NOT A MONTH after the New Yorker accepted “The Demonstrators” for publication, another southern writer—Harper Lee—wrote to a prominent newspaper editor in Richmond, Virginia, named James Jackson Kilpatrick, complaining that her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, had been misunderstood. First published in 1960, Mockingbird boasted over 3 million copies sold, far beyond anything Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, or even William Faulkner had achieved. Mockingbird also preceded “The Demonstrators” by six years. Long before Welty sat down to pen a story about a white doctor who cared for blacks, in other words, Lee had told a similar story of another white professional, a lawyer, who defended a black client against a rape allegation in a fictional town called Maycomb, Alabama.1
Lee explained the idea behind her lawyer, Atticus Finch, to Kilpatrick in January 1966, after hearing that a local schoolboard in Hanover County, Virginia, had banned her book. Located just north of Richmond, Hanover County had deemed Lee’s book “immoral” for espousing racial integration, an odd claim given that the book, according to Lee, did no such thing. “Surely,” she fumed, “it is plain to the simplest intelligence” that Mockingbird was not immoral but rather expressed in plain language “a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic that is the heritage of all Southerners.”2
The code was the same unwritten code of manners that Flannery O’Connor had extolled, a set of mutually accepted rules that governed race relations in the region, softening the harsh edges of segregation. Few, however, understood this. Not only did Hanover County’s schoolboard mistake Mockingbird as a paean to civil rights, but many readers in the North and West also read her southern lawyer protagonist as a forward-thinking progressive who risked “social ostracism” by representing a black client. Yet, that wasn’t who he was, a point Lee had made more clear in an earlier draft of the story, one that she had delivered to her editor, Tay Hohoff, at J. B. Lippincott in New York in 1957. The manuscript told the story of a young woman—Jean Louise Finch—who lives in New York but returns home to rural Alabama only to learn that her father, Atticus—who she reveres for being kind to blacks—had joined the Citizens’ Councils and come out publicly against Brown v. Board of Education. Jean Louise is shocked, but after some reflection comes to realize that Brown and the emerging civil rights movement had effected an ugly transformation in her father and her town—putting its white and black communities at odds and shattering their old bonds. In one scene, for example, Atticus agrees to represent a black driver guilty of accidentally killing a white pedestrian, but does so only to keep NAACP attorneys, or “buzzards” as he calls them, off the case. Atticus’s anger at the NAACP surprises Jean Louise, who recalls that before Brown, Atticus would have represented the very same client simply out of the “goodness” of his heart.3
Later, Jean Louise visits Calpurnia, the black maid who had raised her and her brother, Jem, after their mother died, only to learn that Calpurnia has lost her “compassion” for whites, including Jean Louise. “Cal, Cal, Cal,” laments Jean Louise in anguish when Calpurnia greets her with a “haughty” air at her house. “I’m your baby, have you forgotten me? Why are you shutting me out? What are you doing to me?” Rather than embrace her old ward, Calpurnia blasts Jean Louise with an impersonal, unfamiliar venom, disparaging her by demanding, “what are you all doing to us?”4
Calpurnia’s anger and Atticus’s resentment both lead Jean Louise to wonder, “what was this blight that had come down over the people that she loved?” Of course, it turned out to be Brown, just the type of abstract, “higher law” idealism that the North had long imposed on the South, the same idealism that Robert Penn Warren complained of in his meditations on civil rights in 1956. Indeed, striking parallels emerge between Watchman and Warren’s 1956 book, Segregation: The Inner Conflict, almost as if Lee had read Warren’s memoir—which came out roughly six months before Lee completed her manuscript. For example, Warren recounted a meeting with a Citizens’ Council leader who spouted many of the same ideas that a Citizens’ Council speaker does in Watchman. Likewise, notions of race-mixing, civilizational decline, and so on appear. Warren recoiled at this rhetoric, as did Jean Louise, who goes on to advance a more sensible argument for opposing the Supreme Court that—somewhat uncannily—echoes Warren. For example, Warren argued in Segregation: The Inner Conflict that Brown represented an assault on “constitutionality,” moving the nation “one more step toward the power state, a cunningly calculated step” that expanded federal power under the guise of advancing a “moral issue.” Jean Louise makes a similar argument to Atticus, complaining that “to meet the real needs of a small portion of the population, the Court set up something horrible,” a precedent that “rubbed out” states’ rights and left the nation without “much check on the Court.”5
