It is, by now, well known that Atticus Finch, beloved hero of the late Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, is revealed to be a segregationist in Lee’s recently published novel Go Set a Watchman. In Mockingbird, of course, Atticus defends Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. When I first heard about Atticus’ segregationist stance, it didn’t strike me as implausible. Defending an innocent black man against false charges is a far cry from supporting integration, let alone believing in inherent racial equality. But when I read reviews that noted Atticus belonged to a white “citizens’ council” (to my understanding, such councils were not that different from the Klan) had attended Klan meetings, and read a pamphlet titled “The Black Plague,” I assumed the two portrayals of Atticus would not be consistent. If the Atticus of Watchman was capable of virulent racism, I speculated that in writing Mockingbird, Lee transformed Atticus into the paragon we now know, who, while not necessarily an integrationist, would never have anything to do with citizens’ councils, let alone the Klan. But, once I read Watchman, it turned out the new Atticus is the old Atticus of Mockingbird. Watchman doesn’t reduce Atticus-as-segregationist to a stock figure of villainy or deny his capacity to act nobly. Lee adds moral depths to his persona even as she probes the Mind of the South which constrained his (and her?) range of response. To Kill a Mockingbird is a masterpiece (though, because it has a child narrator and frequently focuses on the imaginative life of children, it is often thought of as a “young adult classic” rather than an unqualified “classic”); Go Set a Watchman is not. However, the two together form a new masterpiece.
Watchman was not only published after Mockingbird, it also treats a later period in history, but it’s not exactly a sequel. Nor would it be completely accurate to describe it as a first draft of Mockingbird. Both novels focus on Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch and her father, Atticus, but Watchman is set in the 1950s (the same decade in which Lee wrote it), while Mockingbird is set in the 1930s. Watchman does not tell the same story as Mockingbird: it alludes to the Tom Robinson plotline but gives the trial a different resolution (in Mockingbird, Tom is found guilty after the jury deliberates for an unprecendentedly long time–a partial victory for Atticus; according to Watchman, the defendant was acquitted). Mockingbird’s other main plotline (the story of Boo Radley, the recluse next door) is absent from Watchman. It has been reported that, when Lee submitted the manuscript of Watchman, an editor told her to rewrite it, focusing on Jean Louise’s childhood, to which there are frequent flashbacks in Watchman. The result was an almost wholly different novel: To Kill a Mockingbird.
Much of the drama of the original novel—call it Scout’s dilemma—is about Jean Louise figuring out the mystery of how the man who raised her (who was a paragon of justice, who did treat all people equally and respectfully) could make common cause with men who call black people “lower than cockroaches.” Atticus is revealed in Watchman to have a paternalistic attitude toward African Americans, which is not at odds with any fact of feeling in Mockingbird. That’s not to say, however, that justifications Atticus offers for associating with outright hatemongers are plausible. In the moment of reading the novel, I was persuaded. Others might not be.
It’s not hard to reconcile the spectacle of Atticus’ paternalism in Watchman with Mockingbird’s approach to fighting racial injustice, which celebrates a great white savior. Reading the two books together transforms Atticus from a “white” plaster saint into a much more credible Southerner of his time—a character who treats all people decently and believes in equality before the law in courts of law, but not when it comes to voting and equal access to schools, employment, businesses, and public facilities.
The complexities of Atticus’s 50s stance might have gone right past most white Northern Liberals back in that time. And I’m not sure Jean Louise’s own politics would have been much easier for them to take in. She is simultaneously pro-civil-rights and pro-states’-rights. She thinks the Supreme Court violated the Tenth Amendment with the Brown decision. But she goes on to say:
I’m trying to say that I don’t approve of the way they did it, that it scares me to death when I think about the way they did it, but they had to do it. It was put under their noses and they had to do it. Atticus, the time has come when we’ve got to do right.
While Jean Louise is pro-civil rights, her qualified endorsement of the Brown decision would not be palatable to many Northern liberals. Yet it is a pretty reasonable point of view for an anti-racist who was raised in the South.
It is on the issue of states’ rights and federal power that there is a possible inconsistency between Mockingbird and Watchman. In narrating Mockingbird, Scout says:
… people had removed from their store windows and automobiles the stickers that said NRA–WE DO OUR PART. I asked Atticus why, and he said it was because the National Recovery Act was dead. I asked who killed it: he said nine old men.
While this passage is not explicit, it implies that Atticus sided with Roosevelt and not the Court. In Watchman (which is written in third person but is still from Jean Louise’s perspective) Jean Louise notices a picture of the “Nine Old Men” in Atticus’ office; any doubt that this is the court that invalidated the NRA is cleared up when Jean Louise wonders, “Is Roberts dead,” referring to Justice Owen Roberts who voted to strike down the NRA but later voted to uphold unemployment insurance. In the same scene, after Jean Louise voices her views on the Tenth Amendment, Atticus says “Sweet, you’re such a states’ rightist—you make me a Roosevelt liberal by comparison” suggesting that he is anything but a Roosevelt liberal. Is this an inconsistency? Did I misread the “Nine Old Men” passage from Mockingbird? Or did Atticus, like many Southern Democrats (though Atticus has voted for Eisenhower in Watchman), change his view of Roosevelt between the Depression and the 1950s?
It seems, in Watchman, almost the whole Finch family is opposed to Federal power. In one of the novel’s weakest scenes (because it’s too polemical), Jean Louise’s Uncle Jack, a lovable character in both novels, espouses libertarian politics.
Please don’t assume when I praise Watchman for adding nuances to Atticus’ politics and way of being Southern, I’m implying Mockingbird’s other characters are thin. One of the many precisely drawn figures that populate Mockingbird is Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose. She shouts at Scout and her brother Jem that their father is a “nigger-lover” because he is a defending a black man. Yet, when she dies, Atticus calls her a “great lady” and “the bravest person I ever knew” because, having become addicted to morphine when her doctor prescribed it to her, she was determined to break the addiction before she died, in spite of the fact that she was dying and in terrible pain. She wanted “to leave this world beholden to nothing and nobody.”
Mrs. Dubose’s complications in Mockingbird, though, are easier to comprehend than Atticus’, when the two novels are read together. While Mrs. Dubose’s moral courage and moral failings seem unrelated, Atticus’ courage and failings are twinned—good and bad responses to White-over-Black facts on the ground. His unobvious turns become one further fictional instantiation of what C. Vann Woodward once termed “The Strange Career of Jim Crow.”
Mrs. Dubose is one of several complex characters in Mockingbird. Atticus, however, is not one of them. When Mockingbird is read alone, he is a paragon. The same can be said of the novel’s most significant African American characters, Tom Robinson and Calpurnia, the Finches’ cook, who, with the widower Atticus, raises Scout and Jem. Tom is beyond reproach and Calpurnia is both loving and strict and, like Atticus, acts as a moral guide to Scout.
In Watchman, by contrast, there are African Americans who behave badly. Reckless driving by black people plays a significant part in the novel, and Calpurnia’s son Zeebo has had multiple wives and numerous children–every time he impregnated a woman, Calpurnia made him marry her. Atticus uses this as ammunition to defend his position that “our Negro population is backward.” He says that, if all black people were allowed to vote, “Zeebo’d probably be Mayor of Maycomb. Would you want someone of Zeebo’s capability to handle the town’s money?”
In Mockingbird, there is only a single instance in which a white reader might perceive black characters as behaving less than perfectly. When Atticus’ is unexpectedly away from home on a Sunday, Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to her church. A woman named Lula tries to prevent Calpurnia from bringing the white children into the church. Scout narrates the scene:
“I wants to know why you bringin’ white chillun to nigger church”
“They’s my comp’ny,” said Calpurnia. Again, I thought her voice strange: she was talking like the rest of them.
