If that mockingbird don’t sing
I originally wrote this over on Google Plus, where I have far more conversations these days than here. I felt like it belonged here, too, though.
I spent some time this morning reflecting on my experiences growing up in Montgomery, AL, face to face with deeply-even violently-embedded race, class, and gender norms, elephants in the room that nobody dared name. We were desegregated by then, and thus clearly past the race and class differences, or so the common wisdom went. And gender-that wasn’t even on people’s radar: This was pre-Butler, after all.
It started as research. Reflective research, I suppose: There’s a poem boiling itself up in me and trying desperately to grasp its way onto a page, or better, whisper itself loudly into a microphone. It starts with spanish moss, and that’s where my research started. Visualizing it found me wandering through my old neighborhoods on Google Maps, to see the place where my childhood home was ultimately bought by a neighbor and then leveled in some senseless act of domestic violence. The neighborhoods-nice, though not quite the nicest-led naturally to Southern Gothic fiction.
I don’t remember ever reading any Faulkner. I do remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I couldn’t quote you the plot, but I remember the pinkish-purple cover of the edition that was popular then. I remember the feel of it in my hands, the cut of the paper. And I remember that it made an impression on me. Or, more precisely, as I reflected I saw its themes inscribed again and again throughout my life and the ways I’ve seen the world around me. Prejudice. Bias. Gender role rejection. Preferential treatment and policing. Violence. Role models sticking to their guns not for profit but because it’s the right and humane thing to do, damnit.
Oh, I’ve strayed from it at times, there’s no doubt about that. But it keeps coming full circle, back to the Gothic imagery, back to the darkly rich, complex relationships with oppressive cultural norms. And even back to simple details that call back out to the book. There’s a Harper Lethal in the Atlanta Roller Girls I’ve recently started working with. I spent some time last night chatting with someone quite dear to me, introducing her to one of my favorite musicians of all time, who took the stage name Scout. I smiled in recognition when I learned several years ago that she got the name from tomboy Jean Louise Finch.
Harper Lee studied some at Huntingdon College, a short walk from the now-leveled childhood home where I first read her her famous book, sitting backward on my bed looking out the window at storms and azaleas and magnolias and spanish-moss-draped oaks.
After writing that book she moved to central Kansas, a few counties over from where I finished high school. She moved there following Truman Capote for research that eventually grew into his In Cold Blood. Me, I moved there following my father’s job. But those same themes pervaded my life there until I found my way back here to the South. Not quite the Deep South of Montgomery-south of the mosquito line-but still that hot, humid climate that’s so comfortably familiar to me, weighing down on everything and holding people together and apart, painting them in sweat.
Researching and reflecting, I couldn’t help but wonder if it’s truly Montgomery that’s inscribed itself onto my life, or if perhaps it’s just To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe for where I was then and there, there wasn’t much difference. Regardless, though, I think I need to reread that book sometime soon. Maybe branch out into some other Southern Gothic fiction.