More similarities stand out as well, like when Warren suggested that Brown had worsened race relations in the region, a point that Lee confirmed when Jean Louise visits Calpurnia only to find that she has “forgotten” about Jean Louise, lumping her together with “white folks.” “It was not always like this,” laments Jean Louise after Calpurnia snubs her. “She loved us, I swear she loved us.” Now, however, that love is gone. “She didn’t see me,” complains Jean Louise, “she saw white folks.” Calpurnia’s replacement, Atticus’s sister Alexandra, confirms the new paradigm when she explains to Jean Louise that “nobody in Maycomb goes to see Negroes anymore,” not after the NAACP had “filled ’em with poison till it runs out of their ears.”6
Even though Maycomb’s whites suspect their black neighbors of being corrupted by outside activists, Lee agreed with Warren that there was a fifth column of decency in the South, a substantial cadre of whites who were themselves sympathetic to the black plight, a point Lee confirmed by noting that “the woods are full of people” like Jean Louise, who feels compassion for African Americans. However, such southerners felt constrained by a cultural aversion to collective efforts at reform, preferring to focus on their relationships with “individuals.”7
While the parallels between Lee’s manuscript and Warren’s Inner Conflict may have been accidental, merely common sentiments felt by educated white southerners generally, Hohoff rejected the draft. Perhaps she felt the story redundant, too similar to Warren’s recent piece, or simply not interesting enough to sell. Instead, she urged Lee to recast her tale in the impoverished, pre–civil rights 1930s, when Atticus and Calpurnia got along and Calpurnia cared unselfishly for “Scout” and Jem as children. The request pressed Lee to shift the narrator’s perspective from a twenty-six-year-old liberal living in New York City to a child who knew nothing but Jim Crow. The resulting manuscript, which Lee titled To Kill a Mockingbird, yielded a less bitter Atticus, a less venomous Calpurnia, and a more innocent, endearing South.8
Lee centered her story around the alleged rape of a white woman, Mayella Ewell, by a black man, Tom Robinson, who came to be represented at trial by Atticus Finch, now a much younger attorney who decides early on that Robinson is innocent of all charges and that Mayella has falsely accused him of rape after getting caught trying to seduce him by her father. Although Robinson emerges as an obvious mockingbird (someone innocent who should not be killed), Lee sprinkled her story with other innocents as well, none more prominent than Atticus himself, whose last name also connotes a harmless songbird. As Lee told it, Finch was representative of the white southern elite, a descendant of a slave-owning cotton planter who “knew his people” and was “related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in town,” a stark counterpoint to Zora Neale Hurston’s Jim Meserve. Conveniently, Atticus had suffered loss, his wife, whose death presses him to rely heavily on his black maid, Calpurnia, to raise his two children. Although Atticus and Calpurnia interact daily, they refrain from physical intimacy, enabling Lee to make a point about the close bonds that existed between whites and blacks in the South, a notion underscored by Calpurnia’s own name, an allusion to Julius Caesar’s third and final wife. A quasi-wife to Atticus, Calpurnia loves him and the children but remains Platonic, as does Atticus, his own name an allusion to the ancient Greek region of Attica, home to Socrates, Aristotle, and, of course, Plato.9
