Alabama Bound: Reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird While Southern

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (New York: Warner Books, 1982 reprinting.) Image courtesy of McCain Library and Archives (de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection and USM Libraries Digital Lab), University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg.

Proud of the glory, stare down the shame duality of the Southern thing

—Drive-By Truckers (“The Southern Thing”)

When I was nine years old—which is the same age as Scout Finch at the beginning of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird—my family packed into our Studebaker and headed south on the Dixie Highway from the suburbs of Chicago to our new home in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. Just outside of Indianapolis, we merged on to US Highway 31 taking us down through Louisville, Kentucky; Nashville, Tennessee; and eventually crossing over the Alabama state line, where a billboard announced “Welcome to Alabama, the Heart of Dixie”—a motto that appeared on standard issued license plates beginning in 1955. As the Lead Belly song goes, I was “Alabama Bound.” Arriving in the heart of Dixie, we slowly made our way through Athens, Cullman, and finally into Birmingham, nicknamed The Magic City. The two-lane highway that we traveled on for years now has been replaced by an multi-lane expressway, but in many places, Highway 65 runs concurrent with old Highway 31. Things change, but they often stay the same.

When I teach To Kill a Mockingbird in my college-level young adult literature course, I bring in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the nonfiction account of three families of white sharecroppers living in the same area of Alabama in the 1930s as the setting for Lee’s novel. Evans’s haunting, black-and-white photographs of the families and their homes serve as the introduction to Agee’s prose. The photographs provide a historical visual companion to the poverty of the lives of the Cunninghams and the Ewells in Lee’s novel. After showing students the photographs from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I then share the photographs from Dale Maharidge’s and Michael Williamson’s And Their Children After Them (1989), which revisits the locations and families that Agee and Evans interviewed and photographed in 1936. Between 1986 and 1988, Maharidge and Williamson were able to locate twelve of the original twenty-two individuals who were featured in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (257). Williamson frequently pairs Evans’s earlier photographs with his more recent images of the same places and people. The children that Agee and Evans met have become adults. While trailers have replaced simple cabins, rural poverty remains a constant.

Two years after Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was published and awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 1960, my family moved to Alabama. It was the year of the release of Robert Mulligan’s popular film adaptation of the novel. The film went on to win three Academy Awards, including “best actor” for Gregory Peck, who played Atticus Finch. The roles of Scout and Jem Finch were played by the ten-year-old Mary Badham and the thirteen-year–old Philip Allford, both child actors from Birmingham; neither had much previous acting experience prior to the film. Badham was the youngest actress to ever be nominated for the best supporting actress role, but she lost that year to sixteen-year-old Patty Duke (who played Helen Keller, another Alabamian, in Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker). Mulligan’s film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, with a screenplay by Horton Foote, is a rare example of a critically acclaimed novel being successfully translated to the movie screen. Taken together, the novel and the film have probably done more to help change and improve race relations in Alabama than any other literary work. While To Kill a Mockingbird appears to some contemporary readers and literary critics as dated and less progressive in its racial politics when viewed in light of contemporary attitudes toward...