Go Set a Watchman is a book I tore through in about four days (If I'd been on vacation, no doubt I would have finished in a day or two). I felt that I could not trust my opinion about this particular book to reviewers, and I don't regret the read. As Adam Gopnik makes clear in his review, "Sweet Home Alabama" in the New Yorker (July 27, 2015), To Kill a Mocking Bird is one of the novels read in school that most people do/did not forget. Did I read it in 8th or 10th grade? That little matters now, some thirty years later. What matters is how the novel led my classmates and I to think about the problem of racism in American society. Atticus was a hero—and when I spent time analyzing the 1962 film version and Gregory Peck's role some years later my opinion of the primary importance of this book's release during the Civil Rights movement remained basically unchanged: reading literature not only leads people to think, it may push them to change their behaviors.
While reading Go Set a Watchman, readers may find themselves easily identifying with Jean Louise's dismay at her father's mediocrity in his small town "rearguard" positioning in the 1950s, while his stance almost twenty years earlier seemed remarkable in its daring integrity.
But maybe what all of us need to wake up to—even in the USA of President Barack Obama—are those little unheeded signs of inherent racism. Jean Louise wants to get beyond it, but she's only able to eject about three quarters of what she must have imbibed from her community as a child. Some elements from her early education will always remain. The best any individual can do with those elements of inherent prejudice, I suppose, is to be on the alert for them, identify them and try to continually struggle to eradicate them as they appear. But humans do err and Jean Louise describes "the musky sweet smell of clean Negro" when she enters Calpurnia's house on a visit (page 156 in the London Heinemann edition of Watchman). This scene smells of Jean Louise's own racism, negating her claim of color-blindness: why does she never mention how her white people smell? Doesn't Uncle Jack, Aunt Alexandra, or her aging father have some kind of odor, say at least a bit of halitosis?
If this novel is the prequel, then To Kill a Mockingbird, it's sequel, deliberately draws the reader into the fusion between Scout and her father, asking that we too see Atticus as hero—someone working against racism. With Scout, Jem, and Dill we learn that Boo Radley and Tom Robinson were both good men. That's already something, and Harper Lee should be lauded for getting that far and for taking her readers along for the ride. Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, it was the child's voice that could set the younger and the older white reader to really thinking about and questioning the racist status quo. With the Boo Radley parallel, the book was also taking a stance against Eugenics. Whether or not we saw that as students, we certainly wanted to believe in the goodness of Atticus and we wanted that kind of goodness to characterize us too.
What is needed today, in our current context, may be the retelling of this tale from Calpurnia's point of view. Harper Lee may not be able to adequately tackle that subject, though for some (but the point remains debatable), Kathryn Stockett's The Help may be a beginning. There Minny trashes Gone with the Wind, but never comments on Harper Lee. Nostalgia is a motivating drive in Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Go Set a Watchman, but the nostalgia involved is completely different: Margaret Mitchell regrets a slave-driven economy that allowed her a life of privilege and ease—do note how happy those slaves looked in the 1939 film's opening scenes as the Confederate flag flew over Atlanta. Lee regrets the innocence of her childhood where she thought her father was an upright color-blind man. Lee was trying to fight against racism in both books, and my guess is most folks in the USA should still be trying to do the same. I refer doubters on that score to a quote from Dream Hampton read on Detroit's writer-in-residence Casey Rocheteau's blog on Write a House (July 16, 2015): "If you look around and find yourself in an all white space you should know you are having a racially curated experience, like a Kenyan safari."
The inside cover illustration in my British edition of Go Set a Watchman is disturbing. It is a railroad track that gets smaller in the distance where it meets the horizon. There is no visible station or train, only the track. The novel would seemingly provide a context: Jean Louise returning home from New York via the train, or some might see it as an image of the Great Migration from the South to the North. Yet such illustrations have been used strikingly elsewhere—and since the Holocaust as well as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), no doubt the significance of an image of a lone train track has changed. Does it bear some fatalistic meaning that should be sought after?
The core of the novel is revealed in its title: Go Set a Watchman. Viewers of the Mockingbird film will remember the watch that haunts the film's opening moments. Jean Louise attends the Sunday morning service in chapter 7 of Watchman, and hears the preacher read Isaiah 21:6, "For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth" (95). If that is not Harper Lee's writing creed, I do not know what is. It is confirmed later in the book, when Uncle Jack says, "Every man's island, Jean Louise, every man's watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious" (265). For Harper Lee, it is declaring what she sees in her idealized child's vision of her home town and in her father that form the story To Kill a Mockingbird.
Yes, there is much to criticize in the prequel, but the depth of what Harper Lee was working against also becomes starkly clear, and makes her masterpiece achievement of 1960 all the more palpable.
And there may be a message or two for the common reader to latch on to, such as this prophetic statement coming from Uncle Dr. Jack:
The only thing I'm afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn't be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won't be that way much longer. (198)
The smell of racism has long been linked to the smell of money.
Cotton was the major crop on the plantations of Alabama, but the sentiment in this song matches something in Watchman.
Links
"Plantation Agriculture" Encyclopedia of Alabama (Nov 7, 2008 and Feb 21, 2011).
Write a House (Detroit).
"CEOs earn 331 times as much..." Forbes (April 15, 2014).