Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

HARPER LEE – GO SET A WATCHMAN – 2015

This is a very complicated book that is going to be debated and even controversially exposed and advocated as the work of “an ordinary turnip-sized bigot” about “an ordinary turnip-sized bigot” concerning the tenth amendment to the US Constitution on one hand, or, on the other hand, as a fireman turned arsonist on questions like school integration, racial integration, racial equality, equal right to vote, one person one vote, and even plain social integration and equal chances to all, even the poor white clearly identified as “trash” by many characters in the book, a type of “trash” the daughter of an established family (meaning one family that is on top of the basket in the community) cannot marry, even if they have been friends for all their lives and even if he is treated like a son in the family business by the father of the young “lady.” This is a caste system, racial against Blacks and social against poor whites.

There is a comment I want to make before starting examining the book itself. It is the title, a quotation of Isaiah (21:6) fully referenced page 95. The book contains many quotations and allusions to quotations, but this one is all the more important since it is the title of the book. Chapter 21 of Isaiah is entitled “The fall of Babylon.” The author forgets about it. In the same chapter the watchman tells us the message he got on his watch:

Look, here come the cavalry, horsemen two by two.

They spoke to me; they said,

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon, and all the images of her gods are shattered on the ground.” (21:9)

This is important because Babylon and her slaves, Babylon and her social corruption, Babylon and her prostitution can only be the South and their slaves, and their social segregation, and their both immoral and unethical treatment, exploitation, perversion of human beings declared inferior, subhuman and even by some non-human. The book does express this racist idea over and over again and in the mouths of the main characters. We are in the early 1950s after the Supreme Court ruling on the integration of schools. Jean Louise, with some sarcasm for sure, declares to her father, Atticus, the lawyer of To Kill A Mockingbird:

“We’ve agreed that they’re backward, that they’re illiterate, that they’re dirty and comical and shiftless and no good, they’re infants and they’re stupid, some of them, but we haven’t agreed on one thing, and we never will. You deny that they’re human.” (p. 251)

We remembered the first book, To Kill A Mockingbird, as a severe denunciation of racism in the South before the Second World War. But here in the early 1950s before the famous events of 1956 and the emergence of Martin Luther King, the books defends a spirit in the South that is defensive against the US Supreme Court that is going against the tenth amendment to the US Constitution and meddles with business like education which is not a constitutional prerogative and competence of Congress and which should be entirely under the sole responsibility of the various states.

And the characters are clear about their originality. First established families must not mix with white poor “trash” who are the Dalits of the South. Second Blacks are supposed to remain separate, to remain in their place, in all the businesses and services the State legislatures will deem right like education, buses, trains, restaurants, churches, and many other things. Third Blacks are even lower that the poor white “trash,” which makes them lower than these Dalits, and under these Untouchable whites there can only be animals. Blacks are part of what was called chattel in the Middle Ages, all the movable items of property that were neither land nor items permanently attached to the land (constructed buildings, wells, lakes, etc.) and the term included among other things but essentially all animals and the serfs. Slavery has been removed after a five year long war, so there are no slaves any more but the Blacks are nothing but serfs.

The book voices only one opinion about the NAACP: trouble makers who want one person one vote and for all people over the age of 21 to have the right to get registered to vote without any screening, hence a new reconstruction, as several characters say, that would give all powers to the Blacks who are… see the above quotation.

If you read the book at that word for word literal superficial meaning it is a defense of the South of segregation (the famous absurdity of “separate but equal,” or the even more absurd wording of “equal because separate”) against the federal rulings and decisions that will bring equal vote for all, one public school system for all, etc. Note at the time the only church that was consistently integrated was the Catholic Church. As such a description of the South in let’s say 1952 it is absolutely amazing and flabbergasting. It is powerful because Jean Louise, the daughter, has been sent to New York by her father Atticus after her basic education for her to have her own life, though we have no precision about it. She reacts as a New Yorker and is shocked and that makes us think there is going to be some middle of the way compromise. She will marry her friend Henry/Hank who is the direct associate of her father and yet is from the poor white “trash.” We hope she will become an advocate of the new order coming to the South or just go back to New York.

In fact there is no compromise. She drops Henry/Hank and will not marry him because he goes along with the resistance of the South against desegregation. This argument is a lie anyway since she forgives her father who did exactly the same thing, and the book is clear she will not marry Henry/Hank even after she has forgiven her father, after she has decided to stay in the South to take her place in the family.

The book is thus extremely cruel with the characters.

But we have to read the book with the distance of more than sixty years between 1952 and today. Harper Lee gives us a slice of South ideology at a very important moment in their history and as such the book is a strong criticism of this ideology. And yet it is difficult to see that criticism in the novel itself since the only one who was critical, Jean Louise, is manipulated by her father, her uncle and her aunt into re-integrating the South and accepting to be an original voice in that crowd of segregation blocked white people, and even accepting to reject Henry/Hank as potential husband;, and not because she would be ostracized, since she would not be for very long anyway, but because she would ostracize herself from Southern society by doing that. That leads to the idea that racism, segregation, castes are genetic entities. Once born in them, forever members and supporters of them.

And that’s probably why this book should be read, even if you will regret, like me, that the ending is not opening any door to what was to come starting in 1956. I am sure there were some signs announcing that turning point in history that was to be fatal, lethal and deadly to segregation, though not to racism, far from it with all the Black men who are killed week after week by police forces or the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU