The End of the Big Read

I intended to go to one of the discussions of To Kill a Mockingbird sponsored by local booksellers and libraries as part of The Big Read but the weather didn't cooperate on the night there was one near me. I also intended to go see an exhibition at the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission today, done in connection with The Big Read. At least, I thought it was today. But when I looked again this morning to see the times I discovered that it was yesterday.

So my final Big Read post will be this, a talk given by Charles J. Shields, the author of A Portrait of Harper Lee:

This was given in San Francisco and it is about an hour in length. But very interesting. Harper Lee will give no interviews and did not cooperate at all in the writing of this biography. Part of me respects her privacy. Another part of me hopes that she leaves all of her papers to a research library so that they can be studied after she dies.

Harper Lee was known as Nelle and she was one of four children. Her father really was a lawyer and her older sister became a lawyer and joined the father's firm. Nelle's father wanted Nelle to also become a lawyer and join them but Nelle never finished her degree because she didn't like the law and she wanted to be a writer. I find her sister's story fascinating. There were very few women lawyers in the 1950's - some, but very few. According to Mr. Smith, Nelle's sister still goes into her law office even in her 90's.

Also, there really was someone in the town on whom Boo Radley was based.

Another interesting part of the talk is about the role Harper Lee played in helping Truman Capote with his book In Cold Blood. A few years ago a film was made, called Capote, about the writing of that book. The actress who played Harper Lee was Catherine Keener, here's the trailer:

The Big Read -- To Kill a Mockingbird

This month I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird as part of the Big Read. I've always loved this novel and reading it again was as enjoyable as the first time I read it years ago. There have been a number of scheduled discussions in the area and I planned to go to one on Tuesday night at one of the independent book stores, but the snow and ice kept me at home.

I've said before that I really love this novel.

I didn't grow up in a small town, but until a few years ago I used to visit a small town in southern Missouri regularly. Southern Missouri is very ... southern. It is southern in its speech patterns and attitudes. When my father first started dating my mother she took him down to visit her aunt and cousins. This was in the late fifties, about the time that Harper Lee was writing this novel, and he said they were still growing cotton in the fields, picked by field hands who were all black. He was a city boy and he said he felt as if he had stepped back in time to another world. Not a particularly good world in many ways.

As a child I remember being in the back seat of the car as we drove into town on the two lane black top, past what can only be called shanties. I never stopped to think about it at the time but they probably had no indoor plumbing and may have had no electricity. I just remember wondering why no one helped the people in them, all black people, build better houses. They were eventually torn down and publicly assisted housing was put up. But I remember it. And I remember walking from my great-aunt's house down past the courthouse to the stores in town. And playing in her yard among her azaleas. She was a lovely lady - and racist as many people in the south were racist in those days, casually racist. There was no political correctness in her (or in her sister, my grandmother). They weren't bad people but they thought that whites were superior. They really did. And although they were intelligent people, intelligent enough to know that an injustice was being done to someone like Tom Robinson, they would never have tried to change the system that perpetrated that injustice.

It isn't that I read this novel with nostalgia; it is that I feel that I know this town and these characters. They are very real to me. I find myself nodding my head as I read. The shades of gray in the novel are very real to me - there are some really good people in this world, people like Atticus, and there are some really bad people in this world, people like Mr. Ewell. But most of the world exists in shades of gray and I think this novel does a good job of showing that.

Favorite Line. My favorite line in the entire novel has always been and still is this complaint by Scout about the education system:

"I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what, I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me."

Favorite Scene. I have many favorite scenes out of this novel, but one of my favorites has always been when the children go to church with their cook/housekeeper Calpurnia. Here's my favorite portion, when the singing starts :

Zeebo rose from his pew and walked down the center aisle, stopping in front of us and facing the congregation. He was carrying a battered hymn-book. He opened it and said, "We'll sing number two seventy-three."

This was too much for me. "How're we going to sing it if there ain't any hymn-books?"

Calpurnia smiled. "Hush baby," she whispered, "you'll see in a minute."

Zeebo cleared his throat and read in a voice like the rumble of distant artillery:

"There's a land beyond the river."

MIraculously on pitch, a hundred voices sang out Zeebo's words. The last syllable, held to a husky hum, was followed by Zeebo saying,

"That we call the sweet forever."

Music again swelled around us; the last note lingered and Zeebo met it with the next line: "And we only reach that shore by faith's decree."

The congregation hesitated, Zeebo repeated the line carefully, and it was sung. At the chorus Zeebo closed the book, a signal for the congregation to proceed without his help.

