Harper Lee's Bio
I have profound feelings that I just read something that sets me right in the middle of today's 21st century, not something that was written in the mid-1950's, but yet seeing the definite mindset of the 50's in the south; the sameness and the sadness of the direction of meaning and passion that troubles the south, and how it reflects in all of us today. Harper Lee writes that passion within her story.
I saw the returning 26 year old Jean Louise incorporated into the child, Scout, growing up in her “color blindness”. She returns to see that nothing, and everything, has changed, including herself. This story takes you from present to past in anecdotal mind wandering recollections...some exceedingly funny, some contemplative and mind shaping, some tearful, some questioning with face to face mood-swinging combativeness. Jean Louise, aka Scout, comes back home and grapples with her own demons in a town called Maycomb, aka home.
Lee touches my nerves, and questions me in her writing...”Do you see what I see?”... “Can you answer those questions for me?” ...“Am I right or am I wrong?” I don’t have to look far to find the answers, as Jean Louise paints her story in honest black and white; all the while the world of Scout is now in living color...finding a colorful and color filled world of contradictions.
After reading this story, I went to B&N to check out the reviews, just to see the overall number of reviews and how many total stars it received. Five is the maximum per review. I don’t usually read reviews in their entirety, for fear of receiving too much information about the storyline, but I do like to know if a reader likes the story or doesn’t, and a brief reason why. I did read the one reviewer who gave Lee’s story a one (1) star, these are the reviews I look at a little bit closer. This particular reviewer felt as though Harper Lee did NOT write this story entirely, as if it was somehow altered in some way, to reflect today’s civil rights issues. Your guess is as good as mine!
Harper Lee has always been a person of her own mind, although, as of late, not well, but I doubt anyone can tell her what to do. I do see a possibility as to why she was asked for GSAW not to be published at first submission in 1957; my assumption would be that with the heated civil unrest in the late 1950s and 60’s - this story (GTAW) would not receive the same welcome as the "second" novel she chose to write and submit instead - “To Kill A Mockingbird”, as a child's non threatening look at the world she chose to make of it.
I don’t know what transpired after TKAM was written to make her set this story aside for so long, and apparently forgotten and lost for so many years. I knew Lee was not fond of being in the public eye, very rarely gave interviews, and receiving more publicity over another book was probably the last thing she wanted. Here is a little more insight into Ms. Lee’s life….and a background on Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, who presumably found this manuscript - more unanswered questions arising.
I also came across this statement by Toni Morrison on GSAW:
“In an interview earlier this year, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison called it a 'white savior' narrative, 'one of those' that reduced black people to onlookers in their own struggle for equal rights.” Read more
I don’t imagine a black woman, especially a writer, would find this novel an honest, current, and enjoyable read, but it wasn’t written by a black writer. I, myself, have read many wonderful novels, deliberately, by black women, I wanted to see the differences in each race presentation. I saw what I was looking for, just as Toni Morrison didn’t see what she wanted to see in Harper Lee’s GSAW.
I’ve alway thought of myself as “color blind”. I like to say I see black people just as I see everyone else. How neive both Scout and myself are in our views. I see a lot differently, now, after reading this novel.
As I am white, and try to understand these differences, I’ve been accused, by black women, of being from another world and would never understand them. These words make me angry, and no matter how hard I try I don’t seem to be able to change the world’s thinking to resemble mine. I am different, and I write about it here, and I try to live with the fact that I’m just one person who can’t do the living for anybody but myself. My support is always for equality, but I now see the struggles in both the black and the white communities trying to come together, still, in the 21st century.
Prejudice is not a word singled out to be used against just black people or white people, it’s a word used worldwide by every known human being who doesn’t like something or someone. Knowing these differences, set them aside, and make the best of both worlds. Jean Louise is a work in progress, just as the rest of us are.
I read a letter from Lee to Oprah, in Oprah’s O magazine. Here is her letter - she talks about books and reading:
May 7, 2006
Dear Oprah,
Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn’t know how? I must have learned from having been read to by my family. My sisters and brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering them; my mother read me a story every day, usually a children’s classic, and my father read from the four newspapers he got through every evening. Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime.
So I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren’t for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We’re talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression.
Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock. There were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again.
As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts. Aesthetic frissons ran a poor second to the thrills of acquisition. The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed — he swapped his sister’s doll buggy.
We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade, and we were impatient with them for having to catch up. We ignored them.
And it wasn’t until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read three-to-one — three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us.
Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.
And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.
The village of my childhood is gone, with it most of the book collectors, including the dodgy one who swapped his complete set of Seckatary Hawkinses for a shotgun and kept it until it was retrieved by an irate parent.
Now we are three in number and live hundreds of miles away from each other. We still keep in touch by telephone conversations of recurrent theme: “What is your name again?” followed by “What are you reading?” We don’t always remember.
Much love,
Harper
