Harper Lee has taken the last train out of Maycomb County. Past Boo Radley’s house, where baseballs still go to disappear and the curtains are still drawn. Past the solitary oak tree in the schoolyard. Past Atticus Finch’s old office in the courthouse where they found Tom Robinson guilty, guilty, guilty.
Past Maycomb County jail, where they shot Tom when he tried to run away. Past Finch’s Landing, where the trees still bend over the river, casting cool shadows that remember when Simon Finch’s boat first shuddered to a halt against the green banks. Goodbye Maycomb, goodbye childhood, goodbye the Old South, for who will tell your stories again with such love and such rage?
Back in 1964, Lee had already signed its epitaph. “I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world,” said the author of To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. “I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.” And now Lee herself is gone. Aged 89, she died in a small cottage in Monroeville, Alabama, less than a mile from the house where she grew up. Monroeville would become the Maycomb County of her novels.
Mockingbird was written in New York, Lee’s escape from “small-town, middle-class southern life”. But the roads and hedgerows that bore down most firmly on her imagination still belonged to south Alabama, in all its beauty and bigotry. In the anonymity of New York, she mapped out that familiar world in fierce detail, until every last leaf is suggested in the story.
Looking for Boo Radley
And so the geographies of Maycomb were also familiar to a reader half a world away, curled up in an armchair in Calcutta. Like Stuart Hall who learnt to recognise Wordsworth’s daffodils long before he could name the trees and flowers of his native Jamaica, I knew Maycomb as if it were my hometown. Walking home from Bengali tuition, there was a certain evening light in which you could believe yourself anywhere, and a deserted house with brambles reaching up to the windows became Boo’s cottage.
Indeed, the kindness of monsters became such a romantic idea that I looked for Boo Radleys everywhere. I wanted to ask people to “pass the damn ham, please,” and I wanted to inhabit a neighbourhood the way the three children in Mockingbird did. Scout, the protagonist, Jem, her brother, and Dill, her best friend, were always squeezing through fences and going on moonlit adventures, something you could not do in late 1990s Calcutta. It would be some years before I realised that the similarities between her world and mine didn’t always have to be imagined.
I had thought racial injustice was something that happened in the American South, where Uncle Tom lived, where Kunta Kinte kept count of the months with pebbles and where Tom Robinson was punished for a crime he did not commit. They charged him with raping a poor white woman, one of the Ewells who lived in squalor on the outskirts of the town. The Maycomb court was set against Tom because of the colour of his skin. The imagined crime fit neatly with contemporary beliefs about rapacious black men establishing their writ on the bodies of white women.
There are, of course, many Tom Robinsons in India, where caste and communal differences are felt as viscerally as race, where stories of the marauding minority feed into the prejudices of the majority. And there are many more Tom Robinsons today, for haven’t our systems of justice made it clear that you could be hounded and put in jail for no better reason than you are who you are?
The goodness of Atticus Finch
More immediately, I learnt about being liberal from Atticus Finch. The splendid Atticus, who looked like Gregory Peck and pulled on his lawyer’s robes to defend Tom in court. In mid-century Alabama, which still believed in segregation between blacks and whites, he alone seemed to stand for racial equality. His was the voice of righteous dissent.
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by minority rule is a person’s conscience,” he tells his daughter Scout, rocking her gently on his knee. His was also the capacious intelligence that could make space for all opinions at once. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” he says to Scout, “… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”.
In the eyes of his young daughter, he can do no wrong. Scout revolts against the beliefs of the middle-class white community in Maycomb, but never against her kind, scholarly father. For the better part of 50 years, most people believed the six-year-old, who was usually identified with Lee herself. In popular dramatisations of the story, Atticus has been the good liberal.
But the goodness of Atticus Finch wears thin in our times. In a New Yorker article published on Mockingbird’s 50th anniversary, Malcolm Gladwell successfully takes down the Southern liberalism of the 1940s and 50s. He shows up Atticus as a paternalistic, accommodationist liberal in the style of “Big Jim” Folsom, the Democrat governor of Alabama in the 1950s – polite enough to black people but not about to fight for formal changes to the Jim Crow laws.
It gets worse. You begin to see why Atticus chose to defend the honest, hardworking Tom against the “white trash” Ewells. It is the conservative’s love of the robust, upstanding citizen, and natural contempt for the weak, rather than the liberal’s love of equality. There is a moral ruthlessness in his choice.
Growing up
But if Atticus wasn’t liberal, who was? And if we are not to be liberal like him, how are we to be liberal? As his reputation faltered, so did Lee’s. Did she merely sit on her whitewashed Southern porch, basking in a genteel benevolence that was best left behind in the 1950s? Not quite. In her last years, Lee returns to her readers as sharp-eyed and radical as ever.
Go Set A Watchman, the sequel to Mockingbird, was published in 2015 amid much controversy – Lee had written the sequel first and then locked it away for five decades, after which it was pursued by agents and publishers in a series of events worthy of a literary whodunit. It is a jagged, polemical novel, less picturesque than Mockingbird. Lee tears through small-town Alabama with the gusto of a literary arsonist.
Twenty six-year-old Scout returns to Maycomb from New York to find a narrow, diminished Atticus, a secretive old man who might even believe in the necessity of segregation. He was always a limited man, and Scout’s grown up eyes finally recognise it. You read with horror as you realise that there is nothing “decent” left in that old world, nothing of value to be saved. Lee has given us childhood and then taken it away. All that’s left is Scout, raging, questioning everything that she loved. For those of us who grew up with her, it is a coming of age.