In defense of sacred story

By Janis Owens

As an American and a Southerner (not always in that order) I have to admit that I never thought I’d take up a pen in defense of the liberal white Southerners who helped turn the world upside down when I was a child in the deep South.

I came from the other side of the tracks. I was born a Cracker in the hardscrabble, church-loving South. When I studied lynchings as a student at the University of Florida, I got first-hand accounts, from living relatives, of mind-bending violence perpetrated on black Americans. I got few apologies. Racism was so thoroughly ingrained and so viciously enforced that the very idea of embracing cultural equality was actively and violently resisted, and the great bleeding-heart liberals who thought otherwise were derided and humiliated, and dismissed as dangerously naïve, in a culture where naïveté was despised.

Yet I found myself not only bristling, but clenching my Cracker jaw, when I read Malcolm Gladwell’s great indictment of the species in the most recent issue of The New Yorker (“The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism,” Aug. 10).

Gladwell is a rising star in pop culture, with three bestselling books under his belt — “Blink,” “The Tipping Point” and “The Outliers.” His books are quasi-science, with an anthropological slant, his worldview shaped by his interpretation of an amalgamation of statistics, trends and expert testimony. He doles out them out with the dry detachment of an alien from Mars, looking down on the face of the earth and trying to figure out just what makes those humans tick. Since I don’t work for the census bureau or have a degree in risk management, I usually take him at his word on his numbers, proof and methods of calculations.

I draw the line at his indictment of Atticus Finch, the fictional hero of Harper Lee’s classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Mr. Gladwell’s latest column takes aim at him, and Big Jim Folsom, and white liberal Southerners in general, in a headlong dissection of their legacy. He begins by idealizing Big Jim with a skill that makes you scratch your head and think, “What a guy.” After setting him up as a modern American hero — a rare realist in a barren racial landscape — he slowly unravels him and, at the end, there is the gut punch: Big Jim using the word no white Southerner dare speak (with reason: it is a hateful word.)

Once he nails Big Jim, he turns his eye to Atticus Finch, and accuses them, among other things, of a stark and unforgivable sin: “Old-style Southern liberalism — gradual and paternalistic.” He concedes their racial tolerance, but dismisses them as insiders, men who didn’t move quickly, or starkly, or urgently enough for “formal equality.” He goes on to paint Atticus as a shyster lawyer, quick to sacrifice a woman-with-a-reputation on the altar of justice. If that isn’t enough, he is also vilifies him for his incomplete hatred of Hitler, making him, yes, anti-Semitic, at least by implication, and somehow connected to the lynching of Leo Frank.

It is a sad bit of irony, to me, that modern revisionists reject Atticus for the same reason hardcore racists dismissed all white liberals, back in the day — for his idealism. He was lost to reality, was Atticus. He was soft. When his daughter asks him pointed questions, he answers in parable. He believes in justice and tolerance and love of his neighbors. He is willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of fairness.

Mr. Gladwell isn’t buying.

I am, and from the bottom of my intuitive, two-second gut reaction — one so well-dissected in “Blink!” — I might point out a few salient cultural points that Mr. Gladwell seems to have overlooked in his march to accusation.

The first is the undeniable fact that Atticus Finch, unlike Big Jim, is a fictional creation. His courtroom strategy was never intended to form legal precedent or create a culture of worship. It was written as a story, a quiet and powerful story that, like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” helped turn the tide of public opinion in the heat of battle, when Americans were being slaughtered in their battle for equality.

The sedition of the story is gentle. Harper Lee is a child of the South, and understood a truth shared by Martin Luther King and all the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement: how that racism, in its lock-step, legalized form, was not best challenged by shouting confrontation, but in a variety of non-violent, non-aggressive ways — marches, sermons, prayers and story.

Especially story, that great love of all Southerners, black and white, on both sides of the tracks. The sacred story has a unique ability to bare the defenses of the hardened heart, and offer a different perspective. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is such a tale- a heroic fable, with an unlikely hero, a kind man in a day when tolerant men were despised as weak. He was also smart, loving and fair, and he knew how to how to shoot a gun. He was committed to a startling new equality, but when push came to shove, he defended his own: he killed a rabid dog. He protected the man who saved his children.

Ms. Lee quietly revised popular culture in her simple, hometown story. She introduced a man of honor — a Southern man with a family, who didn’t rely on hatred to feed his identity. A man, who, in Mr. Gladwell’s estimation, fails the Moral Test — and can I just ask, from my perch deep in the woods of North Florida: who the hell is he to judge?

That Atticus, and all southern liberals, had flaws — paternalism not least — isn’t arguable. But they took a stand on the side of right and, in Atticus’ case, peopled some of the loveliest lines in America prose. I’ve no doubt that prose will endure and the finger-pointers will be silenced by the dreamers. Their magic is too powerful, as in these simple lines, when Scout recalls her lost childhood: “Maycomb was an old town, and it was a tired old town, when I first knew it.”

I can paraphrase that to, “Atticus Finch was an old hero, and a tired old hero, when I first knew him.”

Hero, he was. Hero, he will remain.

Marianna native Janis Owens is author of three novels set in West Florida: “My Brother Michael,” “Myra Sims” and “The Schooling of Claybird Catts.” Her memoir cookbook, “The Cracker Kitchen: A Cookbook in Celebration of Cornbread-fed, Down-home Family Stories and Cuisine” (Scribner), was published in February.
Read Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article at http://bit.ly/fifzu.