Harper Lee’s Book Became Less Honest

Monday

I recently completed Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, the early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s not as polished as Mockingbird but I think it is more ambitious and more honest.

I must first share some personal information that is influencing my reaction. I was raised in the deep south—Sewanee, Tennessee is only a few miles from the Alabama border—and at 64 I am contemplating retiring there. I therefore relate to the grown-up Jean Louise (Scout) Finch as she considers returning to Maycomb, Alabama.

The first part of the book hit very close to home as Jean Louise recollects the virtues of Maycomb, just as I am rediscovering the charms of Sewanee. Then, when she vomits after discovering her father and her potential fiancé at a White Citizens’ Council meeting, I recollected the racism from my childhood. In her case, she hears her father delivering such racist claptrap as the following:

Now think about this. What would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights? I’ll tell you. There’d be another Reconstruction. Would you want your state governments run by people who don’t know how to run ’em?…

Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people. You should know it, you’ve seen it all your life. They’ve made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they’re far from it yet. There were coming along fine, traveling at a rate they could absorb, more of ‘’em voting than ever before. Then the NAACP stepped in with its fantastic demands and shoddy ideas of government—can you blame the South for resenting being told what to do about its own people by people who have no idea of its daily problems?

I remember hearing such ideas when I was a child. Luckily, they were not from my father, who was a civil rights activist and a member of the NAACP. Southern racism, including Atticus Finch’s brand of paternalistic racism, prompted me to flee from the south when I reached college age. (I attended Carleton College in Minnesota.)

When I returned to Sewanee for a year after college (in 1974-75), I heard the n-word virtually every day as a reporter for the Winchester Herald Chronicle. While things are obviously much better today, I still see Confederate flags on an almost daily basis when I return there—not in Sewanee itself, which is a college town and perched on top of a mountain, but down in the valley.

In fact, the following passage from Jean Louise’s uncle, supposedly one of the touchstones of sanity in the book, sounds like it could have come from GOP extremists today, where social safety net programs are regarded as the government taking away our freedom. Note especially Dr. Finch’s reference to Huxley’s dystopian novel to characterize the government:

“Look at the rest of the country. It’s long since gone by the South in its thinking. The time-honored, common-law concept of property—a man’s interest in and duties to that property—has become almost extinct. People’s attitudes toward the duties of a government have changed. The have-nots have risen and demanded and received their due—sometimes more than their due. The haves are restricted from getting more. You are protected from the winter winds of old age, not by yourself voluntarily, but by a government that says we do not trust you to provide for yourself, therefore we will make you save. All kinds of strange little things like that have become part and parcel of this country’s government. America’s a brave new Atomic world and the South’s just beginning its Industrial Revolution. Have you looked around you in the past seven or eight years and seen a new class of people down here?”

“New class?”

“Good grief, child. Where are your tenant farmers? In factories. Where are your field hands? Same place. Have you ever noticed who are in those little white houses on the other side of town? Maycomb’s new class. The same boys and girls who went to school with you and grew up on tiny farms. Your own generation.”

Dr. Finch pulled his nose. “Those people are the apples of the Federal Government’s eye. It lends them money to build their houses, it gives them a free education for serving in its armies, it provides for their old age and assures them of several weeks’ support if they lose their jobs—“

And later:

The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that it government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it won’t be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won’t be that way much longer.

Atticus and his doctor brother think alike. They used to be the paternal fathers of the town and now Blacks are demanding the right to vote and the “white trash”—as various characters in the book call them—are benefiting from the G. I. bill, federal housing loans, Social Security, and unemployment insurance. These “have-nots” are getting “more than their due.”

Dr. Finch doesn’t explain how providing people with benefits will result in them being trampled. But that aside, we now know that his contempt for “the apples of the Federal Government’s eye” will come back to haunt town fathers like him. After all, these are future Tea Party Republicans, who will start expressing their rage at establishment leaders by supporting figures like Donald Trump. Trump expresses their sense of resentment while understanding that they also want to hold on to Social Security and Medicare.

