Would the 'To Kill a Mockingbird' We Know Be Published Today? | Dame Magazine
HOME ENTERTAINMENT LITERATURE WOULD THE 'TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD' WE KNOW BE PUBLISHED TODAY?
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Robin Kirk
For those of us fascinated by the writing process, we have a rare chance to glimpse the
difference between a submitted draft and a final, polished masterpiece.Do I dare let
Lees early work change the way I see her at her best, when shed worked so closely with
a patient, wise editor like Tay Hohoff? Or do I perform a kind of reader's math on the
two, trying to multiply out the writer behind the words?
Its no overstatement to say that Lees debut novel made me want to be a writer. I love
the movie version as much as the book, one of those very rare occasions when a film is as
good as the original. Mockingbird stays on my desk alongside the other books that
inspire me, Norman Macleans A River Runs Through It, Marcus Zusaks The Book
Thief and Alice Sebolds The Lovely Bones among them.
But it has been 50 years since Mockingbird won almost universal praise. The setting is
the Jim Crow South, when segregation was alive and well, and Black people didnt have
the legal right to vote or send their children to schools White children attended,
including most universities (including the university where I work, Duke). They faced
violence dailybeatings, fire-bombings, and murder.The story is set in the years
between 1933 and 1935, when dozens of reported lynchings occurred (not all of them
south of the Mason-Dixon line).
In many important ways, America is a very different place. Black people hold positions of
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power and wealthincluding, of course, the No. 1 spot in the White House. South
Carolina has finally retired the Confederate flag flown proudly as a brutal symbol of
opposition to integration in 1961. But it took the slaying of nine Black worshippers in a
historic Charleston AME church by a young White supremacist to make that happen
activists had been pleading for the flags removal for years, but were met by fierce
opposition. Barack Obamas electoral wins have unleashed a Pandoras box of hatred, this
church massacre only the latest vicious act. There are still sleepy towns like Lees
Maycomb, though in my state of North Carolina, the terrifying Boo Radley seems quaint
compared with the contemporary monsters of meth labs and easy access to heroin and
Oxycontin.
The author has always been a mystery. Born in Monroeville, Alabama, the model for the
fictional Maycomb, Lee was as famous for publishing Mockingbird in 1960 as she was
for not publishing most of what she wrote following its stunning success. Her older sister
Alice, a lawyer, was, by all accounts, fiercely protective of Harper, known as Nelle,
guarding the authors privacy and legacy, especially after the 2007 stroke that left Nelle
wheelchair-bound and mostly blind and deaf. (Nelle once called Alice "Atticus with
pants" while describing herself as more Boo Radley than Scout.)
Alice was likely as concerned about their father's legacy, since Atticus is so clearly based
on him. The Mockingbird Atticusa man ahead of his timeis a more embraceable
character than the realistic, racist Atticus of Go Set a Watchman, a White man who
believed that Blacks were inferior, as many White people did at that time.
Alice died in 2014, leaving a legal protg, Tonja B. Carter, in charge of Nelles affairs.
No sooner did Alice pass then Carter dropped a bombshellshed discovered the new
novel rolled in a Mockingbird typescript. The New York Times has questioned her
account, reporting that Sothebys evaluated Lees papers, including the new novel, in
2011, while Alice was still alive. At that time, no publication was announced, leading
skeptics to wonder if Nelle was capable of releasing Watchman for publication without
her sisters oversight.
We may never know how much egoor the effects of ill healthweighed into Nelles
decision to publish Watchman. I suspect it may never have been published had Nelle,
now 89, predeceased her sister. At the same time, perhaps Nelle, who has been described
by those whove recently met her as sharp, had waited a long time to let the world see a
book she still passionately believes in. And indeed, she is said to be thrilled with it.
(Incidentally, a state investigation concluded in April found no evidence of abuse or
neglect.)
But the story has become more tangled as reviewers have described Watchmans contents
(early birds read the first chapter at the Guardian and The Wall Street Journal). Lee
wrote Watchman first, the adult Scouts account of her return from New York to
Maycomb at the beginning of the civil-rights movement. The publishing house J. B.
