It is, once more, the wisdom of the child that Harper Lee brings out so clearly, vividly, in her novel. The wisdom of the child has no prejudice. Like the song “Carefully Taught” in South Pacific it takes an adult society to teach children to hate those who are different from them.

    Such adult society reminds me of something Atticus says in the novel, “Naming people after Confederate general’s makes them slow steady drinkers.” And there is nothing like naming someone Pope, Reverend, Rabbi, Mullah or Ayatollah to accomplish the same result of making men drunk with their egos and self-importance.

    Jem and Scout are only children. But they talk about people, about issues of life arising from the trial of Tom Robinson. They wonder why people can't get along together when Jem suddenly says to Scout, “I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time ... it's because he wants to stay inside.”

    I have come to love Harper Lee; I have come to love Scout, Jem, Atticus, Maudie, and Calpurnia. I lay in bed last night pondering this and talking it over with God. Like Boo Radley, as Jem had it figured, I realize I would prefer to dissociate myself from many of those who think themselves sane. I most certainly wouldn't have gotten on with those who considered Cotton Mather a “marvelous man.”

    If I could be a child again wearing my bib overalls, walking barefoot in the alkali dust of a Weedpatch or Little Oklahoma road in Southeast Bakersfield, just kickin' it once in a while to make the dust fly, enjoying the honest warmth of it between my toes and just doin' nothin', how delightful that would be. Maybe I'd be carrying my Genuine Daisy Red Ryder Lever-action Carbine BB gun, the one I earned selling garden seed and Cloverine salve door-to-door.

    I was really proud of earning my Daisy Red Ryder; though it was accompanied by the usual and familiar dire threat from adults about putting out the eyes of all the children in the neighborhood. One of the mysteries of childhood was why adults thought the sole purpose of BB guns was that of shooting out the eyes of children? But, then, it did seem adults engaged in a lot of morbid preoccupations of this nature intended to either frighten or make forbidden fruits all that more desirable to children.

    As I walked just doin' nothin', maybe I'd be thinking, like Scout, that there really wasn't much more to learn when I grew up than what I already knew except, possibly, algebra. And like Scout, nothing would be really scary except what I read in books.

    The thing is, I have had this experience of childhood and I know what I am missing. I know and love Scout and Jem and Dill and I long to join them. I know they would welcome me. But I can't, and it makes me feel I've lived too long and know too much. There has been more to learn than algebra and I know all the scary things are not just in books.

    Like Atticus of Jem and Scout, I wish I could have spared my children the pain of growing up in a world with ugly, ignorant, and hate-filled prejudices and hypocrisy, a world that has little concern for children, their future, or the monsters that prey on them. But I could no more do that than Atticus could of Jem and Scout.

    I don't want to write as I do of the pain and suffering of children, I want them to play and I want to write of their playing. I want to go play as I did as a child, I want my occupation to be that of child: To play.

    But the ugliness remained for Jem and Scout long after the trial of Tom Robinson. It remains today and it hurts to imagine Jem and Scout as adults, facing a world that had not changed for the better no matter how hard their father had tried to make it a better world for them.

    Like Atticus, I wanted to make it a better world for my children. But I finally realized this couldn't be done unless it became a better world for all children. But to accomplish this, I can't be the child I long to be. I can't join Jem and Scout and Dill at play. I'll never be able to walk that dusty road again barefoot just doin' nothin'. I've lived too long and I know too much.

    Humankind, as nature, remains red in tooth and claw. And as long as it does, I can't live just doin' nothin'. I have even had to give up the toys of adulthood, the things with which I used to play that only filled the time and gave me the illusion that they were somehow of importance. It is easy to intellectualize the proverb: “A wise man lives simply” unless you begin to deal with the fact that such sayings always exclude women and why. And don't try to make the term man generic when it isn't intended.

    But it's hard to live it, this thing of putting aside the toys and focusing on the things of real importance. And this is new to me; I am grappling with it, trying to understand it every day now. It's a hard thing and I fervently wish I were not compelled to do it, that like Boo I could just stay in the house and avoid the ugliness outside. However, when the circumstances demanded it Boo did come outside and face the ugliness, the real madness, the real insanity, of a society believing it to be sane.

    While I believe in angels, like my daughters Diana and Karen now gone on before me and with whom I believe I will be reunited when I pass away, I believe adults have all the responsibility for children, no part of which may be sloughed off onto angels in any way. As I do not blame God for my failures, so I will not accept the blaming of God or angels for the failures of others.

    As Boo watched the children through cracked shutters from the confines of his lonely, dark tomb, their lives began to be a part of his. He became their guardian angel, a mad angel, from time to time placing small treasures for them to discover in that hole in the tree.

    Was it possible for a madman to know, as I believe he must have, the children were in danger? One has to suppose that such a madman can know and sense things sane people cannot. As the film Rain Man so well portrayed, savants are the product of some forms of madness.