That the South embodied a classical, if unequal society was an argument that whites had long made, not least the Nashville Agrarians in the 1920s. However, Lee went out of her way to cast this society in an endearing light, peppering it with quirky characters like the mysterious “Boo Radley,” a neighbor who rarely leaves his house; the Averys, whose house burns down; Miss Rachel, who is elderly and single; and Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose, a dowager rumored to keep “a CSA pistol concealed among her numerous shawls and wraps.” By contrast, the villains of the story turn out to be the Ewells, a particularly lazy, low-class, “contentious” family who are widely considered to be the “disgrace of Maycomb,” not unlike the white trash in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation.” Blacks inhabit the story primarily as servants—not just Finch’s Calpurnia but also “a Negro girl” who works for Mrs. Dubose and Calpurnia’s son Zeebo, a garbage man. While Calpurnia uses the n-word to refer to lower-status blacks, Atticus chastises Scout for saying it, telling her it is “common,” again an allusion to his decent nature.10
Finch’s respectful attitude toward African Americans continues through his representation of Tom Robinson, a member of Calpurnia’s church who hails from “clean-living folks” and stands in stark contrast to Mayella Ewell, who emerges as a lascivious, treacherous figure. Finch comes to see his representation of Robinson as a matter of honor, noting that if he did not represent the black defendant, then he “couldn’t hold up my head in town . . . couldn’t represent this county in the legislature,” and as he explained to his children, “couldn’t even tell you or Jem not to do something again.” In a startling sentence, Finch likens the defense of Robinson to the South’s fight in the Civil War, noting that “simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,” a hint that the true meaning of the war was not the preservation of slavery so much as the upholding of a code of chivalric honor that had existed in the antebellum period. “This time we aren’t fighting the Yankees,” explains Atticus to Scout, “we’re fighting our friends. But remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they’re still our friends and this is still our home.” Much like Warren, Lee portrayed the South’s struggle as an inner conflict, a battle between the best elements of the region, what Warren called its “fifth column of decency,” and its baser elements, its proponents of violence and hate, its “Ewells.”11
The best elements emerged, in Lee’s telling, as the mockingbirds of the story—and perhaps of the civil rights era. Atticus proved to be one, a “feeble” man with an innocent bird’s name, “nearly blind in his left eye,” who is older than most parents in town and who plays checkers and the “Jews-Harp” instead of football and hunting. He gives Scout and Jem air rifles, telling them that “it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” on account that “they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us,” the only time, in Scout’s memory, that she “ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something.” The link between sin and mockingbirds underscored the moral message of the novel, which obscured the sin of segregation by focusing on individuals or groups who were compassionate, sympathetic, and adhered to a high level of personal standards or manners. Clearly, this applied to Tom Robinson, whose death the local paper compares “to the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children,” and it also applied to Atticus Finch, an upstanding white gentlemen who defends a black client.12
To further drive home her point, Lee made Finch a natural marksman, “the deadest shot in Maycomb County,” who refuses to use his capacity for violence for any reason save to help the innocent. “If your father’s anything,” explains a neighbor to Jem and Scout, “he’s civilized in his heart. Marksmanship’s a gift from God, a talent—oh, you have to practice to make it perfect, but shooting’s different from playing the piano or the like.” At first blush a harmless, half-blind checker-player, Atticus suddenly proves to be a born killer, a white southerner capable of just the type of violence that northerners associated with southern whites generally. However, Finch curbs his violent tendencies, subordinating them to a higher code of civility and honor. As “Miss Maudie” explains to Jem and Scout, “I think maybe he [Atticus] put his gun down when he realized that God had given him an unfair advantage over most living things. I guess he decided he wouldn’t shoot till he had to, and he had to today.” In a scene that shocks the children, Finch shoots a rabid dog in the street “with movements so swift they seemed simultaneous,” killing the dog before he even knew “what hit him.” As Scout moves to inform her friends of the shooting, Jem stops her, cautioning that a celebration of Atticus’s violent capabilities would only diminish his stature. “Don’t say anything about it, Scout,” Jem declares. “Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!”13
