Don't Kill the Mockingbird

Thursday, May 9, 2002

The Halifax Herald Limited

By Brian Bauld

A STARLING makes its nest on the window ledge and the catkins on the red maple on my neighbour's lawn are ready to introduce earth's long-awaited "immeasurable surprise," but all that's in my mind is the news that race activists want to ban the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird in Nova Scotia schools.

I have been teaching English to Nova Scotian students from Grade 7 to Grade 12 for 28 years. Without doubt, the book that has gained the most favour with my students has been To Kill a Mockingbird. From the thousands of students who have had the privilege to read Harper Lee's one-book-wonder, I would be hard pressed to think of any but the most obtuse and inane who could interpret it as racist.

George Orwell's 1984 includes a "memory hole" where concepts, individuals and words are sent to oblivion, in allegiance to an idea that human beings are solely the product of their environment. Change the environment and you change the citizen. Period. Send the word "nigger" down the memory hole and, presto, we are that much closer to an anti-racist society. The sad irony is that both To Kill a Mockingbird and 1984, in an ongoing campaign for mediocrity, were long ago removed from the list of approved reading materials for Nova Scotia schools. For any teacher to continue teaching this book beyond the life of her present stocks would require filing a multi-page anti-bias report with the Education Department. That the book is still being taught, despite ongoing resistance, is a credit to those principals and teachers who have placed quality above quackery.

Why are those who oppose the reading of To Kill a Mockingbird wrong? Not just because Chicago, a city with a robust black population, chose it last year as the book for the entire city to read; not just because Los Angeles has this year chosen Fahrenheit 451, a book about burning and censorship of books by the addle-brained and soul-impoverished; but because it is a fine book. Generations of students have read this book in Grade 10 classes throughout Nova Scotia. Compared to the steady diet of insipid schlock that has appeared on the booklist for the past decade, it is a masterpiece. Although it is reading that challenges the average Grade 10 student, over and over I have seen students drawn by the power of this story into a reading experience beyond their ability.

It is not primarily a book about race. It is a book of two children who pass from the fantasy world of childhood into the ambiguities of adulthood. The girl, Scout, passes into adulthood on the wings of one of the novel's two mockingbirds (a bird that sings a sweet tune and hurts no one); the boy, Jem, passes into adulthood on the wings of the novel's other innocent, Tom, a black man, pure of spirit, who has been falsely accused of raping the local "white trash," Mayella Ewell, who is terrified to reveal that the only one who beats (and rapes) her is her father. Jem is outraged, with the idealism of youth, when he hears Tom pronounced guilty despite all evidence to the contrary. He is provoked to the brink of radical action when he hears that Tom has been shot 19 times while trying to escape.

How one could consider To Kill a Mockingbird harmful to blacks is a mystery; but to think that the department has already succumbed to this argument, by a few against the many, is, sadly, less of a mystery.

When I last taught this novel, two years ago with well-beaten copies, I found it necessary to provide historical background. Thus, we read grim accounts of the "middle passage" from Africa to the Spanish and American colonies on English boats that often packed slaves spoon-fashion in the hope of good weather (quick trip, little loss). The book led me to introduce Maya Angelou's moving account of her youth in a segregated South. There was time, too, to pass over the Civil War in the U.S., the carpetbaggers' descent on the South, the Jim Crow laws which followed; and view the inspiring Eyes on the Prize series, which detailed the heroics of the Little Rock Seven and the significance of the 1954 Brown vs. The Board of Education decision which ended segregation.

This was a preview of the book, and not the point of studying the book, since no work of art should be seen as a polemic, written merely to promote a social cause. Literature promotes ambiguity. Is Atticus Finch, the lawyer who brilliantly defends the accused black man, Tom Robinson, the most pure, Christ-like character in all fiction? Or is Atticus a grand failure because he advocates a gradualist approach to social change, and tolerates a society riddled with evil, thus condemning a generation or two to continuing suffering? Is Calpurnia, the Finches' black housekeeper/mother, with her Roman-style slave name and heart as large as Maycomb, a negative stereotype? Perhaps critics of the novel have seen themselves in the few who object to Calpurnia bringing Jem and Scout to the Black Church?

The best story I have ever read on the idea of race in the South is William Faulkner's "That Evening Sun." In it is the moving line from Nancy who says, "I ain't nothin' but a nigger, God knows, God knows. It ain't none of it my fault." This story was once on the Nova Scotia reading list, too. So was The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks, Black Boy by Richard Wright, and Black like Me by John Howard Griffin. All contained the offending "N" word and all are gone from the list.

My experience is that students are drawn naturally to stories of justice, mercy, fairness, selflessness and honour, especially when handled by great artists. That some students may be embarrassed by such stories is the issue that needs sympathetic address, not wholesale repression, whether the "issue" is race, abortion, divorce, suicide, drug use, social class, teen mothers, terrorism, or whatever might be felt more strongly by certain students than others in an engaged classroom.

Far from "banning" To Kill a Mockingbird from schools, the semi-ban that already exists should be lifted and the book returned to Nova Scotia's list of approved reading. It should not be there because it is so clearly sympathetic and insightful to the powerless condition of blacks in the American South of the Great Depression. It should be there because it is literature.

Brian Bauld teaches in Amherst.