Nelle Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

What cultural forces would kill a bird that is mocking them?

This is a major theme of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” a story about the U.S.  South’s pervasive and ingrained practices of hatred, racism, and bigotry, practices that glorified and promoted using biased legal and governmental systems to silence and kill dissenting voices.  The book investigates and examines political and ethical rationales that are used to promote literal silences and literary silences.

What social mores would make a jury of adults knowingly falsely convict a clearly innocent man?

What perceived “sins” would persuade a father to hide his adult son away in his home?

What community embarrassment would lead a woman to falsely accuse another man of raping her?

The book raises these types of questions:

If you saw people killing a relatively innocent bird for singing what it knew, would you stand by and watch them kill the bird?  Would you be like most people had been for hundreds of years and condone the violence against people who spoke out against unfair treatment?

The 1961 Pulitzer Prize winning book “To Kill A Mockingbird” was written by Nelle Harper Lee.  Lee was a tomboy growing up and never married.  She was childhood friends with her neighbor Truman Capote, a homosexual fiction writer whom she helped research his best-selling novel In Cold Blood (after publishing her wildly successful ”To Kill A Mockingbird”).  After that, neither wrote and published another major novel.

“To Kill A Mockingbird” appears to be largely autobiographical.  The similarities are outlined in Wikipedia as:

Lee has said that To Kill a Mockingbird is not an autobiography, but rather an example of how an author “should write about what he knows and write truthfully”.  Nevertheless, several people and events from Lee’s childhood parallel those of the fictional Scout. Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was an attorney, similar to Atticus Finch, and in 1919, he defended two black men accused of murder. After they were convicted, hanged, and mutilated,  he never tried another criminal case. Lee’s father was also the editor and publisher of the Monroeville newspaper; although more conservative than Atticus with regard to race, he gradually became more liberal in his later years.  While Scout’s mother died when she was a baby and Lee was twenty-five when her mother died, Lee’s mother was prone to a nervous condition that rendered her mentally and emotionally absent.  Lee also had a brother named Edwin, who—like the fictional Jem—was four years older than his sister. As in the novel, a black housekeeper came once a day to care for the Lee house and family.

The character of Dill was modeled on Lee’s childhood friend, Truman Capote, known then as Truman Persons.  Just as Dill lived next door to Scout during the summer, Capote lived next door to Lee with his aunts while his mother visited New York City.   Like Dill, Capote had an impressive imagination and a gift for fascinating stories. Both Lee and Capote were atypical children:  both loved to read, and whereas Lee was a scrappy tomboy who was quick to fight, Capote was the object of ridicule for his advanced vocabulary and lisp.  She and Capote made up and acted out stories they wrote on an old Underwood typewriter Lee’s father gave them.  They became very good friends while feeling alienated from their peers.  Capote called the two of them “apart people”.

Down the street from the Lees lived a family whose house was always boarded up;  they served as the models for the fictional Radleys.  The son of the family got into some legal trouble and the father kept him at home for 24 years out of shame.  He was hidden until virtually forgotten by everyone he knew and died in 1952.

The origin of Tom Robinson is less clear, though many have speculated that his inspiration came from several models.  When Lee was 10 years old, a white woman near Monroeville accused a black man named Walter Lett of raping her.  The story and the trial were covered by her father’s newspaper, and Lett was convicted and sentenced to death.  After a series of letters appeared claiming Lett had been falsely accused, his sentence was commuted to life in prison, where he died of tuberculosis in 1937.  Scholars have guessed that the inspiration for Tom Robinson’s plight was the infamous case of the Scottsboro Boys, in which nine black men were convicted of raping two white women on very poor evidence.  However, Lee stated in 2005 that she had in mind something less sensational, although the case served “the same purpose” to display Southern prejudices.  Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered for flirting with a white woman in Mississippi in 1955, is also considered a model for Tom Robinson.  Historians point to Till’s murder, the acquittal of his killers, and their media coverage as catalysts for the United States Civil Rights Movement.

~ end of Wikipedia excerpt ~

It appears Nelle Harper Lee practiced what she taught, which was to write about what she knew and to write truthfully.  Sounds like good advice.

If you heard a bird singing a song that sounded true, would you encourage it to sing?  Or would you silence or kill it if the song was uncomfortable for you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Lee

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_kill_a_mockingbird

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