Deconstructing a Mockingbird

We had book and a movie night at church yesterday and the book / movie was Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird. To say this work is beloved is like saying grass is green or the sky is blue. Who doesn’t want a father like Atticus Finch? Who doesn’t want a simpler world where country lawyers accept hickory nuts as payment for their services and where mentally ill people become the saviors of young children? Or where a stoical man bears another man spitting in his face with the serenity of Christ in the presence of his torturers?

Well, me for one. Am I the only one who has noticed that grass can be brown as well as green or the sky can be gray or black or all sorts of shades of orange and red and green sometimes? Reality is complicated.

I love To Kill a Mockingbird. It is sentimental in all the right ways, it is nostalgic in all the right ways, it pushes all the right buttons … I mean, who isn’t moved when the balcony full of black people rise and the minister tells Scout to get up because her father’s passing? It made my eyes fill with tears last night.

But is it real?

Is Atticus Finch real? Is Boo Radley real? (I’m convinced that Boo Radley was reincarnated by Billy Bob Thornton in the movie Slingblade, but that’s another discussion for another day.) More than that, are the racial issues presented in the story real? I raised the race issue last night in our conversation after the movie but I didn’t do a very good job of making myself clear. Let me try again. What I said was white people experience racial issues relationally, while minority people experience racial issues systemically. Progressive thinking white people (like me) feel good about ourselves because we identify with Atticus and aspire to act as beautifully as he does. We have black and Latino friends and, because of that, we are sure we aren’t racist. Meanwhile, we are blind to the racist systems we participate in that work to our advantage. On the other hand, minorities know there are nice white people in the world, they know there are good people like Atticus Finch out there, but they also know that the odds are stacked against them in countless ways. Haven’t you noticed that Tom Robinson dies in this story! Justice never had a chance. And I wonder how much better things are today. Fifty years after the release of the book and eighty years after the setting of the story, I watched the movie in a beautiful church with an all-white group of people and then drove home through beautiful white neighborhoods, only a few blocks away from inner-city neighborhoods where the grip of poverty is more real than anything I’d just watched on the movie screen.

The really hard question to ask about To Kill a Mockingbird is what is the message of the story supposed to be for black people? Isn’t it “be patient with us”? But don’t us white folks need to stick our heads in the sand to keep saying that? Has anyone who believes things are getting better for African-American people in our country paid attention to what’s been happening in Detroit?

So, I’m left wondering … does it really serve us to have stories that perpetuate myths about America that aren’t really true. (And hey, I haven’t even mentioned the issues raised by treatment of the “white trash” people in the story.)

Sorry, sorry, sorry if I just stomped all over your favorite book. I love it, too. I really do. But I can’t help and wonder ….