    Boo was a kind of mad savant in respect to the children. The genius in his madness made him their guardian angel, an angel who could plunge a knife into the evil Mr. Ewell that was intent on revenging himself by his cowardly attempt to murder the children; and undoubtedly would have done so had Boo not been there out of sight watching over them.

    Apart from the treasures Boo left for the children in that tree and the incident of the blanket during the fire at Aunt Maudie’s house the children never knew they had such a guardian angel until that moment when the evil Ewell attacked them. Nor should children be expected to know of such angels. They had, in fact, been warned of him, warned by dire threats and morbid stories to stay away from him. He was the neighborhood bogeyman of their childhood. How very strange that a bogeyman, a madman, becomes a guardian angel.

    Scout was mistaken in her sadness that she and Jem had never given Boo anything in return for his love and gifts, his kindness to them, even saving their lives. The children had given a madman the most precious gift of all: A reason for being; a reason for living. Imagine that: Reason in a madman! And reason because of children! But then this should be the kind of reason exercised by all that consider themselves sane.

    What loving parents wouldn't wish for their children such a guardian angel as Boo? An angel who watches over their children when circumstances, circumstances of which the parents are all too often unaware, put them in harm's way?

    Just as Atticus could never tell Jem or Scout to be obedient to him if he failed to perform as a man, neither can I of my own children should I fail to do so. Children all too soon learn the difference between those who only preach and those who do as they preach.

    I often enter the world of both the novel and the film and lose myself in them. Toward the end, the novel describes little Scout taking Boo home after he has saved her and Jem from the evil Ewell. Boo has asked her to do this. It's as though he is a frightened child himself, frightened to be separated from the children, frightened to once more enter his dark and lonely place apart from them.

    But Scout refuses to lead Boo home by the hand. She has him offer her his arm, just like a real lady and gentleman would do, and Scout makes sure that any neighbor that might be watching will see that the madman who has saved her and her brother's lives is a gentleman. And she is a lady, a little eight-year-old lady on the gentleman's arm.

    And I recall the passage, “A little child shall lead them.” But the prophet failed to recognize the fact that the Them are madmen like Boo Radley. And how could he? Women and children were not, and never are, the equal of men to such prophets.

    But little Scout on the arm of a madman, their roles now reversed; it is a scene that never fails to bring the sting of tears to my eyes and a lump in my throat. The producers of the film, the script writers, had enough sensitivity and artistry to have Scout walking Boo Radley to his house with her hand in his arm, as though he was escorting her, rather than her leading him by the hand like a child. I believe Harper Lee insisted on this. But it was too complicated to explain the purpose of this in the film as Harper Lee in her book. Perhaps the filmmakers depended on the sensitivity of viewers to catch this. But like the chiaroscuro effect of the heart in the courtyard of Gigi, very few do.

    You must read Harper Lee’s account in her book to understand the whole significance of little Scout realizing that to tell the truth about Boo would be “sort of like shootin' a mockingbird,” to understand how a little eight-year-old girl could understand the significance of insisting Boo offer his arm to her rather than his hand for her to take him home. Even as I write of this, each time I review this whole scene in my mind's eye I continue to feel the sting of the tears and the lump forming in my throat. And I feel the longing to flee back into a time when the boy, not the man, had such love and wisdom as that of little Scout. And a madman.

    However, when I put the book down or the film comes to an end, when I begin to write, the reality of Now is there to greet me. And I face the fact once more that it is, after all, just a story. There are no Boo Radleys, only children who suffer and die daily for the lack of them.

    But speaking of a little child leading, what of the lynch mob little Scout disperses by the simple but ever miraculously profound ingenuousness of being a child? Don't adults need the leading, the love and wisdom of guardian angels in the form of children? Oh, how very desperately we need them! We need the saving faith of their love and wisdom when our own fails so miserably. How often the world appears to me as a mad lynch mob in need of the love and wisdom of a child to disperse it, “maybe we need a police force of children” as Atticus phrased it to be the leaders of love and wisdom into sanity.

    The hope and optimism with which I greet each day is, I believe, of God, and is based on my belief that if good people know better, they will do better. If I could learn, so can others. If I can be led of a child to see and understand from Harper Lee's story and the cruelties perpetrated against children everywhere, so can others.

    I learned long ago through many futile attempts on my part that good people needed something to give them hope that they could actually do something substantive to change things for the better. Many good people give themselves to causes in the hope that this will prove to be the case. I needed such hope myself.

    However, I also came to realize that there were just too many things in need of change, that good people often feel impotent in the face of so many problems of ever-growing magnitude, of such evil in the ascendancy all about on every hand. But why, as Thoreau pointed out, should there be a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to only one hacking at the root? But so it has always been. This is why the evil has always prevailed. Good people are too busy and fragmented lacking agreement, lacking consensus of what to do!

