Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (26 page)

9. The following comment by Lee is most significant in this regard, referring to Ewell's appearance at the trial: “All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbors was, that if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white” (
TKAM
195).

Works Cited

Butler, Robert. “The Religious Vision in
To Kill A Mockingbird
.” In
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections.
Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007. (121–133)

Day, William Patrick.
In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy
. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1985.

Early, Gerald. “The Madness in the American House: The New Southern Gothic, and the Young Adult Novel of the 1960s: A Personal Reflection.” In
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections
. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007. (93–103)

Ellis, Kate Ferguson.
The Contested Castle: The Gothic Novel and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology.
Urbana: U Illinois P, 1989.

Fine, Laura. “Structuring the Narrator's Rebellion in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.” In
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections
. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007. (61–77)

Freud, Sigmund.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
1905. Reprinted in
A Freud Reader
. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989.

Johnson, Claudia Durst.
“To Kill a Mockingbird”: Threatening Boundaries.
New York: Twayne, 1994.

Lee, Harper.
To Kill a Mockingbird.
1960. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

Malin, Irving.
New American Gothic
. Edwardsville: Southern Illinois U P, 1962.

Oxford English Dictionary
. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1989.

Petry, Alice Hall, ed.
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections.
Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007.

Punter, David.
The Literature of Horror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day
. London: Longman, 1980.

Rowe, John Carlos. “Racism, Fetishism, and the Gift Economy in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.” In
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections
. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007. (1–17)

Sedgwick, Eve.
The Coherence of Gothic Conventions
. New York: Arno Press, 1980.

Carl F. Miller

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt. (
TKAM
3)

This opening passage from Harper Lee's classic
To Kill a Mockingbird
stands to this day as an unusual choice on Lee's part, given the paragraph's emphasis on both masculinity and sports in a novel that has traditionally (and rightfully) been lauded for its portrayal of the feminine and a series of social concerns that seemingly encapsulate everything
except
sports. Upon closer examination, however, Lee's book utilizes sports to specifically establish the identity of a number of its characters, and inversely uses the identity of several characters to solidify their relationship to sports. From the very opening of the book,
To Kill a Mockingbird
is deceptively reliant on the sporting culture of the South in its realistic depiction of the town of Maycomb, Alabama, and its citizens.

To Kill a Mockingbird
is, of course, a quasi-autobiographical account of Harper Lee's own childhood, with Scout (Jean Louise) Finch representing Lee herself, Atticus portraying Lee's father, and Dill Harris serving as a memorable illustration of Lee's close friend, Truman Capote. Jem is modeled after Lee's brother, Edwin, and his fascination with sports is reflective of Edwin's own passion for all things physically competitive in his early adult years. Fiction did, however, afford Harper Lee a number of cathartic advantages that real life did not. The opening passage detailing Jem's injury essentially provides a happy ending to the resultant book, as it implies that Bob Ewell's attack on the Finch children will ultimately carry no lasting physical limitations. Lee's brother, on the other hand, died suddenly in 1951 at the age of thirty, and the cause of his death was blamed in part on sports, as “a few of the servicemen attending the funeral mentioned that Edwin had been playing a strenuous game of softball the afternoon before” (Shields 110). Whatever the veracity of these claims, it seems a bit ironic that his death be attributed to a sport decidedly less violent and dangerous than football—much the same as Jem's own injuries result not from football but rather walking home from a school pageant.

Even if Jem had been based on any number of other boys from Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, his attitude toward sports would likely have been similar. The Deep South of Lee's childhood was characterized by the phrase, “One party, one crop, one sport, and one dollar if you were lucky.” The Democratic Party was the effective default vote of the South at this time (note the Barber ladies mentioned in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, who “were rumored to be Republicans” and are characterized by “their Yankee ways” [288]), and cotton was the dominant crop of the region. Poverty was widespread throughout the South; the novel begins in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, and even by the standards of the time, Alabama was strikingly impoverished. Scout describes the newspaper stories she would read with her father and brother: “There were sit-down strikes in Birmingham; bread lines in the city grew longer, people in the country grew poorer. But these were events remote from the world of Jem and me” (
TKAM
132).

