When I was in middle school, I found myself in the midst of the South’s school desegregation battles. (I was born in 1951 and my family moved to Sewanee, Tennessee in 1954). Therefore, I experienced a disturbing sense of déjà vu when I saw Virginia governor Bob McDonnell two weeks ago declaring a special month to honor the Virginia confederacy while dismissing the concerns of the 500,000 Virginians from that time period who were black and enslaved. Although McDonnell later amended his proclamation, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour then waded into the fray by saying that the issue “doesn’t amount to diddly.”
And then, of course, there was Governor Rick Perry of Texas threatening secession several months ago if he didn’t get his way.
I’m writing this post to reiterate what I’ve written in several past posts—that when the world descends into racism, sometimes literature can come to our aid and help us see straight. It’s as though good novels are able to command an authority that counteracts ignorance and hate.
For me as a child, those books were Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. (Today, incidentally, is the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death.)
First, to paint the scene. I was a plaintiff in a desegregation suit brought by four black families and four white. Our parents were arguing that the Franklin County Board of Education was denying their children the right to attended integrated schools, as decreed by the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
Although my parents were liberal, little that I saw around me supported them. I remember seeing the picture that I’ve posted above in various stores. In fact, it was one of a pair. The first was a picture of a union soldier, stooped over with drooping eyes. He looked a bit like Sleepy from the movie Snow White, and underneath him were the words, “Forget It.”
Then there was the feisty confederate soldier saying, as you can see, “Forget, hell!”
Nor did there seem to be any forgetting. “Dixie,” not “the Star Spangled Banner,” was played before high school football games. In sixth grade I was once kept after school because I did not stand up for “Dixie.” My seventh grade history teacher, Fred Langford, told us that the Civil War (which he referred to as “the War between the States”) was about economics, not slavery. (Later, when I was a junior in high school, my history teacher there stated, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, “He lived by the sword and he died by the sword.”) We regularly sang Civil War songs in school, and n_____ jokes were told regularly by the people around me. William Faulkner’s famous saying (from Requiem for a Nun) seemed to rule: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Mark Twain’s and Harper Lee’s books stepped into this maelstrom.
I have written about how the two works have undergone a fair amount of leftwing criticism in recent years. You can read my discussions of that criticism in a series of posts beginning here, here, and here. At the moment, however, I want to comment on the positive space that a good book can open up. When I was floating with Huck down the Mississippi River and developing a friendship with Jim, I knew there was an alternative to the racism I saw around me. When Huck apologizes to Jim after playing a thoughtless trick on him, and later when he decides he will rescue Jim even if it means going to hell, I was given a glimpse of a far truer world than the one I found myself living in.
Same with To Kill a Mockingbird. When I saw the respect that Atticus Finch paid the African American community and they paid him back, when I saw Scout defuse a lynch mob by talking to a man about her friendship with his son, when I saw Atticus stand up in court and fight against race hatred and injustice, I felt like I had a firm place to stand.
My understanding of those books, of both their strengths and their limitations, has grown since then. The flaws that I now see can’t diminish what they did for me. Therefore, when politicians with throwback politics like McDonnell and Barbour start to grab headlines, I remind myself that great books can work as a counterforce. They speak to something deep in us and to something high.
And when they do, everything else becomes just noise.