On the dying notes of "Jubilee," Zeebo said "In the far off sweet forever, just beyond the shining river."

Line for line, voices followed in simple harmony until the hymn ended in a melancholy murmur.

I looked at Jem, who was looking at Zeebo from the corners of his eyes. I didn't believe it either, but we had both heard it.

Gender Roles - Ladies. This novel is always evoked as a coming of age story in a time of deep racism, but it is also a novel about the coming of age of a woman and all the limitations, both legal and social, that women had to battle early in the 20th century, especially in the south. Early in the story, when Scout doesn't want to do something that might get the children into trouble she is accused of being "a girl." The arrival of the children's Aunt Alexandra is the turning point for Scout - a Southern Lady who is intent on turning Scout into a Southern Lady. There follows a number of scenes of ladies being ladylike that have a certain historical charm to them but which, Harper Lee makes very clear, were very boring in real life. At one point, as Aunt Alexandra argues with Atticus about Scout's upbringing, Scout feels "the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary" closing in on her.

But there is a difference between being a "lady" and being a lady. When the children ask Calpurnia why she speaks ungrammatically when she is with the people in the black church, she tells Scout "It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike." This is the true lady - someone who uses simple manners to make sure that others are not uncomfortable. And later towards the end of the story, when Aunt Alexandra and Miss Maudie carry on with their tea in spite of the terrible news of Tom Robinson's death, Scout picks up the cookie tray and emulates them: "After all, if Aunty could be a lady at a time like this, so could I."

Other Gender Issues. But Scout's issues are small compared to the issues of Mayella Ewell, the alleged victim of rape. The town is outraged when a black man is alleged to have raped Mayella; but the town is indifferent (or at least willing to turn a blind eye) to the abuse Mayella receives from her own father. When Tom Robinson testifies at his trial he occasionally say things that disturb the listeners in the courtroom. But this statement does not evoke any response and is simply buried in the middle of one of his answers: "She says she never kissed a grown man before an' she might as well kiss a nigger. She says what her paps do to her don't count."

The defense of Tom Robinson contains, in Atticus Finch's closing argument, the age old argument that the woman tempted the man. Not that Tom Robinson rose to the bait, but that Mayella Ewell broke a social code. Mayella broke the code that a white woman may not tempt a black man. When caught, Mayella needed to destroy the evidence - Tom. Woman as temptress however is the underlying gender depiction here.

And, of course, only men hear this temptress argument because the jury is composed of all men. Jem asks Atticus why someone like Miss Maudie is never on a jury and Atticus points out that women aren't allowed on juries.

Racism. Of course this is a novel about racism and the trial of Tom Robinson is engrossing and sad. But it is the depiction of casual racism that is, in my opinion, even more important. Those who study basic history might know that it would not be unusual for a town to try to reap its own justice on a black man accused of raping a white woman; but too often we forget the casual racism that even good people exhibit. During the trial, Dill is sickened by how the prosecutor treats Tom Robinson and Scout says "Well, Dill, after all, he's just a Negro." Aunt Alexandra thinks of Calpurnia as one of "them".

This is a novel of small steps. The mere fact that the jury took hours to come back with a guilty verdict is seen as a small step forward in the right direction. And the casual racism throughout the novel shows how far there was to go. Sometimes it is overwhelming. At one point Jem says to Scout: "Scout I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time ... it's because he wants to stay inside." But despite the bad things that happen in this novel it is a novel of hope. Atticus is constantly telling his children to try to see things from the point of view of others. At the end, when Scout stands on the Radley porch and looks down the street and literally sees the street the way Boo Radley had seen it all these years she begins to understand this lesson. And at the end Atticus tells Scout that most people are nice, once you finally see them. A true message of hope considering that there have been some not-so-nice people in the story.

Fathers. This is a novel about the importance of fathers. Mothers play very little role in this story. Scout and Jem's mother is dead. Mayella Ewell's mother is dead. Boo Radley had a living mother but the only thing we know about her is that she watered her canna lillies with dishwater. Dill has a mother but she sends him off each summer to Maycomb to stay with a relative. Even Walter Cunningham, the one child that comes home from school with Scout and Jem, is a child whose mother is not mentioned but whose father plays a role in this story.

It is the father that is key in the lives of the children. Even Dill, who has no father, spends his time making up stories about who his father is and, when his mother remarries, it is his lack of a relationship with his stepfather that incites him to run away to Maycomb. Atticus is, of course, the perfect father. He is calm, understanding, principled and knows how to pick his fights. Walter Cunningham has the father who is a shade of gray - a poor but proud farmer, prejudiced but able to evolve a bit. Mr. Cunningham is the "ordinary man" in the story. Mr. Ewell is a bad father - his children live in poverty and he abuses his daughter.

