Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

  I just reread it, and it’s a very different book when you’re an adult than it is when you’re a kid—the significance of it in terms of justice, in terms of what’s right and wrong, why people are the way they are, why people are racist, why people are bigoted. I am from the South; I live in New York part-time now. So reading about Southern people and Southern ways and the small-town South as someone who doesn’t live there 365 days of the year anymore is interesting—to look at it from an outsider’s point of view now.

  What I see in the Southern small town is a lot of beauty, but I also see a lot of sadness. People are not small-minded because they want to be; they’re small-minded because they have to be. I’m convinced that small-mindedness is a necessity for people who don’t have an opportunity to be any other way. I don’t believe that people want to be racist or homophobic, or whatever it is that they are. I think that it’s a necessity for them to believe these things in order to function so their little worlds will hold together.

  When I read the book, I saw what everybody who reads the book sees, that Tom Robinson was not guilty of what he was accused of. I didn’t know how to wrap my head around what it really meant when I was fifteen and reading it at that time. I don’t know if I do at this point grasp the notion of what it truly means to accuse someone of a crime they didn’t commit.

  I wanted to be Scout. I thought Scout was the coolest thing in the world. Obviously Scout’s a very precocious child, and there were all kinds of things I liked about her. I liked that she could run and play with Jem and Dill. I liked her sense of humor and the whole Boo Radley subplot.

  I didn’t understand what the Boo Radley thing was about when I read it at fifteen. I didn’t understand that Boo Radley is there as a character to represent our judgment of the things that we do not know. I definitely get that this time at the age of thirty-three.

  Scout looked at the world through wide eyes rather than narrow ones. Her relationship with Calpurnia was really cool. I loved that she doesn’t dig her aunt. When she says she could have sworn [Aunt Alexandra] was wearing that corset under her dressing gown, I thought she was exceptionally cool.

  Monroeville is one of those typical old Southern towns built around the town square where the courthouse was. I haven’t been to Monroeville in at least ten years. My aunt and uncle moved away, so I have no reason to go back there. There are quiet little streets. There was a black side of town, and there was a white side of town, and there still is. There’s a little country club. It’s just one of those little Southern towns that [’s] not going to get any bigger. It’s going to get smaller. That’s what happens to those towns.

  The language really takes me back. This book was set in the thirties. My grandmother on my mother’s side was born in 1926, so the way she talks is very much like the language in this book. The Southern way of speaking has changed quite a bit from that time. Even when I’m reading what Scout is thinking and what she’s saying, I always put a soft r on it. That means instead of saying “close the door,” it’s “close the do-ah,” like my grandmother says.

  The Cunninghams: I remember being in school, being in first grade and noticing the kids who got free lunches, and I never had to have a free lunch, but I wondered at times why I didn’t get free lunches, because we certainly didn’t have any money. It was a pride thing. My parents weren’t about to let me get free lunch at school, but there were parents who did, and I noticed. You know, kids do notice: that’s one thing we forget. They take in everything.

  The moment in the movie when somebody scares Dill and he turns around and says, “Good Lord, Aunt Stephanie, you like to scare me to death.” I still say it, I do. That’s what I say when I get scared. It’s funny.

  Harper Lee strikes me as a person who didn’t ever want to put on airs, and that’s another small-town activity she probably didn’t want anything to do with. I get the feeling that people probably wanted to claim her in Monroeville early on, but they finally just gave up.

  I wanted Atticus to be my dad. I wanted him to play with his kids. I loved who he was, and I loved that he was such a strong character and such a great dad to them. But I wanted him to have more fun.

  I lost my mother at fourteen. So it was very fresh at that time. When I read it this year, I tuned into it in a different way. Kids who grow up without mothers—you can kind of spot ’em. They have a look or a way of being that’s maybe a little different. Scout and Jem have Calpurnia, and lucky for them, because she obviously loved them and took an interest in them. But they’re running around free. People looked out for them. I never see kids in trees anymore. I used to climb trees.

  The thing about Scout that strikes me is she’s so tough and so able to take care of herself. That toughness comes through in a way that I recognized. I grew up that way, feeling like I had to take care of myself and the rest of the world. I see that in Scout. She sort of has the world on her shoulders. That happens to kids that lose their parents. It happens to kids who have dysfunctional parents. In Scout you can feel her burden. She feels like she’s got to figure it all out, or she’s holding it all up. I definitely identified with that.

  It’s certainly none of my business—a person’s art is their art—but I do find it fascinating that Harper Lee produced this amazing piece of work and that was it. And maybe that’s all she had to say. Maybe that’s it.

  James Patterson

  James Patterson was born in Newburgh, New York, in 1947. He is the author of more than fifty novels, including the Maximum Ride and Daniel X series for young readers. His Web site, Readkiddoread.com, is aimed at young reluctant readers. Patterson has sold more than 170 million books worldwide.

