Watching the Revelation of Racist Atticus
The book release for Go Set A Watchman was what every publisher dreams of. The iconic novel To Kill A Mockingbird‘s prequel of sorts paints Atticus as the kind of man you’d very much expect to inhabit in the Jim Crow South instead of that wise saint we find in Mockingbird.
I must confess I read Mockingbird just a year or so ago and loved it. I’ve never seen the movie. The novel is powerful and the characters glorious and compelling. I can understand the horror of having the glory of this story dispelled by Watchman.
Saints, Bigots, Power and Closets
Growing up as I did in the home of Stan and Barb Vander Klay the civil rights movement was the Ovaltine in the milk of the Gospel.
We also knew, however, that things were never quite as clear and simple as were our feelings when we watched “Roots” and cheered for the (mostly African American) “good guys/gals” and hated the evil bigots, racists, slave owners and traders.
Before a lot of Christian bigots got closeted by the cultural tide, however, people would tell you what they really thought. Bigots were family, friends, Christians, “good people”, not just the stereotypes you saw.
The power that had been applied to enforce the evils of segregation and legal discrimination now flipped to press against language and bigoted expression but being white meant that there would always be some who would whisper what they really thought about race imagining that white skin meant you were “safe”.
Both Sides of the Street
Growing up with the heroes I did also meant reading biographies of Dr. MLK Jr., and not just the thin hagiographic ones. His issues would be exposed to me a decade after the fact. This great preacher was an adulterer, a sexual sinner.
There were of course other things. The African American movement was obviously full of its own conflicts and tensions. As time dulls our memories we imagined that MLK Jr. rode a glorious tide of liberation uniting all peoples but of course nothing could be further from the truth. It seems obvious to the script that he was assassinated by a white man but many found him problematic or inconvenient especially as he gained in power and reputation. History is like this of course.
On the other side to you begin to realize that the bigots you are supposed to hate are also your family members and loved ones. People who have been kind and gentle to you, but even also to the people that the liberationist script told them they were supposed to hate.
My children get an assignment in a certain grade where they need to go out and interview an older African American person who grew up in the South. I always bring them to the same individual. They arrive with a pre-determined politically correct script to hear about the horrible bigots and the terrible suffering and the clear lines of demarcation between the evil and the good. What they discover is a far more complex story filled with real people who are sometimes wonderful and sometimes terrible across all sorts of lines of color, class, political and social persuasion. I always wonder if my kids pick up the nuance.
I think my kids will learn the same lessons today. The great contemporary liberationist moral struggle is of course about sexual minorities where the lines of bigots and enlightened are marked by how one voted on Prop 8 in California or whether one turned their avatar the shades of the rainbow. What does one say when you realize that many believe Prop 8 attempted to block same sex marriage in California was swung by the votes of African American women. I thought they were the good “guys” on race and gender?
People Are Not Stupid, We Just Play Stupid in TV and Social Media
The observations I made above seem to be known by just about everyone, but just in private. We seemed to have closeted this fact from our public selves. There is something about our national debates that forces us to somehow adopt bigoted postures, making assumptions about people based on gender, skin color, sexual orientation, etc. In private we’ll admit that lefty liberals or arch conservatives somehow manage to be kind to others or horrible to others quite apart from the culture war scripts they were supposed to be reading from.
The great “shock” at the bigotry of Saint Atticus is another chapter in this. It highlights how texts function in communities.
People who have long been cynical about the Bible are outraged that Harper Lee would commit such apostasy. How dare she do this to our saint! Surely it must be attributable to elder abuse.
What I love about the Bible is how unsaintly the heroes so often are and complicated all the moral narratives become. Gideon has no faith. Abraham almost sells out his wife, twice and yet gets hung up on the whole Hagar affair. Moses is often a mess. Even Jesus, the God-Man is terribly problematic and far more complex than Atticus and Scout. His disciples most often have little idea quite what to do with what he says and does.
What we are looking at is the difference between a “children’s Bible” where some hack moralist tries to dumb down stories for kids and real Bible stories where although the children can’t pick up the clues yet they begin to learn something about the real world. In my experience most of us inside and outside the church really wish the Bible was more this way, more like Atticus1 in Mockinbird.
