Scout, Atticus, & Boo Read online

  Scout, Atticus, and Boo

  A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird

  Mary McDonagh Murphy

  To the memory of Constance Laibe Hays,

  a true friend and a good writer

  &

  for Bob, Kate, and James Minzesheimer,

  the three best things that have ever happened to me

  Contents

  Foreword: A Mockingbird Mosaic by Wally Lamb

  Part I: Scout, Atticus, and Boo

  Part II: The Interviews

  Mary Badham

  Boaty Boatwright

  Rick Bragg

  Tom Brokaw

  The Reverend Thomas Lane Butts

  Rosanne Cash

  Mark Childress

  Jane Ellen Clark

  Allan Gurganus

  David Kipen

  Wally Lamb

  Alice Finch Lee

  James McBride

  Diane McWhorter

  Jon Meacham

  Allison Moorer

  James Patterson

  Anna Quindlen

  Richard Russo

  Lizzie Skurnick

  Lee Smith

  Adriana Trigiani

  Mary Tucker

  Scott Turow

  Oprah Winfrey

  Andrew Young

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword: A Mockingbird Mosaic

  BY WALLY LAMB

  During the summer of 1992, when my first novel, She’s Come Undone, was published, I’d drive my sons, ages eleven and seven, to the local shopping mall and, approaching the bookstore, offer them a deal, “Whoever’s the first to find Dad’s book on the shelf gets fifty cents.” They’d dash into the store. I’d wait. And wait. And wait some more. Eventually the boys would return, slump-shouldered and pouty-faced. “We give up, Dad,” they’d say. “Can we still have the money?” Five years later, Oprah Winfrey held up a copy of Undone and announced to her millions of viewers that it was the latest selection of her wildly popular book club. The following week the novel was number one. A Boston Globe article captures the moment. Above a photo of me seated before a high school class, a deer-in-the-headlights expression on my face, a headline asks, “Wally WHO?”

  I own three copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. One is a lush leather-bound edition with gilt-edged pages—a gift from a bookseller for whom I’d signed some first editions of my novels. The second copy was a present from my publisher—a fortieth anniversary edition that brought tears to my eyes when I opened it, leafed to the title page, and saw Lee’s signature. My third copy, the oldest and sorriest of the three, is the one I hold most dear. The cover’s long gone. The pages are foxed, the margins filled with my scrawled notes. Within the text, certain words—ambidextrous, florid, primeval—are circled and flagged for vocabulary lessons. This is my teaching copy of the Popular Library paperback, circa 1974, when Mockingbird, like some of my students, was fourteen years old. The price of the book: a buck and a quarter. The paperback printing number: 94. (The original hardcover published by J. B. Lippincott had returned to press twenty-two times before that.) The binding of this copy fell apart decades ago, and so the loose pages are held together with a black-and-silver metal clip large enough to set off airport security alarms. Said pages have been shuffled hopelessly out of sequence. Thus, Scout walks Boo Radley back to his house before Atticus discredits Bob Ewell on the witness stand. That cranky old racist Mrs. Dubose dies drug-free before Jem is obliged to read to her as she painfully withdraws from morphine. And, this is strange, the final metal-clipped pages of my tattered teaching copy have wandered over from an entirely different book: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Strange but fitting, I guess. In terms of literary heritage, I think of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as Mockingbird’s older brother and Huckleberry Finn as the father of both books. All three novels, each a product of its era, give voice to outsider American kids trying to negotiate an adult world full of hypocrites. All three counterbalance the pain of human failings with the healing balm of humor. “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted,” Twain warns before he allows Huck to speak. “Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” I can all but hear the droll, self-effacing Nelle Harper Lee chuckling at Sam Clemens’s tongue-in-cheek “warning.”

  I met documentary filmmaker Mary Murphy the day she arrived at my Connecticut home to interview me about Mockingbird. As her two-man crew, cameraman Rich White and sound engineer Jack Norflus, converted my garage into a makeshift television studio, Mary and I chatted about our kids, our musical tastes, good New York restaurants. But once the mic had been clipped to my shirt and the bright lights were aimed at my world-weary mug, our conversation shifted to my long-standing relationship with Harper Lee’s only novel—first as a reluctant teenage reader; then as a teacher of high school, university, and prison students; then as a fiction writer; and finally as a writer who, like Lee, was taken unawares by best-sellerdom. At the end of the interview, Mary and the guys backed down my driveway and, over the next several years, drove on to the homes and offices of twenty-something other interviewees. Recently, when I received an advance copy of Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the companion book to Murphy’s illuminating documentary, I flipped past my own comments and hungrily read the interviews of others: writers, teachers, celebrities, and those who know Harper Lee and/or Maycomb, a.k.a. Monroeville, the Alabama town in which Lee was raised. “Each time another person agreed to be interviewed, I wondered if there was anything new to be said,” Murphy writes. “Invariably, there was.”

  And how!

