{"id":106821,"date":"2017-01-18T13:38:34","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T18:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106821"},"modified":"2017-01-18T16:17:13","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T21:17:13","slug":"good-atticus-bad-atticus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/18\/good-atticus-bad-atticus\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Atticus, Bad Atticus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last week, in an uncomfortable but enlightening coincidence, America was confronted with the two faces of its most ambiguous fictional hero, Atticus Finch, the principled racist who bestrides Harper Lee\u2019s To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> (1960) and Go Set a Watchman<\/em> (2015). On Tuesday, Finch took to the public square in both his avatars. There was Atticus, the moral exemplar of Mockingbird<\/em>, who appeared in President Obama\u2019s farewell speech to the nation. And there was Atticus, the courteous Southern chauvinist of Watchman<\/em>, in the form of Senator Jeff Sessions, who was being vetted by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the post of U.S. Attorney General.<\/p>\n

Addressing a profoundly divided nation in his final presidential plea, Obama urged black and white America \u201cto heed the advice of a great character in American fiction\u2014Atticus Finch\u2014who said, \u2018You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view \u2026 until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.\u2019 \u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Obama was channeling the Mockingbird<\/em> Atticus, the courageous lawyer who, in the racist South of the 1930s, defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white girl and faces down a lynch mob\u2014the Atticus whose honorable example inspired Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights marchers to brave fire hoses, batons, and police dogs. This was, of course, a far cry from the segregationist Atticus of Watchman<\/em>, who was revealed to a stunned nation when Lee\u2019s sixty-year-old manuscript was published two years ago. This elderly Atticus was the antithesis of the liberal race hero of Mockingbird. <\/em>He was terrified at the prospect of \u201cNegroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters,\u201d and nauseated by the idea of his Southern \u201csocial Arcadia\u201d despoiled by miscegenation.<\/p>\n

And yet Obama\u2014the child of an interracial union, surely aware of the warts-and-all Watchman<\/em> Atticus\u2014had chosen to quote him anyway, to climb into Atticus\u2019s white Alabaman skin and embrace the content of his character, enacting the very empathy he was pleading for and stepping away from the Manichaean political divide. It was a canny move\u2014something one would expect from an unabashedly literary president. As Obama said<\/a> to Michiko Kakutani in an interview, he chose to quote Atticus Finch because \u201cit bridges them,\u201d with \u201cthem\u201d referring to Americans \u201cisolated in their little bubbles,\u201d as Kakutani had put it.<\/p>\n

Obama was right: the Mockingbird<\/em> Atticus still resonates powerfully in the American imagination; he remains the definitively bipartisan hero. The president urged blacks to look at the world from the point of view of an underprivileged \u201cmiddle-aged white guy,\u201d even as he cautioned whites from disparaging minority demands for justice as \u201creverse racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the \u201cbridge\u201d Obama spoke of goes even farther than that. Just hours before the president invoked the fictional Methodist Alabama lawyer, a real-life Methodist Alabama lawyer was being grilled by the Senate. At seventy-one, Jeff Sessions is roughly the same age as the Watchman<\/em> Atticus, and he harbors similarly regressive views. Where Finch scornfully referred to NAACP-paid lawyers as \u201cstanding around like buzzards,\u201d Sessions has called the group \u201cUn-American.\u201d And just as Sessions called the Voting Rights Act of 1965 \u201ca piece of intrusive legislation,\u201d Atticus strongly felt that blacks, backward and infantile, were simply not yet ready to vote. If Atticus denounced the Supreme Court\u2019s Brown v. Board decision on the grounds that it made nonsense of state rights (and, of course, allowed \u201cNegroes by the carload in our schools\u201d), Sessions vigorously protested the Supreme Court\u2019s sanction of gay marriage as \u201cpart of a continuing effort to secularize\u201d the country by \u201cforce and intimidation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1985, when Sessions was the United States attorney in Alabama, he unsuccessfully prosecuted three African American civil-rights activists for voter fraud\u2014arraigning them with twenty-nine charges that carried a punishment of up to 250 years in jail. He was acting on complaints made by a local branch of the White Citizens\u2019 Council. These groups sprang up all over the South after Brown v. Board to stem the tide of desegregation\u2014Atticus, too, is an upstanding member of the local Maycomb County Citizens\u2019 Council, and it is by listening in to the racist speeches at one of its meetings that his horrified daughter, Scout, first learns of her father\u2019s segregationist sympathies. Sessions\u2019s prosecution was so egregious, so obviously motivated by racism, that the Senate rejected his candidacy for a federal judgeship under Ronald Reagan in 1986, with Senator Ted Kennedy calling him \u201ca throwback to a disgraceful era.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sessions supporters, black and white alike, insist the Senator is far removed from the man he was then. His political arc, they\u2019d argue, is inverse to that of Atticus, who goes from an idealistic young Finch to a bigoted old Crow. To be fair, in the thirty years since that court case, Sessions\u2019s actions have, publicly at least, been uncontroversial on the issue of race. He\u2019s cosponsored legislation to honor civil-rights activists who marched on Selma in 1965, and successfully prosecuted the two Klansmen involved in the 1981 lynching of a nineteen-year-old black man. But Evelyn Turner, one of the black activists he prosecuted in the voter fraud case, is intractable. \u201cHave you ever known a leopard to change his spots?\u201d she recently said<\/a> to CNN. \u201cI haven\u2019t \u2026 Sessions is still a racist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The honorable Mockingbird<\/em> Atticus must have had his Jim Crow spots, too\u2014we just didn\u2019t see them until Watchman<\/em>\u00a0(written earlier but published much later) brought them into glossy relief. I\u2019d argue that, despite its mediocrities, it\u2019s a far more honest, humane, realistic novel than the radiantly folksy Mockingbird<\/em>. It\u2019s testimony to Finch\u2019s enduring appeal that, despite the damaging revelations of Watchman<\/em>, people\u2014Obama included\u2014cling to that simplistic old Atticus. Harper Lee should be commended for daring to complicate our romance with him\u2014a decision that proved to be eerily prescient. In today\u2019s America, as rife as ever with racial prejudice, who could doubt that Atticus Finch would probably end up voting for Trump?<\/p>\n

When Mockingbird <\/em>was published in 1960, and especially when the film adaptation debuted two years later, it augured a kind of hope\u2014as flawed and heavy-handed as its approach to racism was, Mockingbird <\/em>invited the feeling that if only there were more Atticuses, Jim Crow would vanish and the country be reborn a post-racial Arcadia. (Witness, for instance, the ascendance of Atticus as a baby name<\/a>.) As a receptacle for the nation\u2019s optimism and aspiration, Atticus became, in a sense, a proto-Obama. But how can Atticus be both Obama and Sessions? How do the Mockingbird<\/em> Atticus and Watchman<\/em> Atticus cohabit in one skin? It\u2019s a paradox that\u2019s both \u201cbreathtaking,\u201d to use one of Sessions\u2019 favorite adjectives, and \u201caudacious,\u201d to use one of Obama\u2019s. But as Harper Lee knew well, it\u2019s a very humdrum paradox, replicated in millions of Americans across the country; it encapsulates the halting but ever-evolving moral arc of America\u2019s approach to race, in which, as Obama has said, \u201cFor every two steps forward, it often feels we take one step back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nina Martyris<\/a> is a freelance journalist who writes on books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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