper Lee had the same experience, but her work reflects a familiarity with black folks that’s more than you’d find here in New York or in Philadelphia. Our Southern brothers have had that experience of growing up together, and while there’s some distance between them, there’s also a lot of common ground.

  Who are the real separate ones in our society, those who claim to “know your pain” or those who have been your fellow citizens, for whom you have changed a flat tire, who’ve changed your flat tires? In that regard, I appreciate what Harper Lee has done. I appreciate what she’s done in every respect. When my daughter was in ninth grade honors English, she had to read Margaret Mitchell’s book Gone with the Wind. How do you explain to a thirteen-year-old girl a book that depicts blacks as rapists and white-women chasers and savage people? How to explain that to a ninth grader? And what are you saying to them when that book is your honors English reading for the summer? On the other hand, when she read To Kill a Mockingbird, it’s a book that she really liked. She could relate to it, as tragic as it is, and as difficult as it was for her to read.

  Margaret Mitchell is not the writer that Harper Lee is. Harper Lee writes with the greatest clarity and a superb amount of detail, superb amount of plot, character, content, all the kind of stuff that you need to push a book forward.

  People are going to be reading Harper Lee as long as people draw oxygen in this country, and they should. To Kill a Mockingbird [is] a great book now, it was a great book yesterday, and it will be a great book tomorrow. Whoever writes whatever in the New Yorker magazine or whatever, it’ll be tomorrow’s fish wrap. It is a great book.

  If sentimentality can’t be literature, my response to that is like, dippity do dah, dippity ay. Send a copy of Dr. Seuss’s The Sneeches. The sneeches, after awhile they don’t know who’s the sneech, their identities are all spinning around in a circle. To Kill a Mockingbird is not overly sentimental. It’s just a clear vision of what America was at that particular time, when people were filled with hope, ambiguity, love, compassion, anger, rage, everything.

  I think it’s not fair to lob darts and grenades at a work like this that was written with the hope that people would see what the possibilities are in this country. It’s unfair at a time when you can walk into any major bookstore and 95 percent of what you see is just really
wasted trees. I just can’t imagine that someone would think that To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t anything but a great American work. Really.

  She didn’t need a mother in that book. It would have probably soiled the book somewhat. And that’s a complicated character to deal with in the South, particularly at that time: White female characters—they were restricted in many ways.

  It is the metamorphosis of this young girl, evolving from a child to a girl to an almost woman as a result of her experiences without a mother—though she had neighbors who cared, and she had Calpurnia, as well. Yeah, that’s a difficult one, though, because Calpurnia would be the one who people would target and say, “Here we go, you know, it’s the stereotypical black mammy. I mean, how many of these do we need?” But first of all, it’s rooted in reality, and secondly, it worked.

  When the writer gets to the mainland, nobody asks how they got there. No one cares how William Faulkner wrote; they just know that he wrote. So who cares if you got there on the Titanic, or you paddled with a boat, or you jumped from lily pad to lily pad? You got to the mainland, and that’s what counts.

  If you only have one solo to play, then play the one solo. Why come back again and dance again? Why come back and hit the stage again? You’ve already branded the stage to ashes. You’ve killed it!

  One time John Coltrane and Miles Davis were playing in one of the clubs in New York City, and John Coltrane was taking the solo, and he just kept soloing and soloing. Miles finally walked off the stage. And then Miles is meandering, waiting for Coltrane to finish; he smokes a cigarette, and Coltrane’s still playing. Finally, Coltrane is finished, and Miles comes back on-stage, and they finish the song, and then he turns to Coltrane and says, “Why are you playing so long?” And Coltrane says, “I don’t know, Miles. I just can’t seem to stop once I get started.” And Miles says, “Why don’t you try taking the horn out of your mouth?” And so, maybe this is Harper Lee just taking the horn out of her mouth.