  Attorney/author Scott Turow and TV’s Tom Brokaw laud Harper Lee’s bravery in writing Mockingbird, given the tenor of the times and the fact that she was raised in the segregated South. “I think [Lee] helped liberate white people with that book,” Brokaw says. James McBride, author of The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, calls Lee “a brilliant writer,” but stops short of calling her brave. He wonders why the book’s black characters, heroic as they are, don’t survive, and why there are no details about the life of the Finches’ housekeeper, Calpurnia, after she goes home from work. “I think Martin Luther King was brave, Malcolm X was brave, James Baldwin, who was gay and black in America and who had to move to France was brave,” he says. “I think she did the best she could, given how she was raised. That still doesn’t absolve the book or this country of the whole business of racism.” Novelist and fellow Monroeville native Mark Childress, Lee’s junior by more than thirty years, nevertheless remembers the separate white and black service windows in the Dairy Queen of his youth. Educator Mary Tucker, who taught in the public schools of Lee’s hometown before and after segregation, recalls the era in which, as a black woman shopping for clothes in downtown Monroeville, she was obliged to try on dresses over her own clothes—something white shoppers were not obliged to do. Of the “hard scrabble” time and place in which Harper Lee set her novel, the Reverend Thomas Lane Butts, pastor emeritus of the Methodist church where the Lee family worshipped, says, “It was a time in which black people were treated terribly and people took in racism with their mother’s milk.” Reverend Butts identifies Harper Lee as a “ministerial friend” and Lee’s older sister, Alice Finch Lee, as one of his idols. In Scout, Atticus, and Boo, Mary Murphy includes her interview with ninety-eight-year-old Miss Alice, and it’s a fascinating one.

  Fascinating, too, is the discovery that Murphy’s interviewees pledge their all
egiance to several different characters. Feminist writers Anna Quindlen, Lee Smith, and Adriana Trigiani are lifetime members of the Scout Finch fan club. But bestselling novelist James Patterson identifies more with Scout’s big brother. “My connection was more to Jem because he was a boy,” he told Murphy. (I suppose Jem Finch’s impact has leeched into my bones, too. To this day, whenever I write about jewels, spell check has to remind me that the word is “gems,” not “jems.”) The allegiances of attorney and author Scott Turow and lifelong civil rights activist Andrew Young lie with Atticus. “He is a paragon beyond paragons,” Turow says. Young likens Tom Robinson’s courtroom defender to the Eisenhower-appointed judges who took on the segregationists. “These were all the Southern intelligentsia—and they were Atticus Finch,” Young observes. “They were the fine, upstanding men of wisdom and courage that really, without them we would not have had a civil rights movement.” Novelist Richard Russo and singer Rosanne Cash are Atticus fans, too—more for his parenting than his lawyering.

  In the pages ahead, you will read a fascinating mosaic: how and why the interviewees relate to Mockingbird and its characters, their varying reactions to the 1962 film based on the book, and their multitude of theories as to why Harper Lee never published another novel.

  Here’s mine.

  Several years back, Harper Lee and Oprah Winfrey met for lunch in New York. The talk-show host’s hope was that she might be able to convince Lee to be interviewed on her TV show. (Lee has consistently declined interviews since the mid-1960s.) In trying to let Oprah down easily, Lee said, “You know the character Boo Radley? Well, if you know Boo, then you understand why I wouldn’t be doing an interview, because I am really Boo.” But Boo was a recluse and Harper Lee, from all reports, is not. Lee is cagey and Boo was not. So if Lee is part Boo, I think she is also, on her own behalf, the novel’s kind and cagey Sheriff Tate. In telling Atticus why the “official” version of how Bob Ewell got killed will stray from what really happened, Sheriff Tate says, “To my way of thinkin’, Mr. Finch, taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an’ draggin’ him with his shy ways into the limelight—to me, that’s a sin.” A few sentences later, Scout likens the exposure of Boo to Maycomb’s hero worship to “shootin’ a mockingbird.” So to my way of thinkin’, the wise and wonderful Harper Lee is, simultaneously, Boo, Scout, the sheriff, and the mockingbird. She may not grant interviews, but she is still singing away via her 1960 masterpiece.

  Finally, the teacher in me cannot resist giving you an assignment—albeit one that’s sure to bring you hours and hours of pleasure. Read Mary Murphy’s Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of “To Kill a Mockingbird” or watch her documentary. Then watch the Robert Mulligan–directed theatrical film, adapted by playwright Horton Foote and starring Gregory Peck in his Oscar-winning role as Atticus Finch. Then go back, read, and savor the fifty-year-old original. Shuffle the above order as you desire. But however you choose to tackle this assignment, I invite you to think, feel, and enjoy.

  PART I

  Scout, Atticus, and Boo

  “OUR NATIONAL NOVEL”

  Reading To Kill a Mockingbird is something millions of us have in common, yet there is nothing common about the experience. It is usually an extraordinary one. To Kill a Mockingbird leaves a mark. And somehow, it is hermetically sealed in our brains—the memory of it fresh and clear no matter how many decades have passed. If you ask, people will tell you exactly where they were and what was happening to them when they read Harper Lee’s first and only novel. It may be the first “adult” book we read, assigned in eighth or ninth grade. Often it is the first time a young reader is completely kidnapped by a novel, taken on an enthralling ride until the very end. After half a century, To Kill a Mockingbird’s staying power is remarkable: still a best seller, always at the top of lists of readers’ favorites, far and away the most widely read book in high school.

