Of Mockingbird Towns & Maurie Povitch

A mockingbird is pictured resting on a branch in a tree marked with yellow flowers and green leaves. A bright blue sky is in the background.

By. Megan Lea

I’ve been rereading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, as I do every few years. It’s one of my favorites. There’s something in that story that calls to a lot of Southern kids. Our dads aren’t Atticus, but we wish they were, and they do too. Our older brothers are more into video games than elaborate tales of make believe. The racial injustices we grew up with were more skillfully veiled than what happened to Tom Robinson, though I now see and feel their shameful presence. All of those things are important, evocatively rendered, and create the character of the novel, but what draws me to return to it is its sense of place.

I didn’t grow up in Maycomb County, but I'm pretty sure I lived there once. My Maycomb was Laurel, Mississippi. It, like Maycomb, was a Mockingbird town. It was tired and old. Signs of one-time prosperity existed, but so did red dirt roads and overgrown sidewalks. It was unbearably hot, and its days went on the length of at least ten viewings of Maurie Povitch with a minimum of seven paternity tests and their corresponding “surprise” birth certificate reveals.

It should surprise no one that days last longer in Mississippi. The name itself makes you draw it out and say it slowly. It forces its Southernness on you in a way that nothing in the South is really supposed to, what with all of its sirs and ma’ams and manners. I was surprised, every morning of the summer of my twelfth year. I was surprised I was there, surprised at the relativity of time, surprised that anyone could go on Maurie and not already believe that they were, in fact, the father.

My dad’s job as a pipeline welder had brought us – my mom, my brother, my dad, and I – to Mississippi. Welding often took Dad for months, even years at a time, to small towns across the U.S. When we could, we would go along with him as a family, staying in hotels or renting small homes or trailers. It was a semi-nomadic life that could be as draining as the southern summers, particularly for my mom.

That summer, my brother, having just graduated from high school, worked with my dad as a welder’s helper. It left my mom and I to watch bad daytime TV in our lawn chair furniture and go on aimless drives. The drives were the only reprieves to the monotony of my surprise. When they rolled along, I would sit beside her in the passenger seat of her ’79 Grand Wagoner. It was a 4,000-pound steel behemoth with faded light brown leather seats and wood paneling inside and out. It had an AM/FM radio and a cassette player, but unforgivably no CD player, which meant no way to play “My Heart Will Go On” or the Armageddon soundtrack. Beyond this, it was an embarrassment. I told her nearly every day she owned it, “This car is ancient. A relic. They’re looking for it on Antiques Roadshow.” When she’d pull up at school to pick me up, I'd cringe and hurry to it with my head turned down beneath my ponytail. Couldn’t we just get a Toyota Corolla? Her refrain was equally as constant as she would emphatically state, “Not a relic. A classic. I always wanted one like this. You don’t even know how cool we are right now.”

I’d climb in with my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, my summer reading. As we drove through backwoods Mississippi, I would use the book to help me avoid eye contact with the people we passed along the road who, no doubt, had better taste than we did. Instead, I let my eyes wander unfocused, allowing a blur to pass by my window. I made miles of cotton fields turn into summer snow, and my imagination turned every red dirt road into the lane where Atticus was driving to meet Helen Robinson.

We didn’t have any real destination in mind as we pulled into the city limits of Laurel; we were just searching for a place to cool down, somewhere to hide away from summer’s dog days. Most of the time, our first stop was to a part of town where people could easily forget that Laurel had any kind of history to its name. This area was a seamless stream of strip malls and fast food joints: Sonic, Popeyes Fried Chicken, and Payday loans. We went there for Snow Biz, the snow cone stand.

I’d order, “Wedding cake with extra cream." This meant I wanted sugar with an extra dose of sugar in the form of condensed milk on top. Mom would be more experimental. Sometimes it was Tooty Fruity or sometimes Tiger’s Blood or Pina Colada, but she always wanted extra cream, too.

