her vantage point, it’s easy to see why she’d send such a powerful heroine out into the world in her stead. For Scout and what she symbolizes is bigger than Nelle Harper Lee or any one of us.
As heroines, it’s easy to shy away from the sidelines and difficult to respect another person’s place there. The sidelines are a liminal place and a downright weird one. In order to live there, you have to give up the option of defending yourself with words or actions and simply allow others to see you as they will. For some, the sidelines aren’t a choice at all; they’re a place where people are forced by custom or hatred, intolerance and poverty. They’re the place where poor, plain people live, people who are doomed to the margins of society and who know what it’s like to be down and out. But it’s there, standing right alongside Harper Lee, that the Boos and Scouts live, too, the people whom we cannot afford to overlook or abandon.
Compassion is a heroine’s courage to look over there, too, to recognize the parts of others and of herself that are consigned to endless side-spaces and see what she finds. As Scout discovers, taking things at face value can help maintain a certain semblance of peace for a while, but it can also endanger your very life. When we choose status quo over the truth, we fail to act heroically. When we choose judgment over compassion, we allow the loud ones, the Stephanie Crawfords and the Ewells and those who would allow an innocent man to die for the color of his skin, to prevail. It’s hard to choose the rougher route, the one that promises to disrupt everything that’s quiet and serene inside ourselves and then delivers with abandon. But the alternative is chilling. When we adopt the tactics of ignorance that are the easy way out, looking the other way instead of acting from compassion, we fail everyone on the sidelines. Like it or not, when we fail to at least attempt to practice compassion, we fail ourselves as well.
Like her heroic little girl, Harper Lee herself had a soft spot in her heart for the people on the outskirts, and part of the power of her only published book is that she always includes their whispers among the shouts of the self-righteous and powerful. Her heart was always with those people branded as insignificant or difficult, and in a 1965 speech she said, “Our response to these people represents our earthly test. And I think that these people enrich the wonder of our lives. It is they who most need our kindness, because they seem less deserving. After all, anyone can love people who are lovely.”
READ THIS BOOK:
• Before you go to court or have to stare down a particularly loathsome work project
• With your own little girl
• When you get tired of being yelled at by cable news
SCOUT’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Daisy Fay Harper in
• Lily Owens in
• Meg Murry in
Chapter 9
Simplicity
Laura Ingalls in
by Laura Ingalls Wilder
I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.
LAURA INGALLS WILDER,
“A BOUQUET OF WILD FLOWERS”
“Are we there yet? Is this the prairie?” I looked out the window of the Toyota Tercel. We were driving cross- country and I had insisted that my boyfriend take me on a route that at least skirted the prairie lands of the vast Plains states. The trip wouldn’t include the sites of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood, but it was a pilgrimage of sorts. As we reached Kansas and watched the road flatten into endless, monotonous horizon, I imagined how it must have felt to encounter a land so wild, expansive, and simple in a vehicle far clunkier and more uncomfortable than ours. Though the radio was blaring and my boyfriend was within arm’s length, I could feel a sense of quiet set in. After all, there’s not much to focus on but your own heartbeat when you’re under a vast prairie sky.
Leaning out that car window, I was transported back more than a hundred years to the way in which my childhood friend and mentor, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the woman whose stories of prairie life have meant the world to millions of readers like me, encountered this land for the first time. I looked out at the grassy landscape, deceptive in its size and almost endless in its inscrutable power. I imagined what it must have been like for the tiny Ingalls family, dwarfed by the forces of nature around them, as they traveled west to make their home in a new country. And even I, connoisseur of historical fiction and professional imaginer of other places and times, found it hard to conceive of a landscape completely stripped of modern accouterments.
Not that I hadn’t tried. It seems that simplicity becomes more and more desirable as daily life gets more complex. All around us are confusing subprime mortgages, 401(k) statements, crowded closets, and complicated living arrangements, things that make us want to take shelter under the simple quilt of yesteryear. Modern life has backfired a bit, it seems, stripping us of our autonomy, leaving us dependent and discontented even as we luxuriate in a standard of living unknown to our forebears. Lucky for us, it’s fashionable to slough off worldly things in the name of conscience. We’re not alone in seeking a simpler reality, one that focuses on people instead of things and gives honor to who we are as people without burying us under the stuff that can obscure reality as quickly as a storm cloud on the prairie.
These weren’t exactly worries shared by Laura and her family. They had an important role to play in westward expansion and the civilization of a rough land, hewing a productive nation from the vast and endless physical landscape that exhilarated and terrified young Laura. In short, they had bigger concerns: fires had to be built by dint of fuel they gathered themselves; clothing had to be stretched to the last stitch, twice-turned and mended, and then put to further use in quilts, aprons, or curtains.
In Laura’s world, there were no leftovers or seconds. When they left the little house near Independence, Kansas, the Ingallses even dug up the seed potatoes growing in their garden. Every physical possession was something precious, but not necessarily vital. What they could not buy, they traded for crops or furs. Glass windows, bathrooms, and swift transportation are fundamental necessities to us, but they were luxuries to a people who produced almost everything they needed themselves, relying only peripherally on items purchased at far-away stores. As a result, Laura’s family was fiercely independent and self-confident, answering the call of western expansion again and again as they made their own mark on the frontier.
Laura’s life may have been simple in terms of material possessions, but it wasn’t easy. The years following her marriage to Almanzo Wilder were fraught with trouble. At first, all signs pointed to a happy, unruffled marriage. Almanzo, whom Laura called Manly, was a successful farmer and horse breeder with rich relatives, and Laura was an adept housekeeper and a smart manager used to deprivation and simple living. But nothing could have prepared the newlyweds for the disastrous years that lay ahead. Almanzo fell ill with diphtheria, forcing a long separation from their young daughter Rose and partially paralyzing him for the remainder of his life. The couple’s next child, a boy, died before he was a month old; their house burned down; and a drought dried up any hopes of financial prosperity. The couple moved around in a futile search for land that could sustain them, taking on odd jobs as they went and raising Rose with a sense of constant inferiority and poverty.
Eventually, the Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, forcing its unforgiving terrain into submission over many long years of toil and labor. By the time Laura was moved to write about her childhood, the
