When Harper Lee's lawyer and close friend, Tonja Carter,
went combing through the secure archive near the author's Alabama home last
fall, she only intended to check on the condition of the original manuscript of
Lee's beloved best-seller, To Kill a Mockingbird. What she found was something
else entirely: a complete second book, believed to have been lost for more than
50 years.
The discovery, and recent announcement that the uncovered
manuscript, Go Set A Watchman, would be published this summer, shocked both the
publishing industry and the legions of Lee fans who had long ago given up hope
that they'd ever read a new work by the 88-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner. Go
Set a Watchman was written before Mockingbird, but takes place about 20 years
later, during the civil rights movement. Scout Finch, the precocious
12-year-old narrator of Mockingbird, is now an adult woman who has returned
home to Alabama after living and working in New York City.
The first chapter of ‘Go Set a Watchman’ introduces Ms. Lee’s beloved
character, Scout, as a sexually liberated woman in her twenties, traveling from
New York to Alabama to visit her ailing father and weigh a marriage proposal
from a childhood friend. It also includes a bombshell about Scout’s brother.--Jennifer Maloney
Below, the first chapter:
Since Atlanta, she had looked
out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast
coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth
appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in
the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She
grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as
they multiplied, her joy rose.
Jean Louise Finch always made
this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb
Junction on her fifth annual trip home. For one thing, she had the life scared
out of her the last time she was on a plane: the pilot elected to fly through a
tornado. For another thing, flying home meant her father rising at three in the
morning, driving a hundred miles to meet her in Mobile, and doing a full day’s
work afterwards: he was seventy-two now and this was no longer fair.
She was glad she had decided to
go by train. Trains had changed since her childhood, and the novelty of the
experience amused her: a fat genie of a porter materialized when she pressed a
button on a wall; at her bidding a stainless steel washbasin popped out of
another wall, and there was a john one could prop one’s feet on. She resolved
not to be intimidated by several messages stenciled around her compartment—a
roomette, they called it—but when she went to bed the night before, she
succeeded in folding herself up into the wall because she had ignored an
injunction to PULL THIS LEVER DOWN OVER BRACKETS, a situation remedied by the
porter to her embarrassment, as her habit was to sleep only in pajama tops.
Luckily, he happened to be
patrolling the corridor when the trap snapped shut with her in it: “I’ll get
you out, Miss,” he called in answer to her poundings from within. “No please,”
she said. “Just tell me how to get out.” “I can do it with my back turned,” he
said, and did.
When she awoke that morning the
train was switching and chugging in the Atlanta yards, but in obedience to
another sign in her compartment she stayed in bed until College Park flashed
by. When she dressed, she put on her Maycomb clothes: gray slacks, a black
sleeveless blouse, white socks, and loafers. Although it was four hours away,
she could hear her aunt’s sniff of disapproval.
When she was starting on her
fourth cup of coffee the Crescent Limited honked like a giant goose at its
northbound mate and rumbled across the Chattahoochee into Alabama.
The Chattahoochee is wide, flat,
and muddy. It was low today; a yellow sandbar had reduced its flow to a
trickle. Perhaps it sings in the wintertime, she thought: I do not remember a
line of that poem. Piping down the valleys wild? No. Did he write to a waterfowl,
or was it a waterfall?
She sternly repressed a tendency
to boisterousness when she reflected that Sidney Lanier must have been somewhat
like her long-departed cousin, Joshua Singleton St. Clair, whose private
literary preserves stretched from the Black Belt to Bayou La Batre. Jean
Louise’s aunt often held up Cousin Joshua to her as a family example not
lightly to be discountenanced: he was a splendid figure of a man, he was a
poet, he was cut off in his prime, and Jean Louise would do well to remember
that he was a credit to the family. His pictures did the family well—Cousin
Joshua looked like a ratty Algernon Swinburne.
