My Favorite Book: To Kill a Mockingbird
By Amy M. Denton
Everyone has had required reading for school. Whether in high school or college or beyond, we all have had to read something not by choice for school. Nobody likes required reading, really. I certainly don’t. Required reading, however, is how I started To Kill A Mockingbird. Tenth Grade English with Mrs. Almeta Crawford in a suburban high school just outside of Houston in the mid-1980s.
I inhaled it. I read a lot as a child. My whole family did. We still do, but To Kill A Mockingbird was different. It spoke to the 16-year-old me. It reminded me of my mother’s parents, my grandparents, of where my grandmother was from, coastal Louisiana and what my grandfather did before joining the Army—he was a lawyer. I could see the town before me as if I was standing there. Harper Lee was a master writer, but her power came from her evocative descriptions. Scout up a tree in a dress. Atticus in the courtroom. Boo Radley carrying Jem home after Scout and Jem were attacked. It’s all there. It was like watching a movie. My class watched the movie. As good as the movie was, it couldn’t compare to the book.
I read the book years after the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird. Houston is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the country and has been for decades. Look up “Pancho Claus Houston,” “Greek Festival Houston,” or “Chinese New Year Houston,” to see what I mean. Houston not only has a Chinatown, it has multiple “Asian” towns. I live in one of them now. The streets in my neighborhood are in English and Chinese. The paper notices sent out from my apartment complex come in six languages.
My high school, John Foster Dulles High, was a mix of all cultures. We had Halloween and Día de Los Muertos, Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday celebrated the day after Halloween. There is a Buddhist temple I went past for four years that’s still there. So, the idea of being judged by what you looked like was something very hard to comprehend. Yet, Harper Lee made it understandable to me.
As Atticus was in the book, my mother was a single parent, not by choice. She was also a lawyer who defended those who needed the help. When my dad died when I was six, my mom had to make some very tough decisions, one of which was how to support the family. She hadn’t been in the workforce in fifteen years and it was 1978. A lot of the support programs available today didn’t exist back then.
How could she support a six-year-old and a thirteen-year-old? She became a lawyer. In 1981, we moved 1,800 miles so we could be closer to my mom’s family. She put me in school, my sister in Rice University, on a scholarship and she went to law school at 52, at the University of Houston, long before the Internet existed. She was, without a doubt, one of the oldest people in her classes.
She became a lawyer to help people, especially women who had been taken advantage of, like people had tried to do to her when my father died. While I didn’t climb a tree in a dress or get into fights, I identified with Scout the most because I saw a lot of the same things happen with my mom that happened with Atticus. It didn't matter that Scout was far younger than me. She was me, a younger me. In reading To Kill a Mockingbird, I was reading an alternative history of my family.
It’s been over 30 years since I first picked up To Kill A Mockingbird and Mrs. Crawford has long since retired. The school district recently named a high school after her. Yet, the story is as relevant to me now as it was then. I can see what Atticus faced in court in our society today and I keep in mind what he represented in court when I am at work. Everyone is entitled to respect and dignity, regardless of who they are or what they look like, even if they don’t really deserve such. Harper Lee brought Atticus to life, and I keep his lessons in mind all the time. Such is the power of a good story.
Amy Denton been writing since high school and has been making up stories to amuse herself since she was a small child. Currently, she is a lecturer at University of Houston in the English Department. Denton also teaches history online at Southern New Hampshire University and Lone Star College. She is working on a paranormal mystery about a vampire mystery writer who is being stalked, titled Ink and Ashes. It was a finalist in the 2022 Claymore Awards.