The motif of the gentleman recurs throughout the book, tracing a code of conduct that, to Lee’s mind, characterized the best elements of the white South. For example, when Jem and Scout are tempted to retaliate against Mrs. Dubose for insulting their father, Atticus replies, “just hold your head high and be a gentleman. Whatever she says to you, it’s your job not to let her make you mad.” A clear line divides the emotionally controlled Finches from the town’s angry, lower-class whites: “ignorant, trashy people” who resent anyone “favoring Negroes over and above themselves.” Atticus, by contrast, confesses to liking blacks after Scout asks him whether he was a “nigger lover.” “I certainly am,” declares Atticus, “I do my best to love everybody.”14
Just as Welty critiqued northern liberals in “The Demonstrators,” so did Lee in Mockingbird, though her jabs were more subtle. For example, at one point Scout declares that “helping ourselves to someone’s scuppernongs was part of our ethical culture,” a subtle dig at the “ethical culture” school of thought founded by Felix Adler in 1877, a Jewish thinker from New York who declared that morality need not be tethered to religion, and that religion had in fact failed to address the pressing moral issues of the day. Lee also featured a discussion among Maycomb’s leading ladies about northern approaches to racial matters during which a Mrs. Grace Merriweather declares that Yankee liberals were “born hypocrites.” “At least we don’t have that sin [hypocrisy] on our shoulders down here,” proclaims Merriweather. “People up there set ’em free, but you don’t see ’em settin’ at the table with ’em. At least we don’t have the deceit to say to ’em yes you’re as good as we are but stay away from us. Down here we just say you live your way and we’ll live ours.” In keeping with this pluralist observation, Lee presented the black South as a separate society, one that whites needed permission to enter. This becomes apparent when Calpurnia takes Scout and Jem to her church in the black section of Maycomb, the “Quarters,” where they are promptly confronted by a “bullet-headed” woman with “strange almond-shaped eyes” named Lula, who demands to know “why you bringin’ white chillum to nigger church.” Calpurnia responds by saying that the children were her “comp’ny” to which Lula blurts, “you ain’t got no business bringin’ white chillum here—they got their church, we got our’n.” After Calpurnia prevails, the children quickly confront a very different atmosphere to what they are accustomed, including “no sign of piano, organ, hymn-books, church programs—the familiar ecclesiastical impedimenta we saw every Sunday,” but rather a congregation who sang hymns by “linin’,” or repeating spoken-word verses announced by the minister, a practice common in African American churches in the South. Meanwhile, the children are shocked to learn that Calpurnia speaks “colored-folks talk” when she is around other African Americans, not the “white-folks talk” that they are used to hearing from her. “That Calpurnia leads a modest double life never dawned on me,” muses Scout, reflecting on the discernible contrasts between the white and black worlds of Maycomb.15
Comfortable in their own part of town, “the Quarters,” Maycomb’s black community does not come across as a particularly beleaguered group. They are poor, to be sure, but so are Maycomb’s whites, including the Finches. Atticus’s practice has suffered during the Depression, a point he makes to Scout by noting that “professional people were poor because the farmers were poor,” and “nickels and dimes were hard to come by for doctors and dentists and lawyers” like himself.16
The same could not be said for the town’s mixed-race residents. “They’re real sad,” proclaims Jem, referencing a family of mixed-race children fathered by a white drunk named Dolphus Raymond. “They don’t belong anywhere,” explains Jem. “Colored folks won’t have ’em because they’re half white; white folks won’t have ’em ’cause they’re colored, so they’re just in-betweens, don’t belong anywhere.” This was the same argument that Faulkner had made in Absalom, Absalom! and Warren had made in Band of Angels, where Amantha Starr’s primary challenge is not that she finds herself a slave after her father’s death but that she is of mixed-race heritage and does not truly feel like she belongs.17