Jean Louise smiled to herself
when she remembered her father telling her the rest of it. Cousin Joshua was
cut off, all right, not by the hand of God but by Caesar’s hosts:
When at the University, Cousin
Joshua studied too hard and thought too much; in fact, he read himself straight
out of the nineteenth century. He affected an Inverness cape and wore jackboots
he had a blacksmith make up from his own design. Cousin Joshua was frustrated
by the authorities when he fired upon the president of the University, who in
his opinion was little more than a sewage disposal expert. This was no doubt
true, but an idle excuse for assault with a deadly weapon. After much passing
around of money Cousin Joshua was moved across the tracks and placed in state
accommodations for the irresponsible, where he remained for the rest of his
days. They said he was reasonable in every respect until someone mentioned that
president’s name, then his face would become distorted, he would assume a
whooping crane attitude and hold it for eight hours or more, and nothing or
nobody could make him lower his leg until he forgot about that man. On clear
days Cousin Joshua read Greek, and he left a thin volume of verse printed
privately by a firm in Tuscaloosa. The poetry was so ahead of its time no one
has deciphered it yet, but Jean Louise’s aunt keeps it displayed casually and
prominently on a table in the livingroom.
Jean Louise laughed aloud, then
looked around to see if anyone had heard her. Her father had a way of
undermining his sister’s lectures on the innate superiority of any given Finch:
he always told his daughter the rest of it, quietly and solemnly, but Jean
Louise sometimes thought she detected an unmistakably profane glint in Atticus
Finch’s eyes, or was it merely the light hitting his glasses? She never knew.
The countryside and the train
had subsided to a gentle roll, and she could see nothing but pastureland and
black cows from window to horizon. She wondered why she had never thought her
country beautiful.
The station at Montgomery
nestled in an elbow of the Alabama, and when she got off the train to stretch
her legs, the returning familiar with its drabness, lights, and curious odors
rose to meet her. There is something missing, she thought. Hotboxes, that’s it.
A man goes along under the train with a crowbar. There is a clank and then
s-sss-sss, white smoke comes up and you think you’re inside a chafing dish.
These things run on oil now.
For no reason an ancient fear
gnawed her. She had not been in this station for twenty years, but when she was
a child and went to the capital with Atticus, she was terrified lest the
swaying train plunge down the riverbank and drown them all. But when she
boarded again for home, she forgot.
The train clacketed through pine
forests and honked derisively at a gaily painted bell-funneled museum piece
sidetracked in a clearing. It bore the sign of a lumber concern, and the
Crescent Limited could have swallowed it whole with room to spare. Greenville,
Evergreen, Maycomb Junction.
She had told the conductor not
to forget to let her off, and because the conductor was an elderly man, she
anticipated his joke: he would rush at Maycomb Junction like a bat out of hell
and stop the train a quarter of a mile past the little station, then when he
bade her goodbye he would say he was sorry, he almost forgot. Trains changed;
conductors never did. Being funny at flag stops with young ladies was a mark of
the profession, and Atticus, who could predict the actions of every conductor
from New Orleans to Cincinnati, would be waiting accordingly not six steps away
from her point of debarkation.
Home was Maycomb County, a
gerrymander some seventy miles long and spreading thirty miles at its widest
point, a wilderness dotted with tiny settlements the largest of which was
Maycomb, the county seat. Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb
County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware
of the South’s political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted
Republican. No trains went there—Maycomb Junction, a courtesy title, was
located in Abbott County, twenty miles away. Bus service was erratic and seemed
to go nowhere, but the Federal Government had forced a highway or two through
the swamps, thus giving the citizens an opportunity for free egress. But few
people took advantage of the roads, and why should they? If you did not want
much, there was plenty.
The county and the town were
named for a Colonel Mason Maycomb, a man whose misplaced self-confidence and
overweening willfulness brought confusion and confoundment to all who rode with
him in the Creek Indian Wars. The territory in which he operated was vaguely
hilly in the north and flat in the south, on the fringes of the coastal plain.
