It all began during those long timeless dream-dazed days in
a house stricken by high fever. The national flu pandemic penetrated our family
and hit us hard, felling everyone but me. There were days when everyone slept
and some days when no-one slept.
The normal regulators of time: work and school, disappeared.
Further more, the loss of appetite destroyed the marker of meal-times. Mail
delivery marked the middle of the day. The school districts’ absentee call marked
the end of the afternoon. The sun came up and went down.
Sometimes unable to move, the girls’ single comfort was to
be read to. And so the days became like bedtimes, without end. Chapters turned
slowly and pensively. Some story lines blurred as they fell into sleep and had
to be told over another time.
We read the other Welsh Master of words, Dahl. Matilda. A
6-year old trapped and unloved by her greedy family, seeking to rebalance the
world. The girls were especially captured by her first grade teacher, Matilda’s
collaborator.
One of those January afternoons we took Matilda outdoors.
The girls sat bundled up in blankets on the front porch, for the restorative
healing of direct sun.
The day after Matilda we began Harper Lee. At first I read
it only for Havana, but her sister eventually sided up to us on the sofa. Also
written in the voice of a spirited first grader with an older sibling: Scout
was tailor-made for Ilyana. Like learning a second language, Ily got the feel
of the sentences and only now and then its depth. Havana listened more intently
and missed very little.
As the girls’ fevers came and went, we read more. Age
appropriate issues crept into the pages. We changed the unspoken N word into
the word negro and the definition of rape was made very, very general. Boo
Radley intrigued the girls as much as he did Scout, Jem and Dill. But our real
challenge was to be with Tom.
Tom’s trial was coming and Tom’s death was already written,
pages ahead. As the trial began, Jem and Havana were completely convinced that
justice would inevitably prevail for Tom. Each of them still too young to
untangle objective reality and subjective desire.
At this point both girls had returned to school. Mockingbird
had become the first choice for bedtime, just as the storyline was no longer
the last thing you’d want to hear before fading into your dreams.
The girls had each invested into the story. Each at their
own level. Ily, who is more likely to express her anger, is also often herself
unsure of her feelings. When Havana gets sad or angry, she knows exactly why.
But here we are as parents halfway through Tom’s trial. A
friend even suggested we put down the book and leave it unfinished.
What, when and how to tell kids about the problems of the
world depends so much on where our children are at and what they can process.
We live on a block where we’ve had guns pulled on people, where swat teams have
descended, and also where all the kids know each other and often play
basketball in the street. The girls have the good fortune of going to schools
where the majority of students are African American. They learned about Martin
Luther King’s assassination in Kindergarten. They know who Rosa Parks and Carol
Jemison are. Equally, they have friends who have siblings or fathers shot dead.
We did not tell the girls about the recent school shootings
because it would not make sense to them. But Mockingbird made sense, even if it
was not how they wanted the story to go.
We finished the story. The sin of the book’s title was
committed; Tom was found guilty and then murdered by prison officers. Scout and
Jem guardedly walked home in the darkness and Robert E. Lee Ewell got what was
coming to him. And the unlikely hero stepped forward and retreated into
darkness.
When I asked Ilyana about what she thought of Mockingbird,
she said nothing. Two days later she asked me how to spell the word racist. A
couple of days later she handed me a drawing of five stick people with picket
signs, each one saying something about the wrongs of racism.
When I asked Havana how she felt about the book, she was
direct. She was sad. Sad about Tom, but sad more than anything that Scout was
gone. That the story was over. That there were no more chapters to be read.
Scout is still with her, mixed in with all the other stories of our lives. With
the fiction and the facts. With the imagined and with the unimaginable.