  “I think it is our national novel,” Oprah Winfrey told me when I interviewed her for my documentary about To Kill a Mockingbird’s power and influence. “If there was a national novel award, this would be it for the United States. When I opened my school [for girls in South Africa], everybody wanted to know what we can bring and what can we give the girls. I asked everybody to bring their favorite book, and I would say we probably have a hundred copies of this book. Each person who brought the book wrote their own words to the girls about why they believe this book was an important book, and everybody says something different.”

  That’s because almost everyone can relate to it—one way or another. Look at all the ground To Kill a Mockingbird covers: childhood, class, citizenship, conscience, race, justice, fatherhood, friendship, love, and loneliness. With all due respect to the wave of social-networking sites, applications, and abbreviations in which we are awash these days, I would like to point out that the community this fifty-year-old novel invites and enjoys is one of the greatest social networks of all time. Try saying “Boo Radley” to the person next to you on the bus. Or say “chiffarobe,” as Mayella Ewell does. Mention Scout, Atticus, Jem, Mrs. Dubose, or Tom Robinson, and see where it takes you. People respond. They connect. Friendships form.

  When I met Liz Tirrell, a screenwriter and documentary director, it did not take long to find out she could recite line after line from the book and the movie. We bonded over “Hey, Mr. Cunningham…I’m Jean Louise Finch. I go to school with Walter; he’s your boy, ain’t he?”

  When Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Diane McWhorter was growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, she and her schoolmates recited the “Hey, Mr. Cunningham” lines and spoke Scout whenever possible. “Cecil Jacobs is a big wet hen,” and “What in the Sam Hill are you doing?” and other imitations rang out at recess.

  Anna Quindlen, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and novelist, said she simply could not be friends with anyone who does not “get” Scout. “I remember someone telling me that they thought Scout was a peripheral character, and I was shocked out of my skin.”

  But then, I have another friend, a novelist who teaches fiction writing, who told me that when she mentioned To Kill a Mockingbird as a favorite, a fellow professor said, “We don’t consider that literature here.”

  Really?

  “YOU HAVE ANOTHER THINK COMING”

  That pronouncement sent me right back to the novel. And unlike other favorites from childhood, another reading of To Kill a Mockingbird rewards and reaffirms. The story is as rich as the Alabama soil it comes from; its veins can be mined over and over again. If you think you cannot go back to it and find more, “You have another think coming,” as Scout Finch would say.

  My second reading of To Kill a Mockingbird was a revelation. It felt as though I was reading it for the very first time. How could I have forgotten Calpurnia and “It’s not necessary to tell all you know”? Or Dolphus Raymond, the drunk, who was not a drunk at all? Or all the history? And the writing. The writing! The economy was dazzling. My enthusiasm was unbridled, my appreciation immense.

  Looking back, I see that the first time, I was blinded by love. For Scout: funny, smart, overall-wearing, fists-flying, lynch-mob-scattering Scout. Scout knew who she was, and she had the greatest father on the planet.

  Here she was again—only better.

  On her cousin: “Talking to Francis gave me the sensation of settling slowly to the bottom of the ocean. He was the most boring child I ever met.”

  On the neighbors: “The Radley Place was inhabited by an unknown entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell.”

  On her father: “Atticus was feeble: he was nearly fifty.”

  On the caste system in her town: “…to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and re
fined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living.”

  After I finished, I carried my paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird around with me for weeks. I needed to stay in its thrall. I read random pages, sometimes aloud, and was instantly reinvigorated.

  Novelist Mark Childress, who wrote Crazy in Alabama, told me he reads To Kill a Mockingbird “as a refresher course” almost every year. “Every time I go back, I’m impressed more by the simplicity of the prose…. Although it’s plainly written from the point of view of an adult, looking back through a child’s eyes, there’s something beautifully innocent about the point of view, and yet it’s very wise.”

  Allan Gurganus, author of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and other novels, said of his rereading: “What’s marvelous is that you see that sometimes the first things that happen to you are as big as they seemed. And, it’s very moving to see what an evergreen and enduring achievement it’s truly turned out to be.”

  “AS RELEVANT TODAY AS THE DAY IT WAS WRITTEN”

  My second reading of To Kill a Mockingbird was fifteen years ago. And then, like Scout, I decided to go exploring. I began looking into the novel’s history, stature, and popularity. By any measure, it is an astonishing phenomenon. An instant best seller, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a screen adaptation ranked one of the best of all time. Fifty years after its publication, it sells nearly a million copies every year—hundreds of thousands more than The Catcher in Rye, The Great Gatsby, or Of Mice and Men, American classics that also are staples of high school classrooms.