To Kill a Mockingbird

Author: Harper Lee

First Published: 1960

Censorship History: Surprisingly, this was #41 on the ALA's list of the most challenged books of 1990-2000. Now, To Kill a Mockingbird is on a lot of high school curricula, and I have friends who read it as young as 12 or 13. Chicago's City of Big Readers program--in which all city residents are encouraged to read the same book--used it as its inaugural book in 2001. On Amazon, it has nearly 1,800 reader reviews, and it appears on lists with titles like "My Favorite Childhood Books." And the film version is equally beloved: With no disrespct to anyone's actual father, Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch is everyone's ideal surrogate dad, in much the same way we all want to be in Remus Lupin's class. It's safe to call this one a classic, cemented in the canon and in the hearts of readers everywhere. So why are people still challenging it?

When I saw it was on the list, I reread To Kill a Mockingbird to find out what could be causing all the ruckus. It doesn't exactly deal with easy subjects (but then, what good novel does?). There's alcoholism, morphine addiction, illiteracy, domestic violence, rape, poverty, religious conflict, violence toward children and animals, and widespread racism. And we see all this through the eyes of a child, Scout, who is herself just beginning to understand the jarring facts of the world. (I'd argue that's part of the book's genius: Through Scout's curious eyes the senselessness of human cruelty is far clearer.)

But the efforts to ban the book, it turns out, center on its use of one word, common enough in its day--and in fact, common enough in this day, but whispered as "the N word" in polite company. Can you reduce this rich, complicated novel to a single word? Apparently you can. Schools from California to Oklahoma to Nova Scotia have removed it from their reading lists.

This is where things get difficult. You sort of want to assume that people who ban books are all hard-line Nazis, or over-the-top nutjobs like the reverend who was convinced that Mighty Mouse was subliminally endorsing drug use, or the principal who torched Ramones albums in Rock 'n' Roll High School. That is, they are all Bad Guys. They are not on the side of truth and rightness. So it's disheartening when it turns out the people who are lobbying to remove the book are the NAACP.

Can we pretend that racism is no longer a problem in the United States? Not at all. It may not be as overt as it was when Scout was a girl, in 1935, but it's just as subtle, just as casual, just as insidious. It still calls for an Atticus Finch to stand up and name it and say it is wrong. All the same, a book about racism is hardly the same as a book advocating racism. Does anyone actually think that To Kill a Mockingbird is on a par with Mein Kampf?

This is a book about a community slowly learning to stand up and confront its own racism. Yes, it uses the N word. But there is never any doubt that it is an ugly word, or that the circumstances leading to its use are anything less than tragic.

I don't want to suggest that people are wrong to be offended by that word. People have the right to be offended by whatever offends them, and that word, more than most, is freighted with a repellent history. However, if we go about banning whatever offends us we'll never get anywhere, and the brave new world we create will be an intensely boring one. In the face of oppression, the healthy response, the constructive response, is not more oppression but honest discourse. And no discourse can be honest while it censors itself.

I do think there's a dicussion to be had about the more subtle racism of characterization, here and in many Southern narratives. Why is Calpurnia so devoted to the Finch family? Doesn't she ever resent her work? Is the accused, Tom, depicted as a man in full? If the book has shortcomings in that area, are they because Lee's vision is somehow unconcsiously limited by her background? Studying the evolution of white Southern writers' views of black characters would make a fantastic class, in fact. You could build a semester's curriculum out of that history, from colonial writings to Twain to D.W. Griffith and Gone with the Wind and "Everything that Rises Must Converge." (Then compare those works with black writers' views from the same period, and marvel that the country hasn't erupted into a full-scale race war.) But that doesn't seem to be the approach anyone is taking. It's far easier to remove one book from the shelf than to add a bunch of supplemental reading.

That said, I don't believe for a minute that Lee intends to imply that racism is somehow okay, or that she sees blacks as simpler souls in need of white protection. I think she wanted this book to fight the good fight. And in a very large part it succeeds.

Books like To Kill a Mockingbird teach us what racism looks and sounds like. How can we confront what we do not recognize? How can we find the courage to stand up to it if we have never seen an example of that courage? If anything, this is an opportunity for everyone who objects to the N word to become a hero in the style of Atticus Finch--to say, "Yes, this is an awful thing people do, but we will look at it unflinchingly in the hopes of making things a little bit better."

In fact, here's a start, since it seems hypocritical for a blog about censorship to submit to the soft censorship of politeness: The N word is nigger. Like all words, in and of itself, it has no power over anyone. It is six letters long. It is derived from the French and Spanish words for "black." All the rest is context and long, bitter history.

What Else: It can be hard to reread childhood favorites, because the books aren't always as good as you remember them being. I am delighted to report that this one holds up. If anything I appreciate it more now. As fiction, it works on every level. The voice is authentic and true. Lee's intimate knowledge of the community is so sure you can feel the dirt road under your feet. The characters are every bit as contradictory and mystifying as your own family. The story is a page-turner, propelled along by the intrigue of the Radley place and the growing doom of Atticus's trial. And though all these details are painfully specific, the book does what all great books do: it opens a world of greater truths. This isn't just the story of Scout's childhood but a meditation on childhood itself; on what exactly we mean by innocence and knowledge and freedom; on what children learn from our flawed examples; on justice and injustice; and on what it means to have a conscience.

I wept when I finished it.

I want to weep again when I think that people want to deprive young readers of this experience--a book that is a cardinal example of why we read books at all. I hope those kids are lucky enough to find the book on their own, or to wise up, like Scout:

"[A]s I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me."

Many people who attempt to ban books do so because they consider childhood a fragile time of uncorrupted innocence and purity. Harper Lee, bless her, never makes that mistake. As Scout figures out her world, she is as casually racist as many of the adults around her. It's clear that the older Scout recounting the story recognizes that flaw, but she never apologizes for it; it's the sort of mistake that teaches.

Trivia: Harper Lee is one of the great one-hit wonders of literature. This is her only novel.

Some claim that the character of Dill is based on Lee's childhood friend, Truman Capote.

In a thrilling example of People In Charge Who Get It, Chicago's library commissioner said that the city chose To Kill a Mockingbird because of the city's history of problems with racial and social justice. Yes! That's exactly how novels can help us understand ourselves and change things. The Chicago Tribune reported that, at the beginning of One City, One Book, Lee wrote to the organizers:

"When people speak their minds and bring to discussion their own varieties of experience, when they receive respect for their opinions and the good will of their fellows, things change. It is as if life itself takes on a new compelling clarity and good things get done."