    In fact, I began to realize that good people are too busy to be free! If, as philosophers have always pointed out, to be both ignorant and free is an impossibility and America is becoming an ignorant, illiterate nation, the warning is implicit. And if good people are both ignorant and too busy to be politically active, the end of this should be obvious. The very system that condemned Tom Robinson is a reflection of this. But have good people become good citizens as a result? Sadly, even tragically, the answer is No. But I know that all the people of the world have at least this in common: Parents' love for their children. If the focus of the world could be brought to bear on children, it could be the basis of dialogue between all nations of the world.

    Harper Lee addresses many things in her novel which made the story and her way of writing it worthy and deserving of the Pulitzer, many things not brought out in the film and deserving of in-depth analysis such as the interactions of the various people involved with the courtroom proceedings of the trial of Tom Robinson, and the real point of Mrs. Dubose and Mr. Raymond as characters in the book.

    Suffice it to say that the awarding of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer was largely based on the social injustices she addressed in such a masterful way, not on the things about Boo and the children. The world easily recognizes, and always has though throughout history been impotent to prevent, such injustices as the crime committed against Tom Robinson. This is a familiar and infamous theme throughout history. But I believe the real story Harper wanted to tell was the one I have emphasized. I believe she was listening to the little girl within herself who was crying to be heard. And Harper responded to that little girl she used to be, who still cried out to be heard, in a most astonishing way!

    However, neither the Pulitzer nor the Nobel is awarded to children. Nor are they given for the wisdom of children. If this were simple cynicism I could deal with that; I understand that. But the cynical blindness of humankind is beyond my capacity to heal in myself or any other, beyond the ability of any one individual. I will say that I believe my eyes have been opened somewhat because of what a little girl in a grown woman's book has said to me. And maybe Harper Lee, consciously or not, was trying to reach men with this message. And in my own way, I fervently want to help that little girl to be heard. To do this, the little boy within myself must have a voice. It is that little boy who perfectly loves that little girl and understands what she is trying to say. It is that little boy who understands the relationship between Scout and Boo Radley, the relationship between these two angels; each in a very distinctive way, the guardian angel of the other. But isn't this the way it is supposed to be between all children and adults?

    I see Jem and Scout and Dill. They are on their clandestine and fearless mission in the night to try to get a surreptitious peek at Boo Radley. They have not yet discovered that it isn't a madman like Boo they should fear, it is the insanity of the world, the insanity of their own small society in Maycomb that will condemn an innocent man to death just because he is a Negro, a society that will do this and still allow the real monsters such as the Ewells to continue to run wild and prey upon the innocent and defenseless. But Scout becomes afraid as they approach the Radley house and I hear Jem telling her, “I declare to the Lord, you're gettin' more like a girl every day!”

    As a man, I can laugh at Jem and still understand his aggravation. It will take time for him to grow out of his aggravation toward Scout and to appreciate girls, for him to appreciate what little girls become as they grow up. But Jem has the advantage of a father who will teach him to respect girls, a father who loves his little girl and will teach Jem to show her due regard as she grows up. Not all children have such an advantage. But they should.

    And should Jem grow up and become the father of a little girl? Oh, my! What he will learn about girls he would never learn otherwise. He will learn as a man what it is to cherish. But this is only for those like Jem to learn, for only those like him are capable of learning such a thing.

    But if little boys and girls are taught and encouraged to respect each other, they will grow into ladies and gentlemen. Provided they are given the love and affection that is their due as children and don't fall into the hands of real monsters in the guise of human beings.

    All children should have the opportunity of mysterious missions in the night without fear, of play involving daring exploits of courage, of finding nothing scary but what they read in books. I have so much yet to learn. But the children are more than willing to teach. I feel the melancholy of not putting the message of the children in the words they would use. But I live with the disadvantage of being all grown up. Like dear Harper Lee, all I can do is try. And pray God and the children will still bless and overcome my shortcomings of age, overcome the many years of cynical disillusionment through the shattering of dreams, so many of which turned into nightmares, and some those with which all parents live.

    It has been said “all children deserve better parents.” And to a certain extent, I have to agree; but I believe this goes back to my thought that if good people know better, they will do better. But this presupposes that the message of Harper Lee’s book will finally be successful in preventing the Mayella Violet Ewells ever growing up so love-starved that they will put their hands on a Bible and swear a false oath condemning another human being to death!

    What happened to a little girl that produced a woman like Mayella instead of a little girl like Scout and her so very different prospects as a woman? The challenge the message of the children presents is that of awakening the consciences of adults to the all-too-often silent cry of children who cannot be heard, who have no other voice than that of the adults who are supposed to be responsible for the children. But the message can only be effective once it is able to find expression in the voices and language of the children, and finds willing listeners in adults.