When I was asked to do a book signing of my critique of To Kill A Mockingbird at Russo’s Books because of the novel being featured through the Bakersfield reading program I willingly agreed. But this brought to mind the fact most knew of the novel only through the film version, and had the scriptwriters and editors known it was destined to be named one of the most influential films of all time they would have paid much more attention to what they were doing and not allowed some of the poorly done scenes and glaring inaccuracies and contradictions to slip by them.

However, lacking prescience those responsible for the final cut of the film did not pay attention to these details and it suffered accordingly. But the timing of the film brought it much critical acclaim despite its weaknesses, and were it not for Lawrence of Arabia might have won the award for best picture.

There is no discounting the film deserving the praise heaped upon it and the honored place it now holds. But the film is far short of the real story Harper Lee told in her novel, and in my opinion is the reason she never wrote again. This needs some explanation from the opening chapter of my critique:

Chapter one

The weather is moderating here in the Kern River Valley around Lake Isabella. It has been a beautifully mild day with abundant and glorious sunshine. This evening after sundown, I was able to take a turn around the grounds of my little cottage. An occasional bat would flit about the oaks while a coyote barked in the distance and was answered by some closer neighbor's hound. Doves, quail, and other assorted birds had roosted for the night. It was time for the bats, raccoons, skunks, owls, and other nocturnal occupants of this small corner of my world to take their turn in company with me and begin their rounds.

The soft mildness of the evening following the mild weather of the day was a real tonic to me. It was good to be able to be outdoors so late and enjoy the reflective mood such weather and such an evening always calls me to. For some reason, I found my mind dwelling on Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.

As I watched the first stars begin to appear, a slight, night breeze began to stir the leaves of the trees with enough hint of a chill to remind me that winter had not yet had its full say. In fact, a storm is being forecast for this weekend.

I most reluctantly went back inside, pausing only to look up once more at the stars through the now black-silhouetted branches of the tall old pine next to the cottage, and settled down to the writing.

My favorite non-fiction book is Thoreau's Walden. My favorite novel is To Kill a Mockingbird. It, together with Walden, occupies a space on the table next to my bed. And perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to give both books to college graduates along with their diplomas.

One reason for my keeping Harper Lee's wonderful and masterful novel so close at hand is the fact that I was a contemporary of the era Miss Lee describes; and I was born into, and raised in, the identical culture with the identical kinds of people straight out of the Dust Bowl and Grapes of Wrath with the identical ignorance and prejudices all around me (and diet and idiomatic dialect), described in the novel, which is not to discount the very best of civilized manners and behavior portrayed by Harper Lee characteristic of the South.

And thanks to my maternal great-grandmother and grandparents, I am most familiar with the best of the values, sense of justice and fairness, good manners, and civilized behavior so characteristic of the best of Southern people like Atticus Finch. And I am ever grateful loving people so representative of him raised me. But I am also well acquainted with what cruel poverty and ignorance can do to any people of whatever culture or race.

I repeatedly watch the film as well as read the novel, never tiring of the film with its marvelous score by Elmer Bernstein nor failing to gain inspiration from hearing the little girl's singing to herself, and her happy, giggling laughter during the introduction of the film, for there is no sweeter and joyful music this side of heaven than a child's singing and laughter. And I don't doubt God chooses children for His heavenly choir.

The poignant, heart-tugging scene of a little girl drawing, and tearing, her crayon picture of the mockingbird accompanied by her singing and laughter, is an unforgettable adumbration of the events to follow, the ugly events in contradiction to the singing and laughter of children which have been, without let throughout human history, so successful in inevitably stifling, silencing, the voice of children's singing and laughter.

God knows how badly, how desperately, children (and adults) need the Miss Maudies and Calpurnias, the Heck Tates and Atticus Finches! And we desperately need them far more than all the great men and women of history, far more than all the great philosophers and artists of history, none of whom, including all the manufactured deities, messiahs, religions and prophets, have provided the wisdom that would deliver the world from the continued abuse and murder of children or led the world to peace.