  I read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, and it was one of the few books I really liked. Part of my problem with going to this particular high school is they just didn’t give us many books that would turn us on. My mother was a teacher, my father was an English major, but for some reason didn’t bring books to me that might have turned me on as a reader as a kid. I was a good student, but I just didn’t get turned on to reading. The two books I remember from high school that I did like a lot were To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye—the usual, the staples. What I remember most about To Kill a Mockingbird was—and I think this probably is more of an American trait than in other places—I think we are particularly attuned to injustice. The stories that deal with injustice are really powerful here. I think we have more of a sense of that than they do in some places where injustice is more a fact of life. Here, much less so, for some people less so. So that really got to me. I loved the narration, how it went from a pleasant story to a quite horrifying one.

  With both this book and Huckleberry Finn, it just got you thinking a lot about the way the world had changed, the way people think, and how they think so much differently now,

  Sometimes people will criticize To Kill a Mockingbird because of certain language, but it expresses views of how people thought in the 1930s. Similarly people will write books about us now, and I am sure [in the future] people will be scandalized by the way we eat and the fact we’re still having these ridiculous wars and whatever. But I think it’s useful to kids, and it was useful to me to look back to an earlier time and see how different things were.

  My connection was more to Jem, because he was a boy. I found the drama just kept building and building and building. In the beginning, you are suspecting something about Boo, which should tell you something about yourself, that you suspect him for no reason. It was a very, very emotional thing. The suspense was unusual in terms of books that I had read at that point, books that…had really powerful drama which really did hook you. Obviously, I try to do [that] with my books.

  It was probably the first page-turner that I ever read, and yet it had greatness for a lot of reasons: the quality of the storytelling, the complexity of the story, the subject matter, the way it looked at a period with some compassion but also criticism of things going on.

  Millions of kids in this count
ry never read a book that they love. Part of the reason is they haven’t been given a book they might fall in love with. I hope there would be more of an effort to mix it in school—more material that kids say, “I really liked To Kill a Mockingbird. It was cool.” I cared about the characters. I thought about the book. I learned something.

  I think To Kill a Mockingbird holds up because it’s like an awful lot of classics, it’s just good storytelling. It grabs your interest and it holds you. It keeps surprising you. Charles Dickens was a master at this. Whatever Harper Lee had on her mind, she must have realized that readers can get bored. When I write a story, I think I am telling a story to someone sitting across from me and I don’t want them to get up. I would not like to have that happen, so I am always conscious of that. I would think that Harper Lee was also conscious of that. A lot of people might not stick with the story, and she wrote something that got you interested and kept surprising you.

  One of the nice things about it was in the beginning it really puts you in touch with being a kid again. Books about childhood that do that are always irresistible to me. I’m always writing on my manuscripts, “Be there,” which is to try to be there as a writer so the reader can be there. Even though not a lot happens the first summer with Dill, you’re there and you are going along with the whole mini adventure. At this stage you have a feeling about Scout and Jem and Atticus, and then, oh my god, the building just crashes in, and the suspense kicks in [with] a little bit of what’s going to happen to Tom Robinson, and this isn’t fair, and especially as an American kid: This isn’t fair, this isn’t right. And when Jack, my eleven-year-old, read it, he had that same reaction: This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. This shouldn’t happen.

  Anna Quindlen

  Anna Quindlen was born in Philadelphia in 1952. She is a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and the author of fifteen books, including the novels One True Thing (1994), Rise and Shine (2006), and Every Last One (2010). Her nonfiction books include How Reading Changed My Life (1998), A Short Guide to a Happy Life (2000), and Good Dog. Stay. (2007).

  I took To Kill a Mockingbird out of the library at Holy Child Academy, where I went to school through eighth grade. But I can’t exactly remember what year it was or how old I was.

  I totally remember the experience. It’s just all these people in this town, and you are visiting and you stay, and then at the end, you can’t believe that you have to leave, and then sooner or later, you go back again and revisit them all over again. To Kill a Mockingbird is probably in the top three of books like that, where you utterly live in the book, and walk around in the book, and know everyone down to the ground in the book, and then leave, and then inevitably come back. I can’t imagine anyone I like reading To Kill a Mockingbird and then not rereading it.

  I’ve realized over the years that I have a completely different orientation toward the book than most people do, because at some essential level early on, and even as I got older, I don’t really give a rip about Atticus. I mean, he is fine and he is a terrific dad and he does a wonderful thing, and so on and so forth.

  But for me, this book is all about Scout. And I don’t really care about anybody else in the book that much, except to the extent that they are nice to Scout and make life easier for Scout. I love Calpurnia because of Scout. I really like Jem and feel like I know him because of Scout. I’m totally perplexed by and sort of furious at Atticus when he has their aunt move in, who is just a heinous creature and is clearly there to get Scout to wear a skirt and wash her face, because I so don’t want her to do anything like that. I think one of the reasons I became so obsessed with Harper Lee, when I was older and knew more about her biography, is because everything that she did convinced me that she was just a grown-up Scout who hadn’t gone over to the dark side of being a girlie girl.

  I looked over the book again about three months ago. It’s still always about Scout to me because there really aren’t that many of those girls. There were hardly any of those girls in our real life, and there aren’t that many of them in books. So you store them up as a hedge against the attempts of the world to make you into something else.

