This is the Monroeville, Mississippi Courthouse made famous by the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The plot, involving racial injustice and loss of innocence, and the characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her own family and neighbors; her father was a highly respected lawyer in the town.
Here is a little of the text from the book. The narrator is Scout, nickname for the twelve- year old daughter of Atticus Finch. Here she is describing her brother, Jem.
"The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me - he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."
-Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
I was surprised at how emotional it felt to be in the Courtroom which is the model for the one seen in the 1962 film with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.
Sitting in the Judge's place; that's the spot for me.
Upstairs is an exhibit on another famous author from Monroeville, Truman Capote. He and Harper Lee were neighbors. As children they had a little pretend office where they would spend a little time every day typing on an old typewriter.
In the gift shop I enjoyed this artist's rendering of famous Mississippi authors: Helen Keller, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., Truman Capote and Harper Lee.
All that is left is the wall between the homes of the two authors.
I have always enjoyed A Christmas Memory by Capote. Here is an excerpt:
"It's always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: "It's fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat."
The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-doors has faded: it once belonged to a more fashionable relative. Together, we guide our buggy, a dilapidated baby carriage, out to the garden and into a grove of pecan trees."
- Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory
This is my favorite post as of late, Mom! I love thinking of Harper Lee as a child, of her wonderous story (the excerpt made me laugh out loud), and seeing you at the judge's bench. The black man's fate might have looked different with you at the helm. I'm inspired to read something by Truman Capote now.
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