Few people know of Harper Lee's childhood association and friendship with another child, Truman Capote, and her using that childhood friendship in her novel. For that matter, few seem to know that Miss Lee's first name is Nelle. But when I first read the book so many years ago (it was published in 1960), and then saw the film starring Gregory Peck, it never occurred to me that a madman, Boo Radley, would become so influential and important to me.

Long before I was able to fully appreciate the true social implications of the book, I was taken by the charm of childhood Miss Lee made so convincingly real through the eyes of little Scout. Nor was I aware when I first read the book that I would be going through a similar metamorphosis as Miss Lee in my own writing, trying to awaken the child both in myself and in others.

For those who have seen the film but never read the book, you have cheated yourself of some of the most important points that make it a truly great story told in a masterful way, and you will never be able to understand how truly powerful the message of the story is; a message told in such a way that removes it far from being the usual morality play. And told in such a way as to be so very deserving of the Pulitzer Prize Miss Lee was awarded.

But what the film did not do was capture Harper Lee’s real, authentic South in many ways she does in the book. This is not to denigrate the film, for the film is recognized by all as great in its own way. But the film is very, very far from the whole story Miss Lee has told in the book, a story that in its entirety was worthy and deserving of the Pulitzer. The film, while addressing the monumentally important issues of racial prejudice and injustice, could not, due to its brevity, tell the whole story in spite of Peck's Oscar-winning performance. But I will always believe little Mary Badham should have received an Oscar for her role as Scout. At least she was nominated.

This makes me think of Judy Garland’s Oscar for her part as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. And Judy certainly deserved the award, though it was given for the special category of Best Performance in a Juvenile Role. But in 1939 we Americans were much more given to the joy and laughter of children in those decades past. There was Snow White for example in 1938 as a precedent for the marvelous fantasy of Oz. And I often ask myself when I reflect on those years past, where did we as a society lose our love for children, our love for the joy and laughter of the children and the joy and laughter they used to bring to adults?

I do know that in 1939 we knew the magic of childhood and music, and honored it in a way that was no longer possible in 1962. The song Somewhere Over A Rainbow in Oz won an Oscar; It Might as Well be Spring in State Fair of 1945 won an Oscar for best song; but in the 60s and thereafter? We seemed to have lost our way as a nation and the music of the laughter of children, the music of the ideals of love and romance declined making way for the cacophony of noise that is called “music” today.

As is common with great writers I believe Harper Lee wrote better than she knew when she used a madman to balance the scales of justice. Certainly she knew this of the children and Boo Radley, of Tom Robinson, and the evil Mr. Ewell. But that such a madman as Boo would be needed to balance the scales of justice for the children of the world against all the Ewells?

The whole point of such “madness” is to free children so that boys can be gentlemen and girls can be ladies. And this is the responsibility of madmen, not madwomen, since it is men who bear the primary guilt of the decisions that prevent children from becoming ladies and gentlemen; it is disproportionately men that are responsible for the laws passed that either protect children, or protect the monsters that prey upon children. But what inept civilized law and law-abiding citizens could not do in confronting evil with determination to win in order to protect children, only a madman could and would do.

Mr. Dolphus Raymond does not appear in the film. After all, the makers of the film were not thinking in terms of saving the children of the world. Their attention was on the adult issue of racism, apparently not realizing, or ignoring, the fact that racism is a children's issue long before it becomes an adult issue. But to let the reader know how important the real point of the novel is, here is an excerpt as little Scout relates it of Mr. Raymond:

I had never encountered a being who deliberately perpetrated a fraud against himself. But why had he entrusted us with his deepest secret? I asked him why.

“Because you're children and you can understand it,” he said,” and because I heard that one—“

He jerked his head toward Dill: “Things haven't caught up with that one's instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won't get sick and cry. Maybe things'll strike him as being - not quite right, say, but he won't cry, not when he gets a few years on him.”

“Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?” Dill's maleness was beginning to assert itself.

“Cry about the simple hell people give other people - without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people too.”

Harper Lee knew that there were things children understand that adults don't. She knew children weep over injustice and lose this wisdom as they grow into adulthood. Adults excuse this loss, this forsaking of wisdom, by claiming it is a part of growing up, a part of the real world, never realizing that their real world is a world of their choosing and making, a world that has ever failed to attain unto wisdom, the wisdom they, in fact, had as children. And the forsaking of such wisdom contributes so much to this loss in the resulting failure of good people to confront injustice, to confront evil with absolute determination to win!

Harper Lee, since she was very well educated, prefaces her book with a quote from one of my favorite essayists, Charles Lamb: “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”

Granting the difficulty we face in giving lawyers any credibility of being children once, Miss Lee nevertheless chose Atticus Finch, the model for whom was her own father, as the preeminent humanitarian and a man who even as a lawyer kept the best part of the child alive in himself.

But Atticus had the extreme good fortune of having little Scout (Jean Louise) to keep him honest. It is Scout who, innocently, and because of such innocence that must be cherished, is the best part of her father's life and compels him to stand up and be counted for truth and justice. Being a good man, how could he ever betray such believing and saving faith, trust, and innocence as that of his little girl!

I haven't forgotten Jem (Jeremy) in this. But Jem is growing up. And Miss Lee gives Jem a lot of credit for his own sense of truth and justice. But Harper Lee knows how little girls differ from little boys. As she has Scout say at one point, “I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.”

Harper Lee epitomizes the need to include women and children in The Great Conversation: Philosophy, the King of Disciplines. There is indeed some skill involved in being a girl. And boys and men are in desperate need of such skill on the part of girls and women. The constant refusal on the part of men, who were once little boys, to accept women and children as of equal value to themselves is at the heart of the problem which has kept the world at war and without wisdom, and as a result without peace, throughout history.

Harper Lee must have recognized this. But it must not have been as conscious to her as a grown woman as it was to her as a little girl. And how could it be otherwise when men still exclude women and children from The Great Conversation?

To say she has forgotten is not a criticism of Harper Lee. The little boy in me is far more aware than the man of the things Harper Lee’s little girl knows that she had forgotten as a woman, the things that are in fact the well-spring of intimations and hope of immortality.

I mentioned the social implications of Harper Lee's novel. But what was the real impact? Certainly it had an impact on me. Both because of my own background and because it wasn't long after the book was published that I found myself teaching in Watts at Jordan High.

The results of the Watts riot were fully in evidence and I was a part of the whole milieu of that time in our history. You might say I was at Ground Zero during the 60s. But decades after the riots, what has changed for the better? Nothing. If anything, things have only gotten worse in respect to Negroes in America; and for children, the future of America and the world.

Riots and rhetoric, films like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Woman Called Moses, Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, A Time to Kill, The Tuskegee Airmen, Miss Evers' Boys, and Amistad, have not changed things for the better. And the world lacking wisdom, with evil seeming to be ever in the ascendancy how can they? Nor can Hollywood have it both ways; pretending to fight discrimination on the one hand and hypocritically supporting violence and perversion on the other.

Nor can we ignore the fact that so many Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning works have failed to make any substantial changes for the better, including To Kill a Mockingbird. But to quote the Chicago Tribune (one of many sources of praise) about the book: “Of rare excellence ... a novel of strong contemporary national significance.” A reviewer for the Minneapolis Tribune wrote: “The reader will find ... a desire, on finishing it, to start over again on page one.”

And so I have; many times.

Abundant and well-deserved praise was heaped upon Harper Lee and her extraordinary novel. But far too often do great themes such as hers concerning inequities, injustices and discrimination, find the deserved applause and rewards of good people while never accomplishing the avowed goal of righting these inequities, injustices, and discrimination.

