Mockingbird (14 page)

She would have to carefully budget the Browns' gift of money, but it was enough to pay for rent, utilities, and canned groceries destined for the hot plate in her flat. She quit her job at BOAC, and soon her writing regimen fell into place: out of bed in the late morning, a dose of coffee, and then to work—all day long until midnight sometimes. All she needed was “paper, pen, and privacy.”
20
Now that she'd been liberated from having to work nine to five, her output soared.

*   *   *

A novel requires a situation with heft: it must be large in scope, with important ideas and shifting alliances between characters. A theme, or several, should emerge. Until now, Lee had been writing short stories. But away in Monroeville, a small drama had ended recently involving her father and the Reverend Ray E. Whatley, the minister who had presided at Edwin's funeral in July 1951. There were issues connected with circumstances of the type she wanted to address in fiction. As she sat down to write her first novel, it's worth recounting what had happened because of the light it casts on the Monroeville she left behind.

To start with, her father did not believe that a church pulpit was the proper place for preaching about secular issues—politics and so forth. The mission of the Methodist church was to bring people to salvation,
not
to promote social justice. He was a gradualist when it came to change, and believed that Sunday service should not be turned into a debating society. On this point he was in agreement with Methodist pastor G. Stanley Frazier, an outspoken segregationist in Montgomery who believed that the church should bring souls to God, and not ensnare them in transient social problems.

Not long after Edwin Lee's funeral, the relationship between A. C. Lee and the Reverend Whatley began going downhill. For Labor Day, Whatley delivered a sermon titled “The Laborer.” After pointing out that control of the church was often in the hands of the wealthy, he warned, “If we lose the common man from our church, it will spell doom for us, for there are always labor unions and other organizations to welcome him in.”
21
There were whispers afterward that the sermon had “created some feeling.”

Six months later, in February 1952, Whatley gave a sermon entitled “A Brotherhood of Love,” about race relations. “There are many mistaken assumptions about Negroes in America,” he told the congregation. He disputed impressions about Negroes' desiring to intermarry with whites and about Negroes being intellectually inferior, which tests had shown not to be true. He called for equal economic opportunity, saying that it was the purpose of the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), for example, to try to end discrimination in hiring practices.
22

If Whatley had touched A. C. Lee with the frayed end of an electrical cord, he couldn't have sent a stronger jolt through him. Lee was adamantly opposed to the FEPC, as were many businessmen. Federal hiring guidelines, he had once declared in an editorial, would “take away from every employer in this United States the right to choose his employees.”
23

In any case, he'd heard enough—he was going to have to speak to Whatley privately after the service ended. The young reverend needed to be taken in hand, and firmly. Lee was chairman of the Official Church Board, a deacon, and a lay member of the Methodist Annual Conference; his influence had been felt in the church's decision to accept Whatley in the first place.

After the last of the congregants had exited, he told Reverend Whatley that he needed to see him. They walked to Lee's office at the back of the sanctuary, where his lifetime of involvement in the Methodist church was visible everywhere, from the pictures on the walls to the books on the shelves. Soon after he and his family arrived in Monroeville, in 1912, he had volunteered to serve on the building committee for a new church, the first in the area since 1835. But scarcely had the debt been retired than the building caught fire, in 1929. The committee reconvened and started again; so Lee had twice been instrumental in administering a Methodist church in Monroeville.

Now, he barely waited for Whatley to close the door before getting to the point.

“Get off the ‘social justice' and get back on the gospel,” he said sharply.
24

Shocked, Whatley explained that he believed it was within his responsibilities as minister to speak about issues that touched on all moral questions that Christians should be concerned about, especially brotherhood.

A.C. cut him off. He wasn't interested in a theological debate: the day's sermon was inappropriate and had upset people. They felt lectured to, and that's not what they came to church for. If anything, Whatley had alienated people. Was that his purpose?

Whatley admitted that it wasn't, of course. A.C. became more conciliatory and urged the young man, in the future, to keep the church's mission foremost in his mind. That was important.

A year passed until Whatley preached on the theme of brotherhood again; his sermon, “My Brother's Keeper,” took its title from Genesis 4:1–10, in which Cain asks God if he should be expected to take care of his brother Abel. No offense could have been taken from his initial observations about the challenges of interacting with people. But then he turned to Alabama and the example it presented. Because of the impact of mass communication, “no longer can we isolate ourselves and our actions. They are heard and seen literally around the world. Any act of injustice, unfair discrimination, or intimidation occurring in the United States—whether in Alabama, New York, or any other state—may make headlines all over America. But that is not all. These incidents make splendid propaganda materials on the other side of the globe.

“Who then are our brothers?” Whatley continued. “Surely we would not say that God does not love a yellow man, or a brown man, or a red man, or a black man just as he does a white man. He is the God and Father of us all. If that is true, then we are all brothers.”
25

The remainder of the sermon was anecdotal, but the die was cast. The board of the church convened and in the spring of 1953 they informed Reverend Whatley that the members were seeking a “more evangelistic” preacher; they would be requesting that he be assigned to another post.

