Why Harper Lee matters

BY KRISTY LOYE
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2016
5 HOURS AGO

... About 20 years ago just south of Houston, I came of age in one of those sleepy towns seated deep along Highway 6 where the razor wire fences of so many refineries run alongside acres and acres of green farmland and rice fields; like the town that time forgot or at least the 14th and 15th amendments did anyway.

It was not unusual to see a Confederate flag waving as it were in fact representative of some kind of reality, not of a failed coup more than 100 years old. My own house sat perpendicular to the county’s Confederate Cemetery where graves that held the remains of Southern soldiers were regularly decorated and adorned unlike other fresher graves which courted no flowers or recent remembrances ...

... it was my junior year of American Literature when I was assigned to read To Kill A Mockingbird that I found a voice that seemed to speak to my own discomfort. Maycomb County mirrored my own community in almost every way and what Harper Lee left for me in Mockingbird was a map of how to escape ...

Social paradigms are fought and won in a dozen novels before they ever reach Congress’s floor for debate. Mockingbird was that novel for our country and we owe Lee the utmost respect and deference ...

http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/why-harper-lee-matters-8177822