And one can go back into the furthest distant past to find the same themes being declaimed by good and wise men (there must have been equally good and wise women, but they weren't allowed a voice). There is nothing new in these themes. Yet, in spite of the great works of so many great thinkers throughout history, the world has yet to know peace. It is as Emerson noted, Socrates, Jesus, Washington left no “class,” and the disciple is never above his master. But doesn't it puzzle you, as it did me, why this should be so? Perhaps the answer may be found in the following.

In Harper Lee’s novel Tom Robinson was convicted of a crime that he obviously did not commit, and died by the ugly and hateful mechanism of racial prejudice in 1935. And sixty-three years later in 1998, more than a generation later, a Negro was dragged to death behind a truck driven by monsters posing as human beings solely on the basis of his being a Negro! What, any civilized person has to ask him or herself, has changed for the better in this respect for Negroes in the last sixty-four years to date? Or since 1960 when the novel was published?

The sustaining of racial and religious prejudice is by no means peculiar to America. It is, in fact, far, far worse in other parts of the world where Caucasians are killing Caucasians, Negroes are killing Negroes, Christians kill Christians, Moslems kill Moslems, and Jews and Moslems continue to kill each other.

Knowledge is abundant. But Wisdom is, as ever, conspicuously absent, an orphan from knowledge. Since true wisdom is derived from love and compassion with an instinctive hatred of evil, it isn't surprising that the world lacks wisdom and people continue to torture and murder for the sake of ideological differences and in the name of God. It should not be surprising that the same crimes and cruelties continue to be repeated without end in spite of all the great books and apologetics designed to overcome the hatreds, ignorance and prejudices that continue to make their contributions to an increasingly demon-haunted world.

The point that knowledge is confused for wisdom is made by even the best attempts to meld knowledge and wisdom without facing the fact that until women and children are accepted as of equal value to men, and until children become the priority of nations, wisdom will continue to be orphaned from knowledge and unachievable! Nor should it be surprising that knowledge dictates we must become wise or we will most assuredly destroy ourselves!

But at the same time we are reaching out to heaven, hell is abundant throughout the world, a world as much and even more of a demon-haunted world as it ever was on the basis of ignorant and prejudicial hatreds thousands of years old! Wisdom? Where?

Too often I find myself having to point out the obvious: If children are the closest thing to the heart of God, how is it that so many live as though there was something of greater importance? And all too often things done in the name of God are absolutely contradictory to the welfare of children! The time would fail me to list such things.

Harper Lee makes some excellent, even profound points concerning hypocrisy on the part of so many in her novel. For example, she recognizes the religious animosity toward women. That of the Moslem and Jewish religions is patently obvious. But when Harper Lee points out the preaching of the “Women are unclean and a sin by definition” doctrine of Christianity, she strikes at the heart of the matter. And most ministers would certainly get their backs up over her accusation that ministers are preoccupied with the subject. But I believe she, and all thinking people, realize why this is so.

Sex by any definition is still sex, whether cloaked in religiosity or not, whether God is profaned in the process of preaching such damnable doctrine or not. Consider how many preach women and children are of lesser value than men. Of course, men don’t come right out and say it; but it is there nonetheless. Such an abuse of religion is a bullying tactic of men, too often supported by women themselves, designed to keep women appositionally inferior to men. Such tactics led Thoreau to write:

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our hymnbooks resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God.

While Henry put his finger on the problem, and while he had Margaret Fuller as a prime example of the equal value of women, due to the era in which they lived neither he nor his renowned friend Emerson understood nor recognized that such bullying by religion had a primary focus on women and children.

The wisdom of childhood causes children to separate from bullies if at all possible. Children will not play with bullies. And it is the bullying of religion, as much or more than that of education and politics toward women and children, that led Sam Clemens to comment, “He was as happy as though he had just gotten out of church.”

