To Kill a Mockingbird - Father Knows Best

To Kill a Mockingbird

Author: Harper Lee

I’d rather you shoot at tin 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. –Atticus Finch

…The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
–Atticus Finch

Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. […Our neighbor] gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad. –Scout Finch (narrator)

It’s taken me a while to figure out what I want to write about To Kill a Mockingbird. It was one of the books I had not looked forward to reading. It made my list of 30 books because it took the top spot in nearly all of the internet lists I found of “must-read” books. I thought I knew what this book would be about – life in the south in the mid-1930s as seen through the eyes of Scout who, with her brother Jem, interacts with recluse neighbor Boo Radley – but, as usual, I was wrong. Sure, Jem, Scout and Boo are all integral characters in this story. But there is so much more. The book, according to Amazon.com:

Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child.

Let's talk about Atticus. He is a lawyer and father to Jem and Scout. His age and unique parenting style are mentioned many times in the book. We know Atticus is older than the other children’s parents, and he doesn’t parent as other fathers do. Atticus teaches his children to read and speaks to them as adults; he allows Scout to be a tomboy and trusts his children to look out for one another. And most importantly, Atticus teaches his children strength of character and self-respect.

The lesson Atticus teaches his children about choosing your battles – letting people insult you and your family to your face and doing nothing in return – is a lesson that is hard to take, especially for Scout who is used to using her fists as response to insult. But because Scout was raised to respect her father, she not only listens to him, choosing to suffer silently when children tag her father as a “nigger-lover,” but she comes to Atticus’s aid when he is faced with the possibility of fighting with fists instead of words.

Scout makes several observations that are beyond her years – and sometimes she doesn’t even realize she’s making them. And at least twice she mentions in her narration that something that happens in her childhood isn’t fully understood until later in her life. And that leads me to more questions: Does she follow in her father’s footsteps as a lawyer or a parent? Does she marry Dill? Does she continue to think of Boo Radley, even though she mentions at the end of the book that she never sees him after that night? Does she finally turn into the woman that her Aunt Alexandra has been tirelessly trying to make her?

I’d like to speculate that she continues her insufferable education where the teachers finally realize her ability to read early is something to be praised and not silenced. She goes on to become a lawyer, fighting for the Tom Robinsons of the world – both black and white, rich and poor – using the knowledge her father gave her: that all men deserve a chance in front of a judge to defend himself. She marries and has children with Dill and teaches them to read and to embrace their imagination and their individuality. She teaches them the hard lessons and never forces them to conform to the societal rules that break their spirit, but always encourages them to follow the laws – both those written in the books and those written in the thread of their community: neighbors should treat each other as neighbors, family should support one another, humanity should be respected, lies should be forbidden. And killing a mockingbird is a sin.

Scout’s future in my mind is shaped somewhat by her childhood fixation on Boo Radley and the events of the trial, and somewhat on being the tomboy brother of Jem and friend of Dill. But it is shaped mostly on Atticus – on what he says, what he does and who he is.

I’m sure there have been scholarly papers written on virtually every aspect of this book, including the unwritten future of Harper Lee’s most famous narrator, but I’m choosing not to search for those. My observations are my own, as fantastical as they are. And in my mind, Scout will always grow up to become the person her father always was.

And though I dreaded reading this book, I’m glad I did. I liked the beginning and the way that Lee created and rounded out her characters. I liked the middle where Atticus defended an innocent black man to a prejudiced jury and shed light on the white man’s crimes against his family. And I liked the end, with its sense of danger, action and resolution. I suppose I can concede that this book is one for the masses: a lesson in racial prejudice, class separation, gender roles and sense of community, among others. And really, quite a good read.

My takeaway: The lessons we learn in our impressionable youth are sometimes as simple as “do unto others as you’d have done unto you” and as heavy as how to defend your sister in a fight to the death or how to stomach insults to your family; but they are always internalized for our path to adulthood. And sometimes (but not always) a well-loved “classic” really does live up to the hype.