The Watchman on the Shelf

For thus the Lord said to me: “Go, set a watchman, let him announce what he sees. When he sees riders, horsemen in pairs, riders on asses, riders on camels, let him listen diligently, very diligently.”

Isaiah 21:6-7 (RSV)

I bought Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman the day it came out but, months later, I’ve yet to read it. My reasons fall into three areas.

First, I always treasured To Kill a Mockingbird as a Great American Novel if not the Great American Novel. In many ways it addresses American’s issues with race, class, and gender which have not changed much since Mockingbird was published in 1960. Just check out today’s headlines: isolated enclaves where the select erect barriers against the “other” who is not one of “our” kind and where they imagine grievances that affirm their opinions of people they don’t know. Even when faced with evidence that they got it wrong, they cling to their “truth” until it hurts. We still have lessons to learn from To Kill a Mockingbird about our history and our present lives.

Even if the themes did not resonate across two centuries, Mockingbird is literarily rich. When I teach the novel, I always read aloud the beginning of the first chapter – using the last vestiges of my Mississippi accent overlaid with exaggeration. When the class has ended the novel, I read aloud the end of the last chapter and immediately re-read the beginning of the first chapter again. Full circle! Don’t you love it?

Then there’s the complication of narrator and point of view. I lead students to distinguish Jean Louise Finch, the adult narrator, from Scout Finch, the child from whose point of view we experience the story. Jean Louise has an adult’s vocabulary, prospective, and insight into what connects people and events across time. She knows how the story will end and so is careful to recount what really matters so we can understand as much as possible about what it all means. Scout is only six as the story begins and, I believe, eight by the end of the novel. She does “listen diligently, very diligently” and notes rich details of her experiences. We can  understand more than she does about what it all means only because of the rich details she gives us.

Unfortunately, some schools fail to see this distinction of point and view and narrator. For those without vision, it’s a child’s story and when students read it when they are too young to “get” what Scout misses, it remains a child’s story and they never arrive at what really matters. Was it Boo Radley’s coming out? Was it Bob Ewell’s poverty of self-worth? Was it Tom Robinson’s tragic ending? Was it Mayella’s pitiful existence? Was it Atticus’ parenting skills? Was it Scout, Jem, and Dill’s loss of innocence? Or was it the mockingbird that symbolizes each of these characters? (Guess which one I think matters most?)

I read the online free first chapter of Watchman before the book was released and did not get that chill as I did with the first sentences of Mockingbird. There was nothing special in the language and I was not inspired to take on a southern accent and read aloud. By the end of that sample, I was nearly bored and didn’t really care about Jean Louise’s fate. I really didn’t want to read any more. That is why the novel stares at me from my bookcase rarely tempting me to dive in.

My third reason for not yet reading Watchman is on a lighter -- and yet more serious -- note. The pace of life in Maycomb and the people who populated Harper Lee’s fictional town resonated with memories I have of my childhood in Jackson, Mississippi. The Radley house was much like my Aunt Sarah’s, with rumors of a specter who came out when no one was watching to do unmentionable deeds. Like Scout, Jem, and Dill, my sister and I daily dared each other to touch Aunt Sarah’s front steps, her porch, her door. Both of us would run screaming with laughter if we caught any movement of a shadow in the window. But there was no Nathan shutting her in the basement, away from the world.

When she finally emerged into the light of my grandparents’ living room, Aunt Sarah smiled and offered us sweet treats with bright innocent eyes. Like Boo Radley, Aunt Sarah kept to the shadowy corners of rooms when adults were present but relaxed her guard with children.

When I eventually was given her permission to enter Aunt Sarah's little house down the road from my grandparents, I glimpsed a solitary life in a one-room dollhouse. The one room was clean and orderly with neatly groomed dolls filling every room much like my home is always filled with books. Dolls posed on chairs, propped on shelves, relaxing on the bed, and even tenderly placed against furniture on the floor but not too close to the wood-burning stove. There were no fewer than three dolls in each spot.

Even when I was young, I knew Aunt Sarah had a problem (one I could never name) when I saw her holding a conversation with a roach crawling up the wall. Aunt Sarah died before I heard her story but I never doubted there was one as full as Boo’s with sorrow and regret, mystery and borrowed joy.

When I read that first chapter of Watchman, nothing resonated. In fact, I experienced the opposite. Jean Louise already the "watchman" looking from the dining car, her arrival at the train station and everything that happens after she gets off was alien to my childhood in Mississippi. First, the trains were segregated and we were only allowed in the dining car to serve. Pound cake and fried chicken in a shoebox were always part of our journey from Chicago to Jackson. Getting home from the train station was nowhere near as pleasant for me, scrunched in an overcrowded cab with eight other “Negro” passengers and carrying my own suitcase. I found no points of identification with this stranger and the people she met on her way.

It doesn’t bother me that Harper Lee writes about a white experience. What else could she do but “announce what [she] sees” and hears? The experience of growing up white in the south is her experience. In fact, I appreciate the fact that she does not write much about the Negroes of Maycomb. When I teach the book, I spend a good amount of time on the scene when Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to her church. Our only glimpse into Negro life may very well have been part of Harper Lee’s childhood experience, which explains why it’s part of Scout’s. The only other scene set in the Negro part of town was when Atticus goes to tell Helen Robinson of Tom’s death. In the book, Jem recounts his experience to Scout because she wasn’t there. It is likely Harper Lee had no direct experience of visiting a Negro neighborhood and there are only murky details mediated through Jem’s sleepy memory.

This leads me to the questions that occasionally tempt me to pick up Watchman. Do we learn more about the Negroes of Maycomb? Does Jean Louise venture where Scout did not/ could not? Do we learn what becomes of Helen Robinson and her children? Is Calpurnia still part of the Finches’ lives? What becomes of Dill? Does Jean Louise see Atticus with the same rose-colored glasses Scout wore? Has Maycomb changed in any significant way – as the result of world events if not the events we read about in Mockingbird? How does post-War War II Maycomb differ from post-Depression Maycomb?

If at least some of these questions are not addressed, I know I will be disappointed. Is it better to leave me with the satisfaction I gained from Mockingbird or to instill bitterness for Harper Lee’s failure to live up to the promise of her first novel?

More to come.