Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee

You are fascinated with yourself. You will say anything that occurs to you, but what I can’t understand are the things that do occur to you. I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth. We were both born here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder what you saw and heard. “—everybody knows the NAACP’s dedicated to the overthrow of the South . . .” Conceived in mistrust, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created evil. “—they make no bones about saying they want to do away with the Negro race, and they will in four generations, Bill says, if they start with this one . . .” I hope the world will little note nor long remember what you are saying here. “—and anybody who thinks different’s either a Communist or might as well be one. Passive resistance, my hind foot . . .” When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another they are Communists. “—they always want to marry a shade lighter than themselves, they want to mongrelize the race—”