Colonel Maycomb, convinced that Indians hated to fight on flat land, scoured
the northern reaches of the territory looking for them. When his general
discovered that Maycomb was meandering in the hills while the Creeks were
lurking in every pine thicket in the south, he dispatched a friendly Indian
runner to Maycomb with the message, Move south, damn you. Maycomb was convinced
this was a Creek plot to trap him (was there not a blue-eyed, red-headed devil
leading them?), he made the friendly Indian runner his prisoner, and he moved
farther north until his forces became hopelessly lost in the forest primeval,
where they sat out the wars in considerable bewilderment.
After enough years had passed to
convince Colonel Maycomb that the message might have been genuine after all, he
began a purposeful march to the south, and on the way his troops encountered
settlers moving inland, who told them the Indian Wars were about over. The
troops and the settlers were friendly enough to become Jean Louise Finch’s
ancestors, and Colonel Maycomb pressed on to what is now Mobile to make sure
his exploits were given due credit. Recorded history’s version does not
coincide with the truth, but these are the facts, because they were passed down
by word of mouth through the years, and every Maycombian knows them.
“. . . get your bags, Miss,” the
porter said. Jean Louise followed him from the lounge car to her compartment.
She took two dollars from her billfold: one for routine, one for releasing her
last night. The train, of course, rushed like a bat out of hell past the
station and came to a stop 440 yards beyond it. The conductor appeared,
grinning, and said he was sorry, he almost forgot. Jean Louise grinned back and
waited impatiently for the porter to put the yellow step in place. He handed
her down and she gave him the two bills.
Her father was not waiting for
her.
She looked up the track toward
the station and saw a tall man standing on the tiny platform. He jumped down
and ran to meet her.
He grabbed her in a bear hug,
put her from him, kissed her hard on the mouth, then kissed her gently. “Not
here, Hank,” she murmured, much pleased.
“Hush, girl,” he said, holding
her face in place. “I’ll kiss you on the courthouse steps if I want to.”
The possessor of the right to
kiss her on the courthouse steps was Henry Clinton, her lifelong friend, her
brother’s comrade, and if he kept on kissing her like that, her husband. 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.
They walked arm-in-arm down the
track to collect her suitcase. “How’s Atticus?” she said.
“His hands and shoulders are
giving him fits today.”
“He can’t drive when they’re
like that, can he?”
Henry closed the fingers of his
right hand halfway and said, “He can’t close them any more than this. Miss
Alexandra has to tie his shoes and button his shirts when they’re like that. He
can’t even hold a razor.”
Jean Louise shook her head. She
was too old to rail against the inequity of it, but too young to accept her
father’s crippling disease without putting up some kind of fight. “Isn’t there
anything they can do?”
“You know there isn’t,” Henry
said. “He takes seventy grains of aspirin a day and that’s all.”
Henry picked up her heavy
suitcase, and they walked back toward the car. She wondered how she would
behave when her time came to hurt day in and day out. Hardly like Atticus: if
you asked him how he was feeling he would tell you, but he never complained;
his disposition remained the same, so in order to find out how he was feeling,
you had to ask him.
The only way Henry found out
about it was by accident. One day when they were in the records vault at the
courthouse running a land title, Atticus hauled out a heavy mortgage book,
turned stark white, and dropped it. “What’s the matter?” Henry had said.
“Rheumatoid arthritis. Can you pick it up for me?” said Atticus. Henry asked
him how long he’d had it; Atticus said six months. Did Jean Louise know it? No.
Then he’d better tell her. “If you tell her she’ll be down here trying to nurse
me. The only remedy for this is not to let it beat you.” The subject was
closed.
“Want to drive?” said Henry.
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
Although she was a respectable driver, she hated to operate anything mechanical
more complicated than a safety pin: folding lawn chairs were a source of
profound irritation to her; she had never learned to ride a bicycle or use a
typewriter; she fished with a pole. Her favorite game was golf because its
essential principles consisted of a stick, a small ball, and a state of mind.
With green envy, she watched
Henry’s effortless mastery of the automobile. Cars are his servants, she
thought. “Power steering? Automatic transmission?” she said.
