Mockingbird: A study of grace

I was oddly delighted when I stumbled across this page, an interview with Mary Badham, who was Scout in "To Kill a Mockingbird". It is easy to guess--and has been verified, I believe--that Scout was the voice of Harper Lee herself.

I can't remember actually reading the entire book; I'm sure I did, and I should read it again. The history of pre-integration American South is just a vague thing to me; I have my own racism to deal with, and don't need to take on gratuitous feelings of guilt. But this doesn't mean that I can't get into the minds and see through the eyes of Southern characters. The South has been incredibly fortunate in having a great list of white authors who have eloquently presented personal accounts of their interactions across race lines, or stories handed down by their families, possibly embellished in ways that make the protagonists sympathetic, but I doubt that this has been done to the extent of obscuring the essential facts to the discerning eye.

Mary Badham's photograph, which showed her with a smile that seems characteristic somehow, seems to bear witness to the fact that she who so ably created the central character of Scout (you simply must read the excerpts from the interview; she seems to have been every bit as interesting as the character she played) has managed to age so gracefully! Oh if only we were all so fortunate!

To my mind, Mockingbird is all about grace: the grace of the blacks, and their continued love of the white children, and the grace of the lawyer, when he finally listened to his conscience. Both the fact that some whites stood with black slaves against their racist neighbors, and that we find it necessary to glorify this minority, all are reasons to ponder those times with a mix of sorrow, and gratitude that conditions are a little better. Still, it seems to me that a novel that celebrates all that was best in those times should be cherished. Some may complain that it may be more informative to read a novel that presented the raw viciousness that was the order of the day.

This is always the problem with the politics of inequity: whether to educate with fiction depicting noble ideals, or humiliate and inform with fiction that depicts raw confrontation, and the exertion of military might, whether to feed our imaginations of how things could be, or remind ourselves of how things are.

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