Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

  There’s another Coltrane story that’s more relevant. Coltrane, towards the end of his life, was touring Europe. And he was soloing. And during the middle of a solo, he put his horn down and started beating his chest and singing and shouting. And so after they played, the drummer—I think his name was Rashid Ali—he went up to Coltrane, he said, “John, what’s the matter? What’s wrong with you, why’d you do that?” And Coltrane said, “There was nothing else to play on the horn.” Maybe for Harper Lee there was nothing else to play. She sang the song, she played the solo, and she walked off the stage. And we’re all the better for it. We’re very grateful to her for the amount of love that she’s given us.

  If you’re going to say something, let it be that. I wish I could do that. If I could afford to do it, if I weren’t compelled to write, I would say The Color of Water would be where I stop. It’s easy for one to leave behind what you’ve already done. You’ve planted the garden, the tomatoes have grown, and you eat them, and they come back again next year if you’re lucky. There’s nothing as terrible as the comedian who tells the same joke twice. Tell the joke, get off the stage, and move on. She told the story that we needed to hear. Unfortunately, it’s as relevant now as it was decades ago when she first penned the book.

  And interestingly enough, the book still has the kind of lean muscle that is missing from so much of the fiction that we read now. A lot of it had to be true. You can’t make that kind of stuff up. If you made it up, someone would say it’s not believable. So that’s what separates her book from that of many other great Southern writers.

  It is a difficult business, to write, and it is difficult business to really throw your heart on the page and dissect what is real and present it to people. It’s kind of like ripping half your arteries out. So if she spends the rest of her life, whatever’s left of it, just repairing from that one great shout, then amen. Amen to that.

  The movie doesn’t have the power of the book. It’s a wonderful movie. Gregory Peck is a wonderful actor. I even met Brock Peters later in life. But the movie just doesn’t have the resonance and the depth of the book. That is one reason why The Color of Water hasn’t been made into a film yet. Because every time I see To Kill a Mockingbird as a film, I say to myself, This is nothing; this has not one fifth of the resonance and depth of the book. And so The Color of Water may never become a film, not while I’m living. Maybe my kids might want to option it out, but for me, I doubt if it’ll ever be made into a movie. And that’s part of the reason, because I saw what was done with To Kill a Mockingbird. And that was a pretty credible job by a great cast.

  The problem [is] when you start talking about the characters like Calpurnia, who basically vanishes during the movie, and even Brock Peters’s depiction of Tom, which was really well done. You know, Atticus Finch comes off as a liberal who is trying to do that right thing. I’ve had my fill of liberals who are trying to do the right thing.

  Atticus Finch was a citizen in a town who saw wrong and moved to right it, despite what his neighbors thought. It was beyond him trying to do the right thing. He knew God was watching, and he was trying to get to heaven. Gregory Peck, who really was a civil rights advocate, did a wonderful job with what was handed to him, with the script that he had. But I don’t think that you can deal with the complexities of the book in film. You just can’t do it.

  Boo Radley comes off as like a zombie, when in fact Boo Radley is anything but that. The whole business of Boo Radley in his house, by the way, is just brilliant stuff. Copied and emulated by writers everywhere, the haunted house on the block. It’s a classic childhood theme, but not for black people. Yeah, we had the spooky house on our block too. But we had the spooky cops who would stop us on the way to school when you had your flute and open up your case. “What’s in your flute case?” But in general, it is a classic childhood theme. Unfortunately there’s always a but when it involves black folks.

  Still, what other writer during that time was willing to take on this subject with the kind of honesty and integrity that she did. What other white writer? I can’t think of anyone.

  Diane McWhorter

  Diane McWhorter grew up in the fifties and sixties in Birmingham, Alabama. She is the author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and Dream of Freedom (2004), a young-adult history of the civil rights movement.

  My first experience of To Kill a Mockingbird was actually the movie, which came out when I was in fifth grade and really too young to have read the novel. So the experience of reading the book was superimposed on the movie, which made it extra magical because it kind of reinterpreted what was by then a major part of my identity.

  The movie was probably the most vivid memory of my childhood, for the following reason. My fifth-grade class at the Brooke Hill School for Girls, which was a lily-white private school in Birmingham, Alabama, had a big dinner party on the night of the local premiere. And the movie had opened about three months late in Birmingham in the spring of ’63, reputedly because the content was so controversial that no theaters would show it. So the Birmingham Jaycees [Junior Chamber of Commerce] had a campaign to bring it to town, and it was this big deal. Our class dinner party was at the home of Studie and Walker Johnson, who were the twin daughters of the family that owned the Coca-Cola bottling franchise in Birmingham, and whenever we went to their house, we got to drink as many six-and-a-half-ounce bottles of Coke as we wanted. We had sort of fancy food; I recall there was sour cream in one of the dishes or something. And then seniors from our school drove us to the theater. The reason this was such a big party was that our classmate Mary Badham played Scout in the movie. So the first bit of cognitive dissonance I ran up against that evening was seeing Mary on the screen, because in the year between when she shot the movie and when she came to Brooke Hill in fifth grade, which was when I met her, she had hit puberty. The little Scout who looked seven years old in the movie was this gawky preteen.

