You Can Go Home Again...Fifty-five years ago Harper Lee stunned the literary world with a little gem of a first novel that was pure magic. In it, she introduced someone who would become the best-loved character in all of American fiction, a small-town Southern lawyer named Atticus Finch. Atticus was presented as a loving father, an able lawyer, and a figure of towering integrity, holding off a lynch mob to protect a young black man falsely accused of raping a white girl. After publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch was all but sanctified as a paragon of virtue. So it came as an almighty shock when it turned out that the literary hero has feet of clay after all and that Atticus Finch, of all people, was a flat-out racist.Well, given the time and the place, how could he not have been? Atticus, like everybody else, is a product of his environment, and Maycomb County, Alabama adhered strictly to the mores of the Deep South. Black people must be kept in their place. There were thousands of white people all across the South who, like Atticus, treated individual blacks with kindness and courtesy but who were appalled at the idea of black children going to school with their own. Why sakes alive, they might end up marrying each other. Yes, Atticus was committed to justice in the legal sense, but he was never interested in raising the condition of black people where he lived. He sent his children to all-white schools and his devoted housekeeper, Calpurnia, had to enter the house by the back door, and he had no problem with any of it. But his daughter Scout, who was presented as a delightfully devilish little tomboy in TKAM, has expanded her horizons since living in New York City, and on her annual visits back home she has come to realize that segregation was unfair, unjust, and just plain wrong. Scout is Jean Louise now, 20 years older than she was when we first met her, and she feels totally out of place in the world she was born into and raised. She sees Atticus at a meeting of the local White Citizens Council where they are handing out tracts spewing racist garbage and she is literally sick at her stomach. This is the father she has loved unquestioningly since the day she was born and now she has seen another side of him that is totally alien and antipathetic. The big question in "Go Set a Watchman" is if she can still love and accept her father now that she sees him warts and all.Jean Louise's hometown is going through a crisis set off by Brown vs. the Board of Education in which the Supreme Court decided school segregation was illegal, and it's brought out the worst side of people she thought she knew all her life. The white population of Maycomb County sees the end of their world as they knew it. They look at the black people whom they had always seen as being safely subordinate with fear and suspicion. Jean Louise goes to visit Calpurnia, now old and retired, and it suddenly occurs to her to wonder if Calpurnia had hated the Finches all along for belonging to the race that has oppressed black people for two centuries. Nothing makes sense to her any more.Harper Lee's laconic and often humorous writing style is still evident in GSAW and the book flows along effortlessly; it's a short, easy read. There are some flashbacks to the first book; my favorite is a description of Scout, Jem and Dill playing Missionary in the Finch's back yard and Dill swipes one of his Aunt Rachel's best sheets, cuts two holes in it for eyes, drapes it over his head and solemnly proclaims he's the Holy Ghost. But Dill and Jem are missing from the present day; Dill was last known to be traveling through Italy and Jem, having inherited their mother's cardiac condition, dropped dead of a heart attack before his thirtieth birthday. Aunt Alexandra is still around, though, as stubborn and stiff-necked as always, and so is Jean Louise's Uncle Jack Finch, who finally helps her to understand that her father is not the paragon she thought he was nor the demon he seems to her now, but is simply a good, decent and yet flawed human being.Lee wrote "Go Set a Watchman" in the third person, and perhaps this is one reason why it lacks the sheer wonder and magic that ran all through "To Kill a Mockingbird". GSAW was the first draft of TKAM and it's hard to say if it's a prequel or a sequel; certainly it's the latter in view of the time setting. Jean Louise has grown up to be a strong, forceful young woman, and as her Uncle Jack Finch observes, she is one of the very few color-blind people he has ever met. Jean Louise sees people as people, whatever their color. We wonder where she got it from. Wherever it came from, she is very much her own person, still growing, developing and changing, just like the home she left and is gradually finding her way back to.Judy Lind34
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