Frankly, I didn't read the book until after I had my daughter. That's embarra.s.sing. But in defense of me, how many times have you seen a film and read the book and it totally alters your whole impression of the work? I had my whole life up there on the screen, and I was perfectly happy with the way it was.

When I did read the book, here were all these people that I never knew existed! People that we all have in our families, good or otherwise.

Learning more about the relationship of Boo was interesting.

I would love to have included the parts of the book that talked of our relationship with Calpurnia, for it was so close to my relationship with the ladies who raised me, Beddie Harris and Frankie McCall. Frankie McCall was our majordomo and raised six generations of Badhams. When the book covered going to church with Cal, we did that as children with Beddie and Frankie. We went to their houses, it was part of our upbringing. Frankie knew more about what it was to be a lady than most white people. She expected and demanded the best from us.

Anyone who's lived in the South during that time period of the thirties through the sixties and even today, can totally relate to the feel of the book and the tempo, as far as the slowness and the way things are done. The outgoingness. People go to church, and if you don't go to church, they come to your house to check on you or call. If you are sick, they bring food. They take care of your garden if you are not able to.

I think Scout and I were so similar. I grew up in a house full of boys, so I really didn't relate to females at all. I didn't understand females. I didn't know anything about females other than my mother. That's different when it's your mother. I trailed around my brothers and nephews, and I wanted to be doing whatever they were doing. Of course, they didn't want me doing whatever they were doing, and they would try and get rid of me. I felt so attached to Scout. I just wish I could have been as smart as Scout was, always there with the comeback. Scout was a lot smarter then I was. She's a lot smarter then a lot of adults I know.

Being on the set was playtime. We had a blast. Phillip [Alford, who played Jem] said that we used to fight all the time. I don't remember it, but he said we did. Bob Mulligan was one of the best directors ever. He would squat down and get eye to eye and talk to me like an adult. I don't ever remember him talking to us like children. He would just set up the scene for us. "The camera's gonna be here, you're gonna be here. We're gonna move this way. And then you do your line." How I delivered the lines was left to me. I could do them on the fly. I think it shows when you look at the footage now, it was brilliant.

I think we only got as much of the script as we needed to know. I knew nothing about film. I knew nothing about the business. I was just a normal, stupid kid from Birmingham, Alabama. But evidently I had memorized all the lines. So somebody would hesitate on a line, and be thinking about how to deliver the line, and I would think that they were having trouble with their lines, so I would mouth it. And they'd say, "Cut. You can't do that, Mary. We can see you on film doing that. You can't mouth the lines." It was bad. Phillip got so mad at me for that. I'm sure everybody did. I just didn't know about film.

[For the scene in the porch swing with Gregory Peck when Atticus says, "Scout, do you know what a compromise is?"] I was supposed to cry, and I couldn't cry. I was having fun. I was happy. They tried everything. They took me off to the side and they said, "Did you ever lose a pet?" All this stuff. They finally resorted to blowing onion juice in my eye to try and help.

The ham was interesting. Whitey, our prop manager, made that ham and made it out of chicken wire and papier-mache. We had these press photos to do, so I had to pretend that I was helping Whitey paint it. So we had to put the ham on, and I couldn't see out of it. Then they had to put a harness on to hold it off my body. When I went to take a step it was too tight. So it cut my shins. He had to cut the bottom of it off, and then they had to pad it up so that I could walk.

The tire scene: What you don't see was, off to the side there was this big utility truck. And evidently we had one of our disagreements that morning and the boys decided they just about had enough of me. They were just going to kill me and not have to deal with this anymore. So they took that tire and pushed it as hard as they could into that utility truck. After that, Bob Mulligan put a stunt double in the tire scene. You see me in the very beginning and you see me in the very end. But that long shot down the way, that's a stunt double.

"Hey, Boo" was a hard scene to do. For some reason I got tickled. And I couldn't do it. Or, I felt like I wanted to laugh and I had to do this thing. But it turned out OK.

The hardest scene by far was the jail scene, where we go looking for Atticus. The reason it was so hard was because it was the last day of filming. That was the last thing we shot, and I knew that I would have to say good-bye to all these people and I would never see any of them ever again. We'd been together long enough that these people were like family. So I didn't want to say good-bye. I didn't want it to end.

I have that long speech, [I wasn't doing my lines right], finally Mr. Mulligan called "Cut!" and my mom took me to the trailer and said, "I don't know what's going on with you, but you better get yourself together. Do you know what the freeway is like at five o'clock? These people have to go home." So I went out and I did the stuff: "Hey Mr. Cunningham" and "I know your son." It was just hard to do that whole thing, to know that I'd never see those people again.

[Gregory Peck] was my Atticus. He will always be Atticus. He was so wonderful. I miss him a lot. Years later, the phone would ring, and he'd be on the other [end of the] line. "What ya doing, kiddo?" He'd check on me just to see how I was doing because I lost my parents very early in my life. My mom died three weeks after I graduated high school. My dad died two years after I got married. When most people still have their parents, I didn't have anybody. It was kind of hard. I felt really cut off. So after they were gone, Atticus would call and check on me. If he was gonna be on the East Coast, he'd say, "I'll take you out to lunch." And whenever I'd be in California, I'd always go up to the house and visit. It really meant a lot to me. He was such a role model, and I always wanted him to be proud of me.

My father was very much like Atticus. We were raised with all those morals, all that grounding, all those same rules and regulations for females were in place. Little girls were expected to toe the line and learn to take care of the house and be mothers and wives, and that was about it. Atticus understood Scout. He didn't speak down to his children. After my daddy died, it was good to have the continuance of that male role model.

I had three daddies. There was Atticus, and there was my own daddy, and there was Brock Peters [who played Tom Robinson].

I didn't understand the importance of the film until much, much later. I didn't even get to see any of the film until we had the premiere. Then I got to see the whole story, and then I really kind of understood it.

When Scout's talking to Atticus when she comes home after the attack, and she says, "Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?"-her insight, picking up on the whole situation and showing that she really had been listening to everything her father says, taking it all in and looking at her life and saying, "Oh, so this is the way it is"-Scout has that realization of the other, of the world, of her community, and the changes. She is caught there between adulthood and childhood and lost somewhere in that questioning and knowledge.

You don't get a chance to have a film and a book that makes that kind of impact. The messages are so clear and so simple. It's about a way of life, getting along, and learning tolerance. This is not a black-and-white 1930s issue, this is a global issue. Racism and bigotry haven't gone anywhere. Ignorance hasn't gone anywhere.

Boaty Boatwright.

International Creative Management (ICM) theatrical agent Alice Lee "Boaty" Boatwright grew up in Reidsville, North Carolina, in the fifties. She played an important role in the film; albeit offscreen. Boatwright cast the children.

I think I read think I read To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird the day it came out. It was second only to the day it came out. It was second only to Gone with the Wind Gone with the Wind for people to read who had ever lived in the South. for people to read who had ever lived in the South.

First of all, one had enormous identification with it, of what it's like to grow up in a small town. I grew up in a town where you went back and forth next door. Every small town had some kind of person that we thought was crazy or a character who maybe sat on a porch. I had a woman who worked in our house named Soola, and she reminded me a great deal of Calpurnia, the warmth, the love, the understanding. I lost my mother at seventeen. I also adored my father. I think the novel is about children and families and parents and understanding-basically, how people find a better way of understanding other people. It is so indigenous to one's childhood.

I thought I knew the characters. I identified a great deal with Scout. My best friend until I was nine years old was a little boy who lived across the street from us. His name was Philip. I think everybody goes back to some event or moment when they feel that they can identify not only with the story itself, but with the characters.

When I read To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird, I was living in New York and had just started working for Universal Pictures. I was doing publicity, but not in any executive capacity. Subsequently I heard that the book had been bought by Universal.

Then, quite by chance one night at a restaurant in New York, I met Alan Pakula [the producer of To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird], who was introduced to me by a mutual friend. I knew that Alan and Bob Mulligan [the director] had bought the book. I don't know if Greg [Gregory Peck] was in it at the very beginning or not.

