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When you look back over your life, is there a block of years that you would like to forget but you just can’t? Mine were my preteen years beginning about age ten through age twelve. I think many of you would agree that those were horrible years. If you had a worse block of years it had to have been the teen years themselves, otherwise there had to be death, long sickness, jail time, or a bad marriage/divorce involved.

There are reasons for these being the dark years. The major reason is hormones begin to drown out the brain cells that regulate reasonable and acceptable behavior. The primary villains appear to be testosterone in the young male would be human and estrogen in the females of the young beasts. These hormones are just beginning to change the lovable children into problems on two feet. The changes are subtle and slow and usually do not reach the raging beast stage until teen years. I will address the teen years in a later article but for now lets just concentrate on the home and school life of the preteen.

Since this is about my own experiences the setting for this narrative is my hometown of Oxford, Alabama in the years from 1953 until 1956. As I am sure you are aware, there were a few differences in the children of today and us in those days. The kids of today are much more communications and data literate and are tied into being in touch with each other on the internet. It is disconcerting to me, however, that with all the information on any subject in the world instantly available kids of today most do not appear to be as educated as we were at that age . One of my older grandsons, a full blown teenager, was at the house a couple of weeks ago discussing some homework over the phone with his girlfriend. He looked at me and asked if Columbus sailed to America across the Pacific Ocean. I asked him in turn did he think Columbus was Chinese or Japanese. Of course, I doubt seriously if either of them had any idea where China or Japan might be located.

I do think preteen children of today are far ahead of what we were in social interactions. They are so closely connected and participate in more social activities than at least me and my friends ever did. The closest thing to real social activities before and just after reaching age ten was Friday night wrestling. One of my friends, actually my best friend since the first grade, lived with his mother who was divorced as was mine. She loved wrestling and was a regular enough attendee at the Anniston Alabama (bordering city limits with Oxford) civic center that she had gotten to know some of the wrestlers. She always took her son and me with her, and we enjoyed the matches almost as much as getting autographs.

Sometimes one of the male wrestlers that had gotten to know my friend’s mother would come over to the bleachers and talk to us. Occasionally, his mother would have a date that would go with us to the matches and often we would stop at one of the local hamburger drive-ins of the day and get a burger to eat in the car. I remember on one of these occasions my buddy and I were out roaming around of the parking lot, (bare footed of course) when he stepped on a piece of glass and cut his foot. That trip ended up at the emergency room where he got a number of stitches and a shot. Lovely evening. The only good part was that it was him and not me.

Since those days I have seen some of these wrestlers on a couple of T.V. documentaries. The last one I saw the lady wrestlers were in their eighties, but I still recognized them from the pictures in my old autograph book. I especially remember Gorgeous George who was always booed because he acted gay. With his yellow blond curly hair he would prance around the ring and throw gold colored bobby pins to the audience. I still have one of those securely taped in my autograph book.

I guess the next phase of socializing came in the fifth grade when my best buddy decided to join the band. I was always following his lead so, of course, I decided that I also wanted to join the band. After a couple of meetings along with all the other “want to be’ s” with the band director in the band room it was somehow decided that I should play a trombone. So I went home and started the begging and pleading ritual for a trombone. In those days even a used instrument was expensive to our family. Finally my mom gave in and after threatening my life if I quit, bought me a trombone. Turns out after a while I realized I had no ear for playing music, no talent and actually hated the thing and the practice that came with it. I suffered through the fifth and well into the sixth grade before my mother found out I was not attending band practice. Unpleasantness rained hard on my head for a couple of weeks. I think my buddy stayed with it until the seventh grade.

My other jump into social activities also came about age ten, when my best buddy again had a vision from the heavens and decided that we should take dancing lessons. He and a few of our buddies were beginning to see the possibility that girls might be worth something after all. They figured out that lots of girls could be found in a dance studio and that this was a setting in which you could get close enough to touch them. I was a bit slow to pick up on wanting to date, go steady, fall in love or whatever boys and girls were supposed to do at that age. But if my buddy wanted to dance, by damn so did I. Surprisingly my mother thought this was a good idea, go figure. So once a week for a period of about three years we danced our little legs off at Zynaobia King Hill’s School of Dance. It was ballroom dancing and for the most part I had a good time. I took to dancing well and the girls became less frightening to be around though I always felt a little awkward talking with them. We even made a couple of stage appearances in the yearly dance recital.