Although committed to racial separation, Finch’s status within the black community soars when he rises to defend Tom Robinson, “a faithful member” of Calpurnia’s church, a point underscored by Reverend Sykes, who confesses to Jem and Scout that “this church has no better friend than your daddy.” Meanwhile, Atticus contemplates the possibility that a white mob might seize Robinson and kill him before his trial, a question that allows the lawyer to distinguish the civilized white people of Maycomb from lower-class whites, including that “Old Sarum bunch,” the Cunninghams, who are known to binge drink and “get shinnied up.” “We don’t have mobs and that nonsense in Maycomb,” explains Atticus to Scout and Jem, further noting that the Ku Klux Klan boasts no support in the town and had actually been shamed out of existence by a local Jewish businessman named Sam Levy. “Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a Klan,” Atticus tells his children. “They paraded by Mr. Sam Levy’s house one night, but Sam just stood on his porch and told ’em things had come to a pretty pass, he’d sold ’em the very sheets on their backs. Sam made ’em so ashamed of themselves they went away.” Finch’s story diminishes the Klan’s reputation, even as it extols Maycomb’s tolerance for diversity, in this case its acceptance of Jews. “The Levy family met all criteria for being Fine Folks,” remembers Scout, “they did the best they could with the sense they had, and they had been living on the same plot of ground in Maycomb for five generations.” Despite their longstanding tenure in Maycomb, in other words, the Levys remained distinct—but respected—scions of the plural South. As Scout’s teacher Miss Gates explains to her, “There are no better people in the world than Jews . . . They contribute to every society they live in, and most of all, they are a deeply religious people.” This was a clear parallel to arguments made by Warren and, of course, Zora Neale Hurston, who hailed Jews as exemplars of a minority that bore special cultural gifts.18
In stark contrast to “Fine Folks” like the Levys were the Ewells, “the disgrace of Maycomb for three generations,” people who “lived like animals” and had “never done an honest day’s work” but were nevertheless granted certain dispensations because their depravity was immutable. “There are ways of keeping them in school by force,” explains Atticus, “but it’s silly to force people like the Ewells into a new environment.” Reforming the Ewells, Lee implied, was impossible. Just as Finch emerges as an iconic version of the southern gentleman, so too do the Ewells become caricatures of implacable reprobates who exist beyond the reaches of the law. “Every town the size of Maycomb had families like the Ewells,” recalls Scout. “No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and the diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings.” The Ewells occupy a rung of Maycomb’s social ladder even lower than its blacks, their livelihood gleaned in large part by scavenging the town’s dump “every day” for food and reusable items, a dump presided over by Calpurnia’s eldest son, Zeebo, the town’s “garbage collector,” who Calpurnia has taught to read from the Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries.19
More complicated are the Cunninghams, a farm family whose son Walter had “hookworms” from going “barefooted in barnyards and hog wallows” but who otherwise “never took anything they can’t pay back.” Although poor, the Cunninghams work hard, refusing to accept public money. However, they also constitute a menacing presence, threatening violent retaliation against any perceived slights by blacks against whites. For example, Mr. Cunningham’s sinister side emerges on the night prior to Tom Robinson’s trial, when he joins a mob of white men aiming to seize Robinson and kill him. In one of the novel’s most improbable scenes, Scout confronts the mob and engages Cunningham on the topic of his son, prompting the man to abandon the mission. “I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” promises Cunningham, “then he straightened up and waved a big paw. ‘Let’s clear out,’ he called. ‘Let’s get going, boys.’”20
Lee’s inclusion of a lynch mob in Mockingbird introduced the question of white vigilante violence, precisely the kind of violence that had killed Emmett Till. In Lee’s telling, however, Scout humanizes the killers, softening them to a point that even a young girl could dissuade them from murder. As Atticus explains to Jem, “a mob’s always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man.” Precisely for this reason, Scout’s innocent, childlike appeal is able to stop the murder. “That proves something,” argues Atticus, “that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human.” Atticus concludes that precisely because mobs are composed of average folks, appeals to higher principles, including southern manners, could move them. “Hmp,” he declares, “maybe we need a police force of children . . . you children last night made Walter Cunningham stand in my shoes for a minute. That was enough.”21
