“Will you take me home?”
He almost whispered it, in the voice of a child afraid of the dark.
Readers, allow me to make a confession: As I write, I only just today got around to reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Yes, I know. In my defense, I had a very full middle/high school literature education. I just missed this spot, though of course I got the gist by cultural osmosis. But now that I’ve finally read everyone else’s favorite book, naturally I’m eager to compose what’s sure to be a highly original take on it. So, please indulge me while I think out loud a bit about the figure who sits (to me) at the real heart of the story—Boo Radley.
(Spoilers follow, so for those who, like me, for some reason also missed this spot, I recommend fixing that and coming back!)
I say Boo Radley is at the heart of the story, though as readers know, he has very little raw “page-time.” He’s completely absent from the iconic courtroom drama on which the novel’s reputation largely rests. But this searing critique of racial prejudice is only one piece of a story about prejudice writ large. Young Scout comes of age by learning to see not just Tom Robinson, but everyone in her town through new eyes, “walking in their skin,” as Atticus famously instructs her. At the risk of heresy, she learns this lesson so many different times that I’d argue the theme almost wears out its welcome. (Which is why if I were to rank-order my favorite American coming-of-age novels, I would probably place Mockingbird slightly behind a work like, say, Chaim Potok’s The Chosen—not that anyone has asked me.)
Of course, Lee’s writing is so elegant that we ultimately don’t mind learning and re-learning the lesson with Scout. And the lesson learned from Boo Radley, whose arc bookends the work, is indelibly haunting.
For all the ugliness the story lays bare, nothing is more chilling to me than Nathan Radley’s cementing of the knothole where his damaged younger brother has left gifts for Scout and Jem. Somehow, this small, silent act of casual meanness haunts me even more than the menacing Mr. Ewell, or the near-lynch mob outside Tom Robinson’s jail cell. We don’t even get a clear picture of the man who performs it. He’s just “young Mr. Radley,” the son who took over from “old Mr. Radley” and guards the place with a shotgun by night.
But the children have conjured up all manner of monstrous fantasies about Boo Radley, the misfit son who was locked in his own house for 15 years after getting mixed up with the wrong crowd, then locked up in the courthouse basement after he stabbed his own father with scissors—or so the story goes. I think we’re meant to believe that this story might even be true. Boo allegedly does the deed in between cutting shapes out of the paper, which he’s still placidly doing when they come to take him away. Later, he carves small soap sculptures of Scout and Jem. The picture takes shape of a man clever with his hands, his fingers as quick to create beauty as they are to be impulsively violent.
The precise shape of the darkness inside the house of eternally shuttered windows is never fully outlined. Just how did old and young Mr. Radley abuse Boo? Was it harsh, or was it an accumulation of more subtle cruelties, like Nathan’s cementing the knothole? Or was it more like a vicious cycle of tragedy, where the father was so stern and Boo so ill that the two could never find each other? We see through the children’s eyes, so our perspective is unclear. But what the grownups know is enough to make them shake their heads in pity, their faces clouded with sadness. “You reckon he’s crazy?” Scout asks an old neighbor. “If he’s not,” Miss Maudie answers grimly, “he should be by now.”
We get a few glimpses of what Boo was like as a child himself. Miss Maudie recalls that he always “spoke nicely” to her, or at least “as nicely as he knew how.” One of the treasures he leaves in the knothole is an old spelling medal, hinting that so far from being an idiot, he was quick with words. The forces that made him non-verbal were external, not internal.
If we take the scissors story to be true, then Boo’s tender, ghostly interactions with the children are all the more poignant. He has spent his manhood being told he’s a monster, until he’s come to believe it himself. And a monster could never be a father, except in his dreams. So he works away with his hands, utterly alone, offering pieces of himself that wouldn’t be of value to anyone except a child. The children meanwhile vow to make him “come out,” which in a sense he does on the night Miss Maudie’s house burns down in a wintertime fire. In the confusion, he silently casts a blanket over Scout’s shivering shoulders, then disappears into the neighborhood crowd before anyone spots him. In that sense, he hasn’t really “come out” yet—he hasn’t shown his face.
In the end, ironically, he comes out to do violence—a stabbing, no less. It’s a necessary stabbing, of course. An act whose necessity Atticus Finch, a man of peace, doesn’t foresee. Atticus assumes Mr. Ewell will act the way sane, reasonable men do. He assumes Ewell’s talk is simply talk. And whatever he might fear beyond that, he never dreams Ewell would attack the children. Only a maniac would do that, and Atticus can’t think like a maniac. In the end, it takes a man who’s not quite sane to think like a man who’s not quite sane. It takes a blade to stop a blade.
The film changes the book by making Boo wholly non-verbal when he finally meets the children. This eliminates the exchange I put at the top of the post, which might be the most profound moment of the novel—certainly one of them. Boo wants to go back home, but after his violent protective act, he is suddenly too crippled with fear to make the dark walk himself. So, child-like, he asks Scout for help. And Scout, with the uncanny perception that marks her character, gently places her hand in the crook of his elbow, so that it looks like he is giving her his arm, like a gentleman. And they walk like that, together, until he is home. It is the last Scout ever sees of him. And as she turns away, she is sad.
Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.
Here, for the last time, she walks in another man’s skin, looking out on the neighborhood from Boo Radley’s porch, looking back on her whole year with Jem as if through his eyes. Here, at last, she sees. She sees that to Boo, they were not just children. They were his children.
Of course, Scout has not given Boo Radley nothing. She has given him her love. But more than this, she has given him his dignity. She has given him his manhood.
This is perfect. You nailed it.