TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Sunday, October 21, 2007
By WAYNE GREENHAW
Special to the Press-Register
Recently I reread "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the 12th or 13th time; I've lost count which it is.

But I highly recommend the practice of rereading Harper Lee's famous novel, both for the insight it offers into human nature and its illustration of the importance of the rule of law.

I first read it as a 20-year-old student at the University of Alabama, where the author attended law school in the late 1940s.

I was impressed with the novel's clarity of characters, the simplicity and economics of its style, and its brilliant depiction of small-town Alabama in the early 1930s.

I had grown up in such small towns as Maycomb. I knew people like the Haverfords ("a name sy-

nonymous with jackass"), Walter Cunningham, who didn't have money for lunch but who was too proud to take a handout, and Burris Ewell, who has been going to the first day of the first grade and then dropping out for years.

In each of the small towns we had a ghost house in the neighborhood, not unlike the Radley Place, that intrigued us endlessly. For each, we had a cadre of stories woven by our imaginations.

In a 1965 interview, Harper Lee described her life as a child in the'30s: "We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn't have much money. We didn't have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imagination most of the time," she said.

"We devised things; we were readers and we would transfer everything we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama."

So it was in my own growing up. My brother, our friends and I were carried into Birmingham on Saturday mornings by one of our parents. We went to double-feature westerns sandwiched between melodramatic serials.

And always, upon returning home, like Scout and Jem and Dill, each of us would take a part to act out in grand style.

I knew boys like Jem. My younger brother, Donnie Lee, was one. He was always getting skint-up or having his arm broken or ankle sprained.

I remember even a few braggarts from the city, not unlike Dill.

Dill was based on one of Harper Lee's childhood neighbors, Truman Capote, who visited and lived with older cousins in Monroeville near the Lee home on South Alabama Street.

I love the author's description of Dill: "Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions.

"He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies."

But I especially love Atticus Finch's statement to his son, Jem, that yes, he was "a nigger-lover" in the Jim Crow South, because, he says, "I love everyone."

As such, he gives Tom Robinson the best defense he can; and thus, the rule of law begins to take shape in the makeup of the book.

Perhaps in her own childhood in the early 1930s, Harper Lee heard talk in Monroeville about the "Scottsboro Boys," a group of young black men in north Alabama falsely accused and convicted of rape.

And perhaps she heard talk in November of 1933, when a black man in Monroeville, Walter Lett, who'd served time in prison, was accused by Naomi Lowery, a poor white woman, of sexually assaulting her.

I suspect that Harper Lee's father, A.C. Lee, an attorney and a member of the state Legislature, answered her questions simply and honestly.

Although he was a title lawyer, he once had been appointed to defend two black men accused of murdering a white merchant. The men -- a father and son -- were convicted and hanged.

Each time I reread the novel, a phrase or sequence strikes me like a new chord heard on an old guitar, and I feel another pang of recognition.

As I read the confrontation scene in front of the old jail, where Atticus is guarding over his client, Tom Robinson, I remember the year 1955, when I was a 15-year-old part-time sports reporter for The Tuscaloosa News.

Riding home with an older sports writer, I found myself watching a hateful mob on the downtown streets of Tuscaloosa. They were angry because a black woman named Autherine Lucy wanted to attend the University of Alabama.

As we sat in our car, watching from a distance, I saw a carload of black people -- a man driving, a woman sitting next to him, and two children in the back seat. The mob stopped the car.

Some of the mob, many of whom were university students, rocked the car to and fro. They spat filthy language, waved the Confederate flag and sang "Dixie."

Several minutes later, as the crowd parted and the car sped away, I saw the big, round, frightened eyes of a small boy framed in the car's rear window.

The next day I was sitting in the newsroom when our publisher, a gentle, soft-spoken former FBI agent named Buford Boone, came in. After I told him what I'd witnessed, he shook his head and said, "It's such a shame, such a pity that grown people would act so disgustingly. Read my front-page column this afternoon."

In the column, headlined "What a Price for Peace," Boone chastised students, school administrators and citizens for allowing a small group of violent people to tarnish the city's good name.

"The target was Autherine Lucy," he wrote. "Her only 'crimes'? She was born black, and she was moving against Southern custom and tradition -- but with the law, right on up to the United States Supreme Court, on her side.

"What does it mean today at the University of Alabama, and here in Tuscaloosa, to have the law on your side? The answer has to be: Nothing -- that is, if a mob disagrees with you and your courts."

Two years later, Boone was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

The citation praised Boone "for his fearless and reasoned editorials in a community inflamed by a segregation issue."

It could have added that, like Atticus Finch, Boone was a "people lover" and a believer in the rule of law.


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