Happy Birthday Boo Radley!

Our note cards were spread around us on the table like over-sized pieces of confetti. Two, hard cover copies of our books lay with their spines pressed flat to the surface, the forbidden posture of school-issued books as any librarian would disapprovingly point out. But this was serious business; a delicate task was at hand; a grade was at stake. Our sophomore high school English teacher, Ms. Melone, put us into small groups of two and three and tasked us with presenting parts of Harper Lee's historic work, To Kill a Mockingbird. My friend Shaunda and I had chosen to artfully dramatize the tense moments in the courtroom where Atticus Finch, the beloved defender of the weak and discriminated, cross-examines the wretched, back woods bigot Bob Ewell. We were a well-oiled dramatic team, writing out our script on note cards, practicing the stern demeanor of television and movie lawyers, and ruminating over whether Atticus should wear a full suit or simply a tie. That's when we noticed the word. When you read narrative, many times words slip under the mental radar, marching alongside their cohort to become just another jumble of sounds. However, when you read a script, the brain slows, the lips wrap themselves carefully and deliberately around every syllable. There it was, the abhorrent word slur hurled both casually and deliberately throughout America's long, racist history. It was a word Lee invoked in the course of her writing because she was not only writing a story with its distinctive locale and group of people, but she was also writing the country's cultural fabric, for better or worse. It was a word, we realized with dawning dread, we would have to say out loud, in front of our teacher and fellow students. It was a word that neither one of us ever wanted to think about, let alone utter and ultimately own.

In the end, after much discussion with our heads pressed closed together lest my mother or father would hear us conspiring around this dilemma, we took artistic license. We changed the word to the phrase "black man," which made for some clunky prose in the heat of the reenactment, but for an ultimately cleaner conscious on both our parts. With its publication 50 years ago, To Kill A Mockingbird entered the public consciousness to provoke exactly the kind of conversation and enlightenment we experienced as unassuming, suburban high school students. Lee's book celebrates America at its best with Atticus Finch and his family, Jem and Scout, taught the value of diversity, hard work, kindness, selflessness, and courage in the face of the more insidious social and political forces like poverty and racism. She also holds a mirror up to the country at its most debased to unflinchingly look at domestic violence and abuse, bigotry, and the cruelty and perversion that results from ignorance and fear.

From now until mid-September, numerous communities and organizations across the country are offering special events such as staged readings with celebrity guests such as Tom Brokaw, character parties, and walking tours of Lee's hometown, Monroe, Alabama. Students will throw a copy of the book in their beach bags, hoping to knock off a couple of chapters of their assigned summer reading, adults will pick up the work for the first time to see "what all the fuss is about," and countless others will revisit a classic friend or honor a seasonal tradition with a re-reading of one of their most beloved books.

Whether it is a person's first or 501st time reading Mockingbird, the effect remains an historical constant in its capacity to inspire and provoke. Harper Lee never published another novel after Mockingbird. How could she? How could she outpace her own genius and heartfelt sincerity for a people she loved and understood in their mid-twentieth century infancy? Instead, Lee traded a life of celebrity and artistic distillation for one legacy: to create an enduring text that illustrates the complexity of the national spirit, but also renews a sense of hope that is uncanny in its prescience, which reminds us again and again that we can choose to do good over evil, choose understanding over ignorance, and choose compassion over apathy.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/books/25mock.html?ref=books