Alan was so in love with books, as was Bob. They had such an amazing collaboration.

When we met, I immediately, as Alan said, wouldn't let go. I just said, "You can't do this film without letting me work on it. I want to cast the children." And I was very, very persistent. I think I wore him out.

Alan and Bob specifically said we didn't want professional children. We saw a lot of professional kids in New York. It was just something about them needing to be Southern. The Southern accent is not that easy to fake for a child.

And that's how my journey to the South started.

I'd never cast a movie before. I didn't know anything about how to do it. So I called all my friends who lived in the South. I think I covered about eight or nine cities. I started in Richmond and [went] to Charlotte, to Savannah, and to Atlanta.

I would rent a motel room. The kids would come with their mothers; some of them would be driven for hundreds of miles, and they all knew that this person from Universal Pictures was looking for Scout and for Jem and for Dill. I remember by the time I was finishing in Atlanta, I was exhausted and thinking that I did not ever want to talk to anybody under thirty again. So I called Alan and Bob, and I said, "You really have to get someone else. I just cannot go on. I'm getting brainwashed."

Alan made a deal with me. He said, "Go on to Birmingham and finish the meetings you have there, and then I'll meet you in New Orleans, and you can take the weekend off, and we'll have a good time. And then we'll go back wherever you want me, to go meet some of the children."

I still had three or four more cities to do. The next morning, I remember getting off a plane in Birmingham at six A.M A.M., and my oldest and dearest friend from Reidsville, North Carolina, which is where I grew up, met me at the airport. She was now living in Birmingham, having married a man from there. And she said to me, "I think I've found the perfect Scout." I have to give her credit. Her name was Jene-Watt Bagwell. I started interviewing and Mary [Badham] walked in, and she was just adorable. She was wearing jeans and a little striped T-shirt. She had a very short gamine haircut.

I said, "Mary, you're just so cute. How old are you?" And she said, "Nine," [sounding] very Southern. I said, "Well, you look younger and smaller than nine." And I never will forget, she looked at me and she said, "Well, if you drank as much b.u.t.termilk and smoked as many corn silks as I do, you might be smaller too."

So I called Alan and I said, "I found Scout." Mary was not allowed to come and see me in the beginning because her father, who was a [former Air Force] general and very old-school Southern gentleman, forbade it. Mary's mother was his second wife. She was an English woman, and she'd always wanted to be an actress. And her claim to fame, apparently, was that she had once done Saint Joan on the BBC radio.

She had to bring Mary to meet me without letting the general know. I had to really play out my Southern heritage with the general. I said, "Please, let your daughter meet with the director." By this time, we had told him that I had met with her and I thought she would be the perfect Scout.

I did not think about Truman Capote when I was casting Dill. I didn't want to, because Truman was not as gracious as he might have been to Harper and the book. Certainly Dill is patterned after much of Truman. I know he used to visit in Monroeville in the summers. At his best, Truman could be a very unhappy, angry, needful person. I never heard Nelle say a word or mention him in any kind of negative way. But Nelle didn't do that, particularly in public.

Horton Foote was the perfect person to adapt Harper Lee's book. She and Horton became the closest and the best of friends and stayed totally, completely in touch until recently when Horton died. Horton was the most amazing writer himself. He was a poet, and he understood those people, and he wrote so beautifully.

He knew that his job was to adapt the book into a film, not to change the film from the book, which so often happens.

There are many great books that don't make great films. And sometimes there are rather bad books that make good films. But this was a real combination. Harper loved what he did; we all did.

The movie was shot on the back lot of Universal, and I went out for a couple of visits. I don't know the budget. I think it was no more than three million. It just was an amazing set. I can see those sidewalks and those streets and that house now.

The other thing that was so interesting was the opening credits, the opening of the cigar box. That was the genius of a man named Steve Frankfurt, who was a great friend of Alan's. I think they'd gone to Yale together.

I remember he and I went to [a] couple of schools and he had children draw pictures of mockingbirds, and that was the beautiful scene where it's torn apart. In the South, you always hear that line. I remember my own father always saying, "You never shoot a mockingbird, 'cause all they do is sing."

