Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (27 page)

The social and physical boundaries of sports that Lee faced (if not overcame) in her own life are readily reflected in her writing. Michele Ware suggests that “
To Kill a Mockingbird
can be read as a feminist bildungsroman, for Scout emerges from her childhood experiences with a clear sense of her place in her community and an awareness of her potential power as the woman she will be one day” (288). But her growth also leaves Scout aware of her limitations as a female and still excluded from the rites of passage into manhood—for which sports stands as the primary popular designation.

Scout's very nickname (as opposed to “Jean Louise,” her given name) implies a sort of tomboyish nature and acceptance. Her desire to follow in Jem's footsteps is readily evident throughout the novel, but while she can become a lawyer (as Miss Stephanie Crawford suggests) or a nurse or an aviator (professions she considers for herself), there are two things she can never become: a man or a football player. Furthermore, this pair of concepts—manhood and football—is largely synonymous in Jem's mind, as seen in his exchange with Scout after she quarrels with Aunt Alexandra:

His eyebrows were becoming heavier, and I noticed a new slimness about his body. He was growing taller.

When he looked around, he must have thought I would start crying again, for he said, “Show you something if you won't tell anybody.” I said what. He unbuttoned his shirt, grinning shyly.

“Well what?”

“Well can't you see it?”

“Well no.”

“Well it's hair.”

“Where?”

“There. Right there.”

He had been a comfort to me, so I said it looked lovely, but I didn't see anything. “It's real nice, Jem.”

“Under my arms, too,” he said. “Goin' out for football next year. Scout, don't let Aunty aggravate you.”

It seemed only yesterday that he was telling me not to aggravate Aunty.

“You know she's not used to girls,” said Jem, “leastways, not girls like you. She's trying to make you a lady. Can't you take up sewin' or somethin'?” (
TKAM
257)

The social designations evident in this conversation are, for a pair of decidedly progressive children, overwhelmingly traditional; Jem is to become a football player and subsequently a gentleman, while Scout is to engage in needlepoint on her way to becoming a lady—in short, as Jem yells at her on one occasion, “bein' a girl and acting right” (
TKAM
131). When Jem earlier threatens to spank Scout if she antagonizes Aunt Alexandra, Scout attacks him physically. She admits that “it nearly knocked the breath out of me, but it didn't matter because I knew he was fighting, he was fighting me back. We were still equals” (
TKAM
156–57).

Such symbolic victory proves short-lived, however, as Scout can never ascend to a position of equality in the public realm of physical competition. This realization is not lost on the narrator; Michele Ware observes that “according to Scout, power and authority are masculine attributes; to be a girl is to be marginalized and excluded” (286).

Scout and Dill are both characters who are marginalized on the grounds of their femininity. Unable to join Jem (or anyone else for that matter) in a real game of football, Scout and Dill “kicked Jem's football around the pasture for a while” before deciding that—deprived of its competitive element—it “was no fun” (
TKAM
168). Even more revealing are Dill's parents telling him, “You're not a boy. Boys get out and play baseball with other boys, they don't hang around the house worryin' their folks” (
TKAM
162); in this case, biological gender has no bearing upon masculinity, with sports instead serving as the primary designation of manhood. Not coincidentally, upon recollecting this statement, Dill compensates by suggesting the most masculine response he can think of: that he and Scout should have a baby together (
TKAM
162).

Even when left to her own devices, free of her Aunt's rules and Jem's suggestions, Scout invariably (if unintentionally) chooses to conform with the sporting roles traditionally assigned to young women. She explains,

The day after Jem's twelfth birthday . . . [he] thought he had enough to buy a miniature steam engine for himself and a twirling baton for me. I had long had my eye on that baton; it was at V. J. Elmore's, it was bedecked with sequins and tinsel, it cost seventeen cents. It was then my burning ambition to grow up to twirl with the Maycomb County High School band. (
TKAM
116)

While Scout seeks to follow in Jem's footsteps, she does not aspire to join the Maycomb County High School football team, and she rests her desires on the realistic goal of twirling on the gridiron instead of tackling. While this may be partly attributed to the lack of any female football players to look up to, it may also be seen as a desire to engage in the same scene of social normalcy that the sport of football provides for Jem. Short of the trial of Tom Robinson, Friday night high school football is an unparalleled public event in Maycomb, one that offers competition and entertainment opportunities to both genders in a stratified manner.

It is, however, the trial of Tom Robinson that provides the starkest reminder that not every citizen of Maycomb has the same opportunities. The “Colored balcony” in the courtroom is a testament to the enduring segregation practices of the Deep South (
TKAM
187), which are also evident in the children's earlier visit to First Purchase African M.E. Church (
TKAM
134). Although never explicitly depicted in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, schools were among the most segregated institutions of all, assuming that individuals of color even had a school to attend. Criticism of the book has often centered on its treatment of race, to the extent that some have questioned the work's contemporary pertinence on the subject. Isaac Saney, for example, states that “the images and messages of
To Kill a Mockingbird
are [consistently] given new life, despite the reality that, as in the case of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, these motifs have long since outlived any positive and progressive purpose” and are instead “a detriment and a regressive block” (103).

But Tom Robinson's trial highlights an even more enduring aspect of discrimination that stretches beyond legal segregation: what Scout describes as “the secret courts of men's hearts” (
TKAM
276). For it is just such a motivation that drove every major college football program in the South to remain exclusively white,
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despite the fact that there was never any law barring African Americans from participating. This was akin in many ways to the unspoken color barrier of major league baseball, which required the finest African American ballplayers of the time to play in the Negro leagues. Any man who dared violate this established tradition faced ostracism, in much the same way that anyone who loved someone of another race would be outcast; as Atticus says of Mayella Ewell, “She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with” (
TKAM
231).

