The fall unit centered around a great novel in verse: Inside Out & Back Again, about a Vietnamese refugee girl and her family fleeing Saigon and finding home in Alabama.This spring the novel is To Kill A Mockingbird, one of my all-time favorites. I love this book and movie so much I refused to let my high school English teacher kill it for me. Now, having to teach the novel for the first time, I'm remembering all that I love about the book. We are reading and watching the movie as we go, and more than once I've teared up watching Scout sit on Atticus's lap as she learns the lessons of life.
In the spirit of the book, here is an excerpt from Through Eyes Like Mine about the summer when I first met Scout, Jem, Dill, Atticus, Calpurnia, Boo Radley, and Tom Robinson.
Movie Night
It's late, way past our bedtime,
but we rented a VCR and the Butlers are over so Mom lets us stay up. Mom picked
out some old movie for us to watch.
"Are there kids in it?" I ask.
"The little girl tells the whole story, Nori."
Mom says. "You'll like it."
I take the stairs two at a time to the family room but
still don't believe the movie will be any good. It's in black and white.
The family room is still warm from the hot summer day.
The door to the deck is open and a chorus of crickets filters in from the
night. The grown-ups just finished watching a movie about some lawyer. Mr.
Butler's a lawyer too with an office downtown by St. Francis. When he gives us
a ride to school in the mornings, he gives us a word and we're supposed to look
it up in the dictionary and tell him what it means the next day. One day I look
up culpable which means deserving punishment.
I lay on the floor as Mom turns the lights out and
presses play. The tape clicks and the music starts. There is a box with crayons
and a pocketknife. A marble rolls; an old watch ticks. A girl draws a bird and
laughs. The people in the room fade away and my world becomes black and white.
A little girl named Scout counts and swings from a tire tied to a tree branch.
I follow her adventures until I can feel the thin denim of her overalls and the
summer heat on her back. I imagine what Scout thinks as she sits on Atticus's
lap on the porch and he tells her you never really know a man until you walk a
day in his shoes. I wonder if Jem, Scout, and Dill will ever get Boo Radley to
come out and if Atticus will help Tom Robinson. In the end, Atticus doesn't
win, Boo Radley comes out, and I think I know why it's a sin to kill a
mockingbird.
The next day I pull on an old faded t-shirt and shorts
fraying at the edges but I wish they were Scout's overalls. I climb up the
crooked rungs on the willow tree and sit in our tree house. I look across the
backyard at our neighborhood and wonder who in this town might be the Ewells or
the Robinsons. I try to figure out how to get everyone to start calling me Scout
but the name doesn't stick. No one calls me Scout, and the summer turns to
fall.
School starts, fourth grade, and at our first recess I
notice an old house on the border of the playground. I peer into its dirty
windows, past the dusty green jars cluttering the sills. It's dark inside and I
imagine Boo Radley in there, plotting to murder his family. I tell my
classmates about it and they say I'm crazy. I think about beating them up.
That's what Scout would've done, but Atticus wouldn't have liked that. Then I
see Matt Rose looking in the window of the Boo Radley house and I know he's
wondering.
Winter brings snow and during a
close game of kickball, Richard Eigeren sends the ball flying over the fence
into the Boo Radley yard.
"Go get it, Richard," Matt Rose yells.
"No way, that place is haunted."
"Oh, don't listen to Nori. She just made that up
from some old movie she saw."
I look at my classmates and back to the dark house across
the fence. "I'll go get it, you big babies."
I sprint out the playground gate and up the sidewalk. The
red rubber ball is far into the yard, resting on a pile of dirty snow. I look
at the ball and remember the time Jem pushed Scout in the tire and she landed
right on the Radley porch. I take a deep breath and push open the gate. One,
two, three, four, five, six, I count my steps and heartbeats like Scout did
when she was waiting for Jem to get his overalls from the Radley yard. I snatch
the ball and huck it over the fence where the boys dodge it, not wanting to
touch the rubber contaminated by the haunted yard. A dog barks and I nearly
slip on the icy walk as I slam the gate and sprint back to the safety of the
schoolyard, far from Maycomb, Scout and Boo Radley.