I first saw the movie in a small screening room at Universal. Bob Mulligan and Alan invited a few people who worked on it. I remember it didn't have a score and it hadn't been completely finished. Even so, you just knew that it was a jewel of a movie, that everybody had done their best.

I can still see Nelle [Harper Lee] sitting in Alan's living room, when we all used to gather and laugh and talk and drink and have a good time. Nelle worshipped her father. She was this amazing, incredibly talented, fiercely honest woman. She was wildly funny, witty, and smart. She certainly did not suffer fools lightly. And of course one kept hoping and waiting for the next novel. Sadly that never came.

To Kill a Mockingbird gave me my casting career. After that, Universal hired me to become a casting director on the East Coast. So I had the opportunity to work with some wonderful directors. gave me my casting career. After that, Universal hired me to become a casting director on the East Coast. So I had the opportunity to work with some wonderful directors.

[Alan Pakula and Bob Mulligan dissolved their partnership in 1965. Pakula became a director of films, such as Klute Klute, All the President's Men All the President's Men, and Sophie's Choice Sophie's Choice. He died in 1998. Mulligan directed eleven more films, including Up the Down Staircase Up the Down Staircase, Summer of '42 Summer of '42, and Same Time, Next Year Same Time, Next Year. He died in 2008.]

Rick Bragg Rick Bragg was born in Piedmont, Alabama, in 1959. He is a Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter and the author of the memoirs All Over but the Shoutin' All Over but the Shoutin' (1999), (1999), Ava's Man Ava's Man (2002), and (2002), and Prince of Frogtown Prince of Frogtown (2008). Bragg grew up in Trout Possum, Alabama, and was the winner of the Harper Lee Award at the Alabama Writers Symposium in 2009. He teaches at the University of Alabama. (2008). Bragg grew up in Trout Possum, Alabama, and was the winner of the Harper Lee Award at the Alabama Writers Symposium in 2009. He teaches at the University of Alabama.

Like a lot of people, I was in school when I read To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird. They were always sneaking adult books into our consciousness back then. And like a lot of people, I was told to read it. And like a lot of people, you start that way, with that kind of grudging, Let's get this done Let's get this done. And within paragraphs-you hear that over and over again, especially from young men that have been forced to read it, young men who grew up on the wrong side of the issue that dominates this book-they start reading it, and the next thing you know, it's not just held their interest, it's changed their views. That's pretty d.a.m.n...that's almost impossible, but it happens.

I think it means a lot to Southerners. I was born in '59, grew up as a baby boy in the civil rights movement, and it was as though it was invisible. When I was six or seven, I remember scenes and incidents of violence, but for those of us in the mountains, it was as though it was invisible. And then you read this book, and you retroactively tug back into that time and that struggle, and you ask yourself, "How in the world did I miss this? How did I not know this was happening?"

There's a south Alabama feel to the book. There's a much more parochial feel to that place than where I grew up, which was predominantly white. I grew up in the mountains. There was a whole different dynamic going on there. I grew up in the industrial South. I grew up in the steel mills and pipe shops and textile mills, cotton mills. I grew up in a more hillbilly, for lack of a better word, culture than in any kind of south Alabama, agrarian culture.

I've read it twice, three times. Probably, like a lot of people, I'll read parts of it to reaffirm or recondition [myself].

The first time I read it, it was pretty cut-and-dried. It was do right or don't do right. Then you begin to see other themes, like tolerance and kindness. Boo seemed like a much smaller kind of subplot to the book the first time I read it. It was all about the court case, it was all about the attack, and it was all about the wrongdoing of sending that man to jail. But Boo took on a bigger role as I read it down the line.

The writing-it's just wonderful, and to get a six foot three, 280-pound man to say wonderful is hard enough, but Harper Lee did the thing you gotta do to make people care about something, which is to keep them in the story. And the phrases were beautiful. The descriptions were beautiful. The most cliched, worn phrase from the whole book, when Atticus is talking to his children about the mockingbird, you know, that is beautiful.

