To Kill and Inherit the Angry and the Good
How a boy in a courtroom and a girl in a story teach us the cost of justice.
I was always the smallest kid in my class, a late bloomer in every sense, so the only role I landed in my high-school production of Inherit the Wind was the child on the witness stand. I wanted one of the cool parts, the swaggering Hornbeck, the volcanic Brady, but my baby face (and my gender) made me a prop for adults to speak around.
Additionally, the play itself, based on the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, did not really speak to me. Growing up in liberal New York City, the idea of a teacher on trial for teaching evolution felt antique, almost quaint, sepia evidence of a storm already past. But what did touch me were the human flashes: Henry Drummond’s fierce reverence for a child’s mind:
“Yes. The individual human mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted amens… An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.”