Perhaps most ubiquitously of all, football was the sport of choice in the South. While economic and labor developments in Birmingham are decidedly remote from the world of Maycomb, football news of any kind is equally applicable across the entire state and carries with it a degree of interest and excitement that is notably absent from accounts of the Great Depression. Scout recalls,

That spring [of 1934] was a good one: the days grew longer and gave us more playing time. Jem's mind was occupied mostly with the vital statistics of every college football player in the nation. Every night Atticus would read us the sports pages of the newspapers. Alabama might go to the Rose Bowl again this year, judging from its prospects, not one of whose names we could pronounce. (
TKAM
126)

Michael Oriard has theorized that “football is indeed a cultural text, that it tells a story, that this story is read differently by different groups and individuals, and that these different interpretations change through time” (17), and this interpretation is particularly applicable to the South of this time. The enthusiasm attached to football is due in part to the sport providing a source of achievement and pride, in contrast to the national perception of the South as an impoverished, socially inequitable region that had lost the Civil War (an event that a number of people could still personally remember in 1933). The University of Alabama was an institution that was so cash-strapped in the late 1920s that seniors actually had to teach freshman classes, but it was also a college football powerhouse second only to the University of Notre Dame in national reputation. Alabama would indeed go to the Rose Bowl following the 1934 season, capping their fourth national championship in a decade with a 29–13 victory over Stanford University.

The narrative appeal of football reaches beyond the regional affinity for the sport. As Christian Messenger observes, “Injuries are real, even tragic at times, as is the remote possibility of death. Careers are short; bodies are left in pain. . . . Within a known, repeatable format, there is a vast amount of play, room for the improbable, the incredible, the tragic, the absurd” (729). An interest in football also represents a significant step forward in the maturation process of Jem and Scout, who in the early part of the novel are content to busy themselves with games rather than sports. These myriad childhood games, such as “Boo Radley” (
TKAM
43), are unique and private and clandestine, whereas sports are standardized and public and a source of civic pride. The games of Jem and Scout's youth are more akin to stage acting, and the children understand that adults like Atticus and Calpurnia will view such games suspiciously (at one point, Jem suggests changing the names of the characters in “Boo Radley,” so they “couldn't be accused of playing anything” [
TKAM
46]).

Conversely, a sport like football represents the horizon beyond childhood and the passage into adulthood, in both the physical maturity it demands and in the collective social network it enables. While Jem's participation in childhood games marks him as relatively unusual for a boy of his age, his obsession with football is an overwhelmingly ordinary pursuit and a signal of his expanding social development. There is a “fake peace that prevailed on Sundays” because, Scout explains, “Jem in his old age had taken to his room with a stack of football magazines” (
TKAM
168). In fact, Jem's increased interest in football results in his diminished interest in being Scout's playmate, much to the bemusement of his sister, who often finds her brother “on the sofa with a football magazine in front of his face, his head turning as if its pages contained a live tennis match”
1
(
TKAM
155).

Far from simply being extraneous references within the novel, these magazines serve as a deeper window into the children's characters and their culture. Atticus does not understand how deeply frightened Jem is about Bob Ewell's threats until “he tempted Jem with a new football magazine one night,” only to have “Jem flip the pages and toss it aside” in disinterest (
TKAM
249). When Jem seems inconsolable after cutting the tops off Mrs. Dubose's camellia bushes, Scout explains that she “picked up a football magazine, found a picture of Dixie Howell, showed it to Jem and said, ‘This looks like you.' That was the nicest thing I could think to say to him” (
TKAM
118–19). It is unclear whether this is simply the first picture of a player that Scout comes upon, or whether she knows who Dixie Howell is well enough to specifically select him. In either case, the compliment would have been exceedingly satisfactory: Millard “Dixie” Howell (figure 10.1) was the All-American quarterback on Alabama's 1934 national championship team, who was also one of the nation's best punters and punt returners. In his final college game, the 1935 Rose Bowl, Howell was named the outstanding player as he scored two touchdowns and threw two touchdown passes (to future NFL Hall of Famer Don Hutson).

As much as reading about football represents an intellectual identity for Jem, the actual playing of the sport drives his aspirations for physical and emotional maturity. Jem has always been several grades above Scout, and while his graduation to the high school building represents a notable difference between the siblings, it is his place on the football team that truly creates a deviation in their daily routines. As Scout explains,

School started, and so did our daily trips past the Radley Place. Jem was in the seventh grade and went to high school, beyond the grammar school building; I was in the third grade, and our routines were so different I only walked to school with Jem in the mornings and saw him at mealtimes. He went out for football, but was too slender and too young yet to do anything but carry the team water buckets. This he did with enthusiasm; most afternoons he was seldom home before dark. (
TKAM
277)

Jem is effectively stuck in maturity limbo, too old for the childhood games of Scout and too young for the playing fields of high school sports. The only way for him to break from this stasis—both literally and symbolically—is to grow older and larger and make the varsity football team, a task that he takes very seriously (if not entirely realistically). Scout describes a seemingly common scene from that fall:

Jem was worn out from a days' water-carrying. There were at least twelve banana peels on the floor by his bed, surrounding an empty milk bottle. “Whatcha stuffin' for?” I asked.

