Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee

Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her. Henry Clinton was Jean Louise’s own kind, and now she did not consider the dictum particularly harsh.

“Isn’t it fairer for a man to be able to see what he’s letting himself in for?” “Yes, but don’t you see you’ll never catch a man that way?” She bit her tongue on the obvious, and said, “How do I go about being an enchantress?” Henry warmed to his subject. At thirty, he was an adviser. Maybe because he was a lawyer. “First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.”

When his daughter was miserable she prowled, and Atticus liked his women to be relaxed, not constantly emptying ashtrays.

Hell is eternal apartness.

She had been half willing to sponge out what she had seen and heard, creep back to New York, and make him a memory. A memory of the three of them, Atticus, Jem, and her, when things were uncomplicated and people did not lie. But she would not have him compound the felony. She could not let him add hypocrisy to it:

“All the Democratic Party has to do with Jefferson these days is put his picture up at banquets. Jefferson believed full citizenship was a privilege to be earned by each man, that it was not something given lightly nor to be taken lightly. A man couldn’t vote simply because he was a man, in Jefferson’s eyes. He had to be a responsible man. A vote was, to Jefferson, a precious privilege a man attained for himself in a—a live-and-let-live economy.”

“Then let’s put this on a practical basis right now. Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” “They’re people, aren’t they? We were quite willing to import them when they made money for us.”

You deny that they’re human.” “How so?” “You deny them hope. Any man in this world, Atticus, any man who has a head and arms and legs, was born with hope in his heart. You won’t find that in the Constitution, I picked that up in church somewhere. They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.

A real good snub, Atticus, makes you feel like you’re too nasty to associate with people. How they’re as good as they are now is a mystery to me, after a hundred years of systematic denial that they’re human. I wonder what kind of miracle we could work with a week’s decency.

“Uncle Jack, I am so sick and damn tired of listening to the lot of you I could yell bloody murder! Won’t you leave me alone? Can’t you get off my back for one minute?” She slammed down the trunk lid, snatched out the key, and straightened up to catch Dr. Finch’s savage backhand swipe full on the mouth. Her head jerked to the left and met his hand coming viciously back. She stumbled and groped for the car to balance herself. She saw her uncle’s face shimmering among the tiny dancing lights. “I am trying,” said Dr. Finch, “to attract your attention.”

I fail to detect the difference between drinking it and eatin’ it . . . we’re all of us going to hell, it’s just a question of time . . . don’t be such an old pot, Sister, I’m not lyin’ on the floor yet . . . why don’t you have one?”

Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.”

“. . . now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line fastened it like a barnacle onto your father’s. As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings—I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.”

“You wouldn’t have listened to him. You couldn’t have listened. Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level.” “Is that why he didn’t—didn’t lam into me? Is that why he didn’t even try to defend himself?” “He was letting you break your icons one by one. He was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.”

“When you stopped running, Jean Louise, and turned around, that turn took fantastic courage.” “Sir?” “Oh, not the kind of courage that makes a soldier go across no-man’s-land. That’s the kind that he summons up because he has to. This kind is—well, it is part of one’s will to live, part of one’s instinct for self-preservation. Sometimes, we have to kill a little so we can live,

“You’ve no doubt heard some pretty offensive talk since you’ve been home, but instead of getting on your charger and blindly striking it down, you turned and ran. You said, in effect, ‘I don’t like the way these people do, so I have no time for them.’ You’d better take time for ’em, honey, otherwise you’ll never grow.

“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”

But the white supremacists fear reason, because they know cold reason beats them. Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

“That’s the one thing about here, the South, you’ve missed. You’d be amazed if you knew how many people are on your side, if side’s the right word. You’re no special case. The woods are full of people like you, but we need some more of you.”

the time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re right—” “What do you mean?” “I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days. You don’t have it yet, but you have a shadow of the beginnings of it. You haven’t the humbleness of mind—”

He was the only person she ever knew who could paraphrase three authors into one sentence and have them all make sense.

Atticus said, “I can take anything anybody calls me so long as it’s not true.

As she welcomed him silently to the human race, the stab of discovery made her tremble a little.