By Michael Cox
One of my favourite books of all time, which also happens to be one of my favourite movies of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, has been thoroughly downgraded, one might even say trashed, by an article in the New Yorker. The novel, Malcolm Gladwell writes in the August 10 issue, teaches us that there is one law for blacks–and white trash–and another for good old folks, the decent white folks of Maycomb, Alabama.
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, Mary Badham as his daughter Jean Louis "Scout" Finch.
At the conclusion of the book, Bob Ewell, who has been embarrassed by Atticus in court (and accused of attacking his daughter), attacks Scout and her brother. The reclusive next-door neighbour Boo Radley comes to their defence and accidentally kills Ewell. But the sheriff convinces Atticus that it is in everyone’s best interest to say Ewell fell on his knife, saving Boo a trial and possible jail time. “Can you possibly understand?” Atticus asks Scout, after explaining to her that she must tell everyone who asks, that Ewell fell on his knife, and not that Boo stabbed him when he came to the children’s rescue.
“His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites…and another for white trash,” Gladwell writes. “A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb Alabama.”
The problem I have with Gladwell’s conclusion is that there is another way to interpret the novel’s final message, to wit: we live in a world not of good and evil but of varying shades in which justice is, and should be, flexible, adaptable, and open to acts of compassion even if they transgress the written laws. Strict interpretations of acts is one way to practice law; the other, and in my opinion far more beneficial way, is to use common sense and wisdom in applying justice.
Robert Duvall as Boo Radley; Frank Overton as Sheriff Heck Tate
Is Boo Radley given a break by the sheriff, and by Atticus’ silent agreement to the sheriff’s version of events in this killing, because he is white, or because he is mentally challenged, or because his act was done selflessly, to protect his young neighbours? Tom Robinson, a black man accused of rape, is given no such break: everyone thinks him guilty, and as the trial concludes and the jury delivers its unanimous verdict, Atticus has failed to free him (but is held in high esteem by the town’s black citizens for his defence).
The Jim Crow south was apartheid in all but name. Atticus, living within a small town deep in the heart of this segregated society, could not hope to defend Tom Robinson as a man accused of rape, but as a black man accused of raping a white woman, being tried by an all-white jury, in a case without conclusive evidence that Robinson was obviously innocent or obviously guilty. Atticus Finch took him at his word; he knew the odds were stacked against his client; the verdict was foregone.
Atticus’s failure to prove Robinson innocent of rape* taught his daughter Scout that even a good man, two good men, if we presume Robinson was indeed innocent, are still at the mercy of an imperfect society and its imperfect judicial system. That the same unpredictable system, in the voice and action of the sheriff, will allow another man, who has clearly caused a man’s death, to go free, is her next lesson in the mutability of the adult world she is on the verge of entering.
The novel still stands for me as one of the finest stories which seek to explain the adult world through a child’s eyes. Scout may be confused by her father’s failure to “save” Tom Robinson, and then by his tacit agreement to the sheriff’s version of events in Ewell’s death at Boo Radley’s hands, but she, and we, have learned that justice is not impartial, nor is it always fair, but it is as fallible as the humans who mete it out.
Gladwell’s critique of Lee’s Mockingbird has not spoiled the book–or the film–for me, but the next time I encounter either version, I’ll look at it within the context of what he calls the “limitations of Jim Crow liberalism.”
*Robinson’s fictional trial was examined by Steven Lubet in the Michigan Law Review (vol.97, no.6, May 1999, pp.1339-1362).
Editor’s Note: an essay critical of Harper Lee’s book was printed in the Wall Street Journal in 2010.
