Despite the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., despite the new tensions and anxieties, the concern for the future, that we’re all living with now, I decided to go ahead as I had planned and read Harper Lee’s classic novel as part of the Chicago Public Library’s “One Book, One Chicago” initiative.
And I’m not alone.
Even after the national trauma of Sept. 11, the book continues to sell briskly throughout the metropolitan region.
“We haven’t seen a decline in sales,” said Lori Hile of Borders Books and Music, which has special displays of the book at its four Chicago stores and 16 suburban locations. “People are still interested. If anything, maybe the tragedy has made people more ready to read the book.”
Hile said the Borders store in the Loop and the two on the North Side have been selling hundreds of copies a week. That compares with a normal weekly sales volume of about 30 for this time of year. And sales have been strong in the suburbs, even though the official initiative is focused solely on Chicago.
At the city’s public library branches, the book is still being checked out by the thousands, said library system spokeswoman Margot Burke. In fact, since early August, some of the library’s nearly 4,000 copies of the novel have been checked out two and three times, she said.
Small group discussions
Throughout the city and suburbs, plans are going forward for the sort of small group discussions that Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey envisioned when she announced the project in early August.
A couple of days ago, my wife and I received an invitation to a dinner and discussion surrounding the work at the home of a business acquaintance during the first week in October. Then, a few days later, we’re going to a special gathering of the book club we belong to for an examination of the issues and questions raised by the novel.
Normally, my book club reads history books. Although fiction, “To Kill a Mockingbird” will fit in nicely for us since, in many ways, it captures a time and place in our nation’s history — small town Alabama, 1930s — better than any non-fiction work could.
Of course, the greatness of the book is that it paints a portrait not just of a region, and not just of a time. The issues at the core of the novel — racism, injustice, tolerance, community — were as pertinent to the rest of the country in the 1930s as they were in rural Maycomb. And they were as pertinent in 1960 when Lee’s book was published. And again, in 1962, when the movie of the book was released.
And they remain as germane today as they ever were. In fact, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, these issues are brought into even sharper focus.
Community of connected lives
Take the question of community. Lee describes a Maycomb that, for all its racial, economic and educational divisions, is a community of interconnected, interrelated, interwoven lives. Individuals might not like each other. They might not understand each other. But, as Lee makes clear, they live together. Maycomb is what it is because of all the people there.
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The “One Book, One Chicago” initiative is rooted in this reality: that the people of a place form a community. The idea of everyone reading the same book, which culminates in a weeklong celebration Oct. 8-14, is to provide a visible manifestation of that. By reading the book together, we Chicagoans (and suburbanites) are expressing our connectedness. We’re acknowledging that we’re all part of the same fabric.
And, of course, the questions about racism and tolerance that Lee raises are as difficult to wrestle with today as they were when she wrote her book.
True, much social progress has been made since the 1930s — propelled in large measure by the protests and legislative initiatives of the 1960s. Many whites in “To Kill a Mockingbird” use the “n”-word easily and view blacks as second-class human beings. Such attitudes are no longer accepted in American society.
Yet, no one would be so Pollyannaish as to suggest that the race question in the U.S. is settled.
As the taunts and attacks on Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans this month show, we still have much to learn about tolerance and accepting differences.
Early on in Lee’s novel, Atticus Finch is talking with his daughter about her bumpy first day of school. “If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks,” he tells her. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around.”
The curious thing, of course, is that, with the exception of American Indians, those who look with suspicion or lash out in anger against the uprooted from the Middle East are of immigrant stock themselves. Their family’s own immigration saga has much in common with that of the Palestinian shopkeeper in Oak Lawn or the Jordanian cab driver in Edgewater. This commonality overshadows any differences in language or culture.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is a book about differences — and about the need to accept them.
It’s also a book about imperfection. Lee portrays a flawed America in her novel, an America where injustice was so much a part of everyday life that an innocent man could be convicted of a crime that everyone knew he did not commit.
Those flaws were difficult for Americans of the 1930s to see. They were easier to recognize a quarter of a century later when Lee’s novel was published.
Losing its perspective
The point today is that, in pursuing an international war against terrorism, this nation runs the risk of losing its perspective — of demonizing the enemy and envisioning itself on the side of angels. No question, fighting for freedom is good. But no country is perfect.
Reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a reminder of that. Just as we need to “climb into the skin” of Americans who are different from us as a means of building our national community, we also need to do that in the world — to recognize how others see us, what imperfections others see in our actions and attitudes.
In many ways, Lee’s book is the perfect novel for all of us to read at this time. Now more than ever, we need to think about its lessons of tolerance and community.
Read on, Chicago! Read on.