featuring:
Also, James Agee, Charles J. Shields, Flannery O’Connor
I
I must have been thirteen when I first read the book, a first edition hardback given to me by my father. The year was 1960, and I was ripe for an adventure story—three Southern children about my age, spending idyllic summers in the delicious, seductive fear of Boo Radley. My father, I think, saw other things. He was an Alabama judge possessing some of the same qualities as Atticus Finch, a quiet and unobtrusive understanding that occasionally a person is compelled to take a stand, despite a powerful preference to the contrary.
In addition to that, my father was proud that the author of To Kill a Mockingbird came from Monroe County, Alabama. That was where his own family had put down roots, making the trek from South Carolina to a place on the bluffs of the Alabama River. It was 1832, and those were dangerous times in Alabama. President Andrew Jackson had decreed that all Indians east of the Mississippi River be removed to Oklahoma, and as the Creeks who lived in Lower Alabama began their mournful Trail of Tears, there were assorted skirmishes with renegade bands.
The Gaillards, however, made their journey safely enough, and by the early years of the twentieth century were living in the village of Purdue Hill, just a few miles from Harper Lee’s home. My father, like Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird, spent his boyhood summers there, sharing a favored swimming hole with the snakes, blissfully convinced that a moccasin would drown if it tried to bite a young boy in the water. My father’s stories, as well as my own from an active childhood, blended easily with those of Harper Lee, and the adventures of Jem and Scout and Dill were as real to me as if I had been there.
But I think I sensed even then a deeper resonance for the members of my family. The faded aristocracy of the Finches, their indifference to money, and their graceful stewardship of prominence could have described the Gaillards just as well. There was, of course, a darker underside to the story—one that divided my family, as it did many others, when To Kill a Mockingbird first appeared. Though the novel was set in the 1930s, the issues it raised were still unresolved.
Harper Lee was a child when the backdrop of Mockingbird came into focus. She was luckier than some, shielded by the relative prosperity of her family, but she had to know even so that Alabama in the ’30s was a desperate place—“a world coming apart,” in the words of historian Wayne Flynt. The Depression landed hard on the rural parts of the state, so much so that when the great American writer James Agee set out to discover the face of Southern poverty, he came to Hale County in the Alabama Black Belt.
In his iconic book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee entered the lives of white sharecroppers and offered a glimpse of grimness made even more vivid by the accompanying photographs of Walker Evans. Through Evans’s lens—and the haunted eyes of his subjects—we could see the pain, the battered dignity and despair that we later encountered in the Cunninghams and Ewells of To Kill a Mockingbird.
But among the real families of Harper Lee’s childhood, life was defined by more than the grinding misery of being poor. There was also the desperate issue of race. In the 1930s, as hard times amplified the tension, a rash of lynching and racial violence spread from the Black Belt all the way to Birmingham. On July 4, 1930, when Lee was only four years old, there was a startling case in the Sumter County town of Emelle, just a few miles northwest of Monroeville. A sharecropper by the name of Tom Robertson—a name, of course, only one syllable removed from the black hero of To Kill a Mockingbird—had argued with a white storekeeper about the price of a battery. On Independence Day, a mob appeared outside his cabin, and in self-defense Robertson opened fire with his shotgun.
Somehow, in the raging battle that followed, Robertson managed to escape. But four members of his family were lynched, and Robertson himself was captured two months later. On January 2, 1931, he died in the Alabama electric chair.
If it was a terrifying moment in southern Alabama, it was quickly overshadowed by events further north. In the town of Scottsboro near the Tennessee line, one of the most celebrated cases in Alabama history became a topic of conversation all over the state, and certainly in the home of young Harper Lee. On March 25, 1931, barely three months after the execution of Tom Robertson, a posse of whites arrested nine black hoboes on a freight train passing through the town of Paint Rock. Initially, the Negroes were wanted for assault—for fighting with a group of white boys on the train—but when the engine pulled into the Paint Rock station, two white women emerged from a boxcar and announced to the posse that they had been raped.
