One-Shot Finch: To Kill a Mockingbird

A well-known novel of the American south, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a challenging look at the history of race-relations and the process of a child coming to terms with another side of her familiar, safe community of Maycomb. Scout, her older brother Jem, and their friend Dill play around at constructing a drama to act out from the gossip they’ve heard about a reclusive neighbour, only to not long after become the subject of speculation and gossip themselves due to their father, Atticus’ involvement with a polarizing court case.

Scout’s first experiences at school, confronting the ignorance of an out-of-town teacher who doesn’t know the members of the community and what can be expected of them–“Miss Caroline, he’s a Cunningham.”–are an interesting contrast to later events that challenge even Scout’s childish confidence in what people are like.

Scout and Jem’s Aunt Alexandra’s opinion is that everybody has a Streak, and “in underlining the moral of young Sam Merriwhether’s suicide, said it was caused by a morbid streak in the family… Everybody in Maycomb, it seemed, had a Streak: a Drinking Streak, a Gambling Streak, a Mean Streak, a Funny Streak.”

But people are more than the sum of their upbringing and family traits, as seen in young Mayella Ewell who makes an effort to be clean and takes care of geraniums in a yard full of dirt and garbage, alone in her family. Scout herself often wonders how their Aunt Alexandra can possibly be the sister of her father Atticus since they are so different in manner and opinions.

She begins seeing that people’s choices make them who they are more than anything heriditary. It doesn’t take a far leap to see that part of the novel’s subtle messaging is that being raised a certain way isn’t itself an excuse for continuation of a rotten legacy (i.e. racism). It may be a point of sympathy, but not an excuse.

Scout’s father’s advice about walking in someone else’s skin in order to develop empathy and understanding about their point of view may seem trite, but serves her well when confronted with characters like Mrs. Dubose, the violently racist relic of bygone Southern gentility, or Mr. Dolphous Raymond, “an evil man” who, though white, is suffered to live with the black people on the edge of town because he’s land rich and comes from a family of “background.”

In between, there is the code-switching Calpurnia who speaks one way when working for Scout’s family and another way when she is at her black church, the Cunninghams who might be ready to lynch a man or acquit him, depending on whether you can stir their conscience and sense of justice or not, or Mr. Underwood the journalist, admittedly full of personal racial prejudice, while subscribing to an uncompromising sense of right and wrong that leads him to stand on the opposite side of popular opinion.

On the other hand, upbringing can have a lot to do with whether people go right, as well. Atticus does his best to instill honesty, fairness, and love in his children, encouraging them to be humble, patient, and kind. He is a lawyer, not a doctor, yet he seems to subscribe to a “do no harm” policy that extends to all creatures, not just all humans. When he buys his children air rifles, he famously tells them: “I’d rather you shot 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.”

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Briscoe Darling: Did you tell Ernest T. Bass the Sheriff was lookin’ for’im?

Dud: Well, I couldn’t find him, Mr. Darlin’. His cousin said he went off into the woods to kill a mockingbird.

Sheriff Taylor: Don’t sound like a very nice person.

Briscoe Darling: One of the worst we got.

“Mountain Wedding.” The Andy Griffith Show Season 3, episode 31.

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The story is an entertaining romp through childish summers playing in the streets and learning from life, with ridiculous episodes of mishaps and childish terror of everything from imaginary spooks to parental discipline. Relatives and neighbours abound with their quirks, personalities, and opinions, written with witty tongue-in-cheek descriptions that might bring to mind someone you know. There’s the drama with the rabid dog, the reclusive neighbour, and of course a sensational trial of a capital crime.

It’s a novel of growing up, not only of Scout, but of this entire southern town. And it doesn’t happen overnight. There is no triumphal emergence on the other side, vindication for those of the progressive and just cause, or massive swaying of public opinion.

Rather, there is a smaller revolution of individuals deciding what they believe and what they are willing to stand for in their everyday lives. And, unfortunately, not many of them are willing to stand up for what they believe is right. A small swell of quiet support indicates the beginning of something, but is still essentially rooted in fear and an unwillingness to be seen to go against their society’s deeply entrenched racism–even when it means an innocent man will be executed.

Written in the 1960s about the mid-1930s, I was somewhat surprised to see references to Hitler and the beginnings of Jewish pogroms in Germany. Scout, as a child, is able to see similarities between the injustice in her own town and the ones the Nazis are perpetrating, yet others seem blind to it.

The illogic is apparent in the outrage Scout’s teacher Miss Gates expresses about the persecution of the Jews abroad, while she fully supports segregation and “keeping down” of black people in her own community, not realising the same rhetoric used to justify the one is what’s being used to justify the other. An unintentional exposure of this thinking comes from one of the other school children, who says: “Why don’t they like the Jews, you reckon, Miss Gates?… They’re white, ain’t they?” Well.

It’s a novel about the beginning of something: a small beginning, in a small place, started by a small man, as witnessed by a small girl. But despite the diminuitive nature of the change enacted or the length of time the effect was felt, it is not insignificant. It cannot be discounted.

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This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to essence of a man’s conscience–Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.”

“Atticus, you must be wrong….”

“How’s that?”

“Well, most folks seem to think they’re right and you’re wrong….”

“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions,” said Atticus, “but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

To Kill a Mockingbird

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This is, I think, my third time reading this novel, and I have to say it stands up. There were some things I’d forgotten, some things I now question in how the main characters are portrayed and some of their opinions. I definitely already see cracks even in some of Atticus’ ideas, and I don’t think that’s only because I’ve also read Go Set a Watchman, in which grown-up Scout comes to highly question her father’s actions later in life.

There is also a subtle, but noticeable running theme of girlhood and society’s ideas of what it means to grow up and become a woman in To Kill a Mockingbird that I think is drawn out a bit more fully in the sequel, but I’m not confident on my memory of Go Set a Watchman. (I can’t even remember who she’s engaged to in it–is it Dill, as promised when they were childish playmates? Or Walter Cunningham, who she vowed to beat up the next time she saw? Someone entirely different? Maybe I should re-read it, too.)

Suffice to say, it is not purely incidental that the main character is Scout, a girl, as she is reminded at various times and with varying degrees of disapproval or condemnation throughout the novel. I think I was able to notice and appreciate what Lee was doing with that on this read-through because I’m already familiar with the story.

But it’s a novel of the past, written about the even further past, and for that I think Lee does a good job of representing what it was like in places like Maycomb. And while society may have changed, do people change all that much? Causes come and go, issues evolve and change, but the people are still people in every instance.

And that’s a strength of this novel and the way Lee writes–she sees people.

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This has been my thirteenth Classics Club book review! Check out the rest of my list here.