THE PLATINUM RULE
by Forrest Church
January 16, 2005
We are in Maycomb, Alabama, the year, 1933. The Great Depression has hit bottom and is resting there. Our narrator, Scout, the spunky, intellectually precocious daughter of Atticus Fitch, a local public defender and state assemblyman, reports that despite bone-crunching poverty, there existed a mood "of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told by the president in his inaugural address that it had nothing to fear but fear itself."
Harper Lee's beloved To Kill a Mockingbird, was recently voted by America's librarians as the best novel of the twentieth century. The racially charged story of an innocent man's trial and unjust conviction for rape, no novel since Uncle Tom's Cabin has left such a strong imprint on the nation's moral imagination. I turn to it this morning in the spirit of America's newest holiday. As much as any American, before or since, Martin Luther King, Jr. embodies the moral imagination. Answering a nation's fear with dauntless courage and dauntless faith, King dreamed the true American dream: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. This dream goes beyond the Golden Rule: to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Grounded in nature and nature's God, with liberty and equality enshrined by our founders as bequests from the creator, the true American Dream may better be defined as "the platinum rule": to do unto others as God would do unto you. Daunting, yes, but not unimaginable. As John F. Kennedy said 44 years ago this week in another stirring inaugural: "Here on earth God's work has truly become our own."
By accepting the town judge's request to defend Tom Robinson, a poor laborer, Atticus finds himself in danger. The townsfolk of Maycomb—and even Atticus's sister—turn on him for "betraying his race." When bigotry and fear collaborate, they function almost like fraternal twins. On the surface they may look different, but by nature they share several basic traits. Like fear, bigotry is contagious. Also like fear, it grows in virulence as it spreads. In To Kill a Mockingbird, instructed by fear, hate multiplies like a cancer on the town of Maycomb, metastasizing in violence and injustice. Within the poetry and drama of this riveting tale also lies a textbook study of fear's logic, a casebook in which each of fear's five types is illuminated in turn and the courage to overcome them outlined.
At heart, the story is a tragedy, but its lightest moments, of which there are many, also illuminate the human condition. Two doors down from the Finch residence is a haunted house. The Radley place rivets Scout Fitch's imagination and that of her older brother, Jem. Together with their summer friend, a boy named Dill, the three children magnify every rumor about the house with their fevered speculation. They are not alone in equipping the "phantom of Radley Place" with fangs and a taste for children's flesh. No child in Maycomb will eat the nuts that fall into the school yard from a pecan tree on the Radley property for fear that they have been poisoned.
The local children christen the phantom himself (whose real name is Arthur) "Boo," short for "Boogie man." Jem imagines him as follows:
Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were bloodstained—if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.
Even as their imagination haunts them by turning Arthur into a monster, the three playmates haunt Arthur by acting out his story in their front yard. But as they grow older, his specter and their interest diminish. Perhaps Boo isn't all that frightening after all. Maybe he is harmless, a simple introvert who likes to keep to himself. Their attitude softens further, when they suspect that he might be the source of several wonderful gifts (chewing gum, Indian head pennies, and tiny likenesses of Scout and Jem delicately carved out of soap). Might Arthur Radley be the one who has left these gifts in plain sight in the knothole of a tree between their yards? It appears so. Over time—as fear's embers do when left unfanned—the terror Arthur once inspired cools completely, until at last the children walk past the Radley place on their way to school without paying it any mind at all.
Far more frightening than Boo Radley is the bigotry that sweeps through Maycomb during the weeks leading up to Tom's trial. Here appearance and reality are even more tragically at odds. Driven by the ultimate social defense mechanism—whereby insecurity is compensated for by the accidental advantage of being white—bigotry ropes off and demonizes "the other" in a twisted act of self-protection. Even to those who wear it, hate's true face is veiled beneath the conventions of polite society. If young children are less immune to virtue's pretense than they will be as they grow older, such conventions confuse them nonetheless. To Scout's untutored eye, there is nothing polite about polite society. As she narrates the unfolding drama, her childlike logic and trust are confounded time and again by the way the world works. She comes to appreciate her father's principled valiance, even as she learns to mistrust the piety of anyone in whom fear inspires hatred.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Atticus presents to acquit his client, a twelve-man jury unanimously votes to convict Tom Robinson, imposing the death penalty. In the wake of this blatant miscarriage of justice, Tom's accuser, Bob Ewell, a violent and malevolent man, vows revenge on Atticus for embarrassing him publicly in court. Too cowardly to confront Atticus directly, Ewell stalks Scout and Jem, finally jumping them on a dark path between their school and home on the night of the town play.