Well come seventh grade and age twelve my buddy again pulled his head out of it’s dark crevasse and decided we should go out for football. Of course it seemed like a good idea to me – at the time. Many curses did I place on him over the next few years, as I was crawling across the football field wondering which appendage was most likely broken. The way my body usually felt during football season, they all could have been broken.

First day on the practice field, while standing there with a practice uniform made of scraps and leftover equipment (none of which fit) one of the veteran linemen decided to use me as a blocking dummy. It felt like a car had blindsided me. That was my introduction to Oxford football. I still relate that hit to the Beetle Bailey cartoon strips that show Beetle after Serge has beaten him to a pulp. Over the next six years there would be lots more bruising , sprains, scrapes, blood letting and scarring. All in all, though I didn’t know it at the time, football was one of the best decisions I ever made. It was one of those five or six decisions in one’s life that defines what direction your life will go. The development of skills in self confidence, motivation, teamwork, perseverance, positive attitude, group social skills, and endurance of physical and mental stress, have served me well in life.

Other than my lack of self confidence, especially around girls, and motivation/direction shortcomings. there was my dismal school performance. I think the closest I have ever come to seeing a miracle, actually three years in a row, was seeing my end of the year report cards with the word “Passed” stamped on them. There was hardly a subject in which I did not make some D’s and F’s. Thank goodness that back then academics did not determine if you played ball or not. If your grades were bad enough the teacher might talk to the coach who in turn would ride you about the bad grades and strongly suggest you bring them up. The bad grades caused a lot of friction on the home front and of course, like every kid in the world, I hated and detested homework. Like with every kid I have ever known it was a real fight to make me do school work at home. There was just something not right or downright evil about that.

Looking back through the murky vastness of time with only a fragile memory network it is as difficult now as it was then to get a grasp on the me of then. Some of the memories are good while others not so good. There was always this feeling of inadequacy, not belonging, fear of rejection or criticism, trying to fit in and attract attention.

Damn hormones will drive you crazy. There they were sneaking around in my blood stream making me aware of things I had never really thought about before. Take for instance, it became really important to compete with other boys and win. The rougher the competition the better. And then there was the way girls became attractive to look at and be around. For some reason the gals that I had know and played with most of my life looked and smelt a lot better. It became awkward to talk to them and I no longer felt the urge to argue with or punch them on the arm. I wanted to hold their hands or touch their hair. Little did I know that this was just the beginning of the future tortures that females would inflict on me and the other males of my species.

In retrospect, I guess that I had a normal passage through my preteens. Things could have been worse and if I had been a bit smarter they could have been a great deal better. All I know is that I would not want to go through them again. In fact, I cannot think of any phase of my life I would like to do over. What I did or didn’t do through each phase contributed in making me what I am today. Though I am old and things are on the downhill slide, I think, all things considered, I am happy with the way me and the life I have led turned out.

I may not have retained my girlish figure or be as hansom as I once was but who does into their mid sixties. Who wants to die with a pristine body that has been pampered, taken care of and never allowed to live life to its fullest. I want to come sliding into death with a body used up and holding an open bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand a lit cigar in the other and screaming “God what a ride, lets go again”.

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ was set in Alabama during the thirties and wrote the novel in the sixties when Civil Rights Movement was being written. The message of the novel is that people should not be judged according to who/what they are but should be judged on their actions and behaviours. Harper Lee shows prejudice in events like Tom Robinson’s trial, also through characters like Arthur (Boo) Radley. Prejudice is also shown in the day to day activities.

The novel is titled ‘To kill a Mockingbird’ because the mockingbird represent innocence. At the beginning of the novel Atticus tells Scout and Jem “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit `em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” which illustrates and explains you should not kill innocent beings. Tom Robinson is clearly a mockingbird. He is an untainted person who has in no way pained or harmed anybody and is directly and deliberately shot by society not because of justice but prejudice. The jurors sentence him to death not because he did anything wrong but because of the prejudice. He is then later shot for trying to escape this unjust ruling. So Tom Robinson just like a mockingbird is shot for no reason at all.

