To Kill A Mockingbird #
Harper Lee, like J.D.Salinger, was one of the most famous intensely private people in the literary world, also vanished from public view,.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper is a seminal tale of racial prejudice and the failure of law in an American small town following the abolition of slavery.
According to Ruth Ostrow, “There is no greater hero that Atticus Finch and no greater siblings than Scout and Jem. We all need that one novel that makes us feel heroic. It’s hard to keep one’s moral compass in a world where morals are bent all the time and doing the right thing sounds great on paper but rarely happens in real life. Reading To Kill a Mockingbird will set you straight in lightning speed. You’ll gather some courage and wish you WERE Atticus Finch. His address to the court is one of the most inspiring examples of Natural Justice. We all need that one novel that makes us feel heroic. We all need the novel that inspires us to be better and do better and the one that lifts us out of a trough when we’re feeling pathetic and your confidence is less than zero.
Harper follows Mark Twain in having a first-person narrator, who pivots as observer and soliloquist, a six year old, Scout, who like Hamlet and Huck is of two minds, engaging in interior dialogue about what is right or wrong. Her father, Atticus, advises her to ignore her classmate, Cecil’s racist taunts, while she wants to show him she is not a coward.
Sally Jenkins, a staff writer for The Atlantic writes “I periodically revisit To Kill a Mockingbird to remind myself how to build mood and apprehension. Sportswriting is often about trying to make the reader feel a sense of anticipation even if they already know the final score. Harper Lee does something remarkable in the opening of her book: Even though the reader knows that this story about children will likely turn out okay for them in the end, Lee seeds dread in the first sentence, making you want to know how it’s all going to happen.
“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”
First of all, got his arm badly broken! Somebody did it to him; he didn’t fall from a tree. Second, “at the elbow” is an automatic flinch for the reader. It’s a master class, that sentence—a cloud passes right across the sun. And she maintains that tension throughout the book.”
Atticus Finch too has a dilemma; he loves his hometown, despite its racial prejudice, which he articulates to Scout:
“We’re fighting our friends. But remember this, no matter how bitter things things get, they’re still our friends and this is our home”.
Sometimes the Bible in the hands of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another… There are some kinds of men who’re so busy worrying about the next world, they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.
The one place where a man should get a square deal is in a courtroom….but (judges) have a way of carrying their preconceptions on the bench.
Scout discovers that Atticus was right, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
When Scout finally meets the bogey man, “Boo”, next door she says: “Atticus, he was real nice."
Atticus replies: “Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
According to Angus Fletcher in Wonderworks, Scout has come to identify with two other people, her father and Boo. Meanwhile we the readers have reached an even more mind-expanding state, Scout’s, Atticus’s and Boo’s. Which is to say our brain is now experiencing three minds in one. It’s Emerson’s greater soul expanded, giving us an intuition of the humanity beyond… and..beyond..and beyond.
HELEN RAZER
Atticus Finch, as you likely recall, emerges in Mockingbird the novel as a gentleman lawyer idealised by his child and, in the film, by way of Gregory Peck, as the sort of man that George Clooney and Jesus might reproduce during one of their regular meetings.
“He was such a strong force in my life growing up, reading it and re-reading it over the years. I’m always reminded that as long as there are people like Atticus Finch – even though it’s fiction – in the world, we should all be OK.”
One cannot read Mockingbird, or its demanding new partner, in isolation from the conditions that produced it. Of course, we can say this with some degree of force about any book, but it is especially true for one written about and released at the time of the civil rights movement. If there is an adversary in Mockingbird it is myopic intolerance. If there is a hero, it is not Atticus but a (still) slowly emerging justice. The bad guy could reside in all of us. Even Scout must overcome her baseless aversion to Boo Radley.
Lynch Mobs #
Atticus Finch: The Biography by Joseph Crespino.
In 1934, A.C. Lee, the father of Nelle Harper Lee and the inspiration for her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, learned about lynch mobs:
“The danger of the lynch mob and the threat it posed to civilized society was no abstraction for A. C. Lee. One of the most gruesome mob lynchings in the entire history of the practice hit close to home for Lee, literally. It took place in 1934 outside Marianna, Florida, the county where A. C. Lee was raised, where his mother and father were buried, and where all of his brothers and sisters still lived. In a scene similar to the one that Harper Lee would imagine in Mockingbird, a group of men traveling in four or five cars abducted a black prisoner from the jail in Brewton, Alabama, just forty miles south of Monroeville near the Florida state line. The black man, Claude Neal, was accused of having raped and murdered a white woman, Lola Cannidy, in a rural area in Jackson County, Florida. Neal, along with his mother and aunt, was initially taken to the jail in the nearby town of Chipley, A. C. Lee’s hometown.
Neal confessed to the crime, although investigators would later suspect that he had been coerced. In a detail that was similar to how in Mockingbird Tom Robinson testified that he had encountered Mayella Ewell on the day of the alleged rape, Claude Neal told how he had been walking along the fenced border of the Cannidy farm when Lola Cannidy saw him and asked if he would come across the fence and clean out a hog trough that she had been struggling with (Mayella Ewell asks Tom Robinson if he would bust up a chiffarobe for her).
“The men who took Claude Neal from the jail in Brewton carried him back to the Cannidy family farm outside Marianna. A crowd estimated at several thousand people had gathered there, stoked by radio announcements and newspaper headlines earlier in the day. The horde became so large and unruly that Neal’s abductors worried that they couldn’t control it. So they took Neal to an alternative location and murdered him, but not before subjecting him to two hours of sadistic torture, including castration, forced autocannibalism, stabbing, burning with hot irons, and dismemberment of toes and fingers. They tied Neal’s body to the back of a car and dragged it to the Cannidy family home, where the remnants of the mob performed their own barbaric acts. Eventually Neal’s mutilated corpse was hung from a tree on the northeast corner of the courthouse square in Marianna.
“The Monroe Journal ran a story about the grand jury investigation into Neal’s abduction from the Brewton jail, though it included none of the sickening details of the lynching. That was the first news about the lynching to appear in the Journal, yet it was unlikely lo have been the first time that A. C. Lee had heard of the incident. The Monroe Journal office received wire reports from the major news agencies. On October 21, the Associated Press sent a dispatch from Lee’s hometown of Chipley that reported that hundreds of men swarmed the streets all night threatening to destroy the jail if the sheriff didn’t hand over Neal and the other prisoners.
“Or perhaps Lee learned directly from his brothers or sisters about the mayhem in Marianna the day after the lynching.
Neal’s body was cut down from the tree on the courthouse lawn early on a Saturday morning. The rest of that day, a busy Saturday when rural whites and blacks customarily came into town to shop and do business, was, according to one local white man, ‘a day of terror and madness, never to be forgotten by anyone.’
Mobs of whites began attacking blacks around the town square who were there buying or selling goods, or who worked for white store owners. Marianna’s mayor searched for policemen but couldn’t find any; apparently members of the mob had already found them and threatened them with reprisals if they came to the square. The mayor attempted to deputize special officers, but could find no volunteers. One black man who was assaulted on a side¬walk raced across the street into the courthouse where a group of friendly white men, armed with a machine gun, offered protection for him and an¬other black man. The mob attacked a black porter helping a customer. The porter had to slash his way through the crowd with a knife to make it back to his employer’s store, where the owner locked the door and held the mob”
Atticus Finch: The Biography Joseph Crespino Basic Books 1995 : 82-86