But as bad as Mr. Ewell is, Harper Lee seems to be saying that he is not as bad as Mr. Radley. Mr. Ewell neglects and abuses his children but Mayella Ewell's red geraniums are a testament to her pursuit of independence from him and there is a general feeling that Mayella Ewell will end up , if not all right, at least no worse off than she is. Mr. Radley, on the other hand, appears to have ruined Boo Radley's life, turning him into a recluse. There is, perhaps, a certain classism in Harper Lee's portrayals of these families. Perhaps we hold Mr. Radley to a higher standard than Mr. Ewell because the Ewells are "white trash" and the Radleys live on a nice street, although Harper Lee makes clear that the Radleys are not the same as their neighbors. Mr. Radley does not work and his home is not kept up. But the key difference between Mr. Radley and his neighbors and, indeed, between Mr. Radley and Mr. Ewell is that Mr. Radley is driven by religion. Mr. Ewell never tries to justify any of his actions; he acts out of his own sense of entitlement. Mr. Radley is never heard to justify his actions, in fact is seldom heard to speak, but it is the understanding of the neighbors that the Radleys are of a religious sect with strict rules that are somehow abnormal and it is this atmosphere that pervades the Radley House and in which Boo Radley is caught. It is, in fact, the comparison between Atticus and all the other fathers in the story that shows us how special Atticus is.

You Should Read To "Kill a Mockingbird" - Some thoughts on Chapter One

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

And so begins To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper's Lee's beautifully written coming of age story set in small town Alabama in the 1930's. There have been critics who have complained that the language used by the narrator is too "adult" for a child. But the age of the narrator isn't at all clear. The story of Jem's broken arm occurs over a three year period when the narrator is between six and nine years old - but the narrator is looking back at those years from the distance of a greater age:

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident.

How many years? She never says. But even these discussions about the accident took place in an earlier time:

I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn't run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn't ? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right.

Despite the critics, most people love the voice of Jean Louise Finch, who is known to almost everyone in the novel as Scout. It is an adult voice recreating the thoughts of childhood. Don't we all remember ourselves as more verbal than we really were as children?

It is a distinctive voice and distinctively southern. She weaves information into the story in a roundabout way, the way a conversation happens in real life. In those first few paragraphs she gives us a picture of the nature of the relationship between Scout and Jem, she relays the importance of Atticus, their father, as a source of all wisdom for them and she introduces the names of most of the other principal characters: the Ewells, Dill, and Boo Radley. She paints us a picture without us even knowing it.

A few pages later, Harper Lee shows us she is just as skilled when she is overtly painting a picture:

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks; the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.

I love those paragraphs. I love the way she signals the story's time period without actually naming the year. I love the alliteration: rainy /red; grass grew; sagged/square; dog/day; hitched/Hoover; flicked flies. I love the phrase "sweltering shade". And the slow moving people - you can just hear the prolonged first syllable in the southern pronunciation of ambled and shuffled.

She evokes the day-to-day life of children very well. When I was a child we were allowed to go up the street as far as the alley at the top of our block and down to corner at the bottom of the street and we had to be home before the street lights came on. As a child I would have given you my opinion on every person who lived on my street; I knew them all either to talk to or to talk about. Harper Lee paints a similar picture of Jem and Scout's childhood:

When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia [the cook]) were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose's house two doors to the north of us and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an unknown entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell.

But even though some things remind me of my youth, Maycomb did exist in another time and in some ways another world; definitely a pre-1960's world. And the casual way in which the children take that world for granted, the good and the bad, can sometimes be jarring. For instance Jem (aged 9) explains to the new boy Dill (aged 7) that Maycomb is much smaller than Meridian, Mississippi; it doesn't even have a movie theater:

"Don't have any picture shows here, except Jesus ones in the courthouse sometimes," Jem said.

And later Scout, relating the story of the arrest of a white man for disturbing the peace, casually relates that the "Sheriff hadn't the heart to put him in jail alongside Negroes" so the prisoner was locked in the courthouse basement. You can take that sentence at face value as you read it; but on a second reading of the novel, after you know the whole story and you know that Scout is writing this with the advantage of twenty-twenty hindsight, you realize that Harper Lee is making a statement about the Sheriff and about the fact that attitudes like this were taken for granted.

In the first chapter, Harper Lee paints us a picture of Dill, the new boy who is spending the summer in Maycomb. He is very small ("Sitting down, he wasn't much higher than the collards.") and "a curiosity."

