Harper Lee Rocks

The news of Harper Lee’s new release makes me happy for more reasons than I can count, but here are my 5 biggest:

 1. Guts. Reversing half a century of staunch refusal to publish a second novel, Harper Lee is embracing a whole new world by publishing Go Set A Watchman. I find it fascinating to ponder why she’s doing it now, for a manuscript she wrote decades ago. I applaud her courage in allowing new scrutiny of her work, and I’m so excited to read her new novel. What I’d like most of all would be to discover that she has even more books because it’s rather inconceivable to me that the mastermind behind Scout hasn’t been writing all this time. Best of all, she’s happy about the book coming out, and we like Harper Lee to be happy.

 2. My students. Oh, my gosh. I loved teaching my unit on To Kill a Mockingbird, and the way it opened windows into the souls of my students. We acted out the trial scene and dissected Atticus’s speech, paragraph by paragraph, to study how a person can, essentially, argue against prejudice. My students created character scrapbooks of objects mentioned in the book and wrote about the artifacts in the voices of their chosen characters, all to practice getting in someone else’s shoes.

 3. Failure. Lest I ever became too confident in my teaching brilliance, I once had a student cheat with his scrapbook project, recycling a former student’s work. My sense of failure went deep, and the incident reminded me that integrity is not a given. My job was not to compel it, but to encourage it, however I could. To Kill a Mockingbird helps me examine myself to see where I have room to grow.

A TKAM Character Scrapbook

 4. The Scottsboro Trials. On an ill-fated train ride, nine young black men travelled in a boxcar with two white women who falsely accused them of rape. The men were convicted and sentenced to death, despite the lack evidence, even after one of the women recanted her testimony. Despite various appeals, the last man wasn’t released from prison until decades later. Tom Robinson’s trial in Lee’s novel closely parallels the case, and the heart-wrenching injustice of the novel is, for me, inextricably intertwined with the outrageous injustice and suffering in real life.

 5. Boo. We could talk about Boo Radley all day, with how he was rumored to stab his father with a scissors, how he peeked through the shades to watch Scout, Jem, and Dill, how he mended Jem’s pants (in record time), and how he saved Scout’s life. He stands for the unknown, and the way people fear the unknown, yet he was the one who brought a form of justice to the Robinson situation. I think his existence in the novel underscores that not knowing people can lead us to fear them, and that mistaken fear is the underlying root of racism.

I could go on, but I have my own novel to write, and I’m totally inspired by Ms. Lee.