Scout Finch, the kid heroine of To Kill a Mockingbird, was born colour blind. This is how she says it when she's 26 and goes by her adult name Jean Louise. She says it like this right after she's discovered that Atticus Finch, the rock of her life, is not the sturdy monolith she had counted on. He's frail and movable and, to his devoted daughter, suddenly, profoundly disappointing.
Flannery O'Connor was right when she said that To Kill a Mockingbird was a good novel — for children. 'When I was 15 I would have loved it,' she wrote to a friend.
O'Connor's own stories, steeped in the mud of a gothic, Catholic uncertainly, could never be classed as morally sure. Accordingly, her stories did not tap into the desires of the masses the way Mockingbird did. She didn't make it into the required reading lists set for every 15-year-old English student over the next 50 years.
My best friend Z and I sat side by side while we — at 15, of course — studied the novel. Now Z lives in Detroit and is rocked, she says, by the racial segregation she's exposed to there.
We talked about Harper Lee's death, how moved we were by it, having bonded as kids over the passionate conversations and letters the novel inspired. She said, 'I was in awe of Atticus and his relationship with his children. I remember how much of a hero he was to me, how desperately I wanted for him to save the accused black man.
'Maybe if I had read it at my age now, I'd substitute the black man for the hero.'
She articulated what I couldn't: that as gorgeous in its depiction of mid-century southern summers, as moving a piece of rhetoric it is, Mockingbird is no longer an adequate text. At least not adequate for studying the opacity of human entanglement. Its morality is too saccharine, too outrageously simple.
Now is not the time to invest the hopes for radical change in the hands of men who benefit from things staying more or less the same.
Mockingbird is a fable of benevolent white liberalism, and benevolent white liberalism, in real life, has not delivered on its utopian promise.
Sixty years on, racial equality has not been substantiated here or in the states, and the institutions that this worldview rests on, and which Atticus Finch epitomises — justice (the law), knowledge (education), pragmatism (capitalism), and moderation (protestant ethics) — have proven to be woefully underequipped to incite material change.
Enter Go Set a Watchman, Lee's second published novel, which was released late last year. It was slated as a sequel to Mockingbird but was in fact an early draft of the novel — the prose is less assured, and the structure fairly clunky and shapeless.
But, the moral muck! In this incarnation, set 20 years after Mockingbird, Jean Louise comes back home to Maycomb from New York. 'She wondered why she never thought her country beautiful,' Lee writes of Jean Louise's passage back home. Home won't be beautiful, we discover, until Jean Louise learns to unpack her childish beliefs in her father's moral certainty.
In Watchman, Atticus is kind, yes, moderate, yes, thoughtful, sure: but he is also wrong. In his old age, he has stretched his pragmatic moderation to favour Jim Crow segregation laws.
In Mockingbird, the Maycomb County courthouse is a site of Atticus' impassioned pleas to equality: 'Gentlemen, if there's one slogan in this world I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none.' In Watchman, it's the meeting place for white segregationists (including Atticus) to collectively convince themselves of their divine right to lead, to dictate how far civil rights will extend.
The interesting parallel between the novels is that Mockingbird's Atticus is Watchman's Atticus — the character's trajectory is clear, and this is shocking only because of the vaunted place To Kill a Mockingbird enjoys in its many readers lives. Atticus Finch was godly. How can he be complicit, too?
Watchman is titled after a passage in Isiah, verse six:
'For thus the Lord said unto me,
Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.'
With this, Lee infers that you need to have some distance to really see. And that someone needs to be keeping watch.
The sad thing is, Lee's death might have gone completely unnoticed if Go Set a Watchman had been released instead of To Kill a Mockingbird back in 1960.
She might never have won the Pulitzer, sold 40 million copies of her first novel, or gotten onto year ten reading lists, because Watchman tells the story of hard truths, rather than the ones our hearts wish to believe in. That we're complicit when we think we're not; that we never really have the distance to be our own watchmen.
Ellena Savage is the Editor at The Lifted Brow, commissioning Editor at Spook Magazine, and a graduate student in creative writing.