These are lessons we learn as we grow older to discover our parents, teachers, heroes and authority figures are sometimes foolish, dim, small, petty, bumbling, troubled and deeply flawed. We may even, if they grow some wisdom learn that we too are all of these things and that we are not anywhere near as good at loving others and doing right as we imagine. This is private, not public. It must not be spoken.
Learning to Love Your Enemies, Even if its Atticus
None of this is to say I think anything less of Mockingbird. We need stories like this to fill our imaginations with visions of what even the unattainable norms should be. The love and commitment Atticus has for the law and his patience and understanding even with his white community.
One of my favorite parts of the book was with old racist Mrs. Dubose. Atticus made Jem and Scout read to her.
The next afternoon at Mrs. Dubose’s was the same as the first, and so was the next, until gradually a pattern emerged: everything would begin normally— that is, Mrs. Dubose would hound Jem for a while on her favorite subjects, her camellias and our father’s nigger-loving propensities; she would grow increasingly silent, then go away from us. The alarm clock would ring, Jessie would shoo us out, and the rest of the day was ours.
“Atticus,” I said one evening, “what exactly is a nigger-lover?” Atticus’s face was grave. “Has somebody been calling you that?” “No sir, Mrs. Dubose calls you that. She warms up every afternoon calling you that. Francis called me that last Christmas, that’s where I first heard it.” “Is that the reason you jumped on him?” asked Atticus. “Yes sir . . .” “Then why are you asking me what it means?” I tried to explain to Atticus that it wasn’t so much what Francis said that had infuriated me as the way he had said it. “It was like he’d said snot-nose or somethin’.”
“Scout,” said Atticus, “nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don’t mean anything— like snot-nose. It’s hard to explain— ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody’s favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It’s slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.”
“You aren’t really a nigger-lover, then, are you?” “I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody . . . I’m hard put, sometimes— baby, it’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you. So don’t let Mrs. Dubose get you down. She has enough troubles of her own.”
Lee, Harper (2014-07-08). To Kill a Mockingbird (Harperperennial Modern Classics) (pp. 144-145). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Later Atticus would have this to say when Mrs. Dubose had passed.
Atticus reached down and picked up the candy box. He handed it to Jem. Jem opened the box. Inside, surrounded by wads of damp cotton, was a white, waxy, perfect camellia. It was a Snow-on-the-Mountain. Jem’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Old hell-devil, old hell-devil!” he screamed, flinging it down. “Why can’t she leave me alone?” In a flash Atticus was up and standing over him. Jem buried his face in Atticus’s shirt front. “Sh-h,” he said. “I think that was her way of telling you— everything’s all right now, Jem, everything’s all right. You know, she was a great lady.” “A lady?” Jem raised his head. His face was scarlet. “After all those things she said about you, a lady?” “She was. She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe . . . son, I told you that if you hadn’t lost your head I’d have made you go read to her. I wanted you to see something about her— I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
Lee, Harper (2014-07-08). To Kill a Mockingbird (Harperperennial Modern Classics) (p. 150). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Atticus embodied a capacity to love his enemies, even weak bigoted and often cruel Mrs. Dubose and modeled that for his children.
The question we know face is whether we can love Atticus2, now that he’s not the man we thought he was, at least in Watchman.
What Are Norms For?
Part of the difficulty we are having in our conversations about sexuality, race, and loving each other is that we don’t understand what norms are for. Norms are designed to help us align with standards we often can’t fully keep. It seems to me this worldview is deeply tied to theism itself while not simply succumbing to idealism.
I often see “grace” misunderstood as a certain slackness in moral codes and norms. “Grace” means giving all the soccer kids trophies for participating. “Forgiveness” is confused with detachment. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Norms are there to give us orientation even while we lack in endurance and follow through. When we lose norms we are lost. It is the most helpful function of the laws we can’t keep.
Atticus1 in the Age of Decay
The confusion is that we want to believe that Atticus1 from Mockingbird can be real and achievable. That is the artistry of the book. Atticus is believable. We believe Atticus could exist in that context and even if he doesn’t always prevail we believe he can survive.
The truth of course is darker, it is the lesson of Jesus’ death.
Jesus gets killed, the Bible teaches, not because he’s bad, but because he’s good. We want to believe that good people in this world win in the age of decay. We want to believe that the slaves of Egypt were only jerks and idiots because they were oppressed. They clear up this idealism fast when they hit the desert.