In respect to the kind of madness and bullying that seems all-pervading and prevents good people from seizing the initiative in acquiring wisdom, Harper Lee has Calpurnia telling the children, “You're not going to change any of them by talkin' right; they've got to want to learn themselves. And when they don't want to learn there's nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.”

And sure enough most do not want to learn; they not only have no interest in talkin' right, they want to bully others into talking their language no matter how ignorant or self-serving, to be polite to their idols, myths and superstitions no matter how harmful to wisdom. The worst of these insist on everyone either talkin' their language or they will mount a jihad in order to destroy anyone who does not! In spite of how very, even selfishly, ignorant their own language may be, they not only do not know better, like the ignorant Ewells of the novel, they have no interest in doing any better.

When the jury in the novel due to ingrained, ignorant prejudice find Tom Robinson guilty of a crime he so very obviously did not commit, Dill and Jem cry. Scout would have cried if she had been just a little older. She was just old enough to realize a great injustice had been perpetrated, but still young enough to not understand and cry about it. She would learn to cry about such things later. And when Jem asks his father how the jury could have done such a thing his father tells him in words affirming the observation by Mr. Raymond to the children about injustice, “I don't know ... when they do it - seems only children weep.”

It is, once more, the wisdom of the child that Harper Lee brings out so clearly, vividly, in her novel. The wisdom of the child has no prejudice. Like the song “Carefully Taught” in South Pacific it takes an adult society to teach children to hate those who are different from them. Such adult society reminds me of something Atticus says in the novel, “Naming people after Confederate general’s makes them slow steady drinkers.” And there is nothing like naming someone Pope, Reverend, Rabbi, Mullah or Ayatollah to accomplish the same result of making men drunk with their egos and self-importance.

Jem and Scout are only children. But they talk about people, about issues of life arising from the trial of Tom Robinson. They wonder why people can't get along together when Jem suddenly says to Scout, “I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time ... it's because he wants to stay inside.”

I have come to love Harper Lee; I have come to love Scout, Jem, Atticus, Maudie, and Calpurnia. I lay in bed last night pondering this and talking it over with God. Like Boo Radley, as Jem had it figured, I realize I would prefer to dissociate myself from many of those who think themselves sane. I most certainly wouldn't have gotten on with those who considered Cotton Mather a “marvelous man.”

If I could be a child again wearing my bib overalls, walking barefoot in the alkali dust of a Weedpatch or Little Oklahoma road in Southeast Bakersfield, just kickin' it once in a while to make the dust fly, enjoying the honest warmth of it between my toes and just doin' nothin', how delightful that would be. Maybe I'd be carrying my Genuine Daisy Red Ryder Lever-action Carbine BB gun, the one I earned selling garden seed and Cloverine salve door-to-door.

I was really proud of earning my Daisy Red Ryder; though it was accompanied by the usual and familiar dire threat from adults about putting out the eyes of all the children in the neighborhood. One of the mysteries of childhood was why adults thought the sole purpose of BB guns was that of shooting out the eyes of children? But, then, it did seem adults engaged in a lot of morbid preoccupations of this nature intended to either frighten or make forbidden fruits all that more desirable to children.

As I walked just doin' nothin', maybe I'd be thinking, like Scout, that there really wasn't much more to learn when I grew up than what I already knew except, possibly, algebra. And like Scout, nothing would be really scary except what I read in books.

The thing is, I have had this experience of childhood and I know what I am missing. I know and love Scout and Jem and Dill and I long to join them. I know they would welcome me. But I can't, and it makes me feel I've lived too long and know too much. There has been more to learn than algebra and I know all the scary things are not just in books.

Like Atticus of Jem and Scout, I wish I could have spared my children the pain of growing up in a world with ugly, ignorant, and hate-filled prejudices and hypocrisy, a world that has little concern for children, their future, or the monsters that prey on them. But I could no more do that than Atticus could of Jem and Scout.

