I think one of the amazing things about the writing in To Kill a Mockingbird is the economy with which Harper Lee delineates not only race—white and black within a small community—but class. I mean different kinds of black people and white people both, from poor white trash to the upper crust—the whole social fabric.
I have taught To Kill a Mockingbird for years, from junior high to graduate school; I have read it probably twenty-some-odd times. And every single time, it rewards you, and you see something new. I think at first the thing that strikes you so strongly is the depiction of racism and the tragedy of race. But Boo Radley is indelible too. Boo Radley cannot be overestimated as an important factor in this book because every neighborhood has that house that’s overgrown and those neighbors that are weird or that you never ever, ever see. And stories grow up about them. I think that figure always occupies a place in a child’s imagination. And to demystify that—to make us see that people so radically different from us are OK, and can be helpful and wonderful—I think this is so important.
There is no more dramatic book, when you think about the pacing and the order of chapters and the way Boo Radley keeps coming back and coming back, and then the Ewells sneaking around. It is an incredibly dramatic book.
The novel is also dead-on about childhood; it evokes childhood so beautifully. But it also evokes the whole community. I think we forget sometimes that kids live in community, and it’s so helpful in terms of how children relate to older people in the community. There’s also something so evocative about the fact that these are motherless children, although they do have Calpurnia, and they do have their aunt. Somehow, I think, all children, in a way, feel isolated—nobody feels the things that they feel. Because these are motherless children, I think the young reader empathizes with Scout and Jem even that much more; Dill too, who doesn’t get along with his stepfather. So they’re kids against the world—I think that’s very attractive to younger readers.
When I was growing up, girls in the South were—and are still today, I think—oftentimes raised to be fitting into some sort of a ladylike mold where they are not supposed to express feelings and they are not supposed to stand up for things. I just think of girls in the South being squashed as they’re being raised. So the role that Scout has played in all these girls’ minds as they have read the book is very important. Here’s Scout who believes in things, who is funny and curious and passionate and a tomboy. I think Scout has done more for Southern womanhood than any other character in literature. I’m quite serious. She’s turned girls into the kind of women we want.
I think one thing that is really important to remember is that students are reading it today with the same responses we all had in the sixties. I just spent a day in a high school doing a workshop, and it was funny, at first I could not get the students to talk to me about what they were reading. Then a boy said To Kill a Mockingbird, and everybody started talking about it and what they had gotten out if it—every single one of them! It still has a galvanizing effect on a younger reader.
This is a novel which endures, as opposed to other classics which don’t appeal as much to readers today. The Sun Also Rises is a good example, because students just say, “Who are all these people drinking in Spain? What is this about?” You never get that reaction to To Kill a Mockingbird. It remains as relevant today as it was the day it was written. It never ages. It’s a story of maturing, certainly, and initiation, but told in such beautifully specific terms that it never seems generic.
People want to read something with real substance. I think they want to read a novel that gives us all something to believe in. And I think To Kill a Mockingbird manages to do that without being too preachy.
Most writers write entirely too much, ’cause it’s what we love, it’s our passion. And I know it’s Harper Lee’s passion too, because nobody can write like this who doesn’t feel like that. So I absolutely don’t understand why we don’t have another book. Maybe there will be a great number of them left for us sometime. I don’t see how she could bear not to be writing, with a talent like this.
Lots of times I’ve had trouble writing, but I’ve always felt a need to do it, because it’s the way I’ve made sense of my life. I think that’s true for most of us. It’s just astonishing to me that Harper Lee just stopped. I bet she hasn’t, I bet she’s sneaking around doing it. I bet she’s sitting in her house like Boo Radley, writing. I hope so.
Adriana Trigiani
Adriana Trigiani grew up in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, in the 1970s. She is a documentary filmmaker, playwright, and television writer/producer.
She has written ten novels, including Big Stone Gap (2001), Lucia, Lucia (2004), and Very Valentine (2009). In 2009, Trigiani published the first in a series of books for young adults: Viola in Reel Life.
I got To Kill a Mockingbird off of the Wise County Bookmobile in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. And I was twelve years old. It was a perfect time to read it, because around that age I became aware of the different backgrounds of people in the community. I was hyperaware of ethnic differences, because we were Italians in a small Southern town, so we felt like we were from Pluto. This book really helped me understand how segregated the South was before we arrived. ’Cause I really didn’t get it. I didn’t know the South before integration.
It’s interesting that I chose the book at all, because the title To Kill a Mockingbird is very literary. As a child, I found the title off-putting, because I was reading Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh at that time.
At first, I thought Harper Lee could be a man, it sounded like a man’s name to me. Then I found out Harper Lee was a woman author. And I was thrilled. Harper Lee seemed to embody the character of Scout. You felt that, in this instance, the author was the character. To Kill a Mockingbird hooked me on books written in the first person. I wanted the author to speak directly to me. I love the voice of the first person, whether it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Jane Eyre. When the author writes in the first person, I feel like I know her by the end. And you sure feel like you know Scout by the end of this novel.