Lippincott bought Watchman in 1957, and asked her to rewrite the book as a comingof-age story. We know that Nelle was open to being editedindeed she had a very
collaborative relationship with her editor, Tay Hohoff, and the book was arguably the
better for it (and Nelle, the richer for it): To Kill a Mockingbird won a Pulitzer and
quickly became an American classic. So there is an argument to be made that she didnt
want it to be published.
As I sank into Mockingbird, Lees language itself seems like a whisper from a distant
time, expansive, musical and deeply humorous compared to our truncated tweets and
texts. Speaking personally, Im now a 50-something White mother and professor, no
longer the awkward teen who devoured Mockingbird curled on a floral bedspread as I
nibbled Lorna Doones. Rereading it now, I realized that so much of what I loved when I
first read Mockingbird had to do with my own family. Like Scout, I hated dresses and
spent long summer afternoons playing Capture the Flag with a pack of kids (albeit in the
Chicago suburbs). I knew my older brother was no Jem, yet I fantasized about how he
might protect me in the dark of the Halloween woods.
My father was a middle manager, not a small-town lawyer. But I saw in him the moral
qualities of the Atticus of Mockingbird, at least until I was a teen. I imagined that he too
would stand up for the downtrodden. After all, my father once welcomed a Black
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colleague and his wife to our home to have dinner in our fiercely segregated
neighborhood, an act that even as a child I recognized as daring.
During the 1972 presidential campaign, my parents supported Senator George
McGovern over President Richard Nixon, earning me exactly zero friends in my
viciously cliquey junior high. I even wondered if my dad could pick off a rabid dog with
his old hunting rifle, though hed long ago reversed the trigger to disable the gun.
When Lee describes the expectant crowd come to watch Tom Robinsons trail, her
writing is a marvel:
There was no room at the public hitching rail for another animal, mules and wagons
were parked under every available tree. The courthouse square was covered in picnic
parties sitting on newspapers, washing down biscuit and syrup with warm milk from fruit
jars. Some people were gnawing on cold chicken and cold fried pork chops. The more
affluent chased their food with drugstore Coca-Cola in bulb-shaped soda glasses.
Greasy-faced children popped-the-whip through the crowd, and babies lunched at their
mothers breasts. In a far corner of the square, the Negroes sat quietly in the sun, dining
on sardines, crackers and the more vivid flavors of Nehi Cola.
In truth, it took me all of ten seconds to confirm that the book has lost none of its power.
Any great work of art lasts because it speaks beyond a single generation. Yet what each
generation gets from that art changes, and thats certainly true of Mockingbird.
As others have pointed out, there are no crusaders in Maycomb. Far from being a
weakness in the book, I see it as a strength. I believed in heroes as a child, but as an
adult, I know that even the best among us are complicated. In Mockingbird,
complications are everywhere.
Town drunk and miscegenist Dolphus Raymond aids the boy Dill when the hatred
spewed against the defendant Robinson in the courtroom becomes too much. In an artful
twist, the man Scout considers evil since he has mixed-race children reveals that his
soda bottle contains no hard liquor. When Scout asks him why he admitted to them his
trickery, his answer is direct. Because youre children and you can understand it.
Maycomb society is full of trickery at all levels, good and bad.
Its a neighbor who tells Jem that even though the judge who presides over Robinsons
trial is no integrationist, he appointed Atticus because he believed in the defendants
innocence. No one will hire Robinsons wife, Helen, until a local White farmer steps up,
then becomes the familys staunch defender.
Some readers have faulted Lee for not crusading more directly against the injustice so
evident in the story of a Black man wrongly convicted for a crime he didnt commit.
Most of Maycomb is content with the status quo, so long as they can continue their
routines of church, work and indulging in the occasional scandal (like Mrs. Duboses
quiet morphine addiction).
To me, thats one of the most durable parts of Mockingbird. To this day, we send
African-American men to death row for things they didnt do. In 2014 in North
Carolina, two Black half-brothers,Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, were exonerated
after spending a combined three decades in prison, including on death row, for a murder
they didnt commit. The death penalty remains clearly racist and too often applied to
defendants who are poor and Black.
