Hush, little baby, don't say a word

A review of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1960). Ebook.

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Jean Louise "Scout" Finch is a six-year-old girl living in Maycomb, Alabama during the Great Depression. She lives with her older brother, Jem; her father Atticus, the local lawyer and a widower; and their black cook Calpurnia, who helps raise Jem and Scout. They befriend another child named Dill who visits his aunt in the summer. Together, they develop a fascination with their reclusive neighbour, Arthur "Boo" Radley, whom they have never seen and whom the locals don't talk about. But someone is leaving them little gifts in a tree by his house, so it seems that Boo Radley is aware of them.

The town judge appoints Atticus to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a young white woman, knowing Atticus is a man of integrity and will do his best for Tom. Atticus agrees, even though the white townsfolk disapprove. Scout stands up for her father and gets into fights at school, but Atticus tells her not to. Later, when he faces down a mob intending to lynch Tom, Scout (who is there without permission) recognizes the father of one of her schoolmates—whom Atticus has been helping, though he can't afford to pay for his services—and she manages to dissuade the mob.

When Tom Robinson's trial begins, Atticus wants Scout and Jem to stay away, but they sneak in, and they are invited to sit with Calpurnia's pastor in the segregated balcony to watch the courtroom drama unfold.

It feels odd writing a book review of a book that, probably, nearly all of my Faithful Readers have already read. Even in Canada, To Kill a Mockingbird is assigned in schools. I was recently talking to a friend about the books I'd been reading, and she was surprised I'd never read it before. (When I was in high school, we did Huckleberry Finn in grade 10, but TKAM wasn't on the curriculum in any English class that I was aware of.) So here are my first impressions, more than a proper review or analysis. My thoughts are probably neither especially deep nor especially good.

Maycomb, it seems, is a rather dark place with a thin veneer of small-town charm. There's a caste system, separating not only white from black, but respectable white folks from th e "white trash"; domestic violence; and a mob mentality that leads to lynchings. But since it's all seen through the eyes of a six-year-old child, who perhaps lacks a mature understanding of the events around her, the general tone of TKAM is humorous and optimistic. It's a form of satire, but in the gentle Horatian style rather than the bitter Juvenalian. Scout's presence at many significant plot points seems contrived at times, but that's one of the risks of telling a story from a first-person point of view.

Atticus Finch is the novel's moral center: a model of honour and integrity who agrees to defend Tom Robinson to the best of his ability—simply because it's the right thing to do, and let what people think of him be damned. Atticus isn't a perfect man—while he's a good father, he's a bit aloof with his children. Nonetheless, Scout idolizes him. His two biggest moral lessons are probably the most often-quoted passages from the novel:

"First of all," he said, "if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

and

Atticus said to Jem one day, "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.

"Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

Put another way, show empathy for people who aren't like you, and don't harm people who aren't doing harm to you. That's optimistic, and it's hopeful. If humanity can manage that, perhaps it can rise above its murderous prejudice. I've seen opinions that the novel's main message was to have empathy, and not specifically anti-racism. This I can believe, but, of course, the book's centrepiece is a situation of racial injustice. One has to do with the other. I'm reminded of the biblical epistle to Philemon, in which Paul writes to its namesake to receive back his escaped slave Onesimus, who had become a Christian, "no longer as a bondservant, but … as a beloved brother" (Philemon 16). The passage is ostensibly about forgiveness, but there's a subtext: if Onesimus is Philemon's brother, how can Philemon still keep him as a slave? No wonder this letter was a key text for the abolitionists.

As someone born shortly after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., this message seems self-evident, though I can imagine it was less so in the 1930s or even by the early 1960s during the growth of the civil-rights movement. But this being a post-Martin Luther King world, the voices of anti-racism are no longer King and his followers, living out his Christian ethos. They're secular and progressive theorists whose role model is Karl Marx rather than King or Jesus. Instead of a positive message of racial equality and integration borne out of such Christian teachings as "love your neighbour" or "do unto others as you would have others do unto you," To Kill a Mockingbird has now become a book by, about, and for white people to make them feel good about their own racism; and Atticus, rather than being a man of integrity, becomes a "white saviour."

Yes, the author, Harper Lee, was a white woman. That's not her fault. It's about white people because it's semi-autobiographical. Scout is a surrogate for Lee, who also grew up in Depression-era Alabama and saw people like this all around her. Scout is a child who is raised not to hate, and this story is her coming of age, as she realizes that even the "decent" white people around her do hate. (I wonder how many of these critics would also criticize the white Harriet Beecher Stowe for not "staying in her lane" when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin with a black protagonist? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.) Is it for white people? Well, in 1960, it wasn't the black folks who needed to be reminded that they shouldn't lynch people. Come to think of it, maybe some of Lee's progressive critics should sit up and pay more attention.

Calling Atticus Finch a "white saviour" seems to overlook the fact that he isn't much of a saviour at all; he even acknowledge that the deck was stacked against him from the start:

"There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life."

Lee's own father was also a lawyer. In 1919, he defended two black men charged with murder. They were convicted and hanged. Amasa Coleman Lee gave up criminal law. Like Atticus, Amasa Lee wasn't a perfect man—he apparently remained a committed segregationist for most of his life—but we can infer that he believed his black clients were innocent and deserved justice, and despaired when they received injustice.

(By contrast, there is one character in To Kill a Mockingbird who is a good man, who did no wrong, tried to help people, and as a result was falsely accused, tried, convicted, and put to death. The novel's Christ-figure isn't Atticus Finch. It's Tom Robinson.)

The thing about progressivism, though, is that its ideas go in and out of fashion fairly quickly. So maybe 20 years from now, this too shall pass. Hopefully, something even less sensible won't take its place.

In 2015, about a year before Harper Lee died, HarperCollins published Go Set a Watchman. Marketed as a sequel to TKAM, it was actually an early draft of the novel. In this version of the story, Jean Finch learns that, contrary to the lessons he had taught her, her father remained a segregationist and a bigot. While some readers see Watchman as further insight into Atticus's character, I submit that this version of Atticus Finch never existed. Developing the first story, Lee and her editors found an even better story, and rightly set what would become Watchman aside. Writers revise, usually for the better. Look up the first draft of Star Wars, and be glad George Lucas never filmed that one.

TKAM is one of the most frequently challenged books in schools. Like Huck Finn, it makes liberal use of racial epithets that were common in its setting but taboo today. It also deals with the subject of rape, albeit though the eyes of a young girl who doesn't fully grasp what's going on. I can accept the opinion that it wouldn't be age-appropriate for middle school; less so that it's challenged in high schools. This is a pity: despite the racially-charged language, like Huck Finn this is also a profoundly anti-racist book. Parents, teachers, and students need to learn to see the forest instead of the trees.

Nonetheless, outside of schools, it remains wildly popular: at my public library, at the time of writing, I'd be about 80th in line for one of their 12 copies. It would be nearly half a year before I got to read it. It's one of the essential great American novels, and it's been on my to-read list longer than almost anything else. I'm glad that I finally got around to it this September.