[35] To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

One of the most unforgettable stories of all time, To Kill A Mockingbird becomes a landmark novel in American literature since its publication in 1960. It is a novel of a lawyer, Atticus, in the deep south defending a black man Tom Robinson charged with the rape of a white girl. Nine-years-old Jean Louise Atticus, from whom her father always shelters and whom neighbors often deems too young to understand the racial struggle, narrates the story. She does it with a stark manner and equanimity of an adult who is savvy of the law. Her perspective is unbridled of the biased and disapproving voices of the town, of which nobody does even one thing to help Tom Robinson, let alone risking one’s own life to defend a black man who in the secret courts of men’s hearts have no case. That simply being a black yields a disadvantage in the jury’s deliberation let alone a black man who is allegedly convicted of an act of felony against a white person. Tom Robinson is dead as the girl opens her mouth and rains charges on him.

A child’s narration cuts to the core of hypocrisy: some of the most religious people turn their blind eye to an innocent black man who in the absence of any corroborative evidence is indicted on a capital charge and is on the trial of his life. Jean Louise’s voice of the narrative might be hesitant, dubious, and questioning, she packs the novel with intimate voice of conversation, of people living and sorting out their lives and the whole racial entangle. Atticus therefore bears a formidable task to not only defend Tom Robinson but also to rebuff, with a righteous indignation, the inveterate discrimination against the blacks. He thrives to protect the children from absorbing the human ugliness: Why can’t people get along with each other? Who do people get out of their way to despise one another? What really scares me is such racial labeling still exists now but in a subtler manner that no longer makes people feel broken. In the recent Katrina news coverage, the media labeled a black woman who waded through the hip-deep water hurling supplies out of a store a looter. Racial labeling pervades people like babies born with basic instincts: it renders a stereotype that is culpable of perception that is laden with judgment.

Atticus knows that Tom Robinson’s case, though it is as simple as black and white that it should never have come to trial, is something that dives right into the essence of a man’s conscience. Conscience is the one thing that does not abide by the majority rule. It transcends all racial difference and confronts the intimacy of one’s heart. That is the reason he wishes his children to embrace some “ugly things” that are concomitant of his defending a black man – for all he does is to abide by his conscience and to come clear of it. It is never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name, especially when one is defending a good cause against mendacious testimony. It just shows how poor and piteous people are when they with maddening superiority thrive to label and call name at others.

To Kill A Mockingbird vehemently condemns those who recklessly bend the law at the expense of the innocent’s life for the satisfaction of one’s supremacy. It also satirizes self-righteous people who rave madly when anything involving a black person occurs. Every page of the novel reminds us that the fight for equality is yet over: it radiates a wave of racial tension and menacing undertow of conflict.