The doctors who examined the women weren’t convinced. Victoria Price and Ruby Bates were neither battered nor bloody, as they should have been if they had been attacked by nine young men; and though there was evidence of sexual intercourse, the doctors found no vaginal tearing and no living sperm—strange if the rape had happened less than two hours earlier, as Bates and Price both insisted that it had. When one of the physicians, Dr. Marvin Lynch, suggested to the women that they were lying, he reported later that they simply laughed.
Nevertheless, the doomed defendants were hauled off to jail, the nearest of which was in the town of Scottsboro. As newspapers around Alabama trumpeted the story of “Nine Black Fiends,” only the heroism of the local sheriff managed to keep a lynch mob at bay.
The trial that followed was quick and efficient. All nine defendants were convicted of rape, and eight were sentenced to death. Only Roy Wright, barely thirteen, was spared because of his tender years. On appeal, however, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction, ruling that “the Scottsboro Boys,” as they were by then known, had been denied adequate legal representation. The drunken real estate attorney assigned to their defense, who had met his clients on the morning of the trial, offered no closing arguments in their behalf.
But if the original trial had been a caricature of Southern justice, the next one was not. It landed on the docket of Judge James Horton, who could well have been the model for Atticus Finch. To lawyers, juries, and even to defendants who came through his court, Horton was known for his informality and fairness, his commitment to equality in the eyes of the law. Like most white Alabamians, he entered the trial believing that the Scottsboro Boys were guilty. But as the testimony unfolded, he began to have his doubts.
Victoria Price, the Boys’ chief accuser, struck him as shrill and evasive on the stand, but even more telling was the testimony of Dr. R. R. Bridges, one of the two physicians. Bridges testified that the sperm he found in Mrs. Price were “non-motile,” which was nearly impossible if she had just been raped. And then came a decisive, off-the-record moment. During a break in the trial, the other doctor, Marvin Lynch, asked to speak to the judge in private. In the men’s room, with the court bailiff standing guard near the door, Lynch told Horton that in his opinion there had been no rape. The medical evidence was simply not there.
The judge, who had spent a year in medical school before he entered the study of law, understood the importance of that kind of evidence. He urged Lynch to take the witness stand, but decided not to compel his testimony. He knew it could ruin the young doctor’s career. But when the jury came in with a verdict of guilty, Horton decided he had to overturn it. Though it was within the power of a judge to do so, it was not a step to be taken lightly. For one thing, Horton believed in juries, believed in the ability of men duly sworn (all of them white, in those days) to deliver the most impartial verdict that they could. But he also knew that passions inflamed by the issue of race could lead them astray—and this, he concluded, was one of those times.
On June 22, 1933, citing contradictions in Price’s testimony and the medical evidence casting doubt on the crime, Horton issued a ruling that stunned and enraged many white Alabamians:
“Deliberate injustice is more fatal to the one who imposes it than to the one on whom it is imposed,” he declared. “The victim may die quickly and his suffering cease, but the teachings of Christianity and the uniform lesson of all history illustrate without exception that its perpetrators not only pay the penalty themselves, but their children through endless generations . . .
“It is therefore ordered and adjudged by the Court . . . that the verdict of the jury in this case and the judgment of the Court sentencing this defendant to death be set aside and that a new trial is hereby ordered.”
Horton understood as he said it that his political career had come to an end. He would never be reelected as judge. But he also knew that even in Alabama, there were people who would understand what he did. And indeed there were. The members of the bar in his hometown of Athens wrote him a letter, signed by every lawyer in the town, declaring him to be “a judge of unimpeachable character and integrity.”
The lawyers may not have put it this way, but on some level they must have regarded the judge as an archetype of Southern manhood. He had never wanted the Scottsboro case, never sought the fame or notoriety that it brought him. But when duty called, he remembered the Latin teachings of his mother: “Justitia fiat coelum ruat—Let justice be done though the Heavens may fall.”
All of this made sense to Harper Lee. Coming of age at the time of the Scottsboro case, she understood the passions of her place, as well as the strength it took to resist them. And she thought she saw some of that strength in her father.
A. C. Lee, like Atticus Finch, was a pillar of the community in which he lived. In 1926, he was elected by the citizens of Monroeville to serve them in the state legislature, and as a lawyer and local newspaper editor, he was widely regarded by his friends and neighbors as a man of integrity. One of Harper Lee’s biographers, Charles J. Shields, argues persuasively that Mr. Lee almost certainly played a role in the case of Walter Lett, a black man convicted of rape in Monroe County.
