Don't Ban Mockingbird! (And Maybe Don't Force Your Students to Read It.) FRAGMENT DRAFT...

My first exposure to Mockingbird was catching the first few minutes of the film some Saturday afternoon as a child. 

The eerie black and white title sequence, a young girl humming a sing-song tune over music in a minor key, the sudden halt with the brutal rip of paper, followed by a dissolve into Halloween bare branches as the camera craned down to bare sidewalks and a lonely neighborhood -- I recognized this tone, this setup, this genre. 

This was a horror movie. 

A horror movie about children. Children doing evil, unspeakable cruelty in the name of innocence. In the same vein as the opening of The Wild Bunch, where cherubic children burn scorpions and ants with glee. In the same vein of child cruelty as The Bad Seed and The Children's Hour. See the Rocking Horse Winner, see the episode of the Twilight Zone where the boy sends people into the cornfield with his mind. 

I read the actual book some time later, on my own, probably as a teen. The solid black cover and dramatic red graphics of the title had a shock value that intrigued me. I struggled with some of the oblique language "Mr. Avery peeing off his porch" but was let down by the lack of drama or gore. This was a dry trial story, with none of the gruesomeness I was expecting. No Exorcist, no Flowers in the Attic 


Pitt County Schools in North Carolina and Edmond County Schools in Oklahoma have banned Harper Lee's best selling novel To Kill a Mockingbird. 

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