Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

  And so, rather than not permit our band to march, they canceled the parade. A.B. ran a hardware store, and he said that his business suffered because of his decision. So we didn’t have the Christmas parade that year.

  There was the civil rights movement, but we didn’t have much activity in Monroeville. There was in the county just north of us, Wilcox, but not very much in Monroeville. I was told by one of the civil rights activists, Ezra Cunningham from Beatrice, that he tried to get blacks registered to vote. Now, I had no trouble registering. When I went up, the only thing that bothered me, the registrars insisted on filling out the form for me.

  I registered soon after I came, so it must have been ’55. But Mr. Cunningham told me he reached an agreement with the town officials that he would just bring five people per week. So they didn’t feel threatened. And those five people were able to register to vote.

  He said there were repercussions. He was told one time that if he came to Monroeville on a certain route, there would be people waiting for him. And the Board of Education threatened to send his wife over to Lower Peachtree, which is quite a distance away, when she was teaching at her home in Beatrice. So he said that he suffered repercussions and that he couldn’t get a car loan.

  I read the book as soon as it came out and I got my hands on it. I loved it. I was very much impressed. I knew Miss Alice Lee, because when we got a loan to build our house, she was our lawyer. I didn’t know that many people in the white community; I didn’t know their reaction to the book until much later. Not a lot of black people read the book. Later on, I discovered that many did not like it, still don’t. Some have told me they don’t see the play because they don’t like the language. And I’ve tried to explain that the use of the N word was a part of the vocabulary of that time. If they had changed it, it wouldn’t have been realistic. But some still don’t appreciate the book. I’m talking about the black population. They are the ones that don’t like the language.

  White people in town thought that many of the characters were really based on real people. And I understand they resented that. And Atticus’s defense of a black man, I heard, much later; I really didn’t know their thinking then, but I’ve heard, much later. And from what one of my white neighbors told me, that she hated that book, the way they treated the Boulware boy, she said.

  Boo Radley: My husband told me he remembered the incident, that he was one of the teenagers who got into some trouble, and his father, rather than allow him to be incarcerated, said he would lock him up at home and that he would never get in trouble again. My husband remembered that incident.

  The church that’s mentioned, where Calpunia brought the children, because that was in easy walking distance—I think that was my church, Morning Star. I remember [my husband’s] aunt telling me of her father, who was white, who lived outside of town, bringing them into town to shop. And they didn’t want to be seen coming into town with a white man, who was their father. They would ask to be let out of the wagon before going into town. And he refused. He would insist they stay in the wagon till there.

  Hoover carts: I remember the Hoover carts in our little farming community. It was a two-wheeled cart, usually had tires and hitched to a mule or ox. There weren’t many of those in my community, but I do remember seeing them. And they named them the Hoover cart because Hoover was the president when the Depression started and they blamed him for the economic condition, so they called them the Hoover carts.

  I have read To Kill a Mockingbird several times since then. And I always find something different that impresses me when I read it again.

  It has meant so much to Monroeville and to the county, because it brings tourists, and our play has become a big event. I think now we’re appreciating that aspect of it.

  I think because we’ve become more aware of how unfair the system was back then before integration, that there just was no justice. Blacks did not serve on juries. Women didn’t serve on juries. I think we have grown that much that now we understand how unfair the system was, how unusual it was for Atticus to take a case like that, when, as he said—and that was one of my favorite passages—when you know you can’t win, but you take it anyway.

  Scott Turow

  Scott Turow was born in Chicago in 1949. He is a lawyer and the author of nine novels, including Presumed Innocent (1987), Personal Injuries (1999), Limitations (2006), and Innocent (2010) and two nonfiction books, One L (1997) and Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty (2003).

  I was pretty close to Scout’s age when I read To Kill a Mockingbird. It was this big best-selling novel. Probably my mother encouraged me to read it. I was enthralled by it. I loved Scout and was intensely identified with her, and in a way that, in retrospect, probably should have been more uncomfortable for a boy, but which really was not.

  It was just one of those books that sucks you in and carries you along. And, of course, it was telling a story about the South that a Northern boy wanted to hear. I suppose I had lots of reasons for loving it as much as I did. One was this greatly idealized father, which, in candor, I didn’t have. I was hip on race as a very young kid, which led to quite a bit of activity in the civil rights movement until white people were basically thrown out when Dr. King was killed. There was a lot of stuff in there that spoke to me. I loved the book.

  I have a memory of trying to read Anatomy of a Murder, which was [published] a few years before, and I couldn’t get through that. I did many years later with great pleasure. To Kill a Mockingbird might have been the first adult novel that I read, although I read The Count of Monte Cristo when I was ten, and that truly ignited my interest in what I’ll call literature.

  I feel constrained to talk about it a lot because To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about a lawyer. I just think the grace of the writing is substantial, and I am confounded by people who attack it as a work of literature. I think it is a beautifully written and structured book. Is it sentimental? Yes, it’s sentimental, but so was Steinbeck, and people still read Steinbeck, and as my dear friend Mitch Albom [author of Tuesdays with Morrie] is proving, people like sentimentality. One of the things I dislike intensely about the high-art-versus-low-art people is the fact that the high-art people do not acknowledge that all stories are models of the world. It is not as if Ulysses didn’t come with its own set of prejudices and conventions that, in point of fact, don’t match “reality” as we currently apprehend it either. To attack a work because it is sentimental is not to recognize, frankly, why sentiment continues to appeal. It appeals because people want to believe in an idealized world, and that has an instructive function, an instructive moral function. It’s true that there aren’t many human beings in the world like Atticus Finch—perhaps none—but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth striving to be like him.

  I said that that certainly was the way it resonated. He is a paragon beyond paragons. In latter years, my interest in him has been that he is emblematic of the way lawyers were represented up till probably the 1980s, when all of a sudden—it was the hangover of Watergate—people realized that lawyers are not paragons. Lawyers, in some cases, are greedy scum-sucking pigs, which is as one-sided and silly a picture as to imagine that they are all paragons. I am always at pains to point out that not only is Atticus this wonderful father, completely intuitive and caring, but he is even the best shot in the county. He is everything and, of course, the only lawyer in town who will defend this black man accused of this supposedly horrible crime. He is a paragon. He is a type that Americans would no longer believe in much as a lawyer in our popular fiction of today, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great book.

  After Presumed Innocent and especially The Burden of Proof, I became a part-time lawyer. And one of the things that I maintained in my practice was this commitment to doing pro bono work. If you say to me, “Well, why did you want to do pro bono work?” I can’t say it was Atticus alone, but certainly if you can ask me for the earliest example that I was aware of, that was
it. I promised myself that when I grew up and I was a man, I would try to do things just as good and noble as what Atticus had done for Tom Robinson. So I don’t think it inspired me to be a lawyer, but certainly, as a vision of the positives that lawyers can do, it did. I would be unfair to my profession if I did not add that there are many, many, many lawyers around the United States who are still doing what Atticus did.

  My connection with the movie is odd, because it was the first big job that [To Kill a Mockingbird producer] Alan Pakula had, and Alan ultimately directed Presumed Innocent. Alan talked about To Kill a Mockingbird incessantly. The movie did not have the impact on me that the book had had. If you go back to 1960, ’61, ’62, when the movie finally came out, the movies were not recognized as an art at that time. They were kind of celluloid trash, and the assumption was that any movie made from any book was a lesser work, and that was the assumption in my house. I don’t think I took it as seriously.

  One reason the book endures is because of what I’ve referred to as wingspan. It can still be read by thirteen-year-olds. It can be read by blue-haired ladies and men with callused hands. It’s not a hard book to read. It’s a very graceful book. I think, a really moving book, and it also tells a tale that we know is still true. We may live eventually in a world where that kind of race prejudice is unimaginable, and people may read this story in three hundred years and go, “So what was the big deal?” But the fact of the matter is, in today’s America, it still speaks a fundamental truth.

  People understand not only that this happened, but that it still happens, and that people are falsely accused, that race is a factor. So there is a kernel of it that is very contemporary.

  I cannot imagine what drove [Harper Lee] into silence, although Hemingway said that all writers really tell one story, so maybe she felt she told the story she had to tell. I don’t know. It’s a frightening thing to another novelist to see somebody write a book that good and then shut up. It is a great puzzle.

  This was a very brave book to have written when Harper Lee wrote it, and she probably gets zero credit anymore. We are speaking a truth that people in 1959, 1960, were not ready to acknowledge. People forgot how divided this country was, what the animosity was to the Civil Rights Act, which probably never would have been passed if John F. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, and instead it became his legacy. But that was 1963, and in 1960, there were no laws guaranteeing that African Americans could enter any restaurant, any hotel. We didn’t have those laws. In that world, to speak out this way was remarkable.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in 1954. She is a talk-show host, TV and film producer, founder of O, The Oprah Magazine, radio programmer, actress, philanthropist, and chairman of Harpo, Inc. Winfrey was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1999.

  At the time that I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I was living with my mother in Milwaukee. I would not have had any money to buy it, so I would undoubtedly have chosen it from the library. I was one of those kids who would go to the library every two weeks, withdraw five books, read the five books, and return them. It was a librarian who said, “If you like reading that kind of book, I think you will like reading this book.”

  So I picked up To Kill a Mockingbird at the library. It was one of five other books, and I remember starting it and just devouring it, not being able to get enough of it, because I fell in love with Scout. I wanted to be Scout. I thought I was Scout. I always took on or wanted to take on the characteristics of whoever I was reading about, and so I wanted to be Scout and I wanted a father like Atticus.

  Atticus isn’t even real, I know, but my gosh, did I want a dad like Atticus! And I wanted to have a relationship like Scout had with Atticus, so I could call him by his first name. I wanted a nickname like Scout’s. I was drawn to the book because of that, and it wasn’t until I saw the book transformed into a film that I came to realize the depth of the racial implications of the book.

  I remember watching the movie with my father many years after I first read the book. The impact of the movie on my father caused me to see the book differently and experience the book differently. I am right after the cusp of the civil rights movement. I wasn’t a child of the civil rights movement. I am one of those people who has been one of the greatest beneficiaries of the civil rights movement. I don’t know what it is like to be told to go to the back door.

  I did not live a Jim Crow segregated life, because I was one of the fortunate ones who were able to escape Mississippi. And I do mean escape—1960, when this book was published, was about the time I was leaving Mississippi.

  I left for Milwaukee and left my grandmother when I was six years old, so I never experienced the segregation of the South. I moved to an integrated school and was the smartest kid in the class, and when you are the smartest kid in the class, you always get a lot of attention. I never felt any of the oppressiveness of racism. I always recognize that life would have been so different for me had I been raised in a segregated environment, if I had to experience even secondhand what was happening in that environment.

  I think of myself as a Southerner. My roots are Southern. Not only was I born in the South, in Mississippi, but for a great part of my life, I was raised in Tennessee, so I identify with being a Southern woman.

  I identified with being a Southern child. After reading this book, I wished I had an accent, and I would go around trying to imitate Scout. It was really sickening, I guess. I scared a lot of other kids because, just like I do now, I remember reading this book and then going to class and not being able to shut up about it. I read it in eighth or ninth grade, and I was trying to push the book off on other kids. So it makes sense to me that now I have a book club, because I have been doing that since probably this book. This is one of the first books I wanted to encourage other people to read.

  I loved it from the beginning, and like a lot of people, I get the lines blurred between the movie and the book. The movie is very distinct for me because the reading experience comes alive for me in a way that my imagination cannot. In the history of film-making I have never seen a book really live its essence through film like this one, and that is because of the casting of Scout and Atticus, and all of them, really.

  Maybe ten years ago, I had the honor of being seated next to Gregory Peck at a luncheon held for Quincy Jones in Hollywood. I was so like, Oh my God, it is Gregory Peck. What I am going to do? What I am going say? I am not just at the same table, but next to Gregory Peck. Even though it is long after I have had the talk show and I have interviewed many people, I could not think of one thing to say. Finally I turned and I said, “So, how is Scout doing?” And he said, “Well, that was forty years ago, but OK.” I say, “So, how is Scout doing? Do you ever see her?” Because in my brain, no matter what role Gregory Peck has done since then, he will always be Atticus to me, and whoever the woman was who played Scout is, she is always Scout in my mind.

  You just liked Scout. You connected with her. I liked her energy. I liked the spirit of her. I liked the freshness of her. I liked the fact that she was so curious. I loved this character so much. The character was so fully realized and showed, even at ten years old, that she knew who she was and was very assertive and had a lot of confidence and believed in herself and was learning about this whole world of racism in such a way that I could feel myself also experiencing or learning about it—my eyes opening as her eyes were opening to it.

  I think To Kill a Mockingbird is our national novel. If there was a national novel award, this would be it for the United States. I think it is a favorite book of almost everybody you meet. When I opened my school [in South Africa], everybody wanted to know what we can bring and what can we give the girls. I asked everybody to bring their favorite book, and I would say we probably have a hundred copies of this book. Each person who brought the book wrote their own words to the girls about why they believe this book was important, an
d everybody says something different.

  Of course I wanted to choose this for the book club even though America already loves it. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing to have Harper Lee come on and be interviewed for To Kill a Mockingbird?” I started that process several years ago and worked on it for a couple of years with my staff calling back and forth between her agent.

  Finally, we were able to arrange a meeting, and I was so excited. I remember it was a rainy day in New York, and we were going to have lunch at the Four Seasons. I saw her walking along the street with an umbrella and boots. It was so disarming and charming I couldn’t believe it. So all of that What am I going to say? What am I going to do? went away. We were like instant girlfriends. It was just wonderful, and I loved being with her. I knew twenty minutes into the conversation that I would never be able to convince her to do an interview, and it is not my style to push. I decided to relax and enjoy this time that I had. Because [in Southern accent] honey, she was not going to be convinced at all. She said to me, “I already said everything I needed to say. Already we have those buses coming down to my house, and they pull up to the door still looking for Boo Radley, and I just don’t want that to happen any more than it already does.” She said no, and I knew that no meant no. Sometimes no means, “Hmm…let us see what else you have to say.” But when Harper Lee said, “Well, honey, I already said everything I had to say,” I knew that was the end of it. I just enjoyed the lunch. It was fantastic.