“Yeah, an’ I reckon you’s comp’ny at the Finch house during the week.”
The rest of the congregation welcomes the children, and the tension is quickly diffused. This scene briefly calls into question the idealized stereotype of the relationship between white child and black matriarchal caregiver. Scout can’t help noticing Calpurnia has one way of speaking for white people and one way of speaking for black people–that Calpurnia has to put on an act for one or both of these audiences. Yet the scene passes rather quickly and since Lula’s hostility is overwhelmed by the rest of the congregation’s welcoming of Scout and Jem, it is easy to dismiss her point that the Finches do not invite Calpurnia to any gathering in the way that Calpurnia is inviting the Finch children to her church.
Watchman, too, has a scene that challenges the black matriarch-white child ideal. It is just a little longer than the one in Mockingbird, but it looms much larger in the novel. Zeebo’s son Frank (Calpurnia’s grandson) has run over and killed a white man while speeding. Atticus agrees to represent Frank, not out of loyalty to and affection for Calpurnia, but to keep the NAACP from representing Frank. Jean Louise goes to visit Calpurnia, who is cool and formal with her.
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?”
“What are you all doing to us?” she said.
“Us?”
“Yessum. Us.”
Jean Louise said slowly, more to herself than to Calpurnia. “As long as I lived I never remotely dreamed that anything like this could happen. And here it s. I cannot talk to the one human being who raised me from the time I was two years old… It is happening as I sit here and I cannot believe it. Talk to me, Cal. For God’s sake talk to me right. Don’t sit there like that.”
She looked into the old woman’s face and she knew it was hopeless. Calpurnia was watching her, and in Calpurnia’s eyes was no hint of compassion.
Jean Louise rose to go. “Tell me one thing, Cal,” she said, “just one thing before I go – please, I’ve got to know. Did you hate us?”
The old woman was silent, bearing the burden of her years. Jean Louise waited.
Finally Calpurnia shook her head.
Were Calpurnia’s feelings toward Jean Louise warmer in the past? We don’t know for sure. But Calpurnia’s question “what are you all doing to us” suggests that Calpurnia’s coolness has been caused by white resistance, and Atticus’ resistance in particular, to integration. Jean Louise implies that’s the case when she says, “People used to trust each other … They didn’t watch each other like hawks.” In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that this sentiment was “alarming” because it hinted “the Civil Rights Movement roiled things up.” I’d argue that Watchman’s strengths lie in Lee’s capacity to evoke that roiled up feel of the civil rights struggle. It was personal for Lee whose experience of Southern changes was more intimate than that of a white Northern liberal. She saw the Movement from the perspective of a pro-integration white Southerner who’d been shaped by her upbringing.
What makes Watchman unusual, if not unique, among popular culture depictions of the civil rights struggle, is the fact that neither Jean Louise nor Atticus fit neatly into the categories of pro-Civil Rights liberal or white Southern racist.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a masterpiece in its own right, not because it is a particularly insightful exploration of a race in America, but due to its vivid, verisimilar evocation of childhood summers, and its depiction of the complex human beings who make up a community (albeit, that complexity is reserved for the white members of the community)–the above-mentioned Mrs. Dubose, Dolphus Raymond (a white landowner who has had children with his African American common-law wife and who pretends to be a drunk so his neighbors can easily dismiss the way he lives), and several others. I also have to admit that Mockingbird is great because of Lee’s brilliant manipulation of her readers’ heartstrings–it is sentimentality at its best, like the “Marseillaise” scene in Casablanca. Go Set a Watchman by itself does not achieve this level of artistry, but when the two novels are read together, they enable the reader to imagine from within fully human subjects whose reactions to racial injustice and to the civil rights movement are complex and sometimes contradictory. It does this by letting the reader, to borrow from Atticus Finch, “stand in [their] shoes and walk around in them.”