I don't want to write as I do of the pain and suffering of children, I want them to play and I want to write of their playing. I want to go play as I did as a child, I want my occupation to be that of child: To play.

But the ugliness remained for Jem and Scout long after the trial of Tom Robinson. It remains today and it hurts to imagine Jem and Scout as adults, facing a world that had not changed for the better no matter how hard their father had tried to make it a better world for them.

Like Atticus, I wanted to make it a better world for my children. But I finally realized this couldn't be done unless it became a better world for all children. But to accomplish this, I can't be the child I long to be. I can't join Jem and Scout and Dill at play. I'll never be able to walk that dusty road again barefoot just doin' nothin'. I've lived too long and I know too much.

Humankind, as nature, remains red in tooth and claw. And as long as it does, I can't live just doin' nothin'. I have even had to give up the toys of adulthood, the things with which I used to play that only filled the time and gave me the illusion that they were somehow of importance. It is easy to intellectualize the proverb: “A wise man lives simply” unless you begin to deal with the fact that such sayings always exclude women and why. And don't try to make the term man generic when it isn't intended.

But it's hard to live it, this thing of putting aside the toys and focusing on the things of real importance. And this is new to me; I am grappling with it, trying to understand it every day now. It's a hard thing and I fervently wish I were not compelled to do it, that like Boo I could just stay in the house and avoid the ugliness outside. However, when the circumstances demanded it Boo did come outside and face the ugliness, the real madness, the real insanity, of a society believing it to be sane.

While I believe in angels, like my daughters Diana and Karen now gone on before me and with whom I believe I will be reunited when I pass away, I believe adults have all the responsibility for children, no part of which may be sloughed off onto angels in any way. As I do not blame God for my failures, so I will not accept the blaming of God or angels for the failures of others.

As Boo watched the children through cracked shutters from the confines of his lonely, dark tomb, their lives began to be a part of his. He became their guardian angel, a mad angel, from time to time placing small treasures for them to discover in that hole in the tree.

Was it possible for a madman to know, as I believe he must have, the children were in danger? One has to suppose that such a madman can know and sense things sane people cannot. As the film Rain Man so well portrayed, savants are the product of some forms of madness.

Boo was a kind of mad savant in respect to the children. The genius in his madness made him their guardian angel, an angel who could plunge a knife into the evil Mr. Ewell that was intent on revenging himself by his cowardly attempt to murder the children; and undoubtedly would have done so had Boo not been there out of sight watching over them.

Apart from the treasures Boo left for the children in that tree and the incident of the blanket during the fire at Aunt Maudie’s house the children never knew they had such a guardian angel until that moment when the evil Ewell attacked them. Nor should children be expected to know of such angels. They had, in fact, been warned of him, warned by dire threats and morbid stories to stay away from him. He was the neighborhood bogeyman of their childhood. How very strange that a bogeyman, a madman, becomes a guardian angel.

Scout was mistaken in her sadness that she and Jem had never given Boo anything in return for his love and gifts, his kindness to them, even saving their lives. The children had given a madman the most precious gift of all: A reason for being; a reason for living. Imagine that: Reason in a madman! And reason because of children! But then this should be the kind of reason exercised by all that consider themselves sane.

What loving parents wouldn't wish for their children such a guardian angel as Boo? An angel who watches over their children when circumstances, circumstances of which the parents are all too often unaware, put them in harm's way?

Just as Atticus could never tell Jem or Scout to be obedient to him if he failed to perform as a man, neither can I of my own children should I fail to do so. Children all too soon learn the difference between those who only preach and those who do as they preach.

I often enter the world of both the novel and the film and lose myself in them. Toward the end, the novel describes little Scout taking Boo home after he has saved her and Jem from the evil Ewell. Boo has asked her to do this. It's as though he is a frightened child himself, frightened to be separated from the children, frightened to once more enter his dark and lonely place apart from them.