We want to believe that following the rules leads to good outcomes even if it is unpopular. This is the American dream. If you follow the rules the system will reward you. We want to have our Atticus1 and our comforts too. MLK Jr., who was no perfect man, did not survive. Many who were like Atticus1 did not either. That is the darker truth.
The picture the Bible gives us is often grim
- Everyone is a common mixture of splendid glory and horrible evil
- Real goodness is seldom popular or clearly identifiable by all
- True, deep goodness will draw to itself suffering, calamity and death
- Life is finally unworkable in the age of decay. This is something we finally need to be rescued from and that rescue is beyond us.
If we want our Atticus1 pure, we really don’t want to face the terrible truth that the purer he would be the less likely he would be able to survive in this real world. His purity is a function of fiction. Really wonderful people are out there, but the age of decay rules are flexed, not broken. Resurrection can only follow crucifixion.
The Christian story states that when God revealed himself most fully even the culture war conflicted forces of this world were able to align themselves to kill him. We have made ourselves God’s enemies and few friends of God seldom “have it all” in the ways we commonly want it in America.
If there is something wrong with Mockingbird it is this. Atticus lied to Scout.
No Scout, “nigger-lover” does mean something, and in the real world “nigger-lovers” are regularly killed for their “nigger-lovin” ways.
Leadingchurch.com 
No Scout, “N-lover” really does mean something, and they’re commonly killed for it
Watching the Revelation of Racist Atticus
The book release for Go Set A Watchman was what every publisher dreams of. The iconic novel To Kill A Mockingbird‘s prequel of sorts paints Atticus as the kind of man you’d very much expect to inhabit in the Jim Crow South instead of that wise saint we find in Mockingbird.
I must confess I read Mockingbird just a year or so ago and loved it. I’ve never seen the movie. The novel is powerful and the characters glorious and compelling. I can understand the horror of having the glory of this story dispelled by Watchman.
Saints, Bigots, Power and Closets
Growing up as I did in the home of Stan and Barb Vander Klay the civil rights movement was the Ovaltine in the milk of the Gospel.
We also knew, however, that things were never quite as clear and simple as were our feelings when we watched “Roots” and cheered for the (mostly African American) “good guys/gals” and hated the evil bigots, racists, slave owners and traders.
Before a lot of Christian bigots got closeted by the cultural tide, however, people would tell you what they really thought. Bigots were family, friends, Christians, “good people”, not just the stereotypes you saw.
The power that had been applied to enforce the evils of segregation and legal discrimination now flipped to press against language and bigoted expression but being white meant that there would always be some who would whisper what they really thought about race imagining that white skin meant you were “safe”.
Both Sides of the Street
Growing up with the heroes I did also meant reading biographies of Dr. MLK Jr., and not just the thin hagiographic ones. His issues would be exposed to me a decade after the fact. This great preacher was an adulterer, a sexual sinner.
There were of course other things. The African American movement was obviously full of its own conflicts and tensions. As time dulls our memories we imagined that MLK Jr. rode a glorious tide of liberation uniting all peoples but of course nothing could be further from the truth. It seems obvious to the script that he was assassinated by a white man but many found him problematic or inconvenient especially as he gained in power and reputation. History is like this of course.
On the other side to you begin to realize that the bigots you are supposed to hate are also your family members and loved ones. People who have been kind and gentle to you, but even also to the people that the liberationist script told them they were supposed to hate.
My children get an assignment in a certain grade where they need to go out and interview an older African American person who grew up in the South. I always bring them to the same individual. They arrive with a pre-determined politically correct script to hear about the horrible bigots and the terrible suffering and the clear lines of demarcation between the evil and the good. What they discover is a far more complex story filled with real people who are sometimes wonderful and sometimes terrible across all sorts of lines of color, class, political and social persuasion. I always wonder if my kids pick up the nuance.
I think my kids will learn the same lessons today. The great contemporary liberationist moral struggle is of course about sexual minorities where the lines of bigots and enlightened are marked by how one voted on Prop 8 in California or whether one turned their avatar the shades of the rainbow. What does one say when you realize that many believe Prop 8 attempted to block same sex marriage in California was swung by the votes of African American women. I thought they were the good “guys” on race and gender?
