Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee

Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming in the middle of the river last night with no clothes on.” “H’rm,” said Atticus. He touched his glasses. “I hope you weren’t doing the backstroke.”

He was a young man, a Mr. Stone by name, with what Dr. Finch called the greatest talent for dullness he had ever seen in a man on the near side of fifty. There was nothing whatever wrong with Mr. Stone, except that he possessed all the necessary qualifications for a certified public accountant: he did not like people, he was quick with numbers, he had no sense of humor, and he was butt-headed.

She walked down the steps and into the shade of a live oak. She put her arm out and leaned against the trunk. She looked at Maycomb, and her throat tightened: Maycomb was looking back at her. Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not wanted. We have secrets.

Don’t you study about other folks’s business till you take care of your own.”

“The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won’t be that way much longer.”

Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present? I am their blood and bones, I have dug in this ground, this is my home. But I am not their blood, the ground doesn’t care who digs it, I am a stranger at a cocktail party.

“Well, it seemed that to meet the real needs of a small portion of the population, the Court set up something horrible that could—that could affect the vast majority of folks. Adversely, that is. Atticus, I don’t know anything about it—all we have is the Constitution between us and anything some smart fellow wants to start, and there went the Court just breezily canceling one whole amendment, it seemed to me. We have a system of checks and balances and things, but when it comes down to it we don’t have much check on the Court, so who’ll bell the cat?

I’m—I’m just trying to say that in trying to do right we’ve left ourselves open for something that could be truly dangerous to our set-up.”

“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.”

“Very well, if you won’t let me tell you what Melbourne said I’ll put it in my own words: the time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re right—”

Atticus said, “I can take anything anybody calls me so long as it’s not true. You don’t even know how to cuss, Jean Louise. By the way, where did you pick up the ring-tailed variety?” “Right here in Maycomb.” “Dear goodness, the things you learned.”