Scout, Atticus, & Boo
Page 17
I think, Why didn’t I take a tape recorder? because your brain is like, Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I am having lunch with Harper Lee, and I hope I remember everything, and I am trying to memorize every sentence she is saying! Then afterwards you say, “What did she say? What did I say?”
One of the things that struck me: She said, “If I had a dime for every book that was sold…” I was thinking, I hope you have more than a dime for every book that was sold, because nobody expected this. Certainly she didn’t expect it, and obviously the publishers didn’t expect it. [Fifty years later], we are still talking about this book and that it is the number one book on almost everybody in America’s list for their favorite novel. So she wasn’t prepared for it.
She said to me, “You know the character Boo Radley?” And she said, “Well, if you know Boo, then you understand why I wouldn’t be doing an interview, because I am really Boo.” That is all she had to say to me. OK, I know we are not going to bring Boo Radley out to sit on the Oprah show.
I was honored to be able to have that time and communicate with her. That was very special, and I take it for what it is. She will be one of those people, like Jackie Onassis, who I also had wanted to interview, who told me no, and I honor that.
The way I felt about being turned down is exactly the way I felt about Jackie Onassis. In the end, I was glad that she didn’t do it, that she was able to hold on to that for herself. I believe [Harper Lee] is never going to do an interview, and I am glad that she didn’t. I am glad that she was able to hold on to that, because she is obviously a woman of great principles and integrity.
Andrew Young
Andrew Young was born in 1932 in New Orleans. He has been the United States ambassador to the United Nations, a congressman from Georgia, and was the mayor of Atlanta from 1982 to 1990. Young was a minister who joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1960 and worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr.
I wasn’t much of a fiction reader. I read encyclopedias. I read weird stuff. I didn’t sit down and read books until I was getting a little older. But I remember Atticus Finch. For me, he represents a generation of intelligent white lawyers who eventually, in the fifties and sixties, became the federal judges who changed the South.
We didn’t know very many white people of principle when I was a child—not any who were willing to stand up and challenge the system in any way. When I was in seminary, I worked for Adlai Stevenson. Then I came south to Georgia. Thomasville, Georgia, was my first church, and the black leadership had asked me to run a voter registration drive to encourage people to vote for Eisenhower. And I said, “Why?” And they said, “Well, everywhere else it might not be the same, but if Eisenhower wins, he will appoint judges that are men of integrity and the most intelligent people in the South. And he will listen to us. We will have some input. The Democrats to be appointed are really Dixiecrats. And they’re the old segregationists.” So, for Georgia in 1956, Eisenhower was my choice. And he didn’t let us down. Later on in the sixties, we marched from Selma to Montgomery in large measure to get to the court of Judge Frank Johnson—not that he was liberal, but he was fair. He believed in the Constitution.
In Saint Augustine, Florida, in ’64 they tried to beat us up, and the sheriff deputized the Ku Klux Klan and gave them permission to beat us. It was Judge Brian Simpson, another Eisenhower appointee, who upheld the Constitution and protected us and our right to march. And that helped to bring about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In school desegregation cases in New Orleans, it was Judge Minor Wisdom. In Atlanta it was Judge Griffin Bell and Judge Albert Tuttell. These were all the Southern intelligentsia—and they were Atticus Finch. They were the fine, upstanding men of wisdom and courage that really—without them we would not have had a civil rights movement.
To Kill a Mockingbird is like Gone with the Wind. It describes an era of history that we know about glibly. But it gives us a sense of emerging humanism and decency. About that same time, or a little earlier, it was W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, which talked about people pitting the races against each other because they were both poor.
Another book was The Strange Career of Jim Crow. We were aware of the harshness and brutality of segregation. In Birmingham, you had for the first time black people making union wages in the steel mills. And they began to build nice homes. Now these were veterans of service in the military who came back, went to school, got good jobs, and started building nice little homes—nothing fancy, just little three-bedroom frame houses. And there were more than sixty of those houses dynamited before we came to change the civil rights movement.
To Kill a Mockingbird gave us the background of that. But it also gave us hope that justice could prevail. I think that’s one of the things that makes it a great story—it can be repeated in many different ways. I was always surprised at how much the Japanese liked Gone with the Wind. But they liked the fact that this society had been destroyed by war and was reborn. And they identified their destruction and their resurrection with Gone with the Wind.
I think To Kill a Mockingbird does that for the sixties. But the conditions that created it, still to this day in 2009, exist in some parts of the Middle East, Africa, China, India, also in some parts of Europe and America. It’s not the legal injustices that we talked about in To Kill a Mockingbird [that] still exist today.
There’s a whole genre of police shows—CSI, Cold Case, Law & Order—and I find myself looking at them because quite often they’re about people who are victims of injustice [in] one way or the other. And for the most part, justice prevails. We need to see that. We need to believe that in order to keep the society together. To Kill a Mockingbird is a book that inspires hope in the midst of chaos and confusion. And those kinds of books last for a long time.
[The use of the word nigger] is not something that is even resolved in the black community. I always used it as a term of affection and admiration. That’s not the way white people tended to use it. But I think it’s like any word. It’s not the word itself, it’s the intent and meaning of the word. I would say that is one of the great dangers of our public schools and our reactionary society. I heard that somebody wanted to ban Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Now that is the reality of her life. To Kill a Mockingbird was the reality of that time. I don’t think it makes us any wiser or smarter to deny that.
I can’t read Richard Wright. That’s too cruel. I had a hard time struggling through Roots. I read The Diary of Anne Frank, and I read a little of the existentialism that came out of the Holocaust. But the big books on the Holocaust I couldn’t deal with emotionally. They made me too bitter. And that may be why I did not read To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn’t need to read that. I knew what they were talking about. For somebody who didn’t know, OK. But I had no intellectual curiosity about that. I had been through that with my life. I had been through that with my father, and my grandfather. It was too close to me. I remember Emmett Till and all of that drama around that. I was a part of the march around Jimmy Lee Jackson’s death. And the three civil rights workers, Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. There was too much horror around me at the time for me to absorb more.
Now I think, though, it’s different. Young people need to look back and realize how far we’ve come but how the seeds of that same insecurity still exist.
To Kill a Mockingbird was an act of protest, but it was [also] an act of humanity.
It was saying that we’re not all like this. There are people who rise above their prejudices and even above the law.
Acknowledgments
This all started on my back porch when I reread To Kill a Mockingbird for the third time. I was looking for solace and found it. After that came inspiration. And then, my good friends and colleagues fueled me forward.
Connie Hays, from my girlhood summers, was first. A pithy purveyor of good instructions for life—how to coddle an egg for Caesar salad, interview a recalcitrant police sergeant, talk to your b
oss without crying, quell a child’s tantrum—Connie was certain I should do this. And, as it always was with us, her confidence gave me confidence. Connie was kind and funny and brave. She left us entirely too soon and with no instructions for how to get along without her. I miss her all the time and I dedicate this project to her.
This never would have happened without the incredibly talented and generous Rich White, a magnificent director of photography. Cathleen McGuigan, my Newsweek officemate in the eighties and friend ever since, kept my confidences and helped pave the way for me in places where I needed it most. Don Hewitt, once my boss at 60 Minutes, greeted this idea with his usual gusto and had nothing short of a zillion suggestions. His infectious enthusiasm in the early stages was heartening for me, and I am sorry he is not here to see this.
A salute to the Ladies’ Auxiliary: Rosanne Cash, Adriana Trigiani, Jenny Baldwin, Taylor Barton, Sheilah Crowley, Sheila Berger, Wren Arthur, Jane Martin, and Liz Tirrell. What began as a festive annual lunch has brought year-round sustenance and solidarity for more than a decade. On the subject of great women: Sarah Crichton sent me a letter I will never, ever, forget, and Kathy McManus gave me a leg up when I needed one.
I am grateful to all the people I interviewed, especially Wally Lamb.
Many thanks to Elizabeth Buerger and Romy Feder for research, to my former 60 Minutes colleague Bryony Kockler, who lent her considerable skills to the project; and to Megan Axthelm Brown, a fantastic production manager and a remarkable person.
Many more friends and colleagues heard me out, spurred me on, and gave me valuable feedback: Ben Cheever and Janet Maslin, Jennifer and Craig Whitaker, Frank Delaney and Diane Meier, Bob Mayer and Edie Magnus, Joan Jakobson, John Hays, Lynn Rabren and Joanne McDonough, Jane Beasley, Doreen Schechter, Tony Hoyt, Esther Kartiganer, Sarah Callahan Zusi, Mike Whitney, Cathy Lasiewicz, Ellen Hale, Pete Bonventre, Chris Seward, Gail Marowitz, Lisa Linden, Mary Dolan, Lynn Goldberg, Jon Alter, Chloe Arensberg, Chip Logan, Amanda Lundberg, Kari Granville and Peter Boyer, Charles Kaiser and Joe Stouter, Betsy West, Marilyn and Michael Seymour, Julie and Carol Kalberer, Tina Hester and Bob Garrett.
When it came time to turn everything into a book, agent Richard Pine made the experience positively dreamy, editor Hugh van Dusen was a true gentleman, and assistant editor Rob Crawford was a patient guide to the process. My thanks to Jarrod Taylor for his elegant design and to Kate Blum for manning the publicity barricades.
There have been no greater friends to this book, or to me, than Hal Fessenden and Pat Eisemann, two people well schooled in the ins and outs of publishing. Their knowledge, support, and advice were indispensable throughout, as has been their friendship, humor, and original thinking.
Josh Howard and Debbie DeLuca Sheh are two people you want in your foxhole and on the next barstool. My 911s and 411s in life go to Emily Lazar, the Honorable Jen Laird White, and Saint Judith Tygard of Sleepy Hollow, and I am so much better because of them.
Two smart friends and neighbors, author Marilyn Johnson and editor Janet Pietsch, gave the manuscript a careful, constructive read as I sprinted toward the finish line, and it made all the difference.
My mother and sister, Susan and Martha Murphy, who know a lot about books, are the reason I read To Kill a Mockingbird in the first place. For this, their spirited company in life, and much more, I am very thankful. And, by the way, Mom, I do not hate your cooking. Thanks to my brothers, Dan and Patrick, for being on my side; sister and brother-in-law, Emily and Mark; and to my Murphy, Seymour, and McDonagh relatives—it’s a great tribe.
A champagne toast to my father, Ray Murphy: I am grateful, more than I can say, for his faith and trust in me. Not everyone has her own Atticus, but I do. My in-house editors, young Kate and James Minzesheimer, make anyone’s disposition sunnier, especially mine. And then there is Bob, a man of red sneakers and great perspective. Without his love, loyalty, and understanding, there would be none of the above.
About the Author
Mary McDonagh Murphy is an independent documentary director and writer whose work has appeared on PBS. For twenty years she was a producer at CBS News, where she won six Emmy Awards. She has written for Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post, and Publishers Weekly. A native of Rhode Island, Murphy is a graduate of Wesleyan University and was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. She lives in Scarborough, New York, with her husband, Bob Minzesheimer, and their two children.
www.marymurphy.net
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Credits
Jacket design by Jarrod Taylor
Copyright
SCOUT, ATTICUS, AND BOO. Copyright © 2010 by Mary McDonagh Murphy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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