Mockingbirds

Kymulga Grist Mill near Childersburg, Alabama

A Southern classic, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is required reading in the South. Published in 1960, the story is a vision of the summer of 1936 when the Alabama author was ten years old. A brother and sister, Jem and Scout, along with their friend, Dill, run around a small town in overalls, playing the hardy imaginal games taught by freedom to roam in the heat of a Southern summer, learning the lessons of injustice and mercy. Southerners always seem to identify with one or other of the characters, and, like the characters in Gone with the Wind, they might as well be real people who live down the street since their actions and inactions are discussed accordingly.

When the children’s father tells them that it would be a sin to kill a mockingbird, a neighbor, Mrs. Maudie, explains why. A mockingbird is one who

“…don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.“

A mockingbird was revealed to the children in the form of a reclusive, downright odd neighbor, Boo Radley, the town spook, so to speak, with a tragic past, a man scorned and feared. Boo watched over the children without their knowing. Unable to relate to the children, he loved them nonetheless, and left them presents in the hollow of a tree. Treasures left by Boo included: two pieces of Wrigley's Double Mint Gum; two scrubbed and polished pennies; one ball of gray twine; two “almost perfect miniatures of two children” (Scout and Jem); one whole package of chewing gum; a tarnished spelling bee medal; and “a pocket watch that wouldn’t run, on a chain with an aluminum knife.”

Ultimately Boo’s greatest gift was saving the lives of the children and bringing them home. Boo was, in the end a mockingbird, doing no harm, giving without expectation, singing his heart out in his own odd way.

Boo wasn’t such a strange man. I would imagine that many people make containers similar to tree hollows in which they give others their druthers.  Love is seldom melodramatically grand. Often its symbols are little, unpretentious, tentative, yet faithful. Gum, pennies, twine…that’s the stuff with which we sing out our apprehensive, worn out hearts.