We would sit down beneath their black and white umbrellas and race the sun to see who would take the ice first. Many times, the heat would win, making it melt into sugar water and cascade from the cone down our arms. Our stickiness made us an inviting new place for bees to congregate.

Other than Snow Biz, our time was spent erratically. We knew things about Laurel that I’m sure most of the locals didn’t. At 756 North 6th Avenue, there’s a mansion called the Sweet Olive. It’s a novelty because it’s made entirely out of concrete. Right next door there is a house called The Nightingale that was built by a doctor at the turn of the century. He framed the house with a porch that wrapped itself gracefully around. Then he added one room upstairs that was made to look like Rapunzel’s: a place for a girl to let her hair down.

It was odd to me that I never saw anyone coming or going from either house. The owners were downright Radley-like in their seclusions. For a house made of concrete, this felt right; but for a romantic Southern castle, the emptiness always seemed wrong somehow. The lawn testified that people lived there, as did the newspaper in the walk. I reconcile these facts together by thinking that the owners of both houses were preservationists. They held onto the past by meticulously repairing in the present every faltering board, every piece of cracked paint. They would do this and all the while keep the outside world locked behind the door. They were the Miss Havershams of the former Confederacy: wearing a dust covered debutante dress and lamenting at the pace of a world that felt as if it were moving too fast around them.

After we passed by the houses, we usually went to the park. My mom ran that summer. Every day, neither rain nor shine discouraged her. She’d change into her nylon green shorts and a cut off t-shirt and haul me with her to keep her company. I’d complain it’s too hot for this and tell her to buy a treadmill. She’d grab her keys and not bother to look at me when she walked past, “And miss out on Laurel?! What a waste of money! There’s nothing to look at on a treadmill. Besides, Judge Judy is on next, and we both know how much you hate her.”

There were times I would run with her, but mostly I waited in the shade. “I’m too young for all this exercise. It will stunt my growth.” Instead, I would sit on the sidewalk and meticulously pluck each piece of grass within reaching distance. It was too much to move around for more, so when the area was thoroughly cleared, I’d scan the underbelly of the oaks, watching animals and insects move around in their homes: squirrels danced in their chase of one another, limb to limb; birds would make the kinds of noises that people make when they feel totally at ease in a familiar space. I’d copy them sometimes, having gotten comfortable in this third home of mine.

Unsurprisingly, neither of us were sad to leave Laurel at the end of the summer. For my mom, the relief of being out of Laurel felt so good that she decided to leave all the other things that were tying her down: this life of constant motion, of one sleepy town and then the next, of tear-blurred cotton fields, of folding lawn chairs as living room furniture, of no footholds of her own. She pursued a life apart from us, her education, and most of all, her own choices – which had up to the age of 40 had always alluded her. She had conditioned herself into a runner, and when she made her start, she ran so quickly and with so much endurance that it left me far behind for years.

For me, having little idea of what was to come, I was glad to leave, too. Laurel wasn’t anything special, nothing but a Mockingbird town: openly slow and vaguely optimistic. But we never know the places that will later be sacred to us, what last memories they’re keeping. The things that bring us back to those holy places are like tabernacles and the stories that do like scripture. I figure this is why To Kill a Mockingbird is so special to me. To read it now is to open up the page and step into the feeling of that last summer my family was together. In its pages, I catch myself returning to that spot in the shade. I retreat, watch squirrels, and mimic birds. I preserve my space in roots and the dirt beside little hills of picked grass, just like the owners of The Nightingale. I shut myself into its slow place. I preserve so I can keep the ice from melting and so I can wait for her to quit running.

Megan is pictured smiling, wearing a brown and red embroidered long sleeve top, long wavy hair, and black framed glasses. Her hands are folded in front of her near a white coffee cup on a table.

Megan works as a professional writer, photographer, and teacher. Her writing stays primarily in the genres of poetry and creative nonfiction and has been featured in HerStry, Lunch Ticket, Backchannels, and various other publications. You may find more of work at meganlea.net or on instagram: @megan_lea_creative