LETTERS
Editor,
This is both a mea culpa and a thank-you letter. My apologies to Atención readers who, mislead by my misinformation, tried to attend non-existent San Miguel Poetry Week readings, and my thanks to the staff of Atención who worked so hard to clean up the mess I had made.
Kathy Snodgrass
Editor,
We salute Brian Care, resident artist in La Aurora and former teacher’s consultant from Toronto, Canada. Brian is an outstanding member of the San Miguel community who has unselfishly dedicated many hours helping the orphans of Mexiquito. Brian has made a generous donation to the orphanage for the care, comfort and education of the children. His generosity and kindness has sparked an outpouring of support for the restoration of the living quarters, including building new dormitories with weatherproof windows and insulated floors. Thank you, Brian. We hope this gesture will inspire others to support the orphanage’s current Capital Campaign.
Felictades a Las Madres y Brian Care! Y los ninos de Santuario Hogar Guadalupano, AC
Sherry Drew
Editor,
I was so happy to see you covering opera in Mexico City—the upcoming production of Lucia di Lammermoor. But who sings? And who conducts? And doesn’t Guanajuato sometimes have opera? We never seem to hear about it if they do, and would like to.
Betse Streng
Editor,
We were sorry you didn’t include Harry Burrus’ second letter in your print edition. His point was very well taken. It would have been impossible for the Beat writers to be there at the time Greenhaw stated he was with them.
Arthur & Kit Knight
Co-editors, The Beat Vision (Paragon House, 1987)
Kerouac and The Beats (Paragon House, 1988)
Editor,
I’ve read Mr. Burrus’ piece on the Beats in San Miguel. Here we are not dealing with a memory understandably blurred by the passing of years, but with hard facts. Mr. Burrus has researched this matter thoroughly. His article is well-documented. This piece deserves to be published in the printed edition of your publication, for the benefit of all, not just some, of your readers.
Eric Basso
Author, Decompositions: Essays on Art & Literature, 1973-1989
READERS’ FORUM
Law and human nature in To Kill a Mockingbird
By Wayne Greenhaw January 11, 2008 San Miguel de Allende
Wayne Greenhaw gave this speech in September to kick off the Brooklyn Public Library’s year-long Big Read of To Kill A Mockingbird sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Text is reprinted with the author’s permission from the Mobile Press-Register, Sunday, October 21, 2007.
 |
 |
Recently I reread To Kill a Mockingbird for the twelfth or thirteenth time; I’ve lost count which it is. But I highly recommend the practice of rereading Harper Lee’s famous novel, both for the insight it offers into human nature and its illustration of the importance of the rule of law. |
I first read it as a 20-year-old student at the University of Alabama, where Lee attended law school in the late 1940s. I was impressed with the novel’s clarity of characters, the simplicity and economy of its style, and its brilliant depiction of small-town Alabama in the early 1930s.
I had grown up in such small towns as Maycomb. I knew people like the Haverfords (“a name synonymous with jackass”), Walter Cunningham, who didn’t have money for lunch but who was too proud to take a handout, and Burris Ewell, who has been going to the first day of the first grade and then dropping out for years.
| In each of the small towns we had a ghost house in the neighborhood, not unlike the Radley Place, that intrigued us endlessly. For each, we had a cadre of stories woven by our imaginations.
In a 1965 interview, Harper Lee described her life as a child in the 1930s: “We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn’t have much money. |
|
 |
We didn’t have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imagination most of the time,” she said. “We devised things; we were readers and we would transfer everything we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama.”
So it was in my own growing up. My brother, our friends and I were carried into Birmingham on Saturday mornings by one of our parents. We went to double-feature Westerns sandwiched between melodramatic serials. And always, upon returning home, like Scout and Jem and Dill, each of us would take a part to act out in grand style.
I knew boys like Jem. My younger brother, Donnie Lee, was one. He was always getting skint-up or having his arm broken or ankle sprained. I remember even a few braggarts from the city, not unlike Dill. Dill was based on one of Harper Lee’s childhood neighbors, Truman Capote, who visited and lived with older cousins in Monroeville near the Lee home on South Alabama Street.
I love the author’s description of Dill: “Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions.”
“He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies.”
But I especially love Atticus Finch’s statement to his son, Jem, that yes, he was “a nigger-lover” in the Jim Crow South, because, he says, “I love everyone.” As such, he gives Tom Robinson the best defense he can; and thus, the rule of law begins to take shape in the makeup of the book.
Perhaps in her own childhood in the early 1930s, Harper Lee heard talk in Monroeville about the “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of young black men in north Alabama falsely accused and convicted of rape. And perhaps she heard talk in November of 1933, when a black man in Monroeville, Walter Lett, who’d served time in prison, was accused by Naomi Lowery, a poor white woman, of sexually assaulting her.
I suspect that Harper Lee’s father, A.C. Lee, an attorney and a member of the state legislature, answered her questions simply and honestly. Although he was a title lawyer, he once had been appointed to defend two black men accused of murdering a white merchant. The men—a father and son—were convicted and hanged.
Each time I reread the novel, a phrase or sequence strikes me like a new chord heard on an old guitar, and I feel another pang of recognition. As I read the confrontation scene in front of the old jail, where Atticus is guarding over his client, Tom Robinson, I remember the year 1955, when I was a 15-year-old part-time sports reporter for The Tuscaloosa News.
Riding home with an older sports writer, I found myself watching a hateful mob on the downtown streets of Tuscaloosa. They were angry because a black woman named Artherine Lucy wanted to attend the University of Alabama.
As we sat in our car, watching from a distance, I saw a carload of black people—a man driving, a woman sitting next to him, and two children in the back seat. The mob stopped the car.
Some of the mob, many of whom were university students, rocked the car to and fro. They spat filthy language, waved the Confederate flag and sang “Dixie.” Several minutes later, as the crowd parted and the car sped away, I saw the big, round, frightened eyes of a small boy framed in the car’s rear window.
The next day I was sitting in the newsroom when our publisher, a gentle, soft-spoken former FBI agent named Buford Boone, came in. After I told him what I’d witnessed, he shook his head and said, “It’s such a shame, such a pity that grown people would act so disgustingly. Read my front-page column this afternoon.” In the column headlined “What a Price for Peace,” Boone chastised students, school administrators and citizens for allowing a small group of violent people to tarnish the city’s good name.
“The target was Artherine Lucy,” he wrote. “Her only ‘crimes’? She was born black, and she was moving against Southern custom and tradition—but with the law, right on up to the United States Supreme Court, on her side.”
“What does it mean today at the University of Alabama, and here in Tuscaloosa, to have the law on your side? The answer has to be: Nothing—that is, if a mob disagrees with you and your courts.”
Two years later, Boone was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. The citation praised Boone “for his fearless and reasoned editorials in a community inflamed by a segregation issue.”
It could have added that, like Atticus Finch, Boone was a “people lover” and a believer in the rule of law.
Wayne Greenhaw, author of 19 books, was presented the Harper Lee Award in 2006 for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer.