Thursday, July 15, 2010Opinion

The Brownsville States-Graphic

page A4

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By 28th Judicial District Circuit Court Judge Clayburn Peeples

To Kill a Mockingbird Turns 50

Calvin's Corner

By Calvin Carter, Staff Writer

One afternoon, the summer after my freshman year in high school, I was browsing around a newsstand when a paperback novel caught my eye. It had an interesting title, and across the top of the cover were the words, “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.”

I didn’t know what the Pulitzer Prize was then, but the title caught my eye, and I took it off the rack and began reading the first page. Here’s what it said: When he was nearly 13, 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.

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

I was hooked. I wanted to know more about those people, so I bought the book and spent the rest of the weekend reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

I couldn’t put it down; it was like listening to my dad tell a long, drawn out story about his boyhood. When I finished it the next day, I was so enthusiastic about it I actually talked him into reading it, too. He did, and when he finished it, he handed it back to me and shook his head in amazement. “That’s the first book I’ve ever read,” he said, “that tells it the way things really were. I mean, that’s exactly what it was like here in the 30s.”

“Here” was Fulton, Kentucky, but it didn’t matter. Ms. Lee’s description of small town Southern life resonated so deeply with him he even went to see the movie when it came out three years later, something he only did about once a decade.

That’s how powerful an impression the book made on people when it first came out. To people who loved it, and most people who read it did, it was simply marvelous.

And when they made the movie we all talked about how afraid we were that they would ruin the story in translating it,

but our worries were for naught. The movie was just as good as the book.

I thought back to my first introduction to the story over the weekend when I read that Sunday was the 50th anniversary of its publication. The author, Harper Lee, said in an interview she gave in 1964 (the last one she ever gave) that she hadn’t expected the book to sell well at all. What she hoped for, she said, was a “quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers,” but with enough praise to give her encouragement to keep on writing.

What she got instead was almost universal praise and a book that hasn’t stopped selling yet. Still in publication, it has sold more than 30 million copies so far. It has been named the best novel of the 20th Century by at least one rating organization, and it has been the subject of millions of high school themes. Ask people, especially Southerners, what their favorite book is, and an amazing number of those who don’t say, Gone With the Wind, will name To Kill a Mockingbird. Both, by the way, were written by Southern women who never wrote anything else, but that’s another story.

To Kill a Mockingbird, as virtually everybody knows, is a rite-of-passage novel, told through the eyes of a six-year-old, about children growing up in the Depression who learn first hand about the racism and injustice that were woven into the life of their small Southern

town and about how much courage it took to confront it.

That’s what they teach kids today in English classes, but the novel is much, much more than that. It’s about standing up for what you think in right in the face of near universal community opposition and about learning tolerance and how wrong it is to judge other people on surface considerations. It is a book about a father’s love for his children, and finally, it is an enchantingly nostalgic book about the chivalry and beauty, even in the midst of staggering social injustice, that were once hallmarks of small Southern towns. Maycomb may have been a tired old town . . . where bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of live oaks on the square, but it was also a place where Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

Ms. Lee, in the one interview she gave, talked about this. “I would like to leave,” she said, “some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world . . . something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain . . . small town middle-class Southern life.”

“I want to do the best I can, “she said in the same interview, “with the talent God gave me.”

I’d say she did very well indeed.

Give yourself a treat this summer; read the book again.

Breakups or divorces are never really easy for anyone to deal with. Yet, despite the difficult and vulnerable nature of crushing or being crushed by another, it doesn’t mean that the two parties involved can’t be civil with one another.

Well try telling that to 25-year-old Jeanne Mundango Manunga, a Santa Ana woman who managed to get her ex-boyfriend and his sister-in-law in jail from threatening cell phone text messages.

The only problem is that text messages were actually from Manunga.

After arresting Manuanga’s ex-boyfriend and his sister-in-law a few times, they soon discovered that Manunga was actually sending the messages to her phone from another cell phone purchased in the sister-in-law’s name.

I know that when it comes to dealing with matters of the heart, anything can happen. But come on.

Falsely placing someone in jail is no laughing matter. Besides, haven’t you ever heard of the saying that “revenge is for the weak?”

Obviously Manunga didn’t quite get that brief philosophical memo.

Manunga was of course punished with a year in jail, three years probation and $50,000 in restitution for all the bail money the victims had to pay.

Now I don’t really want discuss whether Manunga was the wrong for seeking revenge.

As I said, anything can happen when it comes to the heart, especially when that heart is crushed. And I don’t even know the nature of the break-up. For all I know, her ex-boyfriend could have abused her or cheated on her. Or maybe Manunga trashed the relationship and is just a hateful enough person.

The story never really explains their relationship.

What’s got me curious is her sentencing? Would it have been better for Manunga to be placed in a mental hospital instead of jail? Many argue that placing her in jail will not help with what is clearly to me, a mental problem. Maybe they’re right.

Then again, being falsely placed in jail is not just something that should go unpunished. The sister-in-law of the ex-boyfriend was held in custody for while when arrested because she didn’t quite have the funds to get herself out.

Personally, I think a combination of a little jail time, a lot of mental help and some restitution is in order.

There’s the social stigma, which suggests jail is merely a temporary solution with little long-term answers. It does little to actually rehabilitate.

Addiction is a huge example of this idea, pointing out that repeats offenders will continue their destructive cycle unless they are rehabilitated.

But we’re talking of mental instability not drug addiction, two problems which may live

in the same neighborhood for some people, but do not necessarily share the same crowded house.

To me, jail would do little to help someone mentally, other than tell the person “Ok, I can’t do this to them, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do that.”

And maybe it’s just wrong to assume Manunga has a mental problem. Okay in the short sense, she’s clearly off the rocker. But why do I feel that if this were one of those “he cheated on me, so I’m slashing his tires” revenge songs, it’d be on the top ten music charts instead of the pages of Digg or Google News.

Another social stigma we’ve come to accept is the idea that when a woman is scorned, it’s assumed and almost accepted that revenge is in the cards. It’s almost like an automatic buffer where you have to sympathize, rather than say, “Wow, you need help.”

SO the guys are expected to cheat, and the girls are expected to act on harsh revenge.

Doesn’t it seem unbalanced?

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough about this story. I want to know, dear readers, what do you think? If you’d like to view the story for yourself, you can visit www.ocregister.com/news/sister-257108-law-manunga.html.

Read it, and please give me your two cents.

Don’t text me. I’ll text you

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