Harper Lee is not unaware that the Finches are classist as well as racist. Henry Clinton, Atticus Finch’s former clerk who has raised himself up from dirt poverty to become a lawyer and who has always wanted to marry Jean Louise, points out to her just how privileged she is. She gets away with things as a Finch that he never can as former “trash.”

Lee is also perceptive about Calpurnia, the black woman who raised Jean Louise. When Jean Louise looks her up—the caretaker is retired now—she realizes that Calpurnia was always aware that she was raising privileged white children. In Watchman, Calpurnia knows that Atticus is attending Citizens’ Council meetings and she gives Jean Louise the cold shoulder, prompting a hysterical reaction:

Jean Louise sat down again in front of her. “Cal,” she cried, “Cal, Cal, Cal, what are you doing to me? What’s the matter? I’m your baby, have you forgotten me? Why are you shutting me out? What are you doing to me?”

Calpurnia, making no distinction between the privileged Jean Louise and her racist father, turns the question around:

“What are you all doing to us?” she said.

“Us?”

“Yessum. Us.”

I respect Lee for including such scenes in her book. She understands that the Finches can’t understand what either the Blacks or the poor whites are experiencing. The old world that Dr. Finch longs for is the one where the Finches were in charge. That world is rapidly changing.

I think what has happened is this: Harper Lee went north and, when she returned, she realized just how racist and classist her people were. She loved Alabama and she was horrified by Alabama and she used her book to sort it all out. Go Set a Watchman is filled with long, rambling debates as Jean Louise—a stand-in for Lee—tries to figure out what can be saved and what must be rejected.

Unfortunately, Lee/Jean Louise is blinded by her privilege and refuses to face up to certain biases. This in turn prevents her from understanding the African American perspective. For instance, she seems to accept that (1) the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery but over states’ rights; (2) that the Reconstruction period following the war was a bad thing; and (3) Brown vs. Board of Education was an egregious infringement upon the Tenth Amendment and state sovereignty.

Also, despite disagreeing with Atticus about the benefits of white paternalism, she seems to agree with him that African Americans are like children and unfit to govern. Furthermore, in her vision of the south, there is no threat of violence, whereas we know now that force—sometimes official, sometimes unofficial—was used to keep African Americans in subjection. As Lee sees it in both of her books, the KKK are a bunch of inept clowns who can be laughed off and a little girl can wander into the middle of a lynch mob and defuse it. One can’t get very deep into the truth about race relations if one starts with those assumptions.

But give Lee credit for at least wrestling. To Kill a Mockingbird, by contrast, evades many of the tough questions. Over and over, it indicates that “trash” (a word I find as offensive as “nigger”) are the real source of racism. For instance:

–it turns Atticus Finch into a benign liberal patriarch without looking at the darker side of such paternalism;

–it divides poor whites into two categories: good poor whites like the Cunninghams (who can be shamed into leaving a lynch mob) and bad poor whites like the Ewells (who rape their daughters). The bad whites inoculate the good whites from the worst charges of racism;

–it gives us sentimental images of African Americans, who are good because they know their place and are deferential to the patriarchal whites. Lee’s vision seems to be that of D. W. Griffith in Birth of a Nation, who presents such figures as “faithful souls.” Watchman shows us how Lee might have depicted discontented Blacks–it regards the NAACP as extremist and out of touch–but Mockingbird just avoids the issue.

 Flannery O’Connor, a southern author who handles race and class issues in a far more sophisticated way, once remarked about Mockingbird fans, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they are buying a children’s book.”

She’s right. Mockingbird is a children’s book whereas Watchman attempts to be an adult book. Mockingbird feeds white fantasies of the good hearted white man who, while he can’t save an innocent black man, at least must be given credit for trying. Watchman, by contrast, wrestles with the fact that even the best patrician whites are racist and classist and that they turn to unsavory groups when they feel their power slipping away.

Watchman may not know what should come next, but it at least states that Jean Louise must travel a different road than her father. And that Alabama needs liberals like her if they are to make any progress.

I wonder if Lee felt trapped by Mockingbird. Watchman shows that she once tried to grapple with real problems but that an editor then talked her into writing a different book. She must have come to see her editor as right given that the book went on to become a spectacular bestseller and movie. Something important got lost in the process, however.