Of Finches and Mockingbirds

The first time I recall reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird I was in the back seat of a four-door sedan barrelling down the highway towards Mexico City.  I was flanked in the back seat by my two youngest sisters.  Let's see, if I was nearly 30 that would have made them nearly 23 and 20.  Yes, I remember now.  The only way I would have gone to Mexico was if I were in the company of fluent spanish speakers. One sister had recently returned from a health services mission in Argentina.  In the front seat were my brother-in-law (who had served a mission in Central America) and my sister (who had served a mission in Spain).  We had taken several books with us to read aloud as we traveled.  This book was one of them.

I next read the book aloud to my tween and teenage daughters, just a year ago.  Our small town library had provided free copies as a Big Read Humanities Grant selection.  So, this month's reading was at least my third visit to the book.  I kept a yellow highlighter in one hand, applying it liberally.  I became completely immersed in Scout's comings and goings.  Of course I knew what was going to happen.  I anticipated Atticus's courtroom plea for human decencey, integrity, and the rule of law.  I knew Tom Robinson would be a casualty to the ignorance, fear, and  prejudice of his neighbors.

Neighbors.  This story is about neighbors.  This story is about neighbors making a difference.  Neighbors hurting and neighbors helping.  This story dispells the myth of rugged individualism and installs in its place the need for a community wielding faith, hope, and charity. 

It is a story about abandonment and salvation.

Abandonment.  Scout is motherless.  Dill is fatherless.  Mayella is motherless.  Arthur is fatherless.  Nearly all the significant adults in Scout's life are single.  Each one is fighting a battle, of sorts.  There is Atticus, holding tenaciously to integrity as the chief virtue he would instill in his children.  There is Calpurnia, every bit the equal and even the better of the priveledged community in social graces, education, and insight into human character.  There is Mrs. Dubose, a victim of the good intentions of medical attention which has addicted her to morphine.  These and all the others not singled out here are bound by the expectations of society and using what ammunition they can to break the chains that bind them.

Ammunition.  In this quiver are the arrows of determination (Mrs. Dubose), charity (Tom Robinson), cheerfulness (Miss Maudie),  discipline (Calpurnia), humility (Atticus), repentance (Walter Clunningham), long suffering (Arthur Radley).

Chains.  Links in that awful chain are pride and revenge (Bob Ewell), ignorance, poverty and abuse ( Mayella Ewell), conformity (Aunt Alexandra's guests), shallowness (Miss Caroline).

Atticus encouraged his children to try to see things through other's eyes-- to "walk in their shoes", as it were.  Scout found herself wishing, while the jurors were deliberating, that the entire waiting crowd would concentrate on setting Tom Robinson free.  Which is exactly why Harper Lee wrote this book.  She wrote that Scout heard Jem say that "if enough people--a stadium full, maybe--were to concentrate on one thing, such as setting a tree afire in the woods, that the tree would ignite of its own accord."  That, in a nutshell is how change comes about.  That is how ideas take hold.

Salvation.  Arthur Radley--quiet, alone, misunderstood, misrepresented, all but forgotten--watches.  Watches kindnesses and cruelty, superstition and bravery, all the drama and dullness of an ordinary neighborhood in a forgotten corner of a nation in the throes of depression.  Arthur "Boo" Radley hears a child's cry for help when all others are deaf to it.  Arthur Radley, in his innocence, rights the wrong and saves the children of the scapegoat of Maycomb, Alabama.

We are the finches.  Do we recognize those that are mockingbirds among us?  Do we hear their song?  Atticus reminded his children, "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."  Scout noticed that the feeling in the courtroom during Tom Robinson's trial was "exactly the same as a cold February morning, when the mockingbirds were still."  Mr. Underwood, (interesting name for a reporter--I wonder if Miss Lee composed her book on an Underwood typewriter), the newspaper editor figured it was a "sin to kill cripples, be they standing, sitting, or escaping. He likened Tom's death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children."  And, at last, Scout observed that to drag Arthur Radley into the limelight would be "well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?"

If I am to "get on with my life" I must get this essay monkey off my back.  Scout's story is at peril of fading from the "back burner" of my mind into oblivian.  What is Scout's message for me? 

Scout is telling me that the pen is mightier than the sword.  Is there a message I am to share?  What is it and
how shall I tell it?

Scout is shouting to me about education-- the core phase of education, where one learns about good and bad, right and wrong--the guiding values and discipline phase of education.  Lest I, the reader, miss this point she tells me on page 374 of 376 pages, "As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else left for us to learn, except possibly algebra."  Am I equipping myself and my children with a grounded "Scout Style" foundation?  Scout serves up diplomacy, fairness, friendship, hospitality, hypocrasy, misplaced guilt, optimism, self-discipline, standards, boundaries, dress and behavior, equality, grammar, courtesy, family honor, respect, parenting, expectations, welfare mentality, vocabulary, the power of unified thought (for good or ill), greatness, the rule of law, literacy, situational ethics, and folly, to name just a few.

Scout is challenging me to notice the details.  She is a genius at observation and description.  The Finch family, like mine "ran high to daughters".  Scout found that she had unwittingly spent her tender years "wallowing illicitly in the daily papers".  In her writing mentor Calpurnia's teaching "there was no sentimentality: I seldom pleased her and she seldom rewarded me."  I am witness to childhood dares as Jem "treaded water at the gate".  A looming shadow was "crisp as toast".  At a crucial moment Scout "tarried in indecision a moment too long."  Atticus was called to an emergency session of the state legislature as "the Governor was eager to scrape a few barnacles off the ship of state."

Scout is inviting me to write.  She is showing me how to observe and record.  She is suggesting I pay attention to those around me.  She tells me I can send a love letter of gratitude to the uncelebrated heros of my existance.

Scout's world was everything my world is not.  Her town was tired, sagged, moved slowly, crumbled. People shuffled, took their time, were in no hurry, yet had a vague optimism and trust in a president who assured them they had "Nothing to fear but fear itself".  Her days were filled with routine contentment as she and her brother and their playmate spent the summer hours improving, fussing, and running through their familiar and time-worn list of dramas.

I am a benefactor of Harper Lee's courageous pen.  My children are likewise indebted to her opening hearts to the fact that "most people are real nice when you finally see them."