I have read Harper Lee’s classic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel twice, watched Gregory Peck star in the movie version, and  seen Jeff Bridges in the Tony-award winning Broadway rendition of the book, so I came to this reading of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ expecting few surprises in the story, characters, and meaning.  Think again!  As I’ve learned repeatedly, a re-read can be quite different from a first reading, both because the book reveals elements that were opaque to one on the first go round and because I, the reader, am different from me the reader in earlier days.

The story of three years in the life of Jean Louise Finch, aka Scout,  in the small Alabama town of Maycomb is the vehicle for Lee’s exploration of race, bigotry, the Southern heritage of slavery and its meanings for both Blacks (or ‘niggers’ as her characters repeatedly say), the loss of childhood’s innocence, the courage and ethics of some in contrast to the violence and narrow-mindedness of others.  Scout, her older brother Jem, their best friend, Dill, their widowed father, Atticus and his sister Alexandria, their Black nanny/maid Calpurnia, the victimized Tom Robinson, the ignorant ‘trash’ Ewells, the sheriff, Huck Tate, and always lurking in the background of their consciousness, their neighbor, Arthur ‘Boo’ Radley.

It’s a fine story filled with action and fine phrases mostly offered by Atticus in explaining the world to his two young children.  Here’s Atticus calming Jem about his fears that the Ku Klux clan will harm Atticus because he is defending a Black man: “They couldn’t find anybody to scare.  They paraded by Mr. Sam Levy’s house one night, but Sam just stood on his porch and told ’em things had come to a pretty pass, he’d sold them the very sheets on their backs. Sam made ’em so ashamed of themselves they went away.  The Levy family met all the criteria for being Fine Folks: they did the best they could with the sense they had, and they had been living on the same plot of ground in Maycomb for five generations.”

And then there’s Atticus’s final statement to the jury in Tom Robinson’s case: “But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president.  That institution, gentlemen, is a court.”  Poor Atticus would turn over in his grave if he saw the recent ruling of SCOTUS on presidential immunity.

And then there’s Scout’s account of the current events presentations made in her 4th grade class.  Cecil Jacobs presents the newspaper story of how Hitler is abusing the Jews which leads to the teacher, Miss Gates, teaching the distinction between DEMOCRACY and DICTATORSHIP, the operative difference stated by Scout is ‘Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”  Another cringe in looking at today’s world.

While the New York Times proclaimed the novel to be the best book of the past 125 years and many give it the nod as The Great American Novel over ‘Gatsby’, the 50th anniversary of its publication also led several to criticize it as overly simplistic, dated, and a false picture of the South.  For me, reading it again was an exciting opportunity to enjoy the rich characters and the fine plot.  Try it.