All the White People, Anyway: Race, Gender, and Leaving Home

on Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and My Own Life

I grew up in an Alabama county not that different from the Maycomb of Harper Lee’s novels. As an adult living in Boston when she published Go Set A Watchman, I hadn’t planned on reading it because the whole country seemed to have done that for me. My first thought: “oh god, here we go, another shard of obsolete Alabama to distinguish myself from but still have to admit is kinda true.”

Atticus’s moderate, rule-of-law racism shocked everyone who’d deified him as the Civil Rights champion he never really was. It didn’t surprise me, probably because I grew up in the kind of place Lee wrote from. Most white folks with position or prospects were one kind of Atticus or another. Or a Henry. As Scout’s ill-fitting romantic interest in Watchman, he defends his moral compromises this way: he says he can’t deviate the way Scout can. Scout has Finch privilege: that’s just her way, people would say. Henry fears anything out of line from him will be read not as eccentricity, but as the trashiness of his bloodline coming out. He’s still a good and moral person, he insists; he just doesn’t always vote his conviction. He keeps his mouth shut. He’s a practical man.

I can only imagine what my mother thought when I moved back to Alabama after grad school. When I’d left, she may have resigned herself to me staying gone, since there wasn’t much work to keep many people here. But that year in that place, a teaching job opened at the tiny all-women’s Southern Baptist college. I worry my coming back let her think I wouldn’t leave again.

My wife was not my wife then, but we lived together. We’d finished MFAs together. Wanting to land work in the same place, we applied together. During my interview, the dean said they’d noticed Amy and I listed the same return address in our applications. It would be inappropriate, she said, for an unmarried professor to cohabitate with a woman. What would be my living situation? I had a handy lie: I’d live with my parents, just outside town. Amy would live alone, closer to Tuscaloosa, to what all of Alabama calls “The University,” where she’d gotten her own job.

I soon knew that dean better, and she didn’t really care where I lived. But she had expectations to uphold. Nobody believed we were going to live separately. Everyone I talked to, privately, gave some sly nod to how we all have to pretend to live in some other way than we do.

Mama held up her end of the lie like it was natural. She’d collect the mail, give me the messages, keep the story going when she ran into people at church. You do what you have to do to get by, she knew, and a whole lot of her own getting by had involved keeping her mouth shut.

Nobody cared where I lived or how. The school had to look like it was upholding social order, the traditional codes of shame that had made us who we were, even if we didn’t like who we were, even if it hurt people, even if it hurt us all, even if we were the last ones in the goddamn country to change.

Another faculty member said, “You get used to leading a double life.”

My mother’s brother was one of many on her side who worked in the coal mines. He’d worked with a man from West Virginia who always talked about how they did it back home. Alabama folks don’t like hearing that. They nicknamed him “Back Home,” and didn’t mean anything good by it.

They should change the state motto to “You’re in Alabama now.” All we’ve got is not being like anybody else—always the last to be dragged by the US...