To Kill a Mockingbird is really the model for anyone who wants to write a story in the first person. Harper Lee writes with humor and such grace that as a reader, you’re sold the minute you read the first sentence. You’re with her for the journey of this book and this story.
Harper Lee takes you inside a character, and then she takes you outside the character, and then she takes you back in again. She lets you know, in really gorgeous prose, what the character is feeling and also how everyone around her feels about her. This is really hard to do. There’s that old John Ruskin quote about writers who must learn to tell what they see “in a plain way.” Imagine that scene with Aunt Alexandra with the Add-A-Pearl necklace and the dresses and how a girl is supposed to behave. And how Scout stands up for herself with common sense and says, in effect, Well, I can do that in pants. Scout is just a fantastic character, written with such an authentic voice and such honesty.
People are always bemoaning the fact that Harper Lee never wrote another novel, but I think it’s great that this novel was her definitive work. If you’re going to write a book, write one of the great American classics and say what you need to say. When an author writes a lot of novels, I think we’re simply turning the same rock over and over again, exploring the same themes, solving the same riddle. We’re just dealing with the same issues over and over again. And if you feel that you’ve completed that mission and that you’ve written about it the best you can, really, what else is there to say? I think it’s great that To Kill a Mockingbird is Harper Lee’s opus and that we can read [it] time and time again.
Also, I think, to a great degree, the craft of writing novels in order to sell them has changed. It used to be that a novelist would write a book and you got to have that glorious life of solitude and quietude. You could just stay in your room and do your work. After all, we become writers because we like to be by ourselves and create, figure things out. Now, after we writ
e a book, it’s incumbent upon us to go on the road and sell it. We have to be with the public.
Now, there are great, wonderful things about that that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I like to talk with my readers. But for some authors, it really defeats the purpose of being a writer. Some authors don’t want to be out and about, milling around talking to people. I think Harper Lee’s quest for solitude and quietude is really admirable in a time when everyone’s required to be out on the street with a sandwich board, selling their work. Once the publishing houses knew that you could reach a wider audience by traveling to your readers, they sent you out. After all, it’s a business.
For Harper Lee, her novel rolled out beautifully, it sold beautifully, it took on a life of its own, and its success had very little to do with the fact that she had to be out selling it. The book stood for itself. It would be nice to have that kind of a culture today, but we don’t anymore. The world is big and yet tiny, because we have access to anybody at any time, any place through e-mail, telephone—whatever. It’s a different time, and I think how delicious it must have been to be Harper Lee when To Kill a Mockingbird came out. She was home and would receive these handwritten letters. For that to be your main source of communication with your public was so great. She could sit down and answer those letters at her leisure or just savor them and not answer them at all. She could do whatever she wanted to do.
Good for her. Good for Harper Lee, for being the person she is, knowing her limitations, knowing what she wanted to do, knowing when to quit, and knowing when to say, “Enough.” Imagine actually knowing when enough is enough. Maybe she felt that this novel said it all. Any reader will tell you that she accomplished her goal.
I think this book speaks to kids today because of the nontraditional settings children are being raised in. Blended families didn’t exist then to the degree that they do now. I was in this big Italian family, and I craved the kind of life [Scout] had. She seemed to me to be fiercely independent; there seemed to be a streak of Pippi Longstocking in her, like she owned the town, and that appealed to me.
Atticus Finch, a decent man, a man of principle and values, was a model to Scout. He gave Scout a sense of self-esteem, of self-confidence. Her ideas were not put down. She was heard. And yet everyone does not treat her as Atticus does. Aunt Alexandra puts pressure on Scout, on the way [Scout] looks. Well, this is what we do to girls in life. We imply, You’re worth something if you’re beautiful. You’re worth something if you’re appealing. You’re not, really, if you aren’t.
What I always loved about Atticus was that he had common sense and a clean, clear notion for his daughter, Scout: Be who you are. And that’s enough, and by the way, that’s pretty great. A child needs to hear that, whether it comes from a parent or a parental figure, an aunt or uncle, whoever it happens to be. So I thought their relationship was beautiful and profound, and when I read it the first time, it felt right and comfortable to me. Yeah, I thought. You’re a great girl. Be who you are.
My father died in 2002. I find it incredibly difficult to write his voice. Harper Lee wrote her father’s voice. And she not only wrote her father’s voice, she nailed his temperament, his appearance, his place in the community, his ability in the courtroom, his professional life. It’s as if she had an insight into him that no one else did, which is another reason why this book is so compelling. Harper Lee was able to take complex, grown-up issues and really bring them down to their root basics, so that the reader could understand and embrace the characters and the story. She did it perfectly. That would be another reason never to write another book. When you get that right, your hunt is done. You’re finished, in a certain way.
