©
Charles D. Hayes
Harper Lee’s shocking revelation in Go Set a Watchman
offers us an extraordinary learning opportunity. Set twenty years after the
events of To Kill a Mockingbird, this
second novel discloses that Atticus Finch, the saintly hero of the first book, actually
harbored some of the racist views dominant in the early twentieth century.
In
Watchman, Jean Louise, known earlier
as Scout, returns home as an adult only to have the idealized memories of her
childhood destroyed by a reality she had been sheltered from as a child. Many
readers are crushed to learn this other side of the story, but the response is
forcing us to admit that Mockingbird
has been sheltering us all for half a century.
In
the movie version of To Kill a
Mockingbird, Gregory Peck portrays Atticus Finch as an exemplary human
being in a small town populated by white citizens, whose racial prejudice is so
deeply ingrained that they would rather convict an innocent black man than
embarrass a lower-class white family. But when you merge the Atticus of that
story with the Atticus portrayed twenty years later, what you have is a much
more convincing character in context.
Harper
Lee’s experience bringing Mockingbird
to publication in the late 1950s suggests that her editor held reformist views
about human rights and helped Lee mold Atticus into a virtuous moral icon. Now,
absent the former editor’s influence, Watchman
seems more truthful to Lee’s experience growing up in the South. I’m
sympathetic with critics who suggest that the supremacy of white culture is
also palpable in Mockingbird. Of
course it is, because racism was endemic in the South in those days, but the
idealism in the story moved millions.
Imagining
Gregory Peck as Atticus making racist statements is like going to the doctor
for a common cold and finding out you have cancer: it’s earth-shattering. In
the second novel, discovering the truth about the father she idealized makes a
grown-up Scout sick to her stomach. This should offer us some insight into how
people feel who are targeted for discrimination because of their race.
Racial
bigotry is complicated, but it’s not hard to understand. Psychologist Gordon
Allport laid the subject bare six years before the publication of Lee’s first
book. His work tells us everything we need to know to function peacefully as
adults on a planet teeming with racial diversity.
We
experience, internalize, and record bias and racial prejudice in a smoldering hotbed
of congealed and congested memories residing in our subconscious. When circumstances
pose questions about race, we rationalize because our feelings are vague and indecipherable,
existing as they do in an enormous database of conflicting experience. Our gray
matter keeps records, not of what is right, but of what it accepts as real.
That
we always have the upper hand in emotional matters is an illusion, especially
in social matters concerning ethnicity. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor
of our reasoning ability as a rider
and our emotional subconscious as an elephant
illustrates how we hold racial biases without being aware of the fact. The
metaphor emphasizes the power of our subconscious and the difficulty of taming our
emotions. The Atticus Finch in Mockingbird
is a rider in complete control, but in Watchman
his elephant rumbles and, at times, trumpets.
I’ve
always found it wretchedly disappointing that on a Saturday, people can read
books or watch movies like To Kill a
Mockingbird, Roots, Mississippi Burning, or 42 and empathize and sympathize completely
with the oppressed characters in the drama. Taking in the story, they agree wholeheartedly
about the injustice being depicted. And yet, by Monday morning, their elephant
is back to humming along, murmuring low-frequency racial prejudice.
In
Watchman, Atticus is said to be 72, my
current age, so I can relate to his being cantankerous. But more importantly, I
remember what it’s like to grow up in a racist community. It’s a context of prejudicial
social conformity with so few exceptions that I can recall none like the first
Atticus, myself included.
In
a recent debate, I was asked if I thought we know more today about human
behavior than, say, William Shakespeare knew in his time. After some deliberation,
I had to say no. The Bard was an astute observer of human behavior, and the
research conducted in recent decades offers hard evidence supporting how
predictably we, or Shakespeare’s characters, will behave.
What
we’ve discovered is critical for improving human relations—namely that we are
much more dependent upon context and much less firm, resolute, and unwavering
in our stalwart character than we have been taught. This is significant. In Watchman, instead of continuing to
idealize Atticus, Lee puts him in precise context with his time and place.
It’s
time we stopped romanticizing Mockingbird
through Scout’s childlike innocence. Public naiveté is an enormous obstacle to
overcoming bigotry. The same idealism that enables belief in Mockingbird’s Atticus is an impediment
to acknowledging Watchman’s older characterization
of Atticus and the subtle racism that’s still ubiquitous today.
We
need to apply everything we know about human behavior to relegating bigotry and
racism to the dustbin of history. The objective is simple: strive to make the
first Atticus the norm, not the exception. Mockingbird
is aspirational fiction; working through the disenchantment in Watchman is a way to begin the dialogue
necessary to achieve genuine equality.
When
Scout confronts her father and they have an emotionally aggressive exchange, it
opens the conversation we should be having now about dealing with intolerance. If
you don’t think racism is a problem today, either you are being childish or you
aren’t paying attention.
If
you are avoiding reading Watchman because
you prefer the illusion of innocence in Mockingbird,
I think Scout would say it’s time to grow up and speak up.
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