Growing up fifty miles from Monroeville, Alabama means I have crossed paths with the reclusive Harper Lee many times. I never met her, mind you. I know her from her famous book, a biography she refused to cooperate with and from her home town, We have traveled the same roads for years. Harper Lee and I have nothing in common beyond growing up together in pretty much the same places at different times.
She went to the University of Alabama. So did I.
She wrote for the Rammer Jammer campus humor publication. Been there, done that. Almost kicked out of school for it.
She addressed racism and unabashedly wrote about it often. Ditto.
She won a Pulitzer Prize writing about the most famous trial since Jesus was questioned by Pontius Pilate. Using Monroeville as the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, she wrote the great American novel. Not happening here.
A Pulitzer will never sit next to my iMac. But I have done one thing in Monroeville that I’m pretty sure Ms. Lee has never done: drive a Coca-Cola truck, loading Coke machines until my back hurt in the unsubtle humidity of a town that was no different than my own. I did not exactly stir up the same interest from the locals, to be sure, unless you were thirsty, in which case they were pretty glad to see me.
Those fifty miles between Monroeville and Andalusia have now turned into fifty years. In July, “To Kill A Mockingbird” will have been an American classic for half a century, almost my entire life.
Despite black character references that offend some, her sentences helped shape my Southern attitudes as a child because the bigger story is about intolerance and prejudice in the South I knew all too well. According to Wikipedia, British librarians recently ranked it above the Bible as a book “everyone should read before they die.” You will not find it on your Kindle, however.
Dear Jeff Bezos, if you are reading this (and I doubt it), please put “To Kill A Mockingbird” in Kindle format.
All these years later, I do not know how Harper Lee will celebrate this occasion since she has never been a public person and is hardly inclined to talk about herself, preferring instead, to make her presence known by quietly helping others. Perhaps she would like for us to be farther along in race relations in this country in 2010. I cannot say.
Her language came to mind last week as I listened to two men in a café discussing President Obama in terms that would have fit nicely into a conversation about Tom Robinson in the book’s 1936 setting.
Like it or not, her characters are as real today as ever. Scout is still out there, in a small Alabama town, using her powerful words. What we need these days, however, is another Atticus Finch.