The vagueness of the reasons given was deliberate. “When they initially opposed you, they would try not to oppose you on the issue of race,” said the former Methodist minister Donald Collins, author of
When the Church Bell Rang Racist:
The Methodist Church and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
(1998). “They would always try to find something else, if they could. If they couldn't be successful at that, then they would attack you on race.”
26
For years afterward, Whatley wondered why a minister couldn't be both evangelistic in the traditional sense and also preach a social gospel. But “concerns for racial justice and brotherhood were apparently part of my problem,” he decided.
27

Reassigned to the six-hundred-member St. Mark's United Methodist Church in Montgomery, Whatley became active in issues of race and equality. In 1955, he was elected president of the Montgomery chapter of the Alabama Council on Human Relations. His vice president was twenty-six-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

*   *   *

In January 1957, Harper Lee returned to Maurice Crain's office with a short story, “The Cat's Meow,” and the first fifty pages of a novel,
Go Set a Watchman
, the title taken from the book of Isaiah in the King James translation, “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth” (Isaiah 21:6). A week later, she was back again, this time with one hundred more pages. From then on, she dropped off about fifty new pages with Crain every week through the end of February.
28
With the first draft of the novel in hand, Crain got out his red pencil and went to work editing it. The parent of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, he later said, “was about the most replanned and rewritten book I ever had a hand in, and it turned out finally that all the labor on it was well justified.”
29

In
Go Set a Watchman
, twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch returns by train, the Crescent Limited, to Maycomb, Alabama, after an absence of five years in New York City to visit the town and the people that nurtured her. The novel's opening is one of its better-written passages:

The countryside and the train had subsided to a gentle roll, and she could see nothing but pastureland and black cows from window to horizon. She wondered why she had never thought her country beautiful.… The train clacketed through pine forests and honked derisively at a gaily-painted bell-funneled museum piece sidetracked in a clearing. It bore the sign of a lumber concern, and the Crescent Limited could have swallowed it whole with room to spare. Greenville, Evergreen, Maycomb Junction.

As if reluctant to stop, the train overshoots the station by a quarter mile and Jean Louise steps off with her luggage, helped down by the conductor. Waiting for her a few pages into the novel are many of the characters who later appear in
To Kill a Mockingbird
: her father, Atticus; Aunt Alexandra; Uncle Jack Finch; Calpurnia. Dill is mentioned, too; but Jem has died in a manner similar to Edwin Lee's sudden, early death.

The place she's stepping into is the landscape of her childhood—a southern childhood, haunted by the past. As a former U.S. senator from Alabama, Maryon Pittman Allen, born in 1925, describes that lost world: “Southern children don't simply skip and play through their lives. Family affects them immensely: how the family lives, what it believes in every kind of way. We feel a need for a long time to mimic what our elders say, do, believe, and strongly feel. But some children eventually break out of the family mold and become their own persons and learn to have beliefs of their own, usually beginning in college.”
30
It's precisely the moment of separation between parent and child, past and present, that Lee addresses in
Go Set a Watchman
; a sudden sense of unbelonging—the “apartness” that Lee felt as a child is amplified into a kind of vertigo that the returning twenty-eight-year-old Jean Louise experiences as nausea. “Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not wanted. We have secrets.”

The second most important character after Jean Louise is her father, Atticus Finch. Had
Go Set a Watchman
been published before
To Kill a Mockingbird
, readers would have been introduced to him as a gnarled old gentleman of seventy-two—about the same age as Harper Lee's beloved father in 1956—who is bent and ailing from rheumatoid arthritis. He is a courtly man, insightful, politically astute, and a good judge of people—characteristics Mr. Lee shared with his fictional likeness. He is, however, a man of his time, belonging to the generation that was born before the turn of the twentieth century.

Atticus at seventy-two cannot see any good coming of the changes being forced on the South by the federal government, the courts, and organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Atticus warns Jean Louise that the NAACP will continue to litigate for equality “with its fantastic demands and shoddy ideas of government” and overturn everything that's been so carefully maintained. White Southerners of high and low station alike perceive a second Era of Reconstruction being visited on them, and they are rallying their forces to resist it.
31
The generation that experienced the social leveling of the Great Depression will fight against going back there.

Trying to see that period through the eyes of white adults—not from Scout's innocence as a child in
To Kill a Mockingbird
—is critical to understanding why Atticus Finch in
Go Set a Watchman
is a racist.

*   *   *

What nine-year-old Scout only glimpses in
To Kill a Mockingbird
is the economic collapse of southern society and the impact of the Great Depression. Atticus gives her a lesson. “The Cunninghams [who pay their bills with farm produce] are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest.” Professional people are poor because farmers are poor: “nickels and dimes were hard to come by for doctors and dentists and lawyers.” This was the hardscrabble life of poverty that had oppressed blacks for generations; but to whites, the loss of social status—loss of a sense of “better than”—felt humiliating.

In Dothan, Alabama, for example, a town not far from Monroeville, a desperate man in 1934 scraped together fifteen cents to send a telegram to Governor B. M. Miller:
AM BLIND AND CANT WORK IN THE DITCHES AND UNEMPLOYED AGENCY WONT GIVE ME ANY GROCERIES THAT CAME IN TODAY SALVATION ARMY WONT HELP US WE NEED SOMETHING TO EAT PLEASE WIRE BY WESTERN UNION WHAT TO DO
. Hunters took to the woods with such grimness that no deer or wild turkeys were left, only small game. One cold morning in the mid-1930s, Harper Lee's cousin R. B. “Dickie” Williams rose at dawn to hunt in the fields surrounding Finchburg. He was out all day with several other young men until the autumn sky grew dark. The count was six raccoons, twenty-nine squirrels, five ducks, and a rabbit. Nelle sometimes found bushel baskets of homegrown food left on the back steps in lieu of cash payment for her father's legal services, just as Scout does in
To Kill a Mockingbird.

Faced with such a falling off in status, whites sought to keep themselves ascendant in ways large and small. Unscrupulous employers were known to “cook the books” to keep washerwomen, housekeepers, yardmen, sweepers, and nannies dependent on them, for instance. Schools for black children were poorly equipped and unfunded, making illiteracy another tool of oppression.
32
The “Black Codes” governing the relationship between whites and blacks had existed since Emancipation, but during hard times, blacks needed to be especially careful about not seeming to act “above” themselves.