But Scout refuses to lead Boo home by the hand. She has him offer her his arm, just like a real lady and gentleman would do, and Scout makes sure that any neighbor that might be watching will see that the madman who has saved her and her brother's lives is a gentleman. And she is a lady, a little eight-year-old lady on the gentleman's arm.

And I recall the passage, “A little child shall lead them.” But the prophet failed to recognize the fact that the Them are madmen like Boo Radley. And how could he? Women and children were not, and never are, the equal of men to such prophets.

But little Scout on the arm of a madman, their roles now reversed; it is a scene that never fails to bring the sting of tears to my eyes and a lump in my throat. The producers of the film, the script writers, had enough sensitivity and artistry to have Scout walking Boo Radley to his house with her hand in his arm, as though he was escorting her, rather than her leading him by the hand like a child. I believe Harper Lee insisted on this. But it was too complicated to explain the purpose of this in the film as Harper Lee in her book. Perhaps the filmmakers depended on the sensitivity of viewers to catch this. But like the chiaroscuro effect of the heart in the courtyard of Gigi, very few do.

You must read Harper Lee’s account in her book to understand the whole significance of little Scout realizing that to tell the truth about Boo would be “sort of like shootin' a mockingbird,” to understand how a little eight-year-old girl could understand the significance of insisting Boo offer his arm to her rather than his hand for her to take him home. Even as I write of this, each time I review this whole scene in my mind's eye I continue to feel the sting of the tears and the lump forming in my throat. And I feel the longing to flee back into a time when the boy, not the man, had such love and wisdom as that of little Scout. And a madman.

However, when I put the book down or the film comes to an end, when I begin to write, the reality of Now is there to greet me. And I face the fact once more that it is, after all, just a story. There are no Boo Radleys, only children who suffer and die daily for the lack of them.

But speaking of a little child leading, what of the lynch mob little Scout disperses by the simple but ever profound ingenuousness of being a child? Don't adults need the leading, the love and wisdom of guardian angels in the form of children? Oh, how very desperately we need them! We need the saving faith of their love and wisdom when our own fails so miserably. How often the world appears to me as a mad lynch mob in need of the love and wisdom of a child to disperse it, “maybe we need a police force of children” as Atticus phrased it to be the leaders of love and wisdom into sanity.

The hope and optimism with which I greet each day is, I believe, of God, and is based on my belief that if good people know better, they will do better. If I could learn, so can others. If I can be led of a child to see and understand from Harper Lee's story and the cruelties perpetrated against children everywhere, so can others.

I learned long ago through many futile attempts on my part that good people needed something to give them hope that they could actually do something substantive to change things for the better. Many good people give themselves to causes in the hope that this will prove to be the case. I needed such hope myself.

However, I also came to realize that there were just too many things in need of change, that good people often feel impotent in the face of so many problems of ever-growing magnitude, of such evil in the ascendancy all about on every hand. But why, as Thoreau pointed out, should there be a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to only one hacking at the root? But so it has always been. This is why the evil has always prevailed. Good people are too busy and fragmented lacking agreement, lacking consensus of what to do!

In fact, I began to realize that good people are too busy to be free! If, as philosophers have always pointed out, to be both ignorant and free is an impossibility and America is becoming an ignorant, illiterate nation, the warning is implicit. And if good people are both ignorant and too busy to be politically active, the end of this should be obvious. The very system that condemned Tom Robinson is a reflection of this. But have good people become good citizens as a result? Sadly, even tragically, the answer is No. But I know that all the people of the world have at least this in common: Parents' love for their children. If the focus of the world could be brought to bear on children, it could be the basis of dialogue between all nations of the world.

Harper Lee addresses many things in her novel which made the story and her way of writing it worthy and deserving of the Pulitzer, many things not brought out in the film and deserving of in-depth analysis such as the interactions of the various people involved with the courtroom proceedings of the trial of Tom Robinson, and the real point of Mrs. Dubose and Mr. Raymond as characters in the book.