Scout’s improbable presence is not the only force for good in the white community; so too is Atticus, who decides to guard Robinson’s cell, and Braxton Underwood, the editor of the Maycomb Tribune, who “covered” Atticus with a “double-barreled shotgun” from his newspaper’s window. Of course, neither helps Robinson in his trial, particularly after a jury made up entirely of “farmers,” some of whom “looked vaguely like dressed-up Cunninghams,” are selected to decide his fate. Atticus tries to explain to the jury that Tom had taken pity on Mayella Ewell and agreed to help her complete chores around her home. Mayella, however, had developed designs on Tom and tried to seduce him, a violation of the cardinal rule of Jim Crow, namely the prohibition against interracial intimacy, or what Atticus terms “a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with.” Rather than critique the code, Atticus blasts Mayella for flouting it. “She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance,” he declares, “but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.” This, to Atticus, was unacceptable. “She did something that in our society is unspeakable,” he proclaims, “[she] kissed a black man.” Her father’s subsequent response, which was to call the sheriff and accuse Robinson of rape, was, Atticus continues, actually understandable. “We do know in part what Mr. Ewell did,” declares Finch; “he did what any God-fearing, persevering, respectable white man would do under the circumstances—he swore out a warrant.”22
Finch’s argument showcased Lee’s complex take on Jim Crow, her sense that it embodied an ancient “code,” violations of which led to tragedy. However, African Americans were also due respect and fair treatment under the law. “We know all men are not created equal,” proclaims Atticus. “Some people are born smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others.” However, “there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal,” he continues; “our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal,” a point similar to the one that Warren had made in his 1929 essay “The Briar Patch.”23
While the farmer-filled jury delivers a guilty verdict, the black spectators in the court room stand as Atticus walks out, hailing him; meanwhile, black families across Maycomb inundate the Finches with “enough food to bury the family,” bringing Atticus to tears. Not only does Maycomb’s black population celebrate Atticus’s work for Robinson but so too does the town’s best white citizens. “We’re so rarely called on to be Christians,” explains Miss Maudie to Jem and Scout, “but when we are, we’ve got men like Atticus to go for us.” Of course, Atticus remains conservative in his views on race, confident that Jim Crow would have protected Robinson had Mayella Ewell not violated it. The only laws that needed changing, argues Atticus, are minor ones, including rules of evidence in capital cases. “He said he didn’t have any quarrel with the rape statute, none whatever, but he did have deep misgivings when the state asked for and the jury gave a death penalty on purely circumstantial evidence.” The problem with juries extended, in Atticus’s mind, to their composition. They excluded women (something the Supreme Court would not fix until 1975 in Taylor v. Louisiana) and educated townspeople who weren’t “interested” in serving, or were “afraid” that they might have to decide a case against one of their neighbors. “Why don’t people like us and Miss Maudie ever sit on juries?” asks Jem, providing Atticus with a chance to explain that “we generally get the juries that we deserve.” “What if—say, Mr. Link Deas had to decide the amount of damages to award, say, Miss Maudie,” Finch continues, “when Miss Rachel ran over her with a car. Link wouldn’t like the thought of losing either lady’s business at his store, would he? So he tells Judge Taylor that he can’t serve on the jury because he doesn’t have anybody to keep store for him while he’s gone.” The tendency of juries to be made up of lower-class, uneducated whites was a dubious assertion that Lee made to underscore class divisions in the Deep South, a point illustrated by Jem, who argues that “there’s four kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there’s the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes.” This, of course, was the same point that Ruby Turpin had made in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation.”24
