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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was a kind of gospel, north and south, appealing, through the beauty of story, for us to be better than we were, to live up to our finer natures, and not our baser ones, to rise inside our own consciences and not wallow in the mob. I have written that it was not a cure. The meanness depicted in its story endures and, in the modern day, still often triumphs. Yet the hope in it lingers on, and on.
What was the theme of To Kill a Mockingbird? To her, it was simple. It was not just about race, though that will always be the part we most cut ourselves upon, but about all kinds of justice, and fairness, and a sorting out of what it means to get into someone’s skin and walk around in it. You never gain any understanding, in a pluralistic society, until you do.
I have heard critics say it was a naïve book, simplistic, but I know a little about our South, how the things that make us most ashamed of our past—and present—are not always our actions but our silence. Her words were our tonic, our balm.
It remains, in the lore of our people, a sin to kill a mockingbird. But those simple words have taken on a power and beauty and meaning beyond language, to become a thing to live forever.
“The most prominent place in hell is reserved for those who are neutral on the great issues of life….We will stand as a nation to give account of our stewardship here.”
I do not need a statue or flag to know that I am Southern. I can taste it in the food, feel it in my heart, and hear it in the language of my kin.
In time my grief did give, not because I forgot Skinny or replaced her, but because I found that it was not so hurtful, in time, to remember.
Oh, I would have seen it all, eventually, but it needed to happen to a boy; the world loses much of its wonder about the time you pay your first water bill.
On long trips, like the three-hundred-mile exodus to the Gulf, we devoured fried chicken and cold biscuits from aluminum foil, four doors flung open under Spanish moss. On short trips, we stopped for tomato sandwiches and cans of Vienna sausages. We thought that was as good as life might ever be. It might have been.