At the beginning of the novel we are introduced to life in Maycomb, life in Maycomb is small town life where the people are a mainly friendly community and hold high values, such as values of the family. However, most of the people tend to be judgmental and intolerant, excluding other people from the community, such as poor people and the black community. They also tend to categorize each other on the basis of social status as we see when Atticus says “…Maycomb’s usual disease. Why reasonable people stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up..” this quotation show how whites hate blacks. The Town of Maycomb was divided into strict social classes, with each bearing animosity towards each one another. Status plays a role in every story. But the status divisions in this story are much defined and influences many happenings in this novel. The social structure is made up of some layers. The relatively well-off Finches stand near the top of Maycomb’s social hierarchy, with most of the townspeople beneath them. Ignorant country farmers like the Cunninghams lie below the townspeople, and the white trash Ewells rest below the Cunninghams. But the black community in Maycomb, despite its abundance of admirable qualities such as farming, squats below even the Ewells, enabling Bob Ewell to make up for his own lack of importance by persecuting Tom Robinson. Because of the great differences in the classes blacks were forced to use separate facilities than whites in almost every aspect of society and also allowing them to work in only a few jobs such as being servants.

Throughout the novel we are reminded of the way society is divided an example of this is when Aunt Alexandra forbids Scout to play with Walter Cunningham, a poor boy whom Scout attends school with. This is because Aunt Alexandra sees Walter and his family as poor and beneath the Finches, in her words, “…they’re good folks. But they’re not our kind of folks.” Scout on the other hand doesn’t care about how much money Walter has but about his potential to be a friend. She doesn’t let irrelevant things like money cloud her judgment of people. This is related to Lee’s message about prejudice showing how ridiculous it is to judge people in this way.

Obviously, racism is a major theme of the novel. Throughout the novel, Harper Lee uses Scout to explore the differences between black people and white people. Scout and Jem attend church with Calpurnia and Scout truly enjoys the experience. Afterwards, she asks Calpurnia if she might be able to visit her house sometime because she has never seen it. Calpurnia agrees, but the visit is never made, largely because Aunt Alexandra puts a stop to it. Jem, Scout and Dill also sit with the black citizens of the town in the balcony of the court house to observe the trial. In addition, Scout and Dill have a lengthy conversation with Mr. Raymond, a white man who married a black woman and has mixed children. Mr. Raymond reveals that he pretends to be an alcoholic by carrying around a paper bag with a bottle of Coca-Cola inside in order to let the town excuse his choice to marry a black woman.

The trial is about a black man called Tom who is falsely accused of raping a white woman called Mayella. The trial of Tom Robinson takes up a great deal of space in the novel because it gives Harper Lee a chance to do deep exploration of characters and situations. The people involved in the case are Bob and Mayella Ewell, Tom Robinson and Atticus Finch. The alleged rape of Mayella by Tom allows Harper Lee to look in detail at issues of racial and social prejudice in Maycomb. When the trial begins Bob Ewell takes the stand next and causes a stir in the courtroom with his bad attitude and foul language in his words “I seen that black nigger yonder ruttin’ on my Mayella!”Ch. 17. Mr. Ewell is not shaken from his story, but Atticus carefully plants the seed that Mr. Ewell himself could’ve beaten Mayella. Mayella takes the stand next. Even though Atticus believes that she’s lying, he treats her with courtesy and respect; Mayella thinks that he’s making fun of her. Atticus asks Tom to stand up so that Mayella may identify him; as he does, Scout notices that Tom’s left arm is withered and useless which means Tom could not have committed the crime in the way it was described. Tom then answers all Atticus’ questions in a polite manner, often using the title “suh” (sir) in his sentences. His answers seem to be open, detailed and without guile. However Tom was being really careful all the while not to come right out and say that Mayella is lying. I think and believe that the events are some of many events that Harper Lee used to present racism, sexism and categorising people on the basis of social status. Harper Lee thinks racism is an important issue to write about because of the highly racially tense time was in Alabama during the time she was writing the novel, because she also wants to raise the awareness of being racist and what it might do to victims as what happened to Tom Robinson who was shot 17 times after trying to escape from the prison after being convicted of raping Mayella Ewell though Atticus proved his innocence. Harper Lee uses language creatively and effectively to help us see and recognise the prejudice that existed in Maycomb. From her use of various figures of speech, imagery and devices of sound, we find the society of Maycomb as racist, sexual, and categorise on the basis of social status.

