Yet these similarities are merely superficial and serve to highlight the differences between Mockingbird and Roll of Thunder. The undercurrents of violence and conflict explode in the second section as the children learn of the brutal power their white neighbours hold over their community. The first introduces us to Cassie and her family, as well as to the children’s growing awareness of the racism which determines which school they go to, which clothes they wear, where they can walk, what they can buy… in short, which completely circumscribes their freedom. Although her family are fortunate enough to own their land, sandwiched between the much larger plantations of the local gentry, they struggle to hold on to it whilst making tentative steps towards fighting for their rights.Īgain, like Lee, Taylor’s novel falls into two parts. Unlike Scout, Taylor’s heroine Cassie is black and her position in mid-century Mississippi society is consequently precarious. Like Lee, Taylor focuses on the life of a young girl who is struggling to understand the social mores and injustices she sees around her. This book records and represents a history which, Taylor explains, ‘was not then written in books but one passed from generation to generation on the steps of moonlit porches …, a history of great-grandparents and of slavery and of the days following slavery of those who lived still not free, yet who would not let their spirits be enslaved’. In the UK at least, Taylor’s coming-of-age story about Mississippi life during the Great Depression is unfairly eclipsed by Lee’s masterpiece.īorn almost 20 years after Lee (in 1943), Taylor was inspired by a tradition of oral story-telling and she partially fictionalised her family’s history in Roll of Thunder. Perhaps a better companion novel for Mockingbird is the lesser-known bildungsroman by Mildred Taylor: Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry (1976).

The build-up to this mysterious new novel seems to have resulted only in frustration for many Lee fans, with The Guardian dismissing Lee’s 1950s debut as ‘a literary curiosity’. There has been a lot of disappointed, indignant, or outraged talk recently about Go Set a Watchman – the sequel to Lee’s world-famous To Kill a Mockingbird. Last weekend I went into a bookshop chain and saw copies of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman arrayed on a table just inside the door, waiting to be lifted by the hordes of Christmas shoppers anxious to please bookish friends and relatives this year.

Mildred roll of thunder