To underscore the importance of class in the South, Lee had Scout argue that “there’s just one kind of folks. Folks,” a point that prompts Jem to unravel one of the driving questions of the first half of the book, namely the distinction between the upstanding elements of the white community and the debased, white-trash Ewells. “If there’s just one kind of folks,” posits Jem, “why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?” This child’s question implied that the white South was at odds with itself, prompting Jem to draw a distinction between southerners who possess “background” and southerners who do not. Those who possess “background,” argues Jem, were educated. “Background doesn’t mean Old Family” he suggests, but rather “how long your family’s been readin’ and writin’.” Such folks, in turn, made up the “handful” of whites in Maycomb who “say that fair play is not marked White Only” and that “a fair trial is for everybody, not just us,” all points of view shared by individuals “with background.” Jem’s ruminations on background lead him, oddly, to a revelation about their mysterious neighbor Boo Radley. “Scout,” he claims, “I think I’m beginning to understand something. I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all the time . . . it’s because he wants to stay inside.”25
Boo Radley’s significance becomes clear at the end of the novel, when he emerges to save Scout and Jem from an attack by Bob Ewell on Halloween night. Ewell stalks the children and assaults them with a knife, only to be thwarted and then killed by Boo, who seizes the knife and stabs Ewell. Throughout, Lee describes Radley in ghostlike terms, including his nickname “Boo,” as well as his “sickly white hands,” “colorless” eyes, and the fact that “he drifted” when he walked. Radley’s appearance on Halloween raises the question whether he, too, may in fact have been wearing a costume, a mask for something deeper, more symbolic—something haunting the town. Lee hinted at what this might be on the night of Bob Ewell’s death—just after Radley “drifted” home—when Atticus sits by Jem’s bed and reads Robert Franc Schulkers’s The Gray Ghost, a children’s story from the 1920s about a young protagonist named “Stoner’s Boy” who embarks on a series of misadventures with his friends. In Ghost, Stoner’s Boy is falsely accused of vandalizing a rival gang’s clubhouse, only to be vindicated at the end of the book, leading Atticus to tell Scout, in Mockingbird’s final scene, that “most people” are nice “when you finally see them.”26
The line appeared to be a nod to Radley, who emerges as a hero at the end of Mockingbird. However, the story evoked more than just the adventures of a children’s hero. For anyone familiar with the Civil War, the real “Gray Ghost” was Colonel John Singleton Mosby, a Confederate guerrilla who became known for his surprise attacks on Union forces. Born in Powhatan County, Virginia, in 1833, Mosby attended the University of Virginia, studied classics, and then practiced law before volunteering in the Confederate Army, eventually becoming legendary for his ability to operate behind enemy lines, mounting surprise raids and then disappearing—like a ghost.27
Mosby proved one of the “most-popular Confederate heroes” of the South, a popularity that surged in the 1950s when CBS dedicated a television series to his life. “Once each week for thirty minutes,” notes historian James A. Ramage, “in thirty-nine episodes, Mosby thrilled families throughout the nation with his daring and cunning raids against the Union army.” Even if Lee had not been a Civil War buff, in other words, she likely knew, and knew that her readers knew, Mosby’s story, which was televised nationally from 1957 to 1958 just as she wrote Mockingbird. In fact, The Gray Ghost drew criticism in September 1957 when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus moved to block the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, prompting President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send in federal troops. CBS executives feared that it might prove awkward to “have a Confederate raider humiliating the Union cavalry each week on television” as Faubus flaunted the federal government, leading it to devolve decisions about airing the program to local stations. Only one station, in Boston, cut the show. Most embraced it, generating a huge “ratings success” and an audience of “21 million” viewers.28
Atticus Finch’s interest in The Gray Ghost during the final scene of To Kill a Mockingbird was no accident. Like Mockingbird itself, Gray Ghost was a children’s story that evoked the legend of a Confederate hero who fought an insurgent war against the North, a war that Atticus actually claimed was being refought in the dispute over Tom Robinson. Of course, for Atticus the war was not about reinstating slavery so much as defeating the South’s worst forces, its violent, uneducated, base elements, replacing them with the honor, decency, and mutual respect that he, and Harper Lee, believed to characterize the best of the region. That Atticus picks up Gray Ghost on the night Bob Ewell attempts to kill his children invited readers to draw a link between him and Mosby, a southern hero who fought a principled, guerilla war against the North.29