My people never knew about the mockingbird. We knew it was a sin to kill a dove, because a dove had a biblical significance. It was a sign of hope in a world drowned for its sins in the great flood. But the feeling was the same. It was so real, it was so true to the dirt and the trees and the houses and the dusty streets and the mad dogs, and the sheriff who wants to do right if he can just figure out how, and the mean-spirited neighbor and the kind people in town, and the racial prejudice and the handful of people who just didn't fall in step. All that, it wasn't just true; it was beautifully, beautifully done.

I don't even think I can get my head around whether it's literature or not. I'm probably not smart enough to have that discussion. I think pretensions kill and smudge more good writing than just about anything else. I would have loved for there to have been one more book, and that's the most I can say-[but] we have that wonderful cliche, "Go out with a win."

I have been told that Harper Lee liked my work, she liked my writing. She and my wife have exchanged notes. I never wanted to be-and I don't care if this sounds bad-I never wanted to be one of those Southern writers sucking up to this legendary figure. If she wanted her privacy, then I should give it to her. So I was never one of those people. I'm like everybody else down in my part of the world-I feel like I know her. You hear things she says. You hear, "Well, she likes to be called Nelle." Before you know it, you're thinking about her as Nelle. And then there's just the book, there's always the book. If you want to know what's in her heart, in her consciousness, then go open the book. The truth is, you just open that book and you just start pulling things from it that you spent a lifetime thinking about. They just get stuck in you, notions and ideas, and, for lack of a better word, these moralities get stuck in you and may not save you, may not make you do the right thing, but at least you know when you're doing the wrong thing. Sometimes down here we have to settle for that.

I think it was very brave to write it. I also think it was one of those books where the people down the road might shoot you a dirty look or say mean things about you as the car rolls by, but people a thousand miles away love you and admire you and think that you've done something decent and grand.

I finally did meet her. The spring I won the Harper Lee Award, I asked a friend of hers, the writer Wayne Greenhaw, if I could just say h.e.l.lo and shake her hand. My wife, Dianne, went with me. She was kind and gracious and funny, and it was one of the nicer moments of my life. I would have hated not to have done that, I believe, in my old age.

Tom Brokaw Tom Brokaw was born in 1940 in Webster, South Dakota. He is an NBC News special correspondent and the author of The Greatest Generation The Greatest Generation (1998), (1998), A Long Way Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland A Long Way Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland (2002), and (2002), and Boom! Voices of the Sixties Boom! Voices of the Sixties (2006). (2006).

I was still in college when was still in college when To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out. The sixties were very ripe. We were reading a lot about race, and we were reading what they call literary fiction now. William Styron was writing, James Baldwin was writing essays, and then this book just ricocheted around the country. came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out. The sixties were very ripe. We were reading a lot about race, and we were reading what they call literary fiction now. William Styron was writing, James Baldwin was writing essays, and then this book just ricocheted around the country.

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the gla.s.s, looking at the South from a long way away. Because I lived in construction towns, we had a lot of workers who came from the South. They were all white, and, sorry to say, a number of them were pretty redneck. It just didn't comport with my family's view of how Negroes should be treated. But I did have all this curiosity about it.

And when I read To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird, I was so struck by the universality of small towns. I had lived in small towns in South Dakota, and I knew then, reading about Atticus, not just the pressures that he was under, but the magnifying gla.s.s that he lived in-he was the upstanding legislator and lawyer but also was part of the fabric of that town-and then the complexity of the issues that came before him and the way it divided the community. All this takes place in a very small environment. People who live in big cities, I don't think, have any idea of what the pressures can be like in a small town when there's something as controversial as that going on. It's tough. So it stuck with me for a long time.

Later, of course, it was hard for me to separate the book from the movie, because you'd see the movie a lot, and then you'd remember pa.s.sages and go back and look at the book again.

But it was one of those memorable pieces of literary fiction that came along at an impressionable time in my life, and also in the country's life. Dr. King had already started the movement at that point, we were paying attention on national television every night on the network news to what was going on in the South, and this book spoke to us.