  Scout is totally real and totally imperfect, and she has the best two words in the book and two of the best words that have ever been put into any book by any writer: “Hey, Boo.” There are moments in books that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, and “Hey, Boo” is one of those moments.

  There are some women that you like, but they don’t quite get the Scout thing. I remember being with a group of women once, talking about Little Women and asking about the characters, “Which one were you?” Every time someone would say Amy, my shoulders would sort of go up. And you do encounter that thing with To Kill a Mockingbird sometimes—people who just don’t get Scout. I remember once someone telling me that they thought Scout was a peripheral character, and I was shocked out of my skin. They really thought Atticus was the centerpiece of the book, and it just isn’t true.

  There is that wonderful scene in the classroom where they have that new teacher who is very much the girlie girl, the one who tells her that Atticus taught her to read wrong and who then flips out because the cootie climbs out of the Ewell boy’s hair. Scout just keeps trying to parse the world for this poor woman, to make her understand. She is much more like Atticus in some ways than Jem is, because you can tell there is this roving intelligence.

  You can tell she is a writer, because she sees so much stuff. That moment when she is rolling down the hill in the tire and she hits the Radley house, and she hears the laugh from inside, but she sort of keeps it to herself for a long time. She can’t even tell the people who are reading the book that she heard it. That is a writerly detail.

  I feel like a lightning bolt is going to come through the ceiling, but I have to say that To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t a writerly book. There are not a whole lot of verbal pyrotechnics. It’s not a Southern novel in that way. When we think of the classic southern novels, we think of Faulkner, for example: detail upon detail and metaphor upon metaphor. This is a pretty plainly told story. It reminds you of that old saw that editors tell reporters: If you’ve got a story to tell, tell it; if you don’t have a story to tell, write it. She’s got a story to tell, so she doesn’t have to use verbal pyrotechnics. There are some small moments when she lets the writing bring the way the street looks or the town looks into sharper focus. But just look at the way, for example, she describes the ham costume, which has always been, to me, kind of a Rosetta Stone. Scout isn’t dressed up like Bo Peep or an antebellum Southern girl. She is dressed like a ham, and the description is as basic as can be. [Mrs. Crenshaw, the local seamstress] molds chicken wire, puts canvas over it, and paints it. The fact is, you totally get it. You can see that ham in your mind’s eye. So she does not make the writing do the work. She lets the story do the work. One of the interesting things is, for example, that the prose could not be more different than Capote’s prose, which is so fulsome that sometimes when you are reading Other Voices, Other Rooms, you think, Oh please! Just pull back 20 percent for me. She has pulled all the way back to the bare bones of story and character—mainly character, I think.

  I don’t think Truman Capote had anything to do with To Kill a Mockingbird. Come on, think of how he would have ginned up all kinds of scenes in that book. There is just no way, to my way of thinking. You know, just by reading To Kill a Mockingbird, that Harper Lee, who is obviously Scout, is a person with a grounded self-esteem, surrounded by affection. Whereas you have that horrible moment where her hideous second cousin, Francis, the one that she beats up and calls a whore-lady with no idea what that means, says something terrible about Dill, who is based on the boy Truman Capote. He says he doesn’t come to visit in the summer. His mother doesn’t want him and she passes him around from person to person, and you think, Oh, that little boy is going to be in real trouble, and, of course, that little boy was.

  There is a trancelike aspect to the whole thing. Those people become more real
than real people are. It’s what you are aiming for when you’re writing a novel, that you’ll feel like the characters are more real than the people you eat dinner with every night. And the other thing that is so incredibly engaging about it is that it feels true. Sometimes people will say, “Well, I don’t like the ending to this book or that book because it makes me sad or it wasn’t satisfactory.” In this book, you know where it’s going to end, because you know what the true thing would be to have happened. The way things play out in the courtroom and then the way things play out that night when Scout is walking home in the ham costume, which is incredibly terrifying, and then the resolution of the Radley story, which is about as affecting as any story line that you can imagine. Every kid has had that house in the neighborhood that your friends would dare you to knock at on Halloween. The idea that the person in that house is not a monster but a prisoner is so beautifully wrought in this book that I think you’re just totally present in it the whole time you are reading it. At that moment when she says “Hey, Boo” and her father says, “Jean Louise, this is Mr. Arthur Radley”—it doesn’t get any better than that.

  This book is filled with the use of the word nigger. I mean, it is in here over and over again, and somehow, it stays off the banned book list. [To Kill a Mockingbird is often challenged, however. It is number 23 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books.] I haven’t seen the kind of uproar [as for Huckleberry Finn], and I think it is because the relationship between the white people and the black people in the book is so true, not to the understanding of white people, but to the understanding of black people. There is nothing condescending about it. There is that moment when Calpurnia takes them to church and people are saying they have their own church, don’t bring them to our church, and Calpurnia says, well, you know, I’m taking care of them, or they are my children, or something like that, and one of the women says, is that what you call what you do during the week? To make clear: OK, we all know there is a pecking order here, and language is harsh, and the way they characterize each other is harsh, but the truth surmounts the harshness, in a way. It doesn’t blunt it. It justifies it.