If Atticus was one version of Mosby, an heroic embodiment of southern ideals who was not afraid to defend a black man in public, Radley was another, a silent southerner who believed in the good but was too afraid to get involved, preferring to remain behind closed doors. Even Radley’s real name, “Arthur,” evoked the chivalric ideal, as did his conduct when he kills Ewell to save Scout and Jem, vindicating those with “background” over the white “trash” that “you have to shoot before you can say hidy to ’em.”30
Both Atticus and Sheriff Tate refuse to link Radley to the crime, even though he has a legitimate defense of protecting the children, for fear that it would be a “sin” to take “the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an’ drag him with his shy ways into the limelight.” This was the second mention of sin in the book, the first having referenced the killing of mockingbirds. Radley, of course, emerges as the third mockingbird, a ghostly representative of the silent, or what Robert Penn Warren called “secret,” South that believed in right and wrong but remained out of view. Scout underscores this, explaining to Finch that to arrest Radley would be “sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?”31
By identifying Radley as a “mockingbird,” Lee suggested that her story was not simply about the railroading of Tom Robinson, a mockingbird, but also the railroading of the decent elements of the white South, Radley and Finch. For example, Lee downplayed the racial oppression inherent in Jim Crow by focusing on problems with the law of sentencing, not segregation. If anything, segregation emerged as a useful arrangement, a system that would have saved Tom Robinson from prosecution had Mayella Ewell only adhered to it. Robinson’s problems were further exacerbated by the close proximity between his and the Ewells’ home near the dump, a problem that would not have arisen had he resided where he belonged, in the “Quarters.”
Published in 1960, Mockingbird garnered generally positive reviews, though none picked up on Lee’s rehabilitation of white southerners or her subtle defense of segregation. Writing for the New York Times, Frank H. Lyell noted that Atticus represented “the embodiment of fearless integrity, magnanimity, and common sense,” a sympathetic character who defied “the current lust for morbid, grotesque tales of Southern depravity.” Lee’s book, claimed Lyell, amounted to a “level-headed plea for interracial understanding.” Author Herbert Mitgang took the book to be an exploration of the “opening of the eyes of Southern childhood to the dreary facts of Negro-white injustices.” Mitgang read the book as a lesson in the evils of racial oppression, noting that Atticus is “deeply concerned with imparting a sense of justice to his children,” particularly the “accepted injustice” that characterized the Southern “way of life.” Phoebe Adams reviewed the book for the Atlantic Monthly, commenting that Atticus was a “liberal, honest man” who defended “a Negro accused of raping a white girl” while raising his children with “angelic cleverness,” ultimately yielding “pleasant, undemanding reading.”32
That Lee chose to voice her position on the book six years later, after a Virginia schoolboard banned it, underscored her understanding of the work not as a manifesto for the civil rights movement but as a defense of the South. Lee’s invocation of honor and heritage implied that the book was not about racial integration or rights so much as something inherited from Dixie’s past, an unwritten “code,” as she put it, governing interracial conduct in the region. Lee’s lead character Atticus Finch invokes such a code when explaining to his daughter why the South fought the Civil War and argues that the very same code compels him to defend Tom Robinson. If it was a sin to kill a mockingbird under the theory that it caused no harm, so too was it a sin to kill a finch. Genteel, sympathetic, and respectful to blacks, Atticus shared little in common with the demagogues and thugs who had come to characterize the region during the weeks and months that Lee spent writing her novel, such as populists like Orval Faubus and murderers like J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the killers of Emmett Till.33