Friday, February 13, 2015

Harper Lee and the Benefit of the Doubt





About fifteen years ago, when Harper Lee was still living in a small rent-controlled apartment in Yorkville, I sat next to her at a dinner party. She was, I had been warned, partially deaf. She spoke very little, listening carefully to whoever was talking. Now and then she smiled or nodded her head. Intimidated by her silence, I barely spoke myself. By the end of the party, I had begun to reproach myself for not truly encountering her. I was about to reluctantly join the other guests, who were standing up to leave, when she leaned toward me. In a soft, mellifluous Southern drawl, without the slightest slyness or irony, she said, “Sir, you are one of the most delightful dinner companions I have had the pleasure to sit next to.” She had given me, you might say, the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve been thinking about her graciousness and generosity over the past few days, as news that a sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be published has provoked outrage, anger, and concern. The outcry, from people who have not even set eyes on the sequel, seems wildly out of proportion to the impending event.

It’s understandable, of course, to feel protective toward the author of a book that has cherished status in the imaginations of so many people. Appearing in 1960, in the roiling dawn of the civil-rights movement, “Mockingbird” was the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of its day. Its central black character even bore the name Tom, and, just as Stowe’s character saves a white girl from drowning, Lee’s Tom Robinson helps a lonely, impoverished white girl with her errands because he pities her. It is intolerable to think that figures of authority—Lee’s lawyer, her publisher, and all those who stand to gain from a sequel to the phenomenally lucrative “Mockingbird”—might be manipulating and exploiting the creator of a work of art that itself is about how an official mendacity abets a system of inequality. That the aged and infirm Lee either cannot or will not speak publicly about the sequel has only reinforced the suspicion of shady doings.

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