I knew people like that, who were willing to stand up in these kinds of communities against the conventional wisdom of the time. Racism didn't stop at the Mason-Dixon Line. A lot of those same att.i.tudes were in the communities where I lived, way north, on the Great Plains. And yet there were brave people, men and women, who would speak out against them, in churches, in the business community, or wherever. But for Harper Lee to be there in the epicenter, if you will, of all this, to be so eloquent in how she described it, it shows such great courage in how she describes it. She was in that pantheon, I think, of people who helped us get liberated from racism in this country. I've been doing some work on the anniversary of Dr. King's death, and one of the most telling lines that I hear from early pioneers in the movement is: "We had liberated not just black people, we liberated white people." I think that Harper Lee helped liberate white people with that book.

Scout is irresistible, she's just irresistible. And later I became the father of daughters, and I had those kinds of conversations with my own children-they had great curiosity and their kind of tomboy att.i.tudes, and they were tough on me. They would come to me, just like Scout did. "Why are you doing this? Have you thought this through?" I think that they could identify with her. I still have letters that my daughters wrote to me about things that I thought they should do, and they had their own minds made up about why they were going to do it. And they were good lawyer's briefs. I like to think that as Scout grew older, that she would have evolved in the same way as a teenager. We hear her voice, obviously. I think there is a really distinct relationship between fathers and daughters, and one of the things that happens, if there's a mother around, is that when the girls get to be around thirteen, they go to war with their mothers, and then the fathers are sanctuaries in some ways or the intermediaries.

So Scout will always be in my mind when I think about this book, about the whole idea of this little towheaded kid running around, sitting up in the balcony of the courthouse with the Negroes as they watch the trial unfold, questioning her father about why he was representing the defendant in this case, and the kind of taunting that she received at school.

What I thought, when I went back and read those pa.s.sages again, there was this absence of piety, which I think makes the book really honest. There was self-doubt. Atticus knew that he wasn't a perfect man. He tried as best he could to give Scout the big context of what he was doing and why he was doing it. In her youthful innocence, she was asking all the right questions. So it's no wonder to me why it's so popular as a book and it will be for a long time.

I was particularly taken with when Scout went to him after she'd been taunted at school that her daddy was just nothing but an n-lover, and she asked him why he was doing this, and I still have the same reaction: I think, Oh well, oh, now here it comes, because this is what I must do Oh well, oh, now here it comes, because this is what I must do. And it wasn't that. It was more complicated than that. You can see him working his way through why he was going to take this case, and he couldn't hold his head up unless he took this case. And he knew that there would be consequences for him, and that conversation, the dialogue between the two of them, is sophisticated in its own way, and yet it's still between a father and a daughter. I've always loved that, for all those reasons: the personal relationships, the meaning of being a lawyer, what it's like to be in a small town. Then, of course, when you have a black defendant wrongly accused in the 1930s in the white South, there was no more explosive issue than that one.

Another one of my very favorite pa.s.sages in the book is a small one, but I've always loved the literary construct of it. We have the mysterious figure, Boo, who's living next door. And then of course there's the climactic episode: Jem is in bed, he's been hurt, beaten up. What's going to happen to him? And Scout goes in to see her brother. And there standing in the shadows is this mysterious neighbor. And she turns and says, "Hey, Boo." I just love that moment. It's such a personal connection, and she's absolutely unafraid of him, which is what I love. And again, to go back to the small-town culture, every town has a Boo. People don't know how to approach Boo in those small towns, in most instances. Scout did. I have used that phrase countless times in my own life; when I want to get someone's attention, I'll say, "Hey, Boo."

The Reverend Thomas Lane b.u.t.ts The Reverend Thomas Lane b.u.t.ts was born in Bermuda, Alabama, in 1930. He is the pastor emeritus of the First Methodist Church in Monroeville, Alabama, attended by the Lee family. He is the author of Tigers in the Dark Tigers in the Dark (1994), a collection of his sermons. (1994), a collection of his sermons.

I was in Mobile as a pastor of the Michigan Avenue Methodist Church. I had gone through an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan. They were after me because I'd signed a pet.i.tion to integrate the buses there. This was in 1960 when was in Mobile as a pastor of the Michigan Avenue Methodist Church. I had gone through an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan. They were after me because I'd signed a pet.i.tion to integrate the buses there. This was in 1960 when To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird came out, and it was a great comfort to those of us who had taken some stand on this particular issue. came out, and it was a great comfort to those of us who had taken some stand on this particular issue.