Since Lett’s accuser was a white woman, nobody was surprised by the guilty verdict, or the sentence of death in the electric chair. But before the sentence could be carried out, on May 11, 1934, some of Monroeville’s leading citizens, apparently including Lee, petitioned the governor on Lett’s behalf. There was doubt, they said, about his guilt, for it was not uncommon for some white women—particularly those of a certain class—to cry rape in defense of their own reputations.
At the urging of such upright citizens, the governor commuted Lett’s sentence to life in prison, but Lett by then had been driven insane. His cell in Alabama’s Kilby Prison was only a few feet from the electric chair, and he had heard the sounds of other executions—the rush of the current, the screams of the dying—and he had simply snapped. “He now lies in a state of catalepsy,” wrote the prison physician at Kilby, “and demonstrates fairly definite features of schizophrenia.”
On July 30, 1934, Lett was moved to the Searcy Hospital for the Insane, an all-black facility in Mt. Vernon, Alabama, where he died three years later of tuberculosis.
It is impossible to say—and Harper Lee never has—exactly which pieces of this troubled history served as a model for To Kill a Mockingbird. Certainly, it’s true that the Scottsboro case was more complex than the story of Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson. In Scottsboro, there were nine defendants, multiple appeals and stays of execution, four paroles, four dropped charges, and a daring escape. None of that happens in Harper Lee’s story. But there was the inspirational story of Judge Horton, and the obstreperous example of Victoria Price—her dogged evasions on the witness stand and the wounded defiance that Mayella Ewell would exhibit in the novel.
More broadly, there was also the fact, as Miss Lee said later, that the Scottsboro case “will more than do as an example . . . of deep-South attitudes on race.” But such examples abounded in the 1930s, many of them close to Harper Lee’s home, and for a writer with an eye as keen as hers the leap was really not very large to the characters that began to take shape in her novel.
The transitions, however, did not come easily. Many readers were startled to learn later on, given the grace and certainty of her prose, that Miss Lee had struggled with her story for years. In his unauthorized biography, Mockingbird, Charles Shields offers a dramatic account of her writing—a young author living in a coldwater flat, working with her editor, Tay Hohoff, month after month, draft after draft, becoming so frustrated that at one point she threw her manuscript out the window. Fortunately, she thought better of it and retrieved the pages from the Manhattan snow.
But little by little, the narrative finally took on a shape, and the end result was one of the greatest triumphs in American letters. Miss Lee was thirty-four years old on July 11, 1960, when her novel was released to international acclaim. It was an immediate best seller for J. B. Lippincott & Co., won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and a half century later, had sold an astonishing thirty million copies.
All of which raises the question of why. What was it about this particular book that touched the hearts of so many people? And why does it remain, after all this time, as popular as on the day of its release?
Every reader has his or her own answer, but I was struck first of all by the voice. Even as a boy, when I first read the book, I was captivated by the telling of the story—the sense almost of a double narrator, of a woman looking back on her childhood days with the wit and wisdom such perspective might imply; but also of a tomboy child caught entirely in the moment she was living. It struck me as quite a literary feat, for here was young Scout describing the house where Boo Radley lived, or the scene at the Maycomb County Jail, or the petty torments of certain members of her family.
Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants. Aunt Alexandra’s vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year. She hurt my feelings and set my teeth permanently on edge, but when I asked Atticus about it, he said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go on about my business, he didn’t mind me much the way I was.
Every time I’ve ever read the story—and the count by now is closing in on a dozen—I’ve been struck by the singularity of that voice, the distinctiveness in the writing itself, that among other things should have put to rest the odd speculation that Truman Capote actually wrote Lee’s book. It is true that Capote was the model for Dill, and true also that he read a draft of the novel and made suggestions on how to improve it. But the irony and wry humor that give an edge to the story, tempering its generosity of spirit, are pure Harper Lee. All of her letters, all the testimonials of her friends, confirm the originality of her voice, her view of the world that shines so brilliantly from the pages.
