Book Review: Go Set a Watchman

Title: Go Set a Watchman

Author: Harper Lee

Publisher: Harper Collins

Date: 2015

ISBN: 978-0-06-240985-0

Length: 278 pages

Quote: “It could be, might be, still was, a horrible mistake. Her mind refused to register what her eyes and ears told it.”

That’s Jean Louise Finch, physically sickened by the cognitive dissonance as her mind wraps itself around the sight of her father seeming to support local political activities she expects him to despise as heartily as she does. Jean Louise was the little “Scout” who watched her father—not “Daddy,” but “Atticus” to his children—defend a Black man from false accusations of crime. Now he’s sitting there nodding his head as outsiders try to stir up race hate in their relatively peaceful town.

And that’s not the only surprise on this poor little girl’s plate in this her twenty-sixth summer. (It's the early 1950s; single women of twenty-six are supposed to think of themselves as little girls, but Jean Louise Finch has managed to keep on thinking like one.) Her aunt, who she thought would naturally agree that her boyfriend was one of her “own kind,” insists that her boyfriend is socially beneath her. And her boyfriend is nodding along with the haters, too. And the housekeeper who cared for Jean Louise and her brother, when they were little, is now a Black woman who sees Jean Louise as a White woman, nothing more. Jean Louise thinks she’s become a New Yorker but, to her surprise, she cherishes her memories of her sleepy little home town and hates the thought of its being torn up by race hate. Oh, it’s just one surprise after another, and all of them are awfully upsetting. Jean Louise spends so much time feeling sick, in this book, that a question arises to what extent it may also be describing the effects of pesticides sprayed on local cotton fields.

By now I suspect most readers have read this book and know the back-story. The book Harper Lee published only at the end of a long life, when she knew she wouldn't have to deal with audience reactions for long, was the one she wrote first. A publisher suggested she write a prequel about what Jean Louise and her brother admired about their father. That was To Kill s Mockingbird,

What more is there to say? A disagreement, of course. You have very likely read that this book exposes Atticus as "a vicious racist." It would be easy to say that that's an out-and-out lie, but I think it's more of an illumination of how confused the young have become about history, how little they know about vicious racists. Vicious racists are moving into peaceful little Maycomb, Alabama, but though Jean Louise's father and boyfriend are blandly failing to oppose them--which is bad enough--they, themselves, are not vicious racists. This book is a study of what led up to the violence of the 1960s. It is principled and nuanced. Anyone who thinks Atticus is a vicious racist is failing to perceive either the principles or the nuances, and was not redy to have read this book.

None of the characters in this book is vicious, although they are about to encounter social pressure to become so. None is a hater. All of them are based on real people, believably presented. This is a true (as true as it could decently be) memoir of a place and time that would later be oversimplified into a commercial media stereotype. 

The pressure to hate has started with the most vulnerable. The housekeeper does not hate Jean Louise; she still has a job, probably better than most of her friends' jobs; she's still a decent woman who knows a child can't really be blamed for the racist system. But she's been being sensitized to the evils of the racist system, probably encouraged to feel that she deserved a "better" job all these years, and she's been encouraged to blame and resent White women. She remembers having been kind to Jean Louise because little "Scout" was a child. She has put that kindness and behind her. Jean Louise can still want to trust the housekeeper as a friend, but the housekeeper has been influenced to cut off that possibility and, with it, any possibility of a nonviolent, reconciliatory resolution to her legitimate resentments.

This summer, the pressure is reaching the White working class. Atticus and other educated ladies and gentlemen are still bland, objective, and principled. More aggrieved people will be ready to blame Black people for their being left behind the wave of economic growth, their being despised by families like the Finches, some incident of bullying or harassment. The haters aren't having much effect on Atticus, actually; he's too old and too smart. All they need is his tolerance while they prepare his social inferiors to start burning crosses the next time a Black teenager says a rude word, or uses the one door or water fountain or toilet available, or wants to register to vote. People whose real grievance is with attitudes like Jean Louise's aunt's will be ready to transfer their emotions to an easier target.

Atticus, who probably has few days left to live, is impartial. No, he couldn't sit and watch a man be punished for a crime the man didn't commit. No, he doesn't believe the Black population in Maycomb, as a group, is ready for equal treatment with the White population, either.

He has a point. In objective fact, the gap has narrowed, but the fact is that people are not created social equals. Societies that cling to class distinctions rear people who are not prepared to be social equals. In towns like Maycomb in the 1950s, very likely no Black person had been trained for any job but labor, though they might have been by nature capable of being physicists. The infrastructure for "progress" even in the crassest consumerist sense had not been built. Black students might have been capable of going to top universities, but they had hardly been prepared to go to high school. Even the "wonder drugs" that ended the plagues in the early twentieth century were less available to poorer neighborhoods; Black people might have actually been more likely to have tuberculosis. It was convenient to blame that infamous gap in I.Q. test scores rather than recognizing it as yet another part of the problem that Maycomb was not prepared to accept upward social mobility among Black people.

The problem could perhaps have been addressed without hate, blame, or bitterness--but unfortunately, in many places, those reaching out to aggrieve Black victims of bigotry were "revolutionaries" who wanted to increase hate, blame, and bitterness. 

