“Go Set a Watchman” (2015) by US writer Harper Lee is her first novel to appear since “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960). It has the same characters but takes place in the 1950s, 20 years later.
Disclaimer: I have never read “To Kill a Mockingbird” – I could never get into it – but I saw the movie starring Gregory Peck as lawyer Atticus Finch.
Our story: In “Watchman”, Scout, Atticus Finch’s daughter, is now better known by her grown-up name, Jean Louise Finch. She is 26 and works in New York. Twice a year she goes back home, to the Jim Crow South, to visit her father, now in his 70s. On one such visit, presumably in the summer of 1954, the scales fall from her eyes and she sees how racist her home town is. And it is not just the town, it is her boyfriend, her aunt, her uncle, people she knows from high school, and even her own father, Atticus Finch himself, who back in the 1930s defended a Black man accused of raping a White woman – because he believes in justice for all.
She wonders if something is wrong with her, but no, even people who never said the N-word before are saying it now. Calpurnia, the Black servant who brought her up from the age of two, is now overly polite with her. Her father has joined a White citizens’ council, defending Jim Crow. She finds out he used to be in the Klan too. Go along to get along, it seems.
Spoiler warning: I am about to give away the ending.
The book builds towards a showdown with her father, which comes in chapter 17, by far the best part. She calls out his hypocrisy. Despite all his fine words, he believes Blacks are subhuman. She calls him all kinds of names. It was glorious.
But then, a chapter later, she caves. Ugh. While she is packing her bags to leave town for good, her uncle hits her, almost knocks her out, saying, “I am trying to attract your attention.” According to him, she is the true bigot, someone with fixed, unbending ideas. She lacks the maturity and humility needed to live in the South. Oh, is that what it is? She needs to ease up on her father and the other (White) people in town. They are only human, with human hearts and human failings. Her father is not the tin god she made him into as a girl. Grow up! Then he makes a triple literary allusion. She falls for it.
She accepts her father as a mere human. They make up. The End.
What a cheap ending! And one that seems to write off racism as a mere human failing.
Not to worry: Her publisher back in 1957 did not like it either. They had her rewrite it, hanging it on the rape trial in the 1930s, making Atticus Finch into a White Saviour fantasy figure. Oh, and they changed the title: “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
– Abagond, 2017.
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“But then, a chapter later, she caves. Ugh. While she is packing her bags to leave town for good, her uncle hits her, almost knocks her out, saying, “I am trying to attract your attention.” According to him, she is the true bigot, someone with fixed, unbending ideas. She lacks the maturity and humility needed to live in the South. Oh, is that what it is? She needs to ease up on her father and the other (White) people in town. They are only human, with human hearts and human failings. Her father is not the tin god she made him into as a girl. Grow up! Then he makes a triple literary allusion. She falls for it.”
The description of her father reminds me of Abraham Lincoln. A decent racist.
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You really should read “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It’s the one book I’ve ever read by a white person that is uncompromising in blaming all white people for racism. Not, some, not most, but all, even Atticus.
That’s something that escapes most white folks’ notice mainly because the first part suckers you in so well. If you grew up in a close-knit neighborhood or church, the families are familiar and you see the community they build. Even the black community gets their due.
But the second half blows all that cosy childhood perspective stuff to bits. Even the first half seems less friendly and you see their community for the cowards they are, unable to stand up even to the weakest link in their chain because that means challenging white supremacy and none of them are willing to do that. In the end, the children feel that something isn’t quite right, but take their places in their supremacist society.
I first read “To Kill a Mockingbird” when I was 15. I got it for my birthday. It has always seemed odd and wrong to me that so many white lawyers use Atticus Finch as the reason they chose that profession. It reminds me of your post on white mental age versus black mental age.
Since I was five, I told my mother I wanted to be a lawyer. I read that book and I no longer wanted to study white man’s law. That white people read that book and decide that the study of white law is noble says so much about them.
