My father put To Kill a Mockingbird in front of me in Damascus in 1983. I was eighteen, months from leaving, and I did not yet know that a black-and-white movie could sell a country.
Cecilia Peck, Gregory Peck's daughter, and Mary Badham, who played Scout, were gracious and honest. Photo by Philip Mann, executive director of the Virginia Samford Theatre.
What I saw was a lawyer standing alone in a courtroom doing the decent thing. What I saw was a balcony of people rising as he passed beneath them, and a voice saying, “Stand up, your father's passing.” I crossed an ocean partly because of that scene. I have said so out loud for forty years.
What I did not think to ask, at eighteen, in a living room six thousand miles away, was why those people were seated in a balcony at all.
That question is the essay.
It took me a long time to be able to hold both halves of it. The promise — the thing the film told me America wanted to be, which turned out to be true enough that I came and stayed and raised three children here. And the stone underneath it — the segregated courthouse, the separate stairs, the fact that the most decent man in the story could not change the verdict. I spent years believing I had to choose. I no longer think so. The movie did not lie to me. It told me what this country wanted, and the wanting is the part I still believe in, on the days I believe in anything.
The essay runs as the introduction to something better than itself: a conversation with Mary Badham and Cecilia Peck.
Badham played Scout. She was ten. Peck is Gregory Peck's daughter, and she was five, and she was on that set watching her father become Atticus for the rest of American memory. The two of them met there and have been friends ever since — more than sixty years now — and they have written a play about it called Growing Up with Atticus. It is onstage right now at the Virginia Samford Theatre in Birmingham, and it closes September 27.
Sitting across from them was one of the strange gifts of this job. An Arab immigrant asking the children of that film what it was like to be inside the thing that brought him here. They were generous about it. They were also clear-eyed, which I should have expected and did not.
I want to thank Chuck Reece at Salvation South, who took this piece and made it better, and who has built something rare down here — a publication where loving the South doesn't mean you go easy on it.
Read the full essay and the conversation with Mary Badham and Cecilia Peck at Salvation South: [LINK]
It runs long. Pour something first.
And if you are anywhere near Birmingham this week, Growing Up with Atticus is at the Virginia Samford Theatre through Sunday the 27th. Tickets at [LINK].
Gregory Peck marked over the script of To Kill a Mocking Bird.
