“Faced on the page, a difficult truth becomes a doorway… Where we are now becomes the stepping-point to where we’re headed next.” —Julia Cameron
From the Penguin Publishing Group
I did not remember why Harper Lee named her book To
Kill a Mockingbird. I did not know what it meant.
I don’t know where I was when I first read that book
many years ago—maybe I didn’t finish it. It is a book that will affect you
differently at different times in your life.
I finished it this week.
“It’s a sin,” Atticus Finch tells his daughter Scout,
“to kill a mockingbird.”
It was the only time she heard him use the word sin.
She doesn’t understand why and goes to her aunt, who tells her it’s
because they do no harm. “They only sing their hearts out for us.”
Comments are that To Kill a Mockingbird symbolizes the
loss of innocence. That's a gentle way of saying it. I say it represents the killing of innocence. Read the
ending.
After Liz Gilbert commented on her podcast that To
Kill a Mockingbird was the only book Harper Lee wrote, and she wished she had
written others, I decided to look it up. She did, in fact, write another: Go
Set a Watchman. It was written before To Kill a Mockingbird. The
Watchman was rejected and morphed into the Mockingbird story. (See what a title
can do?)
Here are the reasons I re-read Harper Lee’s book:
1.
I have heard for years that Harper Lee’s To
Kill a Mockingbird is considered the Prima Donna of novels. (I wanted to
know what that looked like.)
2.
It won the Pulitzer Prize. (What are they
looking for?)
3.
It had been banned. (Why?)
To ban that book would insinuate that the reader couldn’t see beyond the racism, couldn’t see beyond the ignorance, and the mores of the Depression era in the 1930’s. It was rural South. It was ignorant. It was racist. Yet, out of that morass, a noble individual emerged. A man of character and integrity. Scout, the narrator, daughter of the lawyer Atticus Finch, forced to defend an innocent Black Man accused by a white woman, a losing battle right off the bat, was 6 years old, a wild child, trying to understand and having to draw her own conclusions while minding adult authorities. It was a tricky business.
My Kindle kept stopping while I was reading that book, and I would have to restart it. That was the only book where that happened. I was beginning to think I was being censored. And it made me realize once again how vulnerable we are putting our books on Kindles--convenient, yes. Inexpensive, yes. But a switch could turn them off.
My husband and I also watched the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. I had seen it in the 60s. He had not. Gregory Peck was superb as Atticus Finch. The film captured the book's essence beautifully.
Shari Watts contributed this:
Live long, live well and prosper,