  Mary came from a kind of an eccentric family. They lived in this Addams Family–type house. Her mother was British and had dyed auburn hair. Her father was much older; he had been a general, and they were from a fairly old Birmingham family—to the extent that any family in Birmingham is old, since the city was founded in 1871! But anyway, it was fabulous seeing Mary up there, because she was so cute. And she got to roll down the street in that tire.

  Every Southern child has an episode of cognitive dissonance having to do with race, when the beliefs that you’ve held are suddenly called into question. For a lot of Southern kids, the classic instance was when you got on the bus with your beloved “maid,” as they were called, and then the bus driver reprimanded her or made her go to the back of the bus. For me, it was seeing To Kill a Mockingbird. I remember watching it, first assuming that Atticus was going to get Tom Robinson off, not only because Tom Robinson was innocent but because Atticus was played by Gregory Peck, and of course he was going to win. Then, as it dawned on me that it wasn’t going to happen, I started getting upset about that. Then I started getting really upset about being upset, because by rooting for a black man you were kind of betraying every principle that you had been raised to believe in. And I remember thinking, What would my father do if he saw me fighting back these tears when Tom Robinson gets shot? It was a really disturbing experience. I’m sure that other girls in the theater that night were going through the same thing, but we never spoke of it at all.

  We became obsessed with Scout. We started imitating Mary Badham and using her Scout expressions like “Cecil Jacobs is a big wet hen!” and “What the Sam Hill are you doing?” I remember asking my mother after seeing the movie, “What is Sam Hill?” There were all sorts of words I didn’t understand, like entailments and chiffarobe. The one thing a lot of us memorized was the “Hey, Mr. Cunningham” speech, when Scout turns away the lynch mob in front of the jail. I look back on that as the little secret rite of passage we Brooke Hill girls shared, that we
could cross over to the other side by identifying with turning away the lynch mob instead of being part of it, which was closer to where we were metaphorically in that time and place.

  I think this may be one of those cases in which celebrity trumps controversy, because my mother, at least, was caught up in the whole Mary Badham phenomenon. The entire community was excited about her being nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress and annoyed when she lost to Patty Duke, who had played Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. I certainly never talked to either of my parents about the content of the movie—and I barely even understood what rape was at the time. So it wasn’t a parent-child talking opportunity at all.

  But that experience summed up the whole school year to me. While researching my book nearly twenty years later, I was going through the local newspapers looking at the spring of ’63, which was, of course, when Martin Luther King came to Birmingham and led the demonstrations that brought segregation to an end in America, with the fire hoses and police dogs attacking the children. I was scrolling through the newspapers, and I saw the movie ads for To Kill a Mockingbird, and I thought, Wow, that’s when that was? Then I was reading the paper about the opening of the demonstrations in early April of 1963, and the very day that Project C, as King’s campaign was called, began, there’s an article saying something like “Klieg lights in Birmingham. Police ride up to the movie theater.” It was about the premiere of this movie. I had never put those two together in my mind. What a perfect example of what C. Vann Woodward would call the irony of Southern history, that these two events should coincide.

  My friends and I became addicted to the movie and would go downtown every Saturday for matinees to see it again and to keep learning more speeches from it. Then one day our parents said, “You can’t go downtown to the movies anymore.” It was after the fire hoses and police dogs were turned against the young demonstrators. If you ask people my age in Birmingham, white people, what those demonstrations meant in their lives, they will, to a person, say, “Our parents would not let us go downtown to the movies anymore.” And in my case, the movie that we were going downtown to see was To Kill a Mockingbird. The experience of watching the movie that first time was so traumatic, and I just remember trying to fight back those tears. I was the age that you don’t want to cry in movies anyway, for anything. But to be crying for a black man was so taboo that I never forgot it.

  I finally read the book in eighth grade, the year I was also reading a lot of those Daphne du Maurier and Mary Stewart books. I’d have these lost weekends of reading. I was just knocked out by it because I didn’t think that the book would be even better than the movie. The voice-over in the movie is kind of straight and sincere—rather un-Scout-like, actually—but the narrative voice in the novel is salty and mischievous and hilarious. For example, I love the passage about Miss Maudie’s reaction to a mere blade of nut grass in her yard, how she “likened such an occurrence unto an Old Testament pestilence.” But it’s funny, I don’t have a specific memory of when I read the book, because it’s one of those things that I feel has always been with me. I also don’t remember hearing about the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, which was also one of those things that I felt was always in me.

  There weren’t that many people in Alabama to be proud of back then, and to be able to claim someone like Harper Lee was quite inspiring. We had Harper Lee from south Alabama; we had Bear Bryant, the winning football coach; and then we had Wernher von Braun to the north in Huntsville, building the rocket that put us on the moon. Then again, von Braun was a transplant from Nazi Germany, so that left Harper Lee and Bear Bryant.

