Harper Lee’s much-anticipated novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” begins with a grown-up Jean Louise Finch’s journey home from New York to visit her ailing father, Atticus Finch.
This is also a journey undertaken in the wake of the 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Not long after the two are reunited, her father asks: “How much of what’s going on down here gets into the newspapers?” — setting in motion one of the book’s guiding preoccupations.
Evidence suggests that “Watchman” was an early version of Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” resubmitted after her publisher asked her to rewrite “Watchman” to focus on the perspective of Scout, a childhood version of Jean Louise, and to place the story 20 years earlier, in the 1930s.
Reading “Watchman,” which publishes Tuesday, one sees the imprint of the earlier draft — whole passages repeated nearly word for word: descriptions of the fictional town of Maycomb, Ala., and character studies of its residents — all of this good fodder for scholars, writers and students of literature who can measure in it the evolution of a writer and her story through the process of revision.
Although the novel covers some familiar ground, just over a third of the way through, the momentum changes to focus on the crux of the contemporary story — contemporary in the era it was written — that we have not heard. Jean Louise is a grown-up tomboy contending with gender roles she loathes to accept, a would-be suitor, and a newfound disappointment with her father and his ideals rooted in the transformations wrought by adulthood and by the burgeoning recognition of different worldviews.
In “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch became a kind of national hero, a progressive thinker who espoused the noble belief in equal rights.
The adult Jean Louise encounters a different Atticus. He is a former member of the Ku Klux Klan and now a member of one of the newly formed Citizens’ Councils springing up in communities throughout the South to oppose desegregation. This is the harsh reality with which Jean Louise must contend. In prose less nuanced than that of “Mockingbird,” prose steeped in the political rhetoric of the time — the aftermath of the Brown decision — the characters in “Watchman” carry out an ideological debate that began in the South but would come to occupy the national consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, and in many ways continues today.
Now, instead of his sweeping and eloquent plea for the rights of all citizens, black and white, we encounter some of the novel’s most difficult passages: Atticus Finch advocating for the preservation of segregation, the hierarchy of racial supremacy to which — despite what appears to her father’s generation, and to readers, as a kind of self-righteous, moralizing indignation — Jean Louise consents in large part: “We’ve agreed that they are backward, that they’re illiterate, that they’re dirty and comical and shiftless and no good, they’re infants and they’re stupid, some of them, but we haven’t agreed on one thing and we never will. You deny that they’re human.”
And herein lies the paradox at the heart of “Watchman,” that many white Americans still cannot or will not comprehend: that one can at once believe in the ideal of “justice for all” — as Atticus once purported to — and yet maintain a deeply ingrained and unexamined notion of racial difference now based in culture as opposed to biology, a milder yet novel version of white supremacy manifest in, for example, racial profiling, unfair and predatory lending practices, disparate incarceration rates, residential and school segregation, discriminatory employment practices, and medical racism.
During the historical moment in which the novel takes place, in states such as Georgia and South Carolina, legislators had begun to authorize the raising of the Confederate flag over the Statehouse or the incorporation of it into the design of state flags, thus inscribing the kind of white Southern anxiety dramatized in Lee’s novel.
Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it gives us a way to look at history from a great distance. It has been 61 years since the Brown decision, and now we have the hindsight to see the larger impact that Lee’s characters could not quite see: an outcome, as Robert Penn Warren suggested, that “desegregation is just one small episode in the long effort for justice.”