He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned up to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duck fluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead.

Knowing that Dill was based on Harper Lee's real life childhood friend, Truman Capote, makes the descriptions even more fun.

The other character she introduces is the mysterious Boo Radley, a person who never leaves his house and whom the children have never laid eyes on. Mark Twain had nothing on Harper Lee when it came to describing the imaginings of children:

Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out when the moon was down, and peeped into windows. When people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events; people's chickens and household pets were found mutilated; although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker's Eddy, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions. A Negro would not pass the Radley Place at night, he would cut across to the sidewalk opposite and whistle as he walked. The Maycomb school grounds adjoined the back of the Radley lot; from the Radley chicken yard tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children: Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked.

Because the narrator is not, in fact, six years old, she follows this description with some actual facts about the Radleys, but still told from the point of view of children. In laying the stage for the children's project to get Boo Radley to "come out" Harper Lee also sets the stage for the reader to start comparing the fathers in the story. She has already, in one sentence, shown us that the children respected their father Atticus. She then relates the story, to the extent known, of the relationship between Mr. Radley and his son Arthur.

It is interesting that only one person expresses judgment on Mr. Radley in the hearing of the children. On the day that Mr. Radley died, the children stood on the porch with Calpurnia, their cook and almost surrogate mother, to watch the commotion up the street as the body is taken away.

"There goes the meanest man ever God blew breath into,"murmured Calpurnia, and she spat meditatively into the yard. We looked at her in surprise, for Calpurnia rarely commented on the ways of white people.

In the first chapter Harper Lee doesn't just set the scene, she begins the action. Dill wonders what Boo Radley looks like.

Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands are bloodstained -- if you ate an animal raw you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.

"Let's try to make him come out," said Dill. "I'd like to see what he looks like."

Dill then dares Jem to run up and touch the Radley house; the first raid on the Radley Place.

Read this novel. You won't be sorry.

The Big Read 2009

This year's Big Read selection is To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. Chicago picked To Kill a Mockingbird as its first One City/One Book selection a few years ago and I re-read it then. But I just may re-read it again. I've always liked it. And I'd like to support the Big Read.

Modeled on successful "city read" programs, The Big Read is designed to encourage literary reading by helping communities come together to read and discuss a single book. Participants for 2008-09 will include more than 200 cities and towns across the United States.

In St. Louis the principal sponsor is Washington University. There will be multiple activities beginning January 6:

Events begin Jan. 6 with a reading and discussion at the Missouri History Museum, which will feature St. Louis television personalities Christine Buck (CW11) and Summer Knowles (Fox 2), along with local actors. On Jan. 8 Missouri's first black congressman, William "Bill" Clay, Sr., will discuss his new book, The Jefferson Bank Confrontation: The Struggle for Civil Rights in St. Louis, at the St. Louis County Library, Florissant Valley Branch.

Edison Theatre and Metro Theatre Company will present a theatrical production of To Kill a Mockingbird Jan. 9 to 18. The opening night celebration will include an appearance by Mary Badham, who was nominated for a best-supporting actress Academy Award for her role as Scout in the 1962 film version. Badham also will host a trio of film screenings Jan. 10 and 11, at the St. Louis Public Library, Schlafly Branch; the Missouri History Museum; and the University City Public Library.

The Human Race Machine, which allows viewers to envision themselves as a different race, will be installed in the university's Mallinckrodt Student Center Jan. 11-18. Subsequent events will include the Black Repertory Theater of St. Louis' performance of Stamping, Shouting and Singing Home at the Missouri History Museum (Jan. 18); the Bias and Bigotry Film Festival, presented by the Anti-Defamation League of League of St. Louis and Cinema St. Louis (Jan. 18-22); and To Kill a Mockingbird Through Art, a family-friendly interactive event exploring racial and social justice issues through the arts, sponsored by Cultural Festivals of St. Louis (Jan. 31).

Individual discussion groups will meet at numerous branches of the St. Louis Public Libraries as well as at local bookstores, cafes and community centers.

Here is the full Calendar of Events.

As I said, I've always loved this novel. I like its depiction of small town life. I like its depiction of the inter-relationships between neighbors. I like its depiction of the relationship between father and children - both the good father and the bad father. I like what it says about education. I like what it says about imagination. I think it says important things about our system of law enforcement and justice in this country and it says many important things about race relations in this country.

It looks as if most of the Big Read discussions about this novel are going to focus on the racial issues in the novel. As I said, it says a lot of important things about race. But I'd like to see it discussed in its entirety. I think they shortchange this novel by focusing on only one aspect.