I’m fascinated to see that the fiftieth anniversary of Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird is eliciting controversy. But as Jesse Kornbluth notes in the Huffington Post piece to which I’ve just linked, who’d have thought we’d live to see Thurgood Marshall’s distinguished career reduced to the dismissive “activist” label, or ministers filing suit to assure the “right” of congregants to tote guns to church, or “educated” Americans blaming our current economic crisis on the poor, who, we’re to understand, bought too many houses in the halcyon days of neoconservative political dominance?
Perhaps I’ve lived too long, as some traditionalist young Catholics have been telling me lately on the Open Tabernacle blog. Like many people as they age, I suspect, I find it . . . disconcerting . . . to read summaries of historic events through which I’ve lived (e.g., Vatican II) described in lurid caricature by those who came long after these events, and know little about what caused them, what transpired as they took place, and how they were handled.
Like many folks as they age, I feel a certain passion to set the record straight, when I was actually there as events now considered historic were unfolding, and when what passes as an accurate historical account of the events is wildly off-base. History demands that eyewitnesses to past events provide testimony re: what they saw, heard, felt as these events happened, as a check against the inevitable tendency of human beings to alter the historical record.
As an elderly woman circulating through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., told me and others gathered around her on my first visit soon after it opened, “I want to roll up my sleeve and show you the number they tattooed on my arm when they put me in that camp. And can you imagine that some people want to deny that this happened, even that there were any concentration camps?” And then, singling out the younger people in the crowd, she said, “Look. Don’t forget. Keep this memory alive, because they will continue denying that this happened. And you have the responsibility of telling the truth when they lie.”
And so To Kill a Mockingbird: Kornbluth notes that, as the 50th anniversary of its publication arrived on 11 July, this important American classic is being dismissed by the Wall Street Journal as "a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams," and misrepresented by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker as a parable about the “limitations of liberalism.” As Kornbluth notes, those now attacking this novel written by a woman as a political rather than literary statement are, predictably, men.
And as I read these attacks, I feel obliged to set the record straight—to provide testimony about what one young Southern boy found in this book, in the middle of the civil rights crisis in the American South. I want to talk, in particular, about what it meant—about what it meant as an educational act in a small-town Southern school—for a teacher to assign this book for her entire class to read, discuss, and write about, while desegregation laws were being struck down and citizens throughout the South resorted to violence to try to stop the legal and cultural changes that finally accorded rights long denied to people of color.
The year was 1965. The place was a small town in south Arkansas on the Louisiana border, El Dorado. The teacher was Ms. Ida Cook. It was the spring semester of my ninth grade of school.
In the fall, we had read Dickens’ Great Expectations. Each semester, the class read a novel assigned to it (this was in addition to the expectation that we would read, individually, a book every nine weeks, and write a report on it). As we read each chapter, we discussed what we had read in class, debated this point or that, and then wrote essays on topics assigned by Ms. Cook, a meticulous, demanding teacher who would not permit a single crossed-out word in our multi-page essays written by fountain pen, since ballpoints were not allowed.
A meticulous, demanding teacher who expected precise paragraphing in which each sentence flowed from a framing sentence that set the paragraph off from others. A teacher who expected us to think critically (“Please don’t tell me what they say; I want to know who they are, and what you think”), argue cogently, defend our positions staunchly, all in literate, correctly spelled and grammatically flawless English.
A teacher who made a lifelong impression.
After Great Expectations, then, To Kill a Mockingbird. If there was any significant controversy when Ms. Cook assigned this book, I was unaware of it. The one rustle of discontent I remember came from a Mennonite family who, we were given to understand in some non-explicit way, objected to open class discussion of a book whose plot centered on allegations of rape.
We were used to the Mennonites going their own way. They were allowed to skip physical education classes because gym clothes were not modest. They tended to keep to themselves. And because they were nice, gentle, entirely decent people who lived in a cultural enclave apart from the rest of us, we accepted their divergence from the norm.
Given what I now know of the politics of that period and of my little town in particular, I suspect that Ms. Cook’s decision may have been more controversial than I realized at the time, however. A year and a half before she assigned our class To Kill a Mockingbird, President Kennedy had been assassinated. And two boys in my home-room class had shouted and clapped with jubilation when the announcement of his assassination came over the school loudspeaker.