Atticus stresses that this realization gives added significance to institutions like the courtroom, where “all men are created equal. . . . In this country our courts are the great levelers” (
TKAM
233). Sports would seem to offer an equivalent institution, but the African American characters in
To Kill a Mockingbird
are more fixated on mere survival (as in Tom's case) than on recreational competition and entertainment. Even a progressive child like Jem thinks that, in Maycomb County, “there's four kinds of folks. . . . There's the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there's the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes” (
TKAM
258). African Americans occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder, and it is a position with seemingly little hope of advancement and leisure. The others may be equal in sports, but the last rung is barred from even participating.

Instead, the lone opportunity for an African American to utilize his athletic ability ends tragically, when Tom Robinson attempts to escape from prison. Atticus tells his family that Tom “was running. It was during their exercise period. They said he just broke into a blind raving charge at the fence and started climbing over. Right in front of them. . . . They said if he'd had two good arms he'd have made it, he was moving that fast” (
TKAM
268). Scout, in an effort to conceptualize the how far and fast Tom would have had to run, recalls, “I had seen Enfield Prison farm, and Atticus had pointed out the exercise yard to me. It was the size of a football field” (
TKAM
270). It is not only instructive that Scout conceptualizes size in terms of football, but also that it is Tom's (or any African American character's at the time) one chance to demonstrate his athletic prowess. However, much the same as Atticus' aforementioned shooting of Tim Johnson, the stakes of this competition are literally life and death. While Tom performs fine on the field itself, it is the fence erected around it that proves to be his undoing.

While the color barrier was broken in major league baseball in 1947 with the debut of Jackie Robinson and was also broken thereabouts in both the National Football League (1946) and the National Basketball Association (1950), major college football in the South was still a whites-only institution at the time of
To Kill a Mockingbird
's publication in 1960. The fact that it was institutions of higher education enforcing this policy makes segregation all the more scathing and perplexing in retrospect, with some Southern universities going out of their way to avoid playing against teams that fielded African American players. By this time, Northern universities had been integrated for several years, a development that was seen in a different light in the South. At Aunt Alexandra's missionary circle meeting, Miss Merriweather refers to Northerners as “born hypocrites” (
TKAM
267). She justifies segregation by explaining that “at least [Southerners] don't have that sin on our shoulders down here. People up there set 'em free, but you don't see 'em settin' at the table with 'em. At least we don't have the deceit to say to 'em yes you're as good as we are but stay away from us. Down here we just say live your way and we'll live ours” (
TKAM
267).

Nevertheless, there was perhaps no better demonstration of the accelerated progress of national integration than major college football. The year after
To Kill a Mockingbird
was published, Syracuse's Ernie Davis became the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy, while Ohio State captured a share of the national championship thanks to African American stars Bob Ferguson, Paul Warfield, and Matt Snell. The other half of the national title was won by the University of Alabama (with an all-white football roster), which was coached by a former teammate of Dixie Howell's: Paul “Bear” Bryant. Bryant's playing career at Alabama (1932–1935; see figure 10.3) effectively parallels the time frame of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, when he was a second-team all-conference receiver. He would go on to win more games than any other college coach in history (figure 10.4),
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along the way becoming one of the two most famous men in the history of the state.

The other most famous man in Alabama history is George Wallace, who is best known for his “Stand at the Schoolhouse Door,” in which he attempted to block the integration of the University of Alabama in 1963. This event was hailed by many as the symbolic end of segregation in the South, as evident in E. Culpepper Clark's historical account,
The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama
(Oxford University Press, 1993). But there still remained the equally significant barrier of racial segregation in athletics, with even a figure as powerful as Bryant unable to break the established code.

As emphasized by
To Kill a Mockingbird
, such injustices can rarely be immediately rectified. When Jem expresses his displeasure with Alabama's system of letting juries determine capital punishment, he tells Atticus (an elected state representative) that he should “go up to Montgomery and change the law” (
TKAM
251). Atticus replies, “You'd be surprised how hard that'd be. I won't live to see the law changed, and if you live to see it you'll be an old man” (
TKAM
251). The same could certainly have been said at the time about segregation in sports in the South, although its status as a “secret” law—rather than a legitimate one—made it a more readily correctible one, based more on public opinion than on outright legislation and bureaucracy.

The game between Alabama and the University of Southern California (USC) in 1970 would prove to be just such a paradigm-changing moment. Played in Birmingham, the contest saw Alabama trounced 42–21 by USC and its African American fullback Sam Cunningham, who rushed for 135 yards and two touchdowns. After the game, Bryant invited Cunningham into the Alabama locker room so he could show his players “what a real football player looks like,” and Cunningham's performance convinced many in the crowd and around the state that integration was both inevitable and necessary. As a result, Alabama assistant coach Jerry Claiborne was quoted as saying, “Sam Cunningham did more to integrate the South in sixty minutes than Martin Luther King did in twenty years” (Yaeger 138). In 1970, running back Wilbur Jackson became the first black athlete to be recruited by Bear Bryant, while the following season transfer John Mitchell became the first African American to play for the Crimson Tide. The change thereafter was startlingly swift: by 1973 (a season in which Alabama won the national title for the first time in eight years) one-third of the team's starters were African American, and by Bryant's last season as coach, 54 of Alabama's 128 players were African American.