I read Stars in My Crown as a boy sick in bed (it’s told by a boy sick in bed) years ago, and came across the movie on TV just in the last few months. The book by Joe David Brown was published in 1947, and the film by Jacques Tourneur was released three years later. I bet Harper Lee knew both works.
I’ve got to think that a 24-year-old Harper Lee saw Stars in My Crown when it played the local movie house in Monroeville, Alabama. Who knows, maybe she shared popcorn with her peculiar childhood friend, Truman [Capote], who would have been less impressed than she with this nostalgic portrait of a small town much like theirs, with its obvious sense of community and shared values, as well as its less obvious cruelties and racism. A story about adult matters, told by a child: the story of a wise and peaceful man, a man of immense integrity and courage, who simply will not stand by and let his town be less than it might be.
He is, in short, a man of his time and place, a part of the problem instead of its repudiation.
As the movie version of Stars in My Crown comes to its climax, the local Klansmen gather at the door of Josiah Grey, demanding he hand over the black farmer they intend to lynch because they want his land. OK boys, Grey says, but first I think I ought to read his will. And holding some papers on which nothing is written and winging it, he improvises a will so good-hearted and generous to these same Klansmen that they bow their heads in shame and shuffle away into the night.
