Reimagining To Kill a Mockingbird: Family, Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law

Chapter Two. I Would Kill for you: Love, Law, and Sacrifice in To Kill a Mockingbird

37  CHAP TER TWO I Would Kill for You Love, Law, and Sacrifice in To Kill a Mockingbird Linda Ross Meyer I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice. Albert Camus, Stockholm interview, December 14, 1957 To Kill a Mockingbird, the film, is now over fifty years old.1 When I first saw it, around its twentieth anniversary, it seemed quaint, a black-andwhite slice of history we had moved well beyond. Atticus Finch’s famous “in our courts, all men are created equal” closing argument registered not as progressive but even as itself regressive, addressed as it was to the white “gentlemen” of the jury, and failing as it did to acknowledge the racism and sexism that mere legal equality simply papered over.2 Sure, the movie was brave for its time, portraying the stark injustice in a trumped-up cross-racial rape case against Tom Robinson,an innocent black man,years before the last miscegenation statute was declared unconstitutional. But, we thought, we were far smarter about racism in 1982. We had moved beyond the ideal of mere “legal equality” to an understanding that something more, such as affirmative action, was required to undo the generations of de facto inequality and subconscious racism that made any playing field racially uneven—especially that of the court system. And by 1982 we could see the racism inherent in the 1962 film’s portrayal of Calpurnia, the Finches’ black housekeeper, and Tom, and we were embarrassed even by Atticus’s white noblesse oblige. But still, in 1982 our endgame was the same; one way or another, we and Atticus were on the same road toward giving our children a world 38 Linda Ross Meyer in which “there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”3 And Atticus’s faith that “it’s not ok to hate anybody,”4 because “most people are [nice], . . . when you finally see them,”5 was still our faith. The clannish Ewells and Cunninghams were bad only because they were ignorant, and eventually that ignorance could be overcome through education and reason. Eventually class, race, and all tribal divisions would be overcome in favor of the principled moral universalism and equality that Atticus exemplified, and the new global community we anticipated as a result. Law still provided the framework for this universalism, with its demand for universally applicable principles and other-embracing neutrality. And many of us, including me, marched off to law school with Atticus as our icon. But some three decades later I see the film’s conflicts touch closer to home. To Kill a Mockingbird no longer seems quaint.The film is above all about the conflict between our particular loyalties (to family,class,country, race, religion, species) and the possibility (and desirability) of a vision of a universal order of law or ethics applicable to all.The film also asks what price we will or won’t pay for our loyalties—both to specific communities and to our vision of universalized law itself. What moral compromises will we make to keep our families safe? What risks to our families are we willing to accept in order to vindicate our vision of “liberty and justice for all”? In our post-9/11 era of deep religious conflict, fear of worldwide terrorism, and factional war, the film’s themes of fear and mistrust, tribal loyalty, and the failure of a universalized vision of justice are more salient and contested than they have been perhaps since it first came out. Horton Foote’s screenplay of To Kill a Mockingbird, while generally quite faithful to Harper Lee’s novel, changes the book’s framing and its perspective to pose more dramatically this question of loyalty: Is there a place for loyalty and love that allows me to die for you, and even to kill for you? The movie explicitly understands that Maycomb is prepared to sacrifice Tom, not out of justice, but out of love and fear: to demonstrate its loyalty to Mayella Ewell, to her tribe, and to the white racial hierarchy of the town’s heritage and history. White Maycomb is willing to kill (and torture) innocents—Tom, Atticus, and maybe even Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem—for its own survival. It seeks to kill the innocent aggressor in defense of its own, for Tom, though innocent, has compromised Mayella’s honor. I Would Kill for You 39...