"Run, Scout! Run!" Jem screams, as Ewell jumps from behind a tree and grabs the back of his sister's costume. The costume, a chicken-wire contraption meant to represent a ham, saves Scout from harm, perhaps even from death, as several knife holes later hauntingly suggest. Jem is not as lucky and is knocked unconscious, his arm shattered. Before Scout, half smothered and fully blinded within her costume, can make sense of what has happened, she finds herself befriended by a strange man. He leads her down the street toward home, cradling Jem in his arms.
Jem's savior is none other than Arthur Radley, whose life at last comes into focus. As spectral as the children had imagined—hollow cheeks, colorless eyes, his hair "dead and thin"—Arthur stays only long enough to assure himself that Jem is all right. Unaccustomed to both company and light, "in the voice of a child afraid of the dark," he whispers to Scout, "Will you take me home?" She leads him up the once forbidding steps of the Radley Place. Upon reaching the door, he gently releases her hand. She never sees him again.
Arthur Radley is terrified of life, his very soul possessed by dread. The only world outside his room is the quarter block visible through the slats of his shutters, into which, on occasion stray three children—acting out his life story to pass the time on long summer afternoons. When he hears a familiar voice cry for help that dark night, overcoming a lifetime of inertia and depression he picks up his whittling knife, rushes onto the path, and strikes down the monster who is about to take Jem's life. There are millions of ways to defy fear's instructions: this is one of them.
Arthur and Atticus aren't the only heroes in To Kill A Mockingbird. One evening Atticus tells his children the story of one of his clients, old Mrs. Dubose, who has just died. They have known her as the vicious creature who assailed them with insults whenever they passed by her front porch. When Jem retaliates by tearing the blooms off her azalea bushes, Atticus forces him to read to her, a harrowing experience. What Jem hadn't known is that Mrs. Dubose had been a morphine addict, struggling to free herself from her addiction.
"You mean that's what her fits were," Jem asks his father.
"Yes, that's what they were. Most of the time you were reading to her I doubt if she heard a word you said."
"Did she die free?"
"As the mountain air," Atticus replies. "I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew." By naming and staring down the source of her guilt and fear, she overcame it.
The best way to avoid the kind of fear that springs from guilt is to give it no cause. To his daughter, Atticus explains, "Tom Robinson's case is something that goes to the essence of a man's conscience—Scout, I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man. . . . Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." When Scout gets into a fight to defend the family name, her father assures her that no defense is necessary. A clear conscience requires no special protection. To be who you are and do what you can is all that conscience demands. Tom Robinson's tragedy unfolds in step with Scout's and Jem's moral education.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois—whose death in Ghana was announced to the crowd on the day Dr. King delivered his I have a dream address in Washington—described the experience of African Americans as a divided one, a "double-consciousness" caused by the denial of full freedom in the land of the free.
The Negro is a sort of seventh son (he wrote), born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
The substitution of tolerance for contempt and pity does little to lighten the burden. We are far better off today than the folks in Maycomb, Alabama were 70 years ago, but simply to follow the letter of new laws alone is insufficient for the realization of King's dream. Which is why we recall it today. His dream, not unlike Atticus Finch's dream, is predicated on the idealistic yet saving proposition that all are created equal, children of one God. Put the Biblical injunction to "Love your Neighbor as yourself" together with the true American Dream—"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"—and you come up with the Platinum Rule. Again, not simply "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" but "Do unto others as God does unto you." Proffer them the same inalienable rights, the same equal standing, the same liberty that God has bestowed as your birthright. As expressed in the civil rights movement—and reprised in the campaigns for equal rights for women and homosexuals—when followed to its logical conclusion, such is the moral consequence of the founders' vision and the moral mandate of Dr. King's witness and sacrifice..
And how does the story end? I can only tell you how To Kill a Mockingbird ends. After Jem's near-death drama, Scout sits late into the evening with her father in his den. "Atticus, I wasn't scared," she assures him. Atticus Finch simply lifts his eyebrows. When she goes on to claim that "Nothin's real scary except in books," he opens his mouth to reply and then closes it again. She may have persuaded herself that what she has said was a very grown-up thing to say, but Atticus knows better. Courage is not vanquishing fear. Courage is walking through fear. And moral courage—the greatest courage of all—is walking through fear to practice the Platinum Rule. A big assignment, yes. But ours nonetheless. "For here on earth God's work has truly become our own."