Well, in anticipation of Go Set A Watchman, I decided to reread To Kill A Mockingbird, which I have not approached since reading it as a kid. I can’t really remember my impressions of the book before, besides probably thinking that racism was silly, but re-experiencing the story as an adult has given me a better understanding of what Harper Lee was trying to convey. At it’s heart, To Kill A Mockingbird is a story of a girl growing up and perceiving the real world through the slowly clearing haze of childhood. We see the world through the lens of a child but with the wisdom of Scout looking back at her past as an adult. Through the novel we see Scout, Jem and Dill go through childish superstitions and beliefs, which they slowly grow out of. But they grow into the crueler aspects of the world that they were generally sheltered against or just didn’t understand. While true, the novel does center on race relations, illustrated ultimately with the trial of Tom, Atticus teaches us that the issue isn’t as specific as that but stems from a general lack of understanding between people.
“First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—”
“Sir?”
“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Which in this case, is the inability for there to be understanding between whites and blacks. As Dolphus Raymond says,
“Cry about the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people, too.”
It’s easy to paint everyone that’s racist or has other faults as evil and make them a one dimensional villain but Atticus tries his best to instill in his children the ability to understand other people rather than making snap judgments about them. As with the case with Mrs. Dubose, who was mean and insulting to him and his children, Atticus saw past her faults and focused on the good qualities she had.
She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe… son, I told you that if you hadn’t lost your head I’d have made you go read to her. I wanted you to see something about her—I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
Atticus also understood why Mayella lied about what happened with Tom.
“I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the state, but my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man’s life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt.
“I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.
Atticus knows that racism is not so simple as just pure hatred and evil, while yes it can devolve to that for some, it is a systemic and social phenomenon that is perpetuated on a premise that is accepted for no justifiable reason and not challenged enough to change. Mayella lied because of fear of her father’s direct wrath but also the judgement of society itself that would deem her act as wrong. He knows it is not out of malice but because it is easy to shift her guilt onto Tom, because he is powerless compared to her in the view of society.
I think one of the reason this book is so powerful is because the experience of crossing that threshold between the a child’s reality and the real world itself is universal. Each of the three kids experiences this situation where they break down in the face of injustices; Dill has a bad reaction to the cross-examination of Tom, by the prosecutor, and starts crying. He cannot stand the way the prosecutor treats Tom while questioning him. Mr. Raymond says,
“Things haven’t caught up with that one’s instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won’t get sick and cry. Maybe things’ll strike him as being—not quite right, say, but he won’t cry, not when he gets a few years on him.”
Meaning that Dill will still feel strange about these displays of injustice but be desensitized to it in the future. Something we all experience as we grow up. Especially these days where information is instantaneous and plentiful, we can experience the suffering and injustices that are perpetuated on people across the entire world.
So while the focus of injustice To Kill A Mockingbird might center on the trial of Tom Robinson, the book itself is timeless in its message of understanding on a basic level, which can be applied to most human conflicts which arise out of a lack of understanding between one another. A lesson which Scout deeply understands by the last chapter of the book when she sees the world from Arthur Radley’s point of view.