Like any red-blooded American English major, I love To Kill a Mockingbird. My appreciation for it was actually determined before me prenatally. Before I was born, my parents decided they would nickname me Scout if I was a girl. I honestly sort of wish they’d kept with that plan even when I came out a boy, because Scout Finch might be my favorite protagonist in any story. She’s got a naivety and innocence that seems so authentic to the way that kids really think and act. The fragment of her growing up we see in the story, along with the longer one we see hinted at with the adult narrator, feels so real and personal. But despite all that, she’s not even my favorite character in the book. That title goes to Atticus, of course. His empathy towards anyone, and justice informed by that empathy, makes him the embodiment of everything that Americans should try to live up to. His philosophy helped me make sense of how I could love my hometown of Waco, even as I realized the racist and cruel elements of its past and present.
Of course, gushing about To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t anything original (there’s a reason it’s taught in nearly every high school English class, after all). And saying that I was deeply disturbed by Atticus’s portrayal in Harper Lee’s posthumously published first draft, Go Set a Watchman, isn’t either. I held off on reading it until now because I’d heard so many complaints about how it recasts one of my favorite characters of all time as a racist. But finally I figured that I needed to read every word of the story I loved, so I picked up a copy.
It was worse than I’d thought. Before reading I’d imagined the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman as a totally new character who just happened to share the name with the final version’s moral center. But Go Set a Watchman doesn’t just change Atticus’s character, it recontextualizes his most noble actions in To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman’s Atticus doesn’t defend poor black men out of empathy, he does it so that black lawyers don’t get the news and come into Maycomb to enact lasting change. Of course, these novels don’t exist in the same fictional universe, but all the same it may hint at a dark hidden meaning for Atticus’s character in To Kill a Mockingbird. He had the resources and the knowledge to get more radical lawyers involved in Tom Robinson’s trial, so why did he go into the trial alone, noble but ultimately doomed?
I read this disturbing revelation at the same time, almost down to the minute, that Trump signed an executive order stopping the separation of undocumented immigrant children from their families. The two moments almost harmonized with their uncomfortable ambiguity. On its face, this was the American system of democracy working. Journalists had uncovered an inhumane practice, the public had raged against it, and the government had stopped it. All the same, it didn’t punish the man who’d decided to break up families on such a massive scale. It didn’t do anything for the 2,000 children who were detained before the policy shift who will remain separated from their families. And it didn’t do a damn thing to stop the countless other atrocities that don’t photograph quite as well but involve just as much human suffering.
One of the great things about living in a family of professors and students is that there’s always someone to talk to about distressing questions in literature and politics. Another is that everyone always has summer break off. So my mom had nothing better to do when I told her about how much the new Atticus disturbed me. She was actually the one who brought the recent executive order into the conversation, and tied the two together with the T. S. Elliot quote, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
After a long talk with her, I ended up coming down less hard on Atticus Finch and the American public (Trump doesn’t get off so easy, though). Atticus may have lost his way in his later years and traded harmony in Maycomb’s white community over radical but potentially lasting change even in his prime. We as Americans (me as much as anyone) might have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to atrocities and only really use our democratic power when it comes to the most extreme circumstances. But we all draw the moral line somewhere, whether it’s splitting up families out of spite for immigrants or letting a man die for a crime he didn’t commit. We need to push that line further, and God willing we will, but at least there’s hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment