Why I’ve never replaced my old copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

This Week’s Winner

Philip Jerome Hilario is an English teacher, a graduate of the UST College of Education, and is currently on the faculty of Civil Law at UST. He wishes to someday write his own "Black Book," and to write, produce and direct a feature film that would be the first one by a Filipino to win the Palm D’Or award of the Cannes Film Festival.

The summer before my sophomore year in law school, I paid a visit to my dormitory in Dapitan to tidy up my files, which I had carelessly left in my room during the sem break. Due to the ongoing renovation being done, I knew that the place would be quite chaotic but I did not quite expect this, since I was told there would be only a few repairs here and there. Alas, when I arrived at the dorm, there was no one there. In addition to the injury that my room had seemingly evaporated into thin air, I was stunned to see the ruins of what used to be my files and books piled up and haphazardly put in a garbage bag. Like a crazy bagman, I rummaged through what was left of the memories of my college life and the all-so-important cases of my current life and then there it was: the "Black Book," Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. The decade-old artifact was the most unsightly thing: torn in the middle, besmirched with dirt, consumed by mold and mildew, and drenched with presumably paint thinner. Of all the things I lost that day, I realized there was no replacing the value of what was a limited-edition copy of To Kill, the anniversary release with the black cover and the scrawny bright red mockingbird sketched on it.

The book is one of a kind. Forget all the kudos and rave reviews. Forget all the great things you have heard from your high school English teacher. Because truth be told, it is not promising – there are no sweeping vistas, no allusions, no obfuscating symbolisms and no panoramic descriptions of war and worlds imagined. A remake of the Oscar-nominated film inspired by the novel would be a flop at the box-office should studios consider wasting money in producing it. In contrast, all the book has to offer is life, viewed through the eyes of the ever so intrepid seven-year-old Jem Scout.

Why has To Kill a Mockingbird secured such a great place in contemporary literature? If a seven-year-old kid could have written it, why was it so important to so many? Why the raves and the films? Why did it sell 30 million copies? Because To Kill a Mockingbird is a lot of things: it is last century’s Huckleberry Finn; it is a mirror of the idiosyncrasies of then-racist America; it is the struggle of one man to bring up his two children amid a world with a distorted values system. The answer is synthesized in a single word: beauty. Make no mistake about it, for the same virtue is possessed by all accepted and unaccepted literatures of the world. The book is a unique gem. Absent are the abused and misused literary devices that poets and writers nowadays tend to confuse beauty with. Beauty is not gibberish or about complicated twists and turns nor is it achieved by manipulation. An idea need not be larger than life; it need not be revolutionary, but it must be magnificent on its own.

Beauty is there the summer Scout and Dill meet for the first time, and the bonds of friendship they create would remain forever. Beauty is there when Jem and her sister inadvertently prevent harm to come upon Atticus Finch by simply being what they were – children. It is magnificent how the lawyer Atticus struggled to fight for a "Negro’s" life and innocence. Who can forget the fluidity of one-shot Atticus’ movements as he rescues the town from the rabid dog, which visits them one night? Who would not be moved by the fact that it is Boo Radley, the supposed bane of a hypocritical neighborhood, who puts the watch, the coin and the gum in the tree hole at the street corner and a blanket on the cold shoulders of a horrified young girl as a peace and friendship offering to the Finch children? There is beauty when Jem’s arm is twisted and Atticus, the father that he is, sits by his bed until daybreak, waiting for his child to wake up and heal. All this happens in only a year’s time, yet their lives would be changed forever and that is beauty that would inspire the best out of men and grip the darkest of our desires. Harper Lee accomplished to narrate all this in the pure voice of a seven-year-old with inexplicably mustered splendor and without exaggerations – as a breathing and living proof that beauty is not in words but in the idea conveyed.

I know there would be objections to my calling the novel the "Black Book" because calling it "black" would be deemed racist, especially when it was after all, a critique of the white man’s prejudice towards the black man. Yet the Black Book I am referring to is not about the limited-edition cover or the color of a man’s skin. What I am alluding to is the darkness that hides in the hearts of all men. Not much has really changed in society: there is still discrimination, inequality between the rich and poor, between men and women. If anything, the walls we built to keep ourselves away from each other have reached new heights, as we continually discover new ways to isolate and new ways to discriminate. This is our dire situation, so far from absolution.

Thus, To Kill A Mockingbird was and is a reminder of what we must continue to struggle against.

I’ve gotten over the fact that I lost my copy of the book forever. I’ve thought of buying a new copy but never got around to it. My old copy is still in my heart.