Yet in the Supreme Court, we still have justices, including Antonin Scalia, who ignore
overwhelming evidence of the death penalty's injustice.Its worth noting that Scalia cited
the McCollum case in 1994 as an example of a convict who should die.
One of the biggest differences I found in my rereading of Mockingbird was my reaction
to the man at its center, Atticus. Its with Atticus that Watchman has so far caused the
greatest controversy. Modeled on Lees father and so memorably played by Gregory
Peck, Atticus is the closest thing to a hero in Mockingbird. But according to early
reviews, he is more villain than savior to the adult Scout, with views just as racist in their
way as the white-trash farmer who tries to murder Jem and Scout.
As an adult reader, I found Atticus frail as well as almost fatally blind to the firm
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structure of violence that surrounds his little family. Atticus believes in the fundamental
goodness of people, that people will, if theyre able to see things from the perspective of
others, begin to understand and feel a common bond. He urges his children to stand for
a moment in the shoes of poor Walter Cunningham, the boy who drowns his meal in
cane syrup, before passing judgment.
But the demons who live in Maycomb arent tamed so easily. The attack on Jem and
Scout that is Mockingbirds thrilling climax demonstrates to Atticus how wrong he was,
how deluded, almost at the cost of the people dearest to him. Maycombs racismstill so
present in the United States, and so intractableis not something that can be
vanquished by fellow feeling alone. Its not something that responds to logic or even,
reliably, the law. Its enormous, yet largely invisible (at least to White people), an edifice
that continues to hold and divide us.
Atticuss prissy, gossipy sister Aunt Alexandra is actually the one who puts into words
the dangers the Finch children face, despite her brothers assurances that alls well. The
sisters a snob and a racist, hosting dainty teas while a lynch mob gathers for Robinson.
But a snob is capable of perceiving societys structure much more clearly than a dogooder like Atticus. In wonderful, creepy foreshadowing, Scout seems to perceive this as
well, musing near the end of the book, Boo Radley was the least of our fears.
So was Atticus a secret racist all along, as some have claimed whove read Watchman?
Well, yes and no. No, because the two novels have evolved into different books, even
though one was a draft of the other. The author transformed To Kill a Mockingbird so
profoundly from what she originally submitted to Lippincott, that the intent in each
work has changed, and the connection has, if not been lost, than weakened. The
character Atticus in Mockingbird is a childs construct. Watchman Atticus is the
creation of a lively, opinionated young woman coming to terms with the harsh realities of
her hometown. And it's rathernave of especially White readers to decry racist Atticus
when the base fact of life in those times practically required a White man of his standing
to support the structures around him. Black people were ruled by these structures, but so
were White people. That doesnt mean that people were forced to be racistthey were
raised racist, they were taught racism, and to challenge that system was not only
dangerous it was unthinkable. The Klan is a convenient villainbut less vilified and
much more powerful were the White Councils, white banks and businesses, white
sheriffs and mayors and churches, all not only supporters of segregation but also true
believers and defenders of the status quo.
Even do-gooders like Mockingbird Atticus didnt necessarily want their daughters
marrying Black men. Racism is a deep and persistent vein in American society and its to
Lees credit that she has made it her lifes theme as a writer. She makes us care about
racists like Walter Cunningham because we should, even as we can decry their violence.
We should also care and deeply about racist Atticus, because even in the midst of his
racism he, like all of us, is capable of great good. I dont think you have to be pure to do
the right thing, as Atticus did in Mockingbird. If change was only the work of the pure,
wed still be clubbing each other over raw game in the darkness of the caves.
My hope it that, with Watchmans release, readers will come to the original either fresh
or as eager returnees, with their own questions. I hope Watchman will be, if not as good,
then at least as compelling. But as we crack open the book after todays release, I find
myself more grateful than ever that Mockingbird exists. Most editors don't take this kind
of time with debut novels anymore (and according to reports left Watchman virtually
untouched). Lee has given us much to think and care about: not only where weve come
from but where were going. And that, in the end, is the miracle of any good book.
TAGS: LITERATURE
#AMREADING
HARPER LEE
JIM CROW
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
RACISM
PUBLISHING
ELDER ABUSE
CHARLESTON
FICTION
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