To Kill A Mockingbird Revisited

As I’ve mentioned, I’m a big fan of audio books. I listen to them at home while I work, knit, sew, cook... this past weekend I had a lot of work piled up that I needed to spend time on and I had an audio book of Harper Lee’s amazing To Kill A Mockingbird to listen to. I have seen the movie with Atticus Finch played, definitively by Gregory Peck, and read the book years ago. But it was time to listen to it again. I’m glad I did.

This time I realized something I hadn’t caught on to before. This is not about a good man’s fight against evil, as I had always thought. There are lots of good people in the book — Heck Tate, the sheriff, the venerable Miss Maudie, Calpurnia, the housekeeper, the mysterious Boo Radley, etc. Even the judge in the trial, who has no choice but to sentence Tom Robinson to prison, is a good man. He tried his best to even the odds for Tom by assigning Atticus as his court-appointed attorney. I never caught all the degrees of subtlety that Miss Lee wove into her book before.

This is a story about good vs. stupidity. That is a point that cannot be emphasized strongly enough. It is a book about people who know they are living in the middle of injustice but have limited means with which to do battle with that. And yet they keep trying. More than anything it is a book that says injustice is ubiquitous and frequently accepted but fighting the good fight is still one’s moral obligation. Early in the story Scout, Atticus’s scrappy 10 year old daughter gets into a fight in school because another kid calls her a “nigger-lover”. Even though she doesn’t fully understand what is bad about that, she knows it was intended as an insult. Atticus tells her, “It is never an insult to be called names by ignorant and low people who don’t know any better.” That hit me hard particularly because we are living in an era when name calling and insult flinging has become the weapon-of-choice of extremists on both sides of the political spectrum.

Random character assassination is the weapon of the ignorant and the low. It is a weapon that is used without any intelligence whatsoever, just the hate-driven need to do damage. We are living in a time when there is so much rage in people’s lives that lashing out, trying to do harm, is all around us. Like the people of Maycomb, surrounded by the uneducated, prejudiced country people who cling to their oppression of blacks as their only source of personal superiority, those of us with a more moderate approach to life, are surrounded by the extremists who want to do damage in order to feel they have some power in this world.

The analogy of Atticus shooting the mad dog hit me powerfully this time too. Most especially because his children were appalled at the idea of the sheriff asking him to take the gun. When, in point of fact, he was the only one who stood a chance of making that shot. It wasn’t his choice to shoot that gun but it had to be done and he was the man to do it. Defending Tom Robinson wasn’t his choice either. It put his children and himself at great risk — but he was the only one who could do it.

So, despite its age, this is still a book for our times. It tells us that people are often mean, low, and ignorant but that doesn’t give us leave to join them. If we have the intellect to see the ignorance then we have the duty to do what we can about it. Atticus tells his children that anytime a white man takes advantage of a black man it is to his shame. He says that to take advantage of a disempowered person is a sign of low moral character.

And more than anything, Atticus tells Jem, his son, that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird because their song is so beautiful. I took that literally when I first read the book but I didn’t catch the allusion at the end when Heck Tate overlooks what Boo Radley did to save Jem and Scout’s lives. There is goodness in the world, too, and we have to keep that balance. In the middle of the ignorance and darkness, the mockingbird still sings.

Thanks for reading.