This is not Mayberry that she has created. Maycomb, Alabama, is a warts-and-all village full of characters familiar to us all. My own Aunt Alexandra, for example, was a family elder whom I loved very much, a prim school teacher who did her job well and spent her spare time marveling at the heroism of her family. In my aunt’s telling, Southern history would not have been the same without the Gaillards, and that glorious history was marred only by injury inflicted from the North. She had little patience with critics of the South, especially those who should have known better, and in that category she most emphatically included Harper Lee.
“I can’t believe you are reading this book,” she informed me when I was thirteen. When I asked her why, she replied in a way that ended our discussion, “It reads like it could have been written by a child.”
Much later, of course, I came to understand that it was not Lee’s style that offended my aunt, for she, in fact, had never read the book. Like many Southerners, she was driven instead by a ferocious belief in the rectitude of white supremacy, and the article of faith that went along with it—that the South was never wrong, only misunderstood. It is easy to forget, from the vantage point of today, that when To Kill a Mockingbird first appeared, a majority of white Southerners refused to concede its most basic point. They didn’t want to hear about racial injustice, or our whispered history of oppression and violence, no matter how gently that story was told.
And so it was that Atticus Finch became a kind of prophet, a teller of truth in his own native land. Later generations may have found him paternal, or at least unremarkable in his racial understandings. Nevertheless, it was a memorable moment—made more so by Gregory Peck’s performance in the movie—when Atticus stood before Tom Robinson’s jury and proclaimed a truth that would seem unassailable:
. . . there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.
The problem, of course, as Harper Lee’s readers understood very well, sometimes much to their own discomfort, was that there had never been a time or a place in the South in which all men were created equal. Nor did most people want there to be.
Miss Lee was not the first to make that point; she was, in fact, only the latest in a line of women writers who compelled a more honest look at their place. It was a literary tradition, you could argue, that began to take shape in 1940 and became in the course of the next twenty years a force too powerful to be dismissed.
II
In the dog days of August 1940, the great black author, Richard Wright, published a book review in the New Republic. In it he registered his frank astonishment at the achievement of a young writer named Carson McCullers. He was full of praise for McCullers’s first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, comparing it favorably to Hemingway and Faulkner, and marveling at the fact that the writer was only twenty-three years old. But there was something he found even more surprising than McCullers’s tender age.
“To me,” said Wright, “the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.”
The Negro character that McCullers created was Dr. Benedict Copeland, a proud and fiercely intellectual man who hated the injustice he saw all around him. He found white people to be full of condescension, a “quiet insolence,” he often called it, and his despair grew deeper as he saw his own children drift through the aimlessness of Negro life. But Copeland was not the only desperate soul in the Southern mill town of McCullers’s creation. There were also a deaf-mute, a lonely young girl, and an alcoholic white man, who raged against capitalism and greed and flirted with the theories of Karl Marx.
What impressed Richard Wright as he read the story was not only McCullers’s concern for social justice—her quiet explorations of racism and poverty—but also her color-blind empathy for the people of the South. And the question he raised between the lines of his review was whether this was merely an aberration, or whether it might be a beacon of hope. The answer came quickly from two other writers.
First, in 1941, a young Mississippian named Eudora Welty published her first collection of short stories, a volume entitled A Curtain of Green. The closing story was “A Worn Path,” a tale so exquisitely beautiful in its telling that the prose alone left many people speechless.
She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles . . . as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.
The heroine of this eight-page epic is an ancient African American woman on a journey she has made many times. Phoenix Jackson, as the old woman is known, has a little grandson who has swallowed lye, and month after month when his throat swells shut, she follows a torturous path into town, stoic in the face of alligators, dogs, and contemptuous white people, driven by her patient love of a child.
As many critics have noted through the years, this was not a political tale Miss Welty was telling, not specifically racial in its intent. (That would come later in her long and distinguished career when she tried, for example, in one of her stories to enter the mind of a racist assassin.) But at the time it was published in 1941, “A Worn Path” had a powerful effect, for not only was the central character a Negro, she was a woman who carried herself with such courage that the whites she encountered seemed petty and small.
Such was Welty’s affirmation of humanity.