All that being said, “Go Set a Watchman” was not a surprise to me. That Atticus is a member of Maycomb’s Community Council (basically one sheet short of being the Klan) is not a surprise to anyone who understood that Atticus never stood against his whole community, just those who wouldn’t go through the motions of fairness.
But people insist on putting Atticus up on a pedestal as if he were the epitome of what a nonracist white person should be.
He was one of the most human characters ever written but he was a racist likev the rest of the white town and Harper Lee makes that plain.
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@ ThatDeborahGirl
Thank you. You may have just saved To Kill a Mockingbird for me.
Like you, I first read it as a teenager. I fell for the whole “white savior” trope and saw Atticus as a noble person — which as you rightly say, most whites do. I loved the book and recommended it to other white kids as a good examination of racial issues.
Years later, I picked it up again and was horrified at the racism within its pages, especially the way Atticus treats Calpurnia like a dim-witted child. I couldn’t forgive my teenage self for not seeing it. I couldn’t get through that first cloying section and put the book away, ashamed that I had ever considered it any good.
Now I’m going to have to read it all the way through again and look for what you saw in it.
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So from what i have been hearing from various book podcast is that the beloved Atticus Finch character is a racist. I don’t think i would be interest in reading this book. I prefer to remember the beloved Gregory Peck character from the film To Kill A Mockingbird.
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I find it ironic that Mary Burrell prefers to remeber the Hollywood sanitized film version of a book rather than believe what the author intended.
Whether you’re reading Mockingbird or Watchman, Atticus is still a racist. Deal south that.
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@That DeborahGirl
“Whether you’re reading Mockingbird or Watchman, Atticus is still a racist. Deal south that.”
Ahhh. And there’s the rub.
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Whites are always portrayed as ‘basically good’ in all forms of media despite their many flaws and sins. Everyone else, on the other hand, not so much. Welcome to a society where the oppressor is made to feel as comfortable as possible while the oppressed is made to feel guilty about being born oppressed.
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I have to admit i have never read the book i am only familiar with the film. So maybe i will read the book.
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Whatever you may think of the site as a whole, Jezebel’s article on Atticus Finch and his racism—from both “Mockingbird” and “Watchman”—is a good read: https://jezebel.com/atticus-was-always-a-racist-why-go-set-a-watchman-is-n-1718996096
A lot of people probably remember the Gregory Peck film more than the book. Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch makes the character appear to be a principled man of integrity who actually wants justice for Tom Robinson. But that adaptation also glosses over important points (e.g., Atticus being assigned the case rather than taking it himself, his mention of White supremacist Tom Heflin) and makes him seem like someone committed to dismantling racism rather than someone trying to uphold a certain image of “civility” and “justice”.
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@ ThatDeborahGirl
Thanks. That is reassuring. I should have known the Hollywood version would sanitize Harper Lee. They even did it to Bambi, for goodness sake.
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@ ASGM
I did not read “Mockingbird”, but compared to the Gregory Peck film, I prefer “Watchman” since it seems more honest.
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I never read either book. The only thing I know about them is that there is a character named Boo Ridley (?) in it.
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Just saw an article about a new book by Prof. Wayne Flynt in which he shares letters written to him by his friend Harper Lee.
This section is relevant:
“Ms. Lee said she was content with “Mockingbird,” though, despite its popularity, she saw its shortcomings.
“’I wonder what their reaction would have been if TKAM had been complex, sour, unsentimental, racially unpaternalistic because Atticus was a bastard,” she wrote to Mr. Flynt on July 31, 2006.
“He didn’t know it then, but she actually had written such a book. It was called “Go Set a Watchman,” and it depicted Atticus as a racist, not a hero, and it had been a first draft that was ultimately rewritten and became “Mockingbird.”
“Watchman” resurfaced and was published in 2015 amid concerns that Ms. Lee, old and infirm, may not have fully participated in the decision to publish a long forgotten and flawed first novel (which has now sold more than three million copies, according to HarperCollins). But Mr. Flynt was adamant at the time that she had welcomed the publication.
“Now, looking back, Ms. Lee’s 2006 letter to him gives us some sense of just why.”
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