To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Highlights)

One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

Why I Picked It Up

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I last read To Kill a Mockingbird in (I believe) the seventh grade, around the time I started this book review blog, and enjoyed it alongside the other classics we discussed.

It'd been far too long since I'd revisited it, but I always considered it one of my favorite books we read in school (how cliché of me.) Of course, I've also read a decent amount of Southern lit—especially Southern Gothics—in the past few years. Flannery O'Connor is darkly funny, and I'm hit or miss on various stories (but adore her emphasis on people being defined by their actions during singular "moments of grace.") I would need to read more Faulkner to gather more of an opinion, but I did read Go Down, Moses. That one wasn't my favorite, but I can appreciate its significance.

In my most recent reread of Jellicoe Road, which is perhaps my all-time favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird (and specifically, the story about Mrs. Dubose) is used as a reference repeatedly, and the reminder to revisit the book lodged in my head.

To Kill a Mockingbird is, of course, gentler—told through the eyes of Scout, an almost nine-year-old raised with her brother and single father, Atticus, the hero of the story. A reclusive neighbor, a tumultuous, unbalanced trial, and the complexities of small town Alabama makes every chapter matter, even when just talking about Calpurnia's lemonade on the front porch, or being rolled straight to Boo Radley's front door. Falling asleep in a ham costume at the school pageant amidst a flurry of children repeating the first grade. The texture of everyday living—sunk in the hot-and-sticky, seasonless Southern year—makes the book.

So when my library hold came in, I was overdue. I ended up reading the entire thing in my hammock this weekend while my laundry churned, basking in the sun.

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”

“We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.”

“There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them.”

“Cry about the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking. ”

“Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go and nothing to buy...and no money to buy it with.”

“Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.”

“Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn't the way they actually are.”

“Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets.”

“Miss Maude hated her house: time spent indoors was time wasted...he was the last person in the world Miss Maude would think about marrying but the first person she thought about teasing...”

“Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes, and made war on each other, the seasons would change; Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves.”

“...the familiar ecclesiastical impedimenta...”

“Serving on a jury forces a man to make up his mind and declare himself about something. Men don't like to do that. Sometimes it's unpleasant.”

“Atticus said that Jem was trying hard to forget something, but what he was really doing was storing it away for a while, until enough time passed. Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out. When he was able to think about it, Jem would be himself again.”

Aspects I thought about this time around:

• The rough-and-tumble childhood of makeshift games around town, time stretching in summer, a kid's awareness of dusk—
• I laughed at the seasons changing—an unintentional reference to my own book!
• Hypocrisy and moral judgement and perception of rightness,
• Sticking to your guns especially when you know you will not get the outcome you want or deserve, but you have to do it anyway for your own conviction,
• Scout's skepticism towards being ladylike (and her voice overall being pretty funny),
• The frustration of those who consider certain people the "right company" and others unworthy,
• Atticus being firm and treating the kids with responsibility and respect, but also being very tender,

I relished the rich atmosphere and the prose and the moral spine of the narrative: earnest without preaching. The simplicity of Scout's POV bakes the racism and injustice down into a truth impossible to push back against. The prejudice is hypocrisy; the system is unbalanced. So why keep fighting and trying and sticking to your guns? For the individual resonance of being a person who aligns who they are with what they know is right, and carries on exhausted anyway.

I especially thought a lot about the freedom of being a kid in the summer in a world when you could still run around and get yelled at by neighbors; embodiment and play (in a psychological way) is something the current era's significantly missing, mostly for widespread cultural reasons but also on an individual level. You learn a lot by being shoved into tires by irritated older brothers and having swimming lessons in the creek, and that absence is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. Nostalgia for "simpler times" will always fascinate me as a double-edged sword, as I pitch my own book as being about corrupted nostalgia.

I'm semi-intrigued by the posthumous Go Set a Watchman but likely wouldn't read it, because it's not meant to be a sequel; it's meant to be an earlier draft. Respectfully, if someone took an earlier draft of Mountain Sounds to print on my behalf, I'd be pissed. A book is a living document up until it hits shelves, yes, so it can go either way depending on who acquires and edits it and how you decide to position it, etc,. but the main critique I've heard of Go Set a Watchman is that it damages Atticus's character—and considering how weighty his perspective is to To Kill a Mockingbird, I'd expect that Harper Lee probably preferred the final draft for a reason. I do love her language though.

Also, in 1956, she received the equivalent of a full year's salary from friends so that she could sit down and spend that entire time writing, and that's just such a lovely (grand) gesture of kindness and intention to have in literary history. I love that so much, and of course, it gave us a book to love.

I very much, very deeply loved my reread this time around. It was oddly soothing for my current period of life, and rich both in my memory and in my most recent reading experience.