But for me the most impressive of the new women writers—the most unforgettable when I came upon her work in the 1960s—was Lillian Smith, a native Floridian who spent much of her life in Georgia and came from an upper-middle-class family. When I read her book, Killers of the Dream, a collection of essays published in 1949, it occurred to me that she might go down as the bravest Southern writer of all time. Certainly, there has never been one more bold.
Smith’s first taste of notoriety had come with the publication of her novel, Strange Fruit, a story of interracial love which took its title from a Billie Holiday song. Published in 1944, the novel became a national best seller, though it was banned for a time in Massachusetts because of its explicit sexuality. But it was Killers of the Dream that sealed Smith’s fate as a lightning rod of Southern controversy. There had simply never been a book—certainly not one by a white Southern author—that confronted so directly the prevailing way of life in the South.
Smith’s target was segregation itself, not only racial violence or the desperate excesses of the Ku Klux Klan, but the very foundation of Southern society. As her book makes clear, her sense of the absurdity of Jim Crow began to take shape when she was a child. She had overheard her parents talking in whispers. Not far away, a little white-skinned girl was living with Negroes, a scandalous thing in a small Southern town, and many of the neighbors began to speculate that maybe the child had been kidnapped. Against the protests of the black foster family, the little girl was seized by the local authorities and brought to live with Lillian and her family in a rambling farmhouse, full of laughing children, with a garden out back and wide open fields in which to play.
For a few happy weeks, Lillian took delight in this new and sweet-tempered younger sister, who seemed, in turn, to be astonished at her own good fortune. But then one day, a call came in from a Negro orphanage. “There was a meeting at our house,” Smith explained in Killers of the Dream. “Many whispers. All afternoon the ladies went in and out of our house talking to Mother in tones too low for children to hear. As they passed us at play, they looked at Janie and quickly looked away again, though a few stopped and stared at her as if they could not tear their eyes from her face.”
What the ladies of the community had learned was that Janie, despite the fact that her skin was white, was the orphaned child of a Negro family. She was sent back immediately to colored town—to the foster family from whom she was seized—and Lillian and her siblings were told never to speak of the incident again. “You’re too young to understand,” Smith remembers her mother saying, in a command that seemed both brittle and rigid. “And don’t ask me ever again about this!”
For more than thirty years the experience was wiped out of my memory. But that night, and the weeks it was tied to, worked its way like a splinter, bit by bit, down to the hurt places in my memory and festered there. And as I grew older, as more experiences collected around that faithless time, as memories of earlier, more profound hurts crept closer, drawn to that night as if to a magnet, I began to know that people who talked of love and children did not mean it. That is a hard thing for a child to learn. I still admired my parents, there was so much that was strong and vital and sane and good about them and I never forgot this . . . Yet in my heart they were under suspicion . . . I was shamed by their failure and frightened, for I felt they were no longer as powerful as I had thought. There was something Out There that was stronger than they and I could not bear to believe it . . .
As I read that story in Killers of the Dream, I remember thinking that even as late as my own generation, every Southern child probably had some similar experience, some startling moment of racial revelation that may or may not have touched the heart. I certainly did. Though the memory, like Smith’s, had been submerged, there was a day in the early 1950s when I was maybe five years old that my mother and I, along with another member of our family, went to visit a servant who had been taken ill. This elderly African American woman lived in a cabin on the edge of Mobile; only two rooms, as I remember it now, with very little paint and no electricity or indoor plumbing. Children played on the dusty lane leading to similar houses nearby, and I remember being struck, though I was far too young to express it at the time, by the terrible bleakness that must cripple their lives.
“Aren’t these children unhappy?” I remember asking. And my mother, a lovely and kindhearted Southern woman, who would one day emerge as a racial liberal, did her best to stammer out a reply.
“They are not like we are,” she said.
Reading Killers of the Dream, I felt the memory come flooding back, giving added force to Smith’s explanation of how it all came to be. As she understood it, the oppressions of slavery, sharecropping, and segregation compelled Southern whites, who wanted to regard themselves as decent, to regard their African American neighbors as somehow less than human. Otherwise, how could they explain the appalling conditions they saw all around?