One of those two boys went on to become president of the student council in the following year—the year of To Kill a Mockingbird—and promptly proceeded, after he was elected to that office, to institute a daily flag-raising ceremony, at which the whole school was invited/expected to gather around the flagpole as the flag was raised and students from the bible-study club he had organized droned long, elaborate in-Jesus’-name prayers. This student was later to be made president of our senior class in high school.
The growing Republican reaction to the Democratic party’s defense of civil rights of African Americans was, in other words, beginning to set in, in small Southern towns like ours, following Johnson’s pushing through of the 1964 Civil Rights bill. And that Republican reaction was, even then, beginning to resort to flag-waving red-scare tactics fueled by right-wing religiosity. My high-school classmate who went this route told me in our senior year of high school that he would never travel outside the U.S.—never!—because he feared there would be a Communist takeover and he could not get back in. To the greatest nation on earth, the one God had set up to be an example to the rest of the world.
Even with all of this brewing, the worldview of defensive reaction had not yet begun to derail the outstanding teaching we enjoyed in our town’s public schools—outstanding teaching provided by well-educated teachers who had, in many cases, graduated from first-rate universities, and who were actively recruited by our well-funded school system. Our schools were well-funded because many of our citizens had wealth—we were an oil town—and they wanted the best education possible for their children.
It is entirely possible that some parents challenged Ms. Cook’s selection of To Kill a Mockingbird as an assignment for my class, and that I did not know of those challenges at the time. I doubt, however, that there was any public or concerted challenge to the assignment, because parents simply did not behave that way, in those years. This was a period in which parents stood squarely with teachers, even when the two did not see eye to eye. Because that was how things were done, and how they should be. Parental authority bolstered every other kind of authority in the world, and vice versa. The cultural upheavals of the 1960s, with their challenge to all sorts of authority, were yet to hit our town: we had the sole, all-absorbing issue of challenges to our long-held racial views to contend with in these years.
And so the significance of To Kill a Mockingbird, when a fifteen-year old small-town boy read that book in the Deep South in 1965: I recognized myself in the book. I saw the citizens of my own town in the small Deep-South town Harper describes in the book.
I began to realize that a world I had taken for granted as natural and ordained by God was anything but naturally and divinely ordered. It was a social construction. It was a world arranged in a certain way, by a certain group of citizens, to serve the needs of that group of citizens at the expense of everyone else in the world.
It was a socially constructed world that demanded my response: either I accepted the world as it was and showed up each morning for the flag raising and prayers in Jesus’ name, or I went my own way, found a path more humane and connected to the wide world outside our defensive small town. I had no choice. I had to choose. My life and my soul depended on my doing so.
And this is precisely what, I am certain, Ms. Cook expected To Kill a Mockingbird to say to those in my class whose ears were open to hear the message of that book. You may imagine you are the world. But you are not the world. It is much broader and richer than anything you have begun to imagine, in this tiny, parochial, racist town that views itself as the center of the universe.
And in the wider world, you must contend with questions about race, class, economic privilege and injustice, oppression of minority groups, gender, and so forth. You must contend with those questions because you will have no choice except to do so. In the world coming into being as racial barriers fall even in your little community, there will no longer be any refuge from the storm: the eradication of legal segregation will be the first step in a process that brings rights to one marginalized group after another, a process you cannot stop now that it has begun. No amount of flag waving and praying in Jesus' name will stop what is happening now.
Your only choice is to choose: to choose how you intend to respond to the forces reshaping the cultural world you inhabit. In my classroom, I set before you life and death, and I encourage you to set your feet into the path that leads to life. But the choice remains yours, since they’re your feet and the path on which you set your feet will be uniquely yours, even as it moves toward one goal or the other.
This is the monumental lesson that I took from To Kill a Mockingbird as a young adolescent preparing to enter high school in a small Southern town rocked by racial turmoil as that school integrated, under court duress, two years later. It is a lesson that has served me well throughout my life. I imagine many other young people reading To Kill a Mockingbird in the same period in circumstances similar to mine experienced this novel in much the same way as I’ve described here.
As their Ms. Cooks wanted them to do. And for that reason, I’m entirely baffled now to hear the Wall Street Journal dismiss this significant classic as “a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams,” and to hear the New Yorker sniff that To Kill a Mockingbird is a parable about the “limitations of liberalism.”
It’s almost as if these arbiters of conservative and center-right American public opinion didn’t want any of those revolutionary social changes that flowed from the civil rights movement to take place . . . .
