Isms: Original views on life from rural America

Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” is one of my favorite novels. Perhaps it’s because of the lyrical motion of the words she employs in telling the story of Jem and Scout and their father Atticus. Maybe it’s because of the lessons Lee imparts: don’t be judgmental, treat others the way you wish to be treated. I believe it provides a realistic portrayal of life in the deep South during the depression era.

Let’s not sugarcoat it. Lee saw plenty of social injustices growing up in Monroeville, Alabama, the inspiration for fictional Maycomb. Lee’s father, A.C. Lee, a lawyer, formed the template for Atticus in her award-winning novel.

I’ve read the book at least 75 times. Dad introduced the book when I was in high school and our class spent close to a month breaking down the symbolism and analyzing characters and their motives. Five different college classes in which I was enrolled required its reading. And, I taught it twice a year, for 25 years. Every single time I’d find something new to dissect and tie back to that time period or relate it to something currently happening.

Yes, the book is one of the most frequently challenged for myriad reasons, most often cited for excessive violence, depiction of rape and offensive language.

At its heart, though, TKaM offers historical context about time and place, people and persecution. It may be a work of fiction, but it’s a snapshot of life in the south at that precise moment.

That’s why I was shocked to read a “Washington Post”article about a Washington state school district whose English educators deemed the book harmful. So harmful, in fact, that they attempted to “forbid” its teaching at their “liberal school district,” per the “Post.” Teachers from another high school in the district were against the book being banned. In the end, the book was removed from the district’s required reading list for freshman but it was allowed to remain on the district’s approved novels list.

My teacher brain is thinking about how one could incorporate snippets of the novel to help students put it in context and think critically about the text. My teacher brain thinks there are so many quality pieces of literature that never get taught (it’s a shame, really) so maybe the “how to” of teaching literature needs to be evaluated. My teacher brain also thinks there needs to be a stronger connection between reading, applying what you’ve learned and analyzing a situation and its effects throughout history. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, but we need to think how students are going to use information now and in the future, whether that’s reading, writing, math or science.

But 7-year-old LuAnn sees the themes of the novel differently. That’s how old I was when our family spent a summer in North Carolina during the late 1960s - Dad was working on an advanced degree at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro - mere months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I still see the separate lunch counter at the five-and-dime store. I can still hear the employee whispering offensive names about the Blacks who were grabbing a bite to eat on their lunch break.

That was 30 years after Lee’s setting in TKaM, but some things hadn’t changed then. Still haven’t today. That says a lot, unfortunately, about the state of this world.