Suffice it to say that the awarding of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer was largely based on the social injustices she addressed in such a masterful way, not on the things about Boo and the children. The world easily recognizes, and always has though throughout history been impotent to prevent, such injustices as the crime committed against Tom Robinson. This is a familiar and infamous theme throughout history. But I believe the real story Harper wanted to tell was the one I have emphasized. I believe she was listening to the little girl within herself who was crying to be heard. And Harper responded to that little girl she used to be, who still cried out to be heard, in a most astonishing way!

However, neither the Pulitzer nor the Nobel is awarded to children. Nor are they given for the wisdom of children. If this were simple cynicism I could deal with that; I understand that. But the cynical blindness of humankind is beyond my capacity to heal in myself or any other, beyond the ability of any one individual. I will say that I believe my eyes have been opened somewhat because of what a little girl in a grown woman's book has said to me. And maybe Harper Lee, consciously or not, was trying to reach men with this message. And in my own way, I fervently want to help that little girl to be heard. To do this, the little boy within myself must have a voice. It is that little boy who perfectly loves that little girl and understands what she is trying to say. It is that little boy who understands the relationship between Scout and Boo Radley, the relationship between these two angels; each in a very distinctive way, the guardian angel of the other. But isn't this the way it is supposed to be between all children and adults?

I see Jem and Scout and Dill. They are on their clandestine and fearless mission in the night to try to get a surreptitious peek at Boo Radley. They have not yet discovered that it isn't a madman like Boo they should fear, it is the insanity of the world, the insanity of their own small society in Maycomb that will condemn an innocent man to death just because he is a Negro, a society that will do this and still allow the real monsters such as the Ewells to continue to run wild and prey upon the innocent and defenseless. But Scout becomes afraid as they approach the Radley house and I hear Jem telling her, “I declare to the Lord, you're gettin' more like a girl every day!”

As a man, I can laugh at Jem and still understand his aggravation. It will take time for him to grow out of his aggravation toward Scout and to appreciate girls, for him to appreciate what little girls become as they grow up. But Jem has the advantage of a father who will teach him to respect girls, a father who loves his little girl and will teach Jem to show her due regard as she grows up. Not all children have such an advantage. But they should.

And should Jem grow up and become the father of a little girl? Oh, my! What he will learn about girls he would never learn otherwise. He will learn as a man what it is to cherish. But this is only for those like Jem to learn, for only those like him are capable of learning such a thing.

But if little boys and girls are taught and encouraged to respect each other, they will grow into ladies and gentlemen. Provided they are given the love and affection that is their due as children and don't fall into the hands of real monsters in the guise of human beings.

All children should have the opportunity of mysterious missions in the night without fear, of play involving daring exploits of courage, of finding nothing scary but what they read in books. I have so much yet to learn. But the children are more than willing to teach. I feel the melancholy of not putting the message of the children in the words they would use. But I live with the disadvantage of being all grown up. Like dear Harper Lee, all I can do is try. And pray God and the children will still bless and overcome my shortcomings of age, overcome the many years of cynical disillusionment through the shattering of dreams, so many of which turned into nightmares, and some those with which all parents live.

It has been said “all children deserve better parents.” And to a certain extent, I have to agree; but I believe this goes back to my thought that if good people know better, they will do better. But this presupposes that the message of Harper Lee’s book will finally be successful in preventing the Mayella Violet Ewells ever growing up so love-starved that they will put their hands on a Bible and swear a false oath condemning another human being to death!

What happened to a little girl that produced a woman like Mayella instead of a little girl like Scout and her so very different prospects as a woman? The challenge the message of the children presents is that of awakening the consciences of adults to the all-too-often silent cry of children who cannot be heard, who have no other voice than that of the adults who are supposed to be responsible for the children. But the message can only be effective once it is able to find expression in the voices and language of the children, and finds willing listeners in adults.