Small town Texas in the summer of 1964 is the setting in “Mockingbird Summer” by Lynda Rutledge. During this summer, we see a town on the cusp of change, as its Southside (of the tracks) and Northside neighborhoods and implicit Jim Crow laws butt heads with the Civil Rights Era. We see most of the events through the eyes of Kathryn Kay Corcoran, or Corky as she is known to her friends. Corky lives with her parents, her brother, and their much-loved pets. Both Roy Rogers, a large mixed-breed dog, and Goldy, their senior horse, become important to the story, but especially Roy Rogers, whose unquestioning loyalty and instincts are highlights throughout the story.
Corky’s father is from a family who were sharecroppers on the land of the wealthiest family, the Boatwrights, in their small town. Cal junior, however, decided to go to college against his father’s wishes and now owns the only pharmacy in town. Both Corky and her older brother Mack are expected to work there during the summer. Corky, who describes herself as a tomboy, must wear her Sunday dress while working at the lunch counter.
This book is unusual in that most of the narrative is from Corky’s point of view, and she’s thirteen. And even though the narrative is third person, and there is definitely a narrator who tells us the history of the town and about other characters, the story is so focused on Corky’s viewpoint that at one point, when her brother swears, Rutledge doesn’t write out the swear word but rather uses symbols instead. Which struck me as strange in an adult book, but which also makes this a book that would not be inappropriate for younger readers.
The novel showcases the innocence of Corky, who at thirteen doesn’t understand much of what is going on around her. She’s never thought about the fact that the train tracks basically divide the town into segregated areas. And she’s also never thought about the fact that Southsiders never sit at the lunch counter to be served. And when the town’s librarian gives her “To Kill a Mockingbird” to read over the summer, she is confused about several events in the story. She asks her mother what the word “rape” means, and her mother finds responding difficult. She also wonders why the White men in the story wanted to break the Black man out of the jail, and what they wanted to do with him. She couldn’t understand why the townspeople believed “the lying white-trash woman over the nice Black man.” So in spite of the innocence of this novel and its barely teenage protagonist, this is an adult book simply because adults know the answers to those questions. Like Corky, most young readers might not know what life was like during the Jim Crow era.
During that summer, Corky befriends a Black girl whom she greatly admires. Named America, this sixteen-year-old newcomer to town can sew beautiful clothes, play the piano, and run like the wind. In fact, when Corky’s brother Mack times America, they realize she runs as fast as Wilma Rudolph, the Olympic runner. America’s mother is working for Corky’s mother in order to pay off a loan that Corky’s father made to America’s father so he could go look for work. Over the course of that summer, America integrates the yearly Baptist-Methodist girls’ baseball game. Corky’s father’s lunch counter experiences a sit-in, and he must decide how to respond. And Corky comes to realize what she had not known before in her sheltered childhood, that not all people are treated equally. And that just because the color of a person’s skin doesn’t matter to Corky, it matters a lot to many others. The fact that this wonderful girl’s name is America is an indication that Rutledge is pointing out that America, the girl, symbolizes all that America, the country, could and should be.
Rutledge makes one of Corky’s personality traits her incessant curiosity. She is constantly asking questions, many of which, in the south in 1964, verge on impolite. When she comments to a journalist that he asks a lot of questions, he responds that it’s part of the job, and that’s when Corky realizes what she wants to do and be. One of the most beautiful lines in the book is at the end, when now-retired journalist Corky wants to write a book. She writes, “Because while a journalist’s job is to tell what is true, a novelist’s job is to tell what is truth, to create a world in which you’d want to live, in which everything is just, even if only in the end.”
Rutledge’s novel does just that. We learn truths about Corky and her small town and small town values—the good and the bad. Rutledge is kind enough to let us know about Corky and her brother, and what happens to them in the future. But she leaves us guessing about America’s life, although from what she shares about America’s character traits, we can imagine a rich life filled with beauty.
This actually would be an ideal choice for a mother-daughter book club because of its historical nature and the many important themes that emerge. There is some violence, and several references to drinking, but nothing that a mature middle grade reader or young adult reader would not have been exposed to. I think some very productive conversations about race, friendship, ambition, family, and literature would result in such a setting. The big question to discuss would be how the participants think the events of that summer shaped the lives of the important characters: Corky, America, and Mack.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.