The book was written in a way that it could not be refuted. It was a soft opposition to people who were against civil rights. It was just a great comfort to those of us who had been involved in the civil rights movement that somebody from the Deep South had given us a book that gave some comfort to us in what we had done. That was my first encounter with To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird.

It was great encouragement-and still is great encouragement to anybody who's involved in the civil rights movement. It made a tremendous difference in the civil rights movement, and it continues to make a difference. You would think that a novel would play out after a while. There are still civil rights issues, and the concept in this book is large enough to include other civil rights causes. It's still read with interest because of that. Plus, it's a real interesting story, wonderfully told, with a lot of good humor in it, along with the serious moments. It is obviously a well-loved book, not only in this country but around the world.

There are aspects of the book that were interesting to me that were not a part of the central drama. For instance, in that book you can see where a child learns values: at home. And you don't worry so much anymore about children not listening to you. You worry because they're watching you.

Here a single parent bringing up children is able to instill values in them that are far ahead of their time. This is one of my favorite aspects of the book.

Harper Lee refers to it as a love story. And she said, "I don't mean romantic love, but it is a love story." How love flows beyond the boundaries of affection for one person or even one family, but caring for everybody. It's love in its finest understanding of the meaning of the word.

Harper Lee developed her characters in such a marvelous way. Naturally, everybody would identify with Atticus; I like that character. But I like the sheriff. The sheriff was caught in between the people who voted for him and the issue at hand. And he handled it wonderfully well, with great thoughtfulness. When he came to the part about Boo Radley having killed a man, his decision about what to do about that was overriding what Atticus thought should be done. And he said, "You know, I may not be much, but I am the sheriff." So I liked that part too.

The book is not supposed to be autobiographical, but all novels have some autobiography in them, and all autobiographies have some fiction in them too.

I was born and reared ten miles from where the author and her family lived. We did not know their family personally because we were in another county, but Harper Lee's older sister Alice was a mentor to me as a young minister. She was always advocating my ministry and pushing me and helping me every way that she could.

I didn't meet Harper Lee until twenty-five or thirty years ago. She was able to attend the church with great regularity when she was in town. I was her pastor for five years, and still her ministerial friend to this good day.

I understood the context in which the book was written, because that's how I grew up. It was a rural, poverty-stricken situation during the Depression, where people did not have much. It was hardscrabble for most people to make a living. It was a time in which black people were treated terribly and people took in racism with their mother's milk. Here in this novel, you have a person bucking the tradition in order to advocate the rights of a person without regard to color. But it also was the farming aspect of it, people coming to town with their mules and wagons, the streets being muddy. I remember all of that and the little towns that surrounded the rural area in which I grew up during the Great Depression.

People were provincial. They cared about one another. They were stuck with certain customs they were unwilling to give up. And in fact, in the Deep South, we've never stopped fighting the Civil War; it's still going on in the minds of some people, and it's hard to get them beyond that. But basically the people in the South are very loving and caring people. People in the South are storytellers. That's how they pa.s.s on tradition from one generation to the other, by storytelling. That's how I grew up.

Everybody suffered during the Depression. It was just a matter of degree. But the Lee household was a household that espoused values that were ahead of the times in which they lived. That was obvious. Miss Alice, ever since I can remember her, has been very much a.s.sociated with the church and espousing the kind of values which she learned at home. She's one of my idols, by the way. She's a great lady.

Miss Alice is very thoughtful and slow moving, very wise in her counsel and would not take any risks. She is a good guide. Nelle Harper is a more impulsive person and more expressive of her thoughts and ideas. They're both brilliant people, but they have different temperaments. Nelle Harper tends to sparkle, whereas Alice is very quiet and reserved. Nelle Harper loves to travel and to go to the exciting places. Miss Alice would not do that, but she enjoys knowing that Nelle Harper's doing it. She vicariously enjoys the things that Nelle Harper enjoys.