GO SET A WATCHMAN
By Harper Lee
278 pages
Available at National Book Store
The first shock of reading Harper Lee’s long-buried (and controversial) novel Go Set a Watchman is that the main character now goes by the name “Jean Louise Finch.”
We, of course, grew up calling her “Scout.”
Many things have changed since tomboyish Scout, her brother Jem and neighborhood pal Dill occupied the backyards and swimming holes of Maycomb County in Lee’s perennial 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. Two decades later, in this “sequel,” Scout — rather, Jean Louise — is all grown up, living in Manhattan, come back to visit her Alabama roots because her father, the saintly lawyer Atticus Finch, is crippled by arthritis. She’s also visiting her boyfriend Henry, a young law student who has the blessing of Atticus, though not her Aunt Alexandria. Nearby, black servant Calpurnia dispenses homegrown warmth and compassion.
Everything should be the same, but we are in the 1950s now, a time of the Civil Rights movement in America; Southerners are suspicious of Negro advancement and meddling Northern lawyers, and actively seek to turn back the clock of history — through police force, if necessary.
In fact, it is a time so strikingly similar to modern-day America that you wonder if Harper Lee had a crystal ball along with her typewriter.
Lee, now in her 90s, made a big splash when she suddenly announced the book was coming to light. This from a writer who had launched — and abandoned — her writing career after publishing a single novel. Or so it seemed.
In fact, Go Set a Watchman existed in manuscript form as early as 1957, when it was submitted to her publisher — who suggested she go back and tell the story that came before it. Thus, Go Set a Watchman is really a first draft of what would instead become the more fable-like, idyllic childhood of To Kill a Mockingbird.
And now we must deal with the hangover morning of its “sequel.”
The great news: Lee wrote so easily — anecdotally, in the style of the times — that it’s almost a crime she didn’t keep right on going. Sure, it feels like a first draft. But who knows what chapters she could have added to the national dialogue on race?
Here, the big reveal — and it’s a horrifying one, to be sure — is that Atticus is no longer the kindly, humanistic lawyer of yore. He is a bigot. A practical, pragmatic bigot, perhaps. But a bigot no less. “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters?” he asks his daughter at one point. “Do you want them in our world?”
It’s like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole and discovering white is black, and black is… suspect.
Jean Louise/Scout comes back to discover that her father sits on Maycomb’s city council, a gathering of rednecks who regularly grumble about the uppity-ness of local blacks, now that the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) is sending their slick lawyers and people like Martin Luther King Jr. down to stir things up. You know: by blatantly sitting in the same restaurants as white people sit, that kind of thing.
When Jean Louise sees her daddy alongside potential Klan members spouting hate, it creates the book’s main crisis: she wants to flee her home, her father and fiancé and head back North. But not without a few interludes first about her growing up as a tomboy, attending her first school dance, and mistakenly thinking she’s pregnant because a young boy had the audacity to kiss her.
These bucolic episodes are nice, but they sit uneasily next to long passages detailing the Southern point of view. It’s almost as if a separate novel decided to step in and take over. Or like someone pitched a Confederate flag right in the Finches’ living room.
As the novel progresses, things become much more talky, and the arguments grow pedantic: this is the South, we learn, and the South is made up mostly of poor white and black folk, sprinkled with a few really rich white families. And, so the argument goes, the last thing the poor whites have to cling to after the Civil War and Reconstruction is their all-important “white pride.” No wonder they don’t want the government telling them that schools have to be desegregated! That races must mix so that every one has a fair shot at a decent education!
It’s really hard to look back at this blatant apology for Southern ways, just as Civil Rights was sweeping the nation in the late ‘50s, and find some peace with it. But that’s exactly what author Lee does, and one has to imagine this is what she had in mind by finally releasing the book to the world in 2015.
But peace with what, exactly? A kind of unblinking view of how the American South viewed things, maybe. An unspoken belief (or rather, often very vocal belief) that American Negroes were inferior, were “children” not ready to attain the same things as their white fellow citizens. Abraham Lincoln may have freed the slaves, but he didn’t make them “equal.” That was a battle fought county by county, district by district, city by city. It’s a battle still being fought today.
And those like Jean Louise who think that living in the North — in New York City, no less — makes them more progressive and liberal-minded are kidding themselves. It took an ironic songwriter named Randy Newman to point out, in his 1973 song Rednecks, the hidden hypocrisy of the North, where blacks were supposedly “free”: “Yes, the black man is free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City, and he’s free to be put in a cage in the south side of Chicago and the west side, and he’s free to be put in a cage in Hough in Cleveland, and he’s free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis…”
Reading Go Set a Watchman, one feels a growing horror at the racial divide that still infects some Americans at a root level. It’s in the air whenever right-wing hate-mongers take to the radio shows and spew vitriol about Obama. It’s in the headlines whenever a white cop shoots a black kid, and we are called upon to see “both sides” of the issue: that it’s really the cops’ world (and word) versus the world of African-Americans. Or whenever we see people like Donald Trump push the same buttons of ethnic division and hate that make voters see red. Whenever gun lovers cling ever more lovingly to their weapons, claiming they must keep The Government at bay.
If To Kill a Mockingbird had a moral lesson, it was this one, from Atticus: “Try to climb into someone’s skin and walk around in it before passing judgment.” That seems a more helpful lesson than the one in Lee’s follow-up: “Every man’s watchman is his conscience.”
Mostly, Go Set a Watchman can’t be much of a happy occasion for the modern South, which has come to grips with “Brown v. Board of Education” and integration on a day-to-day — if not a cellular — level since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. It’s no doubt another unwelcome reminder of its past, just like that stubborn Confederate flag — yes, the South shall writhe again — but it’s also a reminder of how much further some Americans have to go.