May, a Courtroom in Maycomb

In May of the year 2000, I was part of a group of Alabama writers speaking at a writers' conference in Monroeville, Alabama, home of Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Although I am a great fan of both those fine writers, it was my first trip to Monroeville, which in so many ways typifies the small, sleepy town of Southern mythology. I was raised in a town in southeast Alabama even smaller than Monroeville, more provincial and isolated, if possible, so Monroeville is my hometown, in many ways. It is a place I know.

The high point of the conference was attending the local theater group's production of To Kill a Mockingbird, which is staged at the old courthouse. The production is done entirely by the local community; coincidentally, Atticus Finch was played by an attorney, but Tom Robinson was a school teacher and Boo Radley, a mechanic. As far as I could tell, there were no professionals involved, which made it more meaningful to me. I thrilled to the idea of the community working together hand-in-hand to make this production happen, shedding identities as sales clerks, nurses, firefighters, and hairdressers and taking on strange roles, stepping in the spotlight as fictional characters not unlike them, residing in the fictional town of Maycomb, not unlike Monroeville. As a member of the audience you sit with an old funeral home fan in hand and watch the trial re-enacted in the courtroom which has been restored to look exactly as it did in the 1930s, complete with a 1935 calendar on the wall. If you're white, you sit on the main floor of the courtroom; if you're black, you're in the balcony.

If luck is with you, you'll be one of the members of the audience picked at random to sit on the jury. I was quite disappointed at not being chosen--no women on juries at that time, no women and, of course, no African-American jurors. To make us feel a part of the drama, various cast members are seated among the audience, where they include those of us around them in their observations of the trial as it unfolds, commenting on the judge and the lawyers and the witnesses. It's a lot of fun, not only watching a play but being a part of it, with much friendly conviviality and laughter and camaraderie taking place. Something magical happens, and you become not just a member of the audience but a member of the fictional community, someone who knows Atticus and Scout and Jem and Calpurnia and Tom, who has arrived early each day and taken a seat in the hot courtroom, not wanting to miss a minute of the most notorious trial in a lifetime.

It's a lot of fun to begin with, but as the trial goes on, you become engrossed in the drama and forget that you know the outcome, that Harper Lee was writing about a time when a black man accused of raping a white girl in the deep South had no chance of acquittal, no matter how obvious his innocence. When Atticus makes his impassioned speech in a futile attempt for justice, the laughter and the fun stop, and it becomes so quiet in the audience that you can hear the silence, can feel it like the hot summer night. When the African-American cast members in the balcony, along with Scout and Jem, stand in respect as Atticus leaves the court room after the guilty verdict is handed down, the quiet is suddenly broken--you hear a stirring in the audience. Some of us hang our heads in shame and disbelief, others openly weep, none of us are unaffected. It is a very moving moment, one that has stayed with me months later.

As we filed out of the courtroom in a stunned and awed silence, two thoughts came to me. One of them had to do with being a native...