Harper Lee presents many conflicting pictures of prejudice in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird ‘. One person that is treated unfairly is Calpurnia, as you can see when Aunt Alexandra tried to get Atticus to fire Calpurnia, because in her eyes, Calpurnia wasn’t a good enough female role model (p.136). This is a prejudice action, because Calpurnia is as good as a role model as Aunt Alexandra, if not better. Aunt Alexandra is a bigot and doesn’t see the character of Calpurnia, just the colour of her skin. Another person who is treated in prejudice way is Scout by her teacher, because she knew how to read. “She discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste.” (p17). Scout is treated like it is her fault that she knows more than the average child did. She learned earlier than others so she gets punished unjustly. The final group that was made to feel different was the character that defended and protected the minorities and the wrongfully treated people. Atticus was a good example of one who defended the different by defending Tom Robinson in his case. Atticus had integrity that gave him the strength to endure the ridicule that arose from his decision to defend a black man in a segregated area. Atticus was threatened and his children were treated poorly by their peers, because he had the courage to stand up for the oppressed.

Harper Lee’s main message to the readers is not to treat others according to who or what they are but according to their behaviours. Harper Lee was really successful at achieving this aim by using many techniques such as when she uses Scout as the first person; she opens the reader’s eyes to the way children think and act. She also offers an unbiased opinion of the affairs of Maycomb, and doesn’t dwell on adult matters and make it boring. Using Scout as narrator also makes it easier for the readers to get the message behind this book. Harper Lee used a variety of literary techniques to make the novel interesting. Harper Lee used almost every single one when she wrote ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. She used symbolism, humor, suspense, foreshadowing, dialect, flashback and irony to tell her story. When Lee wrote this book, she made the entire novel a flashback. She begins the story as reminiscence about her brother’s broken arm and she ends it with how Jem’s hand was broken. Suspense was another good addition to the novel. When she ends chapters with sentences like: ‘Well, call him’ or ‘He was right’, this makes the readers want to find out what is going to happen next, so making readers read on further. Dialect is another interesting addition to the novel. When she uses words and language that are appropriate to the times, this makes readers feel that they are really there. When Lee uses foreshadowing to tell what is going to come, she makes readers wonder what is going to happen next. So foreshadowing is another excellent way to keep readers on reading. Irony is one of the biggest elements in this story. Because it gives the readers the sense of how silly and ridiculous it is to judge people according to who or what they are.

Worry of Bob Ewell’s Threat:

Bob Ewell’s threat to Atticus worries everyone except Atticus himself. Bob threatens to get back at Atticus for the embarrassment he received during the hearing. Atticus shrugs his shoulders and tells the children that Bob Ewell needs to get the spirit of revenge out of his system. He regards the whole thing as an empty threat. Atticus does not expect Bob to make any more trouble, but Aunt Alexandra and the kids cannot help feeling worried.

Tom Robinson is Wrongfully Imprisoned:

Tom Robinson stays in a prison that is about 70 miles from Maycomb. His appeal is still active in the court system. Atticus feels Tom has a good chance that the court will grant him pardon. Jem asks Atticus about the consequence of losing the case. Atticus honestly tells him that there is a possibility Tom may end in an electric chair if he loses the case. The State of Alabama considers rape as a capital offense. Atticus explains to Jem about the jury process and the possibility of an execution. Atticus reveals that Alabama law regards a white man’s word highly over a colored man’s word. He sees that Tom has been lucky enough to make the jury out longer than expected. One of the twelve men tried to acquit. Surprisingly, he came from the Cunningham clan.

Scout want Walter Cunningham over for Dinner:

Scout hears the remark and expresses her desire to invite Walter Cunningham over the house for dinner. However, Aunt Alexandra denies the requests, telling her that the Finch family does not make any associations with trash. Scout begins to get upset and Jem hastily leads her out of the living room.

Jem and Scout Try to Understand:

Jem shows Scout the hair growing on his chest. He plans to join the football team and try it out this coming fall. They end up talking about the society and the family’s class system. They are looking to understand why their Aunt does not like the Cunningham clan and why the Cunningham’s hate the Ewells. They are trying to understand why the Ewell family hates colored people. They are unable to derive an explanation for the hatred running among these people. They then come to the conclusion that Boo Radley does not goes out of his house because he simply does not want to leave the house.