  What are the odds of two people like Truman Capote and Nelle Harper Lee coming simultaneously out of a town like Monroeville? It’s phenomenal, the incredible contrast between them: the one, who is considered the conscience of the country, and the other, who was probably a sociopath.

  Most non-Southern readers would not understand how Atticus could stand up for Mrs. Dubose, because she was such a racist. Southerners understand this perfectly because the racism is kind of a given, especially in the time frame of the novel. One of the powerful and instructive things about the book is that even though it’s such a classic indictment of racism, it’s not really an indictment of the racist, because there’s this recognition that those attitudes were “normal” then. For someone to rebel and stand up against them was exceptional, and Atticus doesn’t take that much pride in doing so, just as he would have preferred not to have to be the one to shoot the mad dog. He simply does what he must do and doesn’t make a big deal about it. Another skillful thing about the book is that Scout really does reflect the conditioning.

  She does use the N word and still has that childlike befuddlement when she asks Calpurnia why she talks differently around her own people than she does around the Finches. Somebody now might find that too politically incorrect to put on the table. A lot of the novel is about what one is allowed to say, as in the morning after Scout averts the lynch mob, Atticus and Aunt Alexandra are arguing about whether he should have mentioned in front of Calpurnia that Mr. Underwood despises Negroes. It’s interesting that she, the highly prejudiced one, is supposedly concerned about Calpurnia’s “feelings.” And in yet another layer of complexity, Mr. Underwood had been covering Atticus with his shotgun from his newspaper office the night before, siding with him against the mob—a little unsentimental coda to the scene that the movie left out. Harper Lee is willing and able to show without judgment what the conditions were like, partly because the action takes place in the past and partly because it’s seen through the eyes of a child. But for a white person from the South to write a book like this in the late 1950s is really unusual—by its very existence an act of protest.

  I think some of us have to leave the South to love it. You can’t write about it if you don’t love it, and it may be hard to love when you are down there amongst ’em.

  Jon Meacham

  Jon Meacham was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1969. He is the editor of Newsweek and the author of three books, including Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (2004) and American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2009.

  I first read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the eighth grade at McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is on Missionary Ridge, the old battlefield there. It was a small paperback, the kind if you got it all wet, it would be trouble. I remember very clearly reading it at home when I was about thirteen. The story was particularly appealing. I would have been Jem’s age, more or less, and we knew that world of being outdoors all the time in the summer in the heat. It was not a foreign landscape to me: Boo Radley and the houses you didn’t go to—I think every Southern neighborhood has that sort of mythology. Certainly ours did.

  We all like to think that Atticus Finch was our father or our grandfather. They weren’t, or it would have been a much better South, a much better country. There wouldn’t have been the need for the novel if everyone had been like Atticus. He wasn’t a caricature, either of good or of evil. And that’s the way most folks were, and are. If you were a Southerner, you recognized almost everyone in To Kill a Mockingbird, and they weren’t perfect. I think the courageous thing that Miss Lee did was end it on a tragic note. Melodrama would have ended with an acquittal. Instead it’s a tale of good and evil that ends on a note of gray, which is where most of us live.

  The ambiguity of the moral conclusion of the book became ever more real as I got older. I was with Harper Lee once in Sewanee, Tennessee, a couple of years ago at an occasion where Winston Churchill’s daughter and Miss Lee were receiving honorary degrees from the University of the South. At one of the events, the recipient stands up and says how they got to be where they are, and when Harper Lee stood up, she simply looked at Churchill’s daughter, Mary Soames, and said, “I would like to thank Lady Soames for everything, because if her father had not done what he did, I would
n’t have been able to write anything at all.” And then she sat down. It was one of the most remarkably gracious things I have ever seen.

  Telling it through Scout’s eyes gives it a kind of Huckleberry Finn quality. Unlike some other narrators, Scout ages well—better, surely, than Holden Caulfield. For me, it evokes the kind of Southern courthouse world I grew up in, and the idea of paying tribute to a man even after he lost is quite moving and noble in many ways. Again, [I remember] being quite surprised even when very young that Atticus did not turn out to live happily after. I think the reason the book endures is it doesn’t end on a fairy-tale note, and neither does life.

  The fact that there has not been a second book is one of the great details in American literature: If you get it right once, stop.

  Allison Moorer

  Allison Moorer is a singer/songwriter whose ten albums include Mockingbird (2008) and Crows (2010). She was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1972. After her father killed her mother and himself in 1986, Moorer moved to Monroeville, Alabama, to live with relatives.

  I first read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was fifteen. I was in high school. It wasn’t on our required summer reading list, even though I actually went to high school in Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee lives, still, today. When I was a little kid, I remember seeing a copy of the book in my grandparents’ house. And I always wondered about it, for some reason. I thought it was an interesting title, and I remember one of my older cousins was reading it.