Also, if you write about the person who you feel was instrumental in your life in an honest way, you’ve said all there is to say. Artistic process is so much about formulating, Why was I put in this family and where do I fit in it, and why did I get these parents? And once you get past the why, which is some kind of mystical thing, and you attempt to communicate those relationships as a writer, that’s the tough stuff, the bare-bones work. Our job is to describe people and to remember how they sounded, and then to relay that to a reader. Harper Lee studied her father, observed everything about him, enough to explain him to us, her readers.
You know, my father used to say, “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” But if you really want to understand someone, watch what they do. Actions define character. As a parent, when I reread To Kill a Mockingbird today, I think, Wow, there’s really an important message in here for parents. You think that you’re watching your kids 24/7. But they’re really watching you.
Art is the emotional landscape of a culture. It’s our feelings talking, in whatever form it is, whether it’s a dance, a poem, a short story, a novel. To Kill a Mockingbird is the best of American literature because it tells us who we are, who we can be, and it paints the communities we lived in, in vivid, truthful detail. I mean, if that’s not art, or our highest dreams for literature, for storytelling, I don’t know what is.
Mary Tucker
Mary Tucker was born in Burnt Corn, Alabama, in 1927. She has lived in Monroeville, Alabama, since 1954 and taught in its public schools before and after integration.
I moved to Monroeville in 1954 after marrying John Tucker, who lived in Monroeville. The town, as all the Southern towns were at that time, was segregated. There had been quite a bit of development from the time of To Kill a Mockingbird, set in the 1930s. The streets were all paved around the square and into town. It was very segregated. We could not use the restaurants in town. The library was segregated. Churches were very segregated. I was taking a correspondence course on the short story. And there were several books that we didn’t have in our school library nor in the little branch library in the black community. So I went to the library in town. Mrs. Mort McMillan was the librarian, and I told her what I needed and asked if she would borrow the books through the interlibrary loan. She agreed, and I would pick the books up and take them home and use them. I didn’t try to use them in the library. But she was very nice about getting the books that I needed.
When I first came to Monroeville, I lived outside of the city limits, the place where my husband grew up. And then we built a house in town in 1960 on Drury Road. The area where I lived was called the Morning Star community, which was practically all black, but on the street right behind me was a white area. And then the other black community was down in what is called Clausel, where the black high school was, Union High School.
Downtown was all white. There were some homes right outside of the business area, but that was all white. There were no black businesses at all in downtown. The closest was a cleaners at that time; it was New Modern, which was owned by a black man. I can’t remember the year that the first black policeman was hired, but it must have been in the late seventies. Vanity Fair [the lingerie company] was very segregated. They did not hire any blacks except as truck drivers and janitors until they were forced to in the seventies, I believe. And one lady who was hired there told me that her supervisor told her, “We had to hire you. We didn’t want to.”
When I came to Monroeville, at one of the little dress shops, I was told that if I tried on a dress, it had to be over the clothes that I was wearing, [unlike white customers], which surprised me. I resented that I couldn’t use the library. We would go to the drugstore, where they had a soda shop, and I couldn’t sit down and have a Coke or ice cream. I resented those things. I taught in Beatrice when I first came to Monroe County, from 1957 till 1960. And then I taught at Union High until schools integrated.
I resented the fact that our black students from the lower part of the county would come to Union High School and drive past Monroe County High. And they were often late, and they left early to get home before dark. So, yes, I resented that.
And I knew we didn’t have the equipment that they had at Monroe County High School.
Black people stayed in their neighborhoods, so I didn’t really notice any tens
ion. We shopped in town, but other than that, we didn’t have any interaction with whites. We were just very separate. I didn’t know any white people except the businesspeople that I had dealings with, and the professionals. My doctor, Dr. Rayford Smith, was great, but I had no interaction with whites.
Integration actually went well in Monroeville. I think the student body and the public schools were about 45 percent white and 55 percent black, but it went extremely well. My husband was the principal of the middle school. He had great support from some of the leaders in the white community. Many have told me that they think that he was one of the reasons that it went so well.
After integration, I’ve just gotten to know many more of the whites. I have attended community Bible study up at First Baptist, where I met a lot of people. And then I’ve served on various boards—the library board, the museum board, and now the historic preservation board—where I have gotten to know and had interactions with many whites.
There certainly was some progressive thinking in town, but they could not go against the conventions. Before integration, A. B. Blass [owner of the hardware store] used to tell a story about the Christmas parade that was sponsored by the Kiwanis Club, I believe. This was in the sixties before schools integrated. A white citizens council had been organized, and the Klan was still active. And A.B. said that he was told that if the black band from Union High School marched in the parade, there would be trouble. Mr. McMillan, the principal, was told that the high school black band was not to march.
Scout, Atticus, & Boo Page 15