“Coach says if I can gain twenty-five pounds by year after next I can play,” he said. “This is the quickest way.” (
TKAM
282)

While Jem finds himself on the young side of the window to play football, his father, Atticus, is instead too old to participate in the sport. Football, in accordance with Messenger's aforementioned statement, is characterized by short careers, and in the early part of the novel Jem and Scout are both apt to gauge their father's masculinity and social status in terms of his physical and recreational abilities. “Jem and I found our father satisfactory,” Scout says, “he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment” (
TKAM
6). But while he plays
with
them, Atticus never plays
against
them—at least not to win—and never pits them against one another in competition, either. Instead, Atticus is fond of crafting scenarios in which his children “were both right” (
TKAM
4). Since sports are designed to establish winners and losers, participating seems to run contrary to Atticus' central philosophy.

To Atticus' son, this is taken at best as a sign of old age, at worst as a sign of weakness. Jem is described as having been “football crazy. Atticus was never too tired to play keepaway, but when Jem wanted him to tackle him Atticus would say, ‘I'm too old for that, son'” (
TKAM
102). The breaking point for Jem comes when Atticus dismisses the opportunity to compete against other fathers in the South's sport of choice:

Jem underlined it when he asked Atticus if he was going out for the Methodists and Atticus said he'd break his neck if he did, he was just too old for that sort of thing. The Methodists were trying to pay off their church mortgage, and had challenged the Baptists to a game of touch football. Everybody in town's father was playing, it seemed, except Atticus. Jem didn't even want to go, but he was unable to resist football in any form, and he stood gloomily on the sidelines with Atticus and me watching Cecil Jacobs's father make touchdowns for the Baptists. (
TKAM
105)

Despite Atticus' impeccable reputation as both a lawyer and a state legislator, the cultural capital for fatherhood (at least in Jem's mind) is based on the ability to compete on the football field for public edification. Scout, likewise, is unimpressed that Atticus can play the Jew's harp or draw up an airtight will (both nonsporting pursuits) and is unwilling to cede that Atticus is the best checker player in town, on the grounds that she and Jem beat their father all the time—to which Miss Maudie knowingly emphasizes, “It's because he lets you win” (
TKAM
104).

Instead, it is only when Atticus is summoned to shoot Tim Johnson, the rabid dog wobbling dangerously down their street, that Jem and Scout both take notice of their father's sporting abilities. Despite not having fired a gun in thirty years, Atticus takes down the dog in a single shot, to the amazement of both of his children. Hunting is a sport to Jem and Scout and to most of the residents of Maycomb, and when Miss Maudie reports in the wake of the shooting that Atticus' nickname growing up was “One-Shot Finch,” it effectively clinches Atticus' status as a master sportsman in the eyes of his family (
TKAM
111). The fact that he shoots out of necessity (rather than sport) only heightens their appreciation for their father's talent; in this case, the stakes are not win or lose, but rather life or death. At chapter's end, Jem declares, “Atticus is real old, but I wouldn't care if he couldn't do anything—I wouldn't care if he couldn't do a blessed thing.
. . . Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!” (
TKAM
113).

Of course, the notion of being a sporting gentleman raises the conundrum of where ladies fit into the world of sports. Harper Lee's own biography offers some insight into this query, as she was a self-described tomboy who was often willing to test the social boundaries traditionally ascribed to women. While attending the University of Alabama from 1945–1949, Lee wrote for the campus humor magazine, the
Rammer Jammer
, so named after the cheer that erupted after football victories in Denny Stadium (“Rammer jammer, yellow hammer, give 'em hell, Alabama!”). Furthermore, Charles Shields records that, while Lee was at Alabama, “one of her favorite spots to hang out was the University Supply Store, the SUPe—a combination bookstore and soda fountain—where she liked nothing better than to sit in a booth crammed with young men and talk about football” (99). In Lee's first year on campus, the football team went undefeated and again won the Rose Bowl, and by this time the fervor for playing football was no longer limited to just male students. The Honey Bowl (figure 10.2) was established to showcase female intramural football teams at Alabama, and “Nelle [Lee's given name] played on a powderpuff team of junior and senior girls—‘pigskin-packin' mamas,' the
Crimson White
[Alabama's student newspaper] called them” (Shields 99).