I made it all the way through high school and some college without ever reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and not because it wasn’t assigned.
Oh, it was assigned plenty of times.
How could it not be when the first two years of college is simply a repeat of the last two years of high school?
I am racially fatigued.
No pithy transition for that emotion.
It happens from time to time that I get tired of being black.
However, I was also radicalized at a young age when I realized I was “allowed” to say no.
When it came time to read certain literature in school, I was racially fatigued times.
These books written by white writers — they were the ones presented to us by sometimes ill-prepared white teachers as tomes wherein the “heroes” were white characters come to save blacks from the illiterate savagery of our/themselves.
I could never just easily swallow all this whole and merely read these books simply because it was a line item on some teacher’s agenda, lesson plan or course outline.
And most teachers who are not accustomed to teaching a student in demand of alternatives hate challenges to their authority.
Cathleen Arnold, one of the best teachers I have ever met who was the only person besides my mother to tell me I was a writer, gave me a big fat zero for not reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; I cannot remember which.
What I do recall is that I turned Twain’s work into my personal little protest novel and I told my parents about the grade. They just wanted to be sure the rest of my grade in that class could take in a factor of zero.
I protested largely because we were one or two years into our four-year forced busing to Greenhills High School where, despite the administration’s valiant efforts to welcome, include and highly educate us, I was occasionally called “nigger” in the hallways.
I learned through practices at home that no stranger in the street should ever call me anything I am not referred to at home.
I have never been overly emotional about that word, but sometimes it is not necessary, so when it is, it’s blown out of proportion.
Ms. Arnold forewarned us that Twain had used “nigger” in his work as a documentation of language of the times and to prove certain racial and social points.
Didn’t matter to me.
I wasn’t interested in taking any high roads and reading something I did not care to hear in the realities of my life.
This also came from home.
I did not realize it so much at the time, but my parents were a little older than everyone else’s.
Both my parents survived the white supremacy of Jim Crow and were from southern Affrilachian communities — my father from the backwoods of Alabama; my mother from the coal mountains of Chatteroy, West Virginia.
When I was a young girl, my mother regaled me with stories of when she was a young girl and my grandparents would put her on a train “down south” to see her paternal grandfather. Without fail, some white person would tell her grandfather, “Boy, you best tell that gal to step in the street when a white person passes.”
My great-grandfather, whom I never met but who looked like he stood well over six feet, snatched my mother down in the dirt road with him, where she mouthed back.
Always too much for him to handle, he would send her back to West Virginia, with a note saying she was going to get him lynched.
Then there were all the black family cultural signposts like Roots that were nearly impossible for my parents to sit through. I felt the same way about 12 Years a Slave, because of the truth of the mentally ill savagery surrounding slavery, but also because we are repeatedly shown the kindness of white people, especially in our own narratives, without ever being shown if this is always accurate.
And if anyone is paying attention, it is pervasive.
Perhaps this is why Hollywood as an industry refuses to green light “our projects.” Because Hollywood is afraid we will tell our own stories truthfully. (Gasp!)
This is why whites — the guilty-feeling, nice ones, anyway — do not mind taking an ass-whipping; why Chris Rock was the perfect one to host the Academy Awards. It was a moment that will pass, that may make some year-end, Top 10 Stories of the Year of some news editors. Otherwise, why not laugh at ourselves until this ish finally blows over?
And it will blow over.
I made it through school and nearly 51 years of life without reading some books others thought were seminal to my development and critical thinking.
I was never so interested in the heavy-handed moral lessons of Atticus Finch, that seemingly perfect white dad showing his kids how to walk in someone else’s shoes, as I was interested in Harper Lee’s abilities to basically make a living off one book for her entire life.
How’d she do that?
By simply being reclusive, writing a text that would appeal to school teachers and Oprah and then refusing — for life — to ever speak about it again?
I also was more interested and remain so in her working relationship with Truman Capote and all his professional envy after his In Cold Blood did not “outdo” her novel.
I loved the way they interviewed people for his book without ever taking notes publicly and how they would go back to the hotel and work through the night recreating people’s answers by challenging one another’s memories.
This still amazes me.
Writers are hardly ever the best collaborators.
But knowing Capote, this wasn’t a tactic used in any grand spirit of collaboration. He did it to make his work greater.
The decision is still out as to whether Harper Lee’s final gesture cannibalizing and pilching her own work to release the “prequel” Go Set a Watchman was a good move. Some said she should have left things alone, but that is not what the thirsty mind does.
The thirsty mind always looks for that one final corner to turn.
Is there just one more page to turn, one more path to explore, and can I walk it before I leave this place?
I took myself through a similar litany of questions before I started saying no to certain books, before zero became my hero.
I am glad Chris Rock took the gig and not the zero.
He passed with flying blackness.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Mar 2-9, 2016.