“You bet,” he said.
“Well, what if everything shuts
off and you don’t have any gears to shift. You’d be in trouble then, wouldn’t
you?”
“But everything won’t shut off.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s what faith is. Come
here.”
Faith in General Motors. She put
her head on his shoulder.
“Hank,” she said presently.
“What really happened?”
This was an old joke between
them. A pink scar started under his right eye, hit the corner of his nose, and
ran diagonally across his upper lip. Behind his lip were six false front teeth
not even Jean Louise could induce him to take out and show her. He came home
from the war with them. A German, more to express his displeasure at the end of
the war than anything else, had bashed him in the face with a rifle butt. Jean
Louise had chosen to think this a likely story: what with guns that shot over
the horizon, B-17s, V-bombs, and the like, Henry had probably not been within
spitting distance of the Germans.
“Okay, honey,” he said. “We were
down in a cellar in Berlin. Everybody had too much to drink and a fight
started—you like to hear the believable, don’t you? Now will you marry me?”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“I want to be like Dr.
Schweitzer and play until I’m thirty.”
“He played all right,” said
Henry grimly.
Jean Louise moved under his arm.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“Yes.”
There was no finer young man,
said the people of Maycomb, than Henry Clinton. Jean Louise agreed. Henry was
from the southern end of the county. His father had left his mother soon after
Henry was born, and she worked night and day in her little crossroads store to
send Henry through the Maycomb public schools. Henry, from the time he was
twelve, boarded across the street from the Finch house, and this in itself put
him on a higher plane: he was his own master, free from the authority of cooks,
yardmen, and parents. He was also four years her senior, which made a
difference then. He teased her; she adored him. When he was fourteen his mother
died, leaving him next to nothing. Atticus Finch looked after what little money
there was from the sale of the store—her funeral expenses took most of it—he
secretly supplemented it with money of his own, and got Henry a job clerking in
the Jitney Jungle after school. Henry graduated and went into the Army, and
after the war he went to the University and studied law.
Just about that time, Jean
Louise’s brother dropped dead in his tracks one day, and after the nightmare of
that was over, Atticus, who had always thought of leaving his practice to his
son, looked around for another young man. It was natural for him to engage
Henry, and in due course Henry became Atticus’s legman, his eyes, and his
hands. Henry had always respected Atticus Finch; soon it melded to affection
and Henry regarded him as a father.
He did not regard Jean Louise as
a sister. In the years when he was away at the war and the University, she had
turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable
facsimile of a human being. He began dating her on her annual two-week visits
home, and although she still moved like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured
most feminine adornment, he found something so intensely feminine about her
that he fell in love. She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the
time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person. She was afflicted
with a restlessness of spirit he could not guess at, but he knew she was the
one for him. He would protect her; he would marry her.
“Tired of New York?” he said.
“No.”
“Give me a free hand for these
two weeks and I’ll make you tired of it.”
“Is that an improper
suggestion?”
“Yes.”
“Go to hell, then.”
Henry stopped the car. He turned
off the ignition switch, slewed around, and looked at her. She knew when he
became serious about something: his crew cut bristled like an angry brush, his
face colored, its scar reddened.
“Honey, do you want me to put it
like a gentleman? Miss Jean Louise, I have now reached an economic status that
can provide for the support of two. I, like Israel of Old, have labored seven
years in the vineyards of the University and the pastures of your daddy’s
office for you—”
“I’ll tell Atticus to make it
seven more.”
“Hateful.”
“Besides,” she said, “it was
Jacob anyway. No, they were the same. They always changed their names every
third verse. How’s Aunty?”
“You know good and well she’s
been fine for thirty years. Don’t change the subject.”
Jean Louise’s eyebrows
flickered. “Henry,” she said primly, “I’ll have an affair with you but I won’t
marry you.”
It was exactly right.
