Reviewing Movies

Two immediate reactions. First if a child fought in school the way Scout does today her teachers would have permanently expelled her from school and suggested counselling and/or institutionalization. Second had I defied my father the way Jem does here I would not have expected to survive the experience. The children do not appear to be particularly obedient.

Jem and Scout have internalized their Father’s values without even knowing it. When they arrive at the courthouse and find the main floor packed they have no second thoughts about going upstairs to the balcony, the section to which Blacks were relegated. In a very real sense Calpurnia is their mother, fulfilling that role in their lives save for the relationship with their father.

Save for the absence of any ethnic minority whatsoever the village in which I grew up in Nova Scotia is not unlike that of Jem and Scout. Everyone knew everybody, nobody locked their doors, and strange characters were accepted for whom they were. In an agrarian society the mentally deficient or emotionally disturbed managed to survive with the support of their neighbours. In fact it was a point of honour that we looked after our own.

I thought nothing of my freedom to walk for miles through our woods and forests, to go berry-picking, or swimming at the mill pond. No one thought to caution me when I hopped on my bicycle and pedalled the 1.2 miles uphill to my grandfather’s home or walked across the hills to visit my Great-Uncle and Grandmother who kept house for him. The security I knew then I took for granted.

Crime, if it existed, was of a moral nature, the town seven miles distant had its own police department but the RCMP who patrolled the county were rarely seen and unknown to us. Murder was something one read about in the news and robberies happened far away in big cities. Night time was for sleeping and by day no one did anything their neighbours didn’t know everything about before they had finished doing it. My Father, for example, sat in his rocking chair watching the road in front of our house and identified every car that passed. He could identify anyone who visited the graveyard in front of our house by the section of the cemetery they paused at.