That was what it came down to, and from the tangled roots of that belief, which twined back deep into Southern history, came a complex set of notions that produced a society of moral cripples. That was how Smith saw it, and in her unrelenting critique she also argued that our very ability to think was compromised in a fundamental way, for we were compelled every day of our lives to rationalize things that our hearts inevitably understood to be absurd.
I do not remember how or when but by the time I had learned that God is love, that Jesus is His Son and came to give us more abundant life, that all men are brothers with a common Father, I also knew that I was better than a Negro, that all black folks have their place and must be kept in it, that sex has its place and must be kept in it, that a terrifying disaster would befall the South if ever I treated a Negro as my social equal and as terrifying a disaster would befall my family if ever I were to have a baby outside of marriage . . . I learned it the way all of my Southern people learn it: by closing door after door until one’s mind and heart and conscience are blocked off from each other and from reality.
Reading Killers of the Dream in the 1960s, I could not imagine how, in 1949, Lillian Smith found the courage to write it, or why the retributions she faced were not more extreme. Perhaps it was because she had that gift—that ability of Southern writers from Robert Penn Warren to Pat Conroy, Eudora Welty to Willie Morris and Rick Bragg—to create such beauty with the language itself. For even as her poetry helped her to dig through the hardest, least appealing layers of the truth, still she was able to give sweet voice to the things about the South that she loved:
. . . jessamine crawling on fences and trees, giving out a wonder of yellow fragrance, bays blooming white and delicate down in the swamp, and water lilies fattening on green pond water, making you love the loneliness you hate, making you want to stay even as you feel you must leave or die.
III
Lillian Smith developed breast cancer in the 1950s. But even as she fought it, until death finally took her at the age of sixty-eight, she pursued her career as a writer and an activist. In 1955, she published a new book called Now Is the Time, urging compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown decision, and the following year she threw her support behind the Montgomery bus boycott. She soon became friendly with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, and on the night of May 4, 1960, the Kings were driving her to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where Smith was undergoing cancer treatments. A policeman stopped them on the way, curious about this interracial group, and discovered that King, who had recently moved to Atlanta, still had an Alabama driver’s license.
For this misdemeanor offense, King received a one-year suspended prison sentence, and the following fall, when he was arrested during an Atlanta sit-in, the judge revoked the suspension and ordered King to spend four months on a Georgia chain gang. He was led away from the courtroom in chains.
Hearing about these events, Senator John F. Kennedy, who was running for president, picked up the phone and called Coretta Scott King, asking if there was anything he could do. Within a few hours, the senator’s brother, Robert Kennedy, made a private call to the judge in the case and persuaded him to release King on bail. Word quickly spread within the African American community, not only in Atlanta, but nationwide, and for his simple act of compassion John F. Kennedy became a hero. Black Americans, who had voted overwhelmingly Republican in 1956, voted for Kennedy in 1960 by the stunning margin of seventy percent to thirty percent.
Thus did Lillian Smith become a curious footnote to presidential history. But she is remembered, of course, for more than that, for hers was one of the strongest voices in a line of women writers—beginning with McCullers and Eudora Welty—who compelled a more honest look at the South. Flannery O’Connor followed quite importantly in the 1950s with her Southern Gothic characters and dissenting opinions on religion and race, and then Harper Lee. Each of these women, in her own way, left an important literary mark, and each had a powerful effect on the cultural and social history of the region.
There were important differences among them, of course. If Lillian Smith was intentionally political in much of her writing, the others were not. But all were caught inevitably in the current of the times. To Kill a Mockingbird appeared in 1960, the year of the first civil rights sit-ins, and the movie that followed premiered in Alabama at the time of the Birmingham demonstrations—the fire hoses and dogs, and a few months later the bombing of a church in the heart of the city, killing four children and creating a specter of deadly injustice. It was no surprise against such a backdrop that Atticus Finch would emerge as an iconic character, a repository of the sanity and fairness that many white Southerners believed—or hoped—lay dormant somehow in the heart of our place.
Maybe that is why of all the books by these great writers, To Kill a Mockingbird is the most beloved. For many of us, the most appealing thing about Atticus Finch was something profoundly simple and reassuring. He was one of us.