People Are Not Stupid, We Just Play Stupid in TV and Social Media
The observations I made above seem to be known by just about everyone, but just in private. We seemed to have closeted this fact from our public selves. There is something about our national debates that forces us to somehow adopt bigoted postures, making assumptions about people based on gender, skin color, sexual orientation, etc. In private we’ll admit that lefty liberals or arch conservatives somehow manage to be kind to others or horrible to others quite apart from the culture war scripts they were supposed to be reading from.
The great “shock” at the bigotry of Saint Atticus is another chapter in this. It highlights how texts function in communities.
People who have long been cynical about the Bible are outraged that Harper Lee would commit such apostasy. How dare she do this to our saint! Surely it must be attributable to elder abuse.
What I love about the Bible is how unsaintly the heroes so often are and complicated all the moral narratives become. Gideon has no faith. Abraham almost sells out his wife, twice and yet gets hung up on the whole Hagar affair. Moses is often a mess. Even Jesus, the God-Man is terribly problematic and far more complex than Atticus and Scout. His disciples most often have little idea quite what to do with what he says and does.
What we are looking at is the difference between a “children’s Bible” where some hack moralist tries to dumb down stories for kids and real Bible stories where although the children can’t pick up the clues yet they begin to learn something about the real world. In my experience most of us inside and outside the church really wish the Bible was more this way, more like Atticus1 in Mockinbird.
These are lessons we learn as we grow older to discover our parents, teachers, heroes and authority figures are sometimes foolish, dim, small, petty, bumbling, troubled and deeply flawed. We may even, if they grow some wisdom learn that we too are all of these things and that we are not anywhere near as good at loving others and doing right as we imagine. This is private, not public. It must not be spoken.
Learning to Love Your Enemies, Even if its Atticus
None of this is to say I think anything less of Mockingbird. We need stories like this to fill our imaginations with visions of what even the unattainable norms should be. The love and commitment Atticus has for the law and his patience and understanding even with his white community.
One of my favorite parts of the book was with old racist Mrs. Dubose. Atticus made Jem and Scout read to her.
Later Atticus would have this to say when Mrs. Dubose had passed.
Atticus embodied a capacity to love his enemies, even weak bigoted and often cruel Mrs. Dubose and modeled that for his children.
The question we know face is whether we can love Atticus2, now that he’s not the man we thought he was, at least in Watchman.
What Are Norms For?
Part of the difficulty we are having in our conversations about sexuality, race, and loving each other is that we don’t understand what norms are for. Norms are designed to help us align with standards we often can’t fully keep. It seems to me this worldview is deeply tied to theism itself while not simply succumbing to idealism.
I often see “grace” misunderstood as a certain slackness in moral codes and norms. “Grace” means giving all the soccer kids trophies for participating. “Forgiveness” is confused with detachment. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Norms are there to give us orientation even while we lack in endurance and follow through. When we lose norms we are lost. It is the most helpful function of the laws we can’t keep.
Atticus1 in the Age of Decay
The confusion is that we want to believe that Atticus1 from Mockingbird can be real and achievable. That is the artistry of the book. Atticus is believable. We believe Atticus could exist in that context and even if he doesn’t always prevail we believe he can survive.
The truth of course is darker, it is the lesson of Jesus’ death.
Jesus gets killed, the Bible teaches, not because he’s bad, but because he’s good. We want to believe that good people in this world win in the age of decay. We want to believe that the slaves of Egypt were only jerks and idiots because they were oppressed. They clear up this idealism fast when they hit the desert.
We want to believe that following the rules leads to good outcomes even if it is unpopular. This is the American dream. If you follow the rules the system will reward you. We want to have our Atticus1 and our comforts too. MLK Jr., who was no perfect man, did not survive. Many who were like Atticus1 did not either. That is the darker truth.
The picture the Bible gives us is often grim
If we want our Atticus1 pure, we really don’t want to face the terrible truth that the purer he would be the less likely he would be able to survive in this real world. His purity is a function of fiction. Really wonderful people are out there, but the age of decay rules are flexed, not broken. Resurrection can only follow crucifixion.
The Christian story states that when God revealed himself most fully even the culture war conflicted forces of this world were able to align themselves to kill him. We have made ourselves God’s enemies and few friends of God seldom “have it all” in the ways we commonly want it in America.
If there is something wrong with Mockingbird it is this. Atticus lied to Scout.
No Scout, “nigger-lover” does mean something, and in the real world “nigger-lovers” are regularly killed for their “nigger-lovin” ways.
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About PaulVK
Husband, Father of 5, Pastor