“Don’t be such a damn child,
Jean Louise!” Henry sputtered, and forgetting the latest dispensations from General
Motors, grabbed for a gearshift and stomped at a clutch. These denied him, he
wrenched the ignition key violently, pressed some buttons, and the big car
glided slowly and smoothly down the highway.
“Slow pickup, isn’t it?” she
said. “No good for city driving.”
Henry glared at her. “What do
you mean by that?”
In another minute this would
become a quarrel. He was serious. She’d better make him furious, thus silent,
so she could think about it.
“Where’d you get that appalling
tie?” she said.
Now.
She was almost in love with him.
No, that’s impossible, she thought: either you are or you aren’t. Love’s the
only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of
love, certainly, but it’s a you-do or you-don’t proposition with them all.
She was a person who, when
confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way. The easy way out of
this would be to marry Hank and let him labor for her. After a few years, when
the children were waist-high, the man would come along whom she should have
married in the first place. There would be searchings of hearts, fevers and
frets, long looks at each other on the post office steps, and misery for
everybody. The hollering and the high-mindedness over, all that would be left
would be another shabby little affair à la the Birmingham country club set, and
a self-constructed private Gehenna with the latest Westinghouse appliances.
Hank didn’t deserve that.
No. For the present she would
pursue the stony path of spinsterhood. She set about restoring peace with
honor:
“Honey, I’m sorry, truly sorry,”
she said, and she was.
“That’s okay,” said Henry, and
slapped her knee. “It’s just that I could kill you sometimes.”
“I know I’m hateful.”
Henry looked at her. “You’re an
odd one, sweet. You can’t dissemble.”
She looked at him. “What are you
talking about?”
“Well, as a general rule, most
women, before they’ve got ’em, present to their men smiling, agreeing faces.
They hide their thoughts. You now, when you’re feeling hateful, honey, you are
hateful.”
“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.”
She smiled brilliantly and said,
“Hank, I agree with everything you’ve said. You are the most perspicacious
individual I’ve met in years, you are six feet five, and may I light your
cigarette? How’s that?”
“Awful.”
They were friends again.
— Excerpted from
Ms. Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman,’ to be published July 14 by HarperCollins
Intrigue and
Controversy
To add spices to the epic discovery, it is not without
controversy or complications. Harper Lee's sister Alice Lee, who ferociously
protected Harper Lee's estate (and person) from unwanted outside attention as a
lawyer and advocate for decades, passed away late last year, leaving the
intensely private author (who herself is reportedly in ill health) vulnerable
to people who may not have her best interests at heart.
Tonja Carter, Harper Lee's attorney since Alice Lee
retired at the age of 100, acknowledges that the author—who was left forgetful
and nearly blind and deaf after a stroke in 2007—often does not understand the
contracts that she signs. "Lee has a history of signing whatever's put in
front of her, apparently sometimes with Carter's advice," Gawker's
Michelle Dean reported last July.
"The existence of 'Go Set a Watchman' was unknown
until recently, and its discovery is an extraordinary gift," said
HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham in a statement.
But was the gift willingly given?
"After much thought and hesitation I shared it with
a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it
worthy of publication," Lee said in a statement of her own. "I am
humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years."
That might seem like confirmation of Lee's willing
involvement in Go Set a Watchman's publication, except for the fact that we
know about Lee's messy relationship with her attorney (who, again, often gets
her to sign things that she does not understand) and Lee's own publicity-shy
character.
Lee once told Oprah over lunch that she hated being
compared to To Kill a Mockingbird's spunky protagonist Scout Finch. "I'm
really Boo," she said, referring to the reclusive hero whose actions—by
the grace of Atticus Finch (and the benevolent Heck Tate)—were allowed to go
unpublicized.
In the past, Lee affectionately referred to her sister
Alice as "Atticus in a skirt." Not just because she was an amazing
lawyer, but because she was the protector who shielded Harper Lee from the
publishing world and press attention that she was so adamantly repelled by. But
now Alice—her Atticus—is gone and an unhealthy and unstable Lee must alone face
the publishers, interviewers and literary agents that she's spent her entire
life avoiding.
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