There are documented cases of Southern White people and communities of good will taking various initiatives to help improve the social status and quality of life for Black youth they recognized as deserving. Joycelyn Elders' education was sponsored by White neighbors, for one. There are documented cases of people who worked together to organize integrated schools like Berea College, or all-Black towns where race prejudice would not hold anyone back from any positions like Zora Neale Hurston's home town. 

Those calmer stories weren't told because "revolutionaries" kept screaming out the story that fit their agenda: Southern White people were all "vicious racists," Black people were always and only and ever victims, and Northern interference was necessary to save Alabama from itself. Northern interference meant a bigger, more intrusive federal government, which suited the "revolutionary" agenda. 

Atticus would probably have been more alert than Jean Louise to the "revolutionary" point of view, though in the 1950s he might have felt no need to explain it to her, or might not have felt that he understood it well enough. He considers the haters' point of view too. Both are alien to him. He is developing the detachment that comes with extreme old age, the sense that the social problems around him are for the young to solve and not for him. There's not a vicious bone in Atticus's body, but Atticus is passive. His passivity enables viciousness. He won't live to realize how much viciousness he is likely to have enabled. 

In the 1950s it could truly be said that "Black people weren't ready" for many things they had been told they ought to want, for which they had not in fact prepared. They were in fact not ready./Technological change was sweeping (or running) everyone off their feet, at best. Maycomb's Black population hadn't even set their feet in the way of it. The children may have wanted Cadillacs; the parents might have been happier with wagons. There could have been more honest discussion of just what the Black people in Maycomb did want, why they wanted it instead of having it, what to do about it.

Probably every earnest twelfth grade student reading Go Set a Watchman would agree, for example, that Black people deserve equal access to education at big-name universities. Well, so would I; they do. And in fact, if not in 1950, certainly by 1990 the university professors and deans and presidents agreed with that statement. 

So what happened in the 1990s? Black students were admitted to big-name universities, and some of them stayed through one midterm exam, and several left before that. I remember watching it happen at Berea, the school that had started out with integration as its raison d'etre. Berea also advertised the ideal of a good liberal arts education for youth of all ethnic types. More Black students was actually a goal, but in practice, too many of those Black students were intelligent enough for the quality of education Berea offers but unprepared to do the work it entailed. The "research" schools, like Berea, are set up to accommodate students with high school records including two or three years of math, science, foreign languages, at least a year of history, preferably some "classics" in the sense of Greek or Latin, a computer course or two, some fine arts, and at least one year of independent study projects. High school students who majored in being cool and popular, with one year of math, one year of science, no languages, lots of study hall and "fun" classes like Current Events Seminar or Family Life Education, arrive at college not even knowing how to study and their first few quizzes warn them that they are not in a place where they are likely to succeed. That the attrition of Black students is not caused by racism is shown by the fact that a minority of Black freshmen do stay in school and graduate, but the percentage of Black students decreases from more than proportionate in September to less than proportionate by November.

Anger, yelling, picketing, holding deans hostage, has been tried and has not fixed this. Crybullying and calling everything and everybody "racist" won't work either. What's not been tried nearly enough, but has helped when it was tried, has been systematically teaching bright but lazy sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds, of all ethnic types, how to study. Giving them a clue: "You are no longer in high school. You are expected to do some reading on your own before and after class, as well as reviewing your notes on class discussions and lectures. You will be expected to do independent projects. You are responsible for being a good citizen of the college and its town." 

That, plus a few good basic courses, bridges the gap between some intelligent Black students--and other types of students coming out of second-rate high schools--and their academic superiors at colleges and universities. Screaming "racist" does not help Black students succeed at university. Good community colleges do.

Atticus's objective, detached approach is the one that actually works, if it can be separated from the detachment and fatalism Atticus shows in Go Set a Watchman. The fact is that all students are not equally prepared to succeed at universities. When people detach from emotionality enough to observe the fact, but retain enough attachment to care about helping a student or group of students succeed, the problem is easily solved. The students' fundamental relationship to their school needs to shift from "School is a place where I am forced to spend time, although I hate the school and either already knew, or don't believe, everything teachers ever tell me" to "This school is a place where I want to spend time and can use the information teachers offer." This change is unlikely to be made overnight but it is what levels the field when students from "Hogwash High" join students from "Pride Prep" and "State Trophy High" and "St. Oldmoney's." 

Screaming "They're vicious racists!" is aggravating the problem if the students from the second-rate high school view themselves as a "race" minority. Analyzing, "This is the style, these are the standards they expect from students" gives disadvantaged students an actual chance to succeed.

Are the standards "racist" because they come from one culture rather than others? Possibly. The question is how well the cultural standards serve the culture. Cultural norms like coming to meetings on time, drinking alcohol at parties or not at all, maintaining a healthy interpersonal distance, respecting women, and composting rather than wearing out soil, are useful ones for other cultures to adopt, even if other cultural norms from the same part of the world seem to be less valuable

In Go Set a Watchman Atticus Finch's integrity in being himself, an imperfect but decent member of a dying generation, upsets his daughter; so does her own abiding love for her home town despite other people there not sharing the new ideas she's embraced with youthful zeal. After her own little fit of screaming "racist, racist" in her own way, Jean Louise is prepared to think, though the novel doesn't show her thinking, about what--besides "Just vote for our party!"--might actually help address the patterns of racism and elitism in Maycomb. Harper Lee never did take her protagonist that far, and now she never will. She left it to readers to consider how we can intelligently address the issues of racism, sexism, and elitism.