I heard the news of Harper Lee’s new novel—or, to be precise, of the planned release of the companion novel to To Kill a Mockingbird that she penned many decades ago—while I was doing research at the Missouri Historical Library and Research Center. My own subject, still vaguely outlined, is the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, now more than a century in the past. Lee’s subject, of course, was the Jim Crow racism that prevailed in the mid-20th century American South. In terms of language, then, both To Kill a Mockingbird and Lee’s forthcoming work, Go Set a Watchman, lie midway between the vernacular of the St. Louis World’s Fair and that of our own time.
I’m not terrifically hopeful about the reception that Go Set a Watchman will receive, despite the beatification of Harper Lee over the decades. Her sole published novel, though still widely read in middle-school classrooms, has come under critical attack in recent years. However daringly progressive Scout’s story may have seemed in 1960, we have to set the language of speeches like righteous Miss Maudie’s in the context of Harper Lee’s time:
“The handful of people in this town who say that fair play is not marked White Only; the handful of people who say a fair trial is for everybody, not just us; the handful of people with enough humility to think, when they look at a Negro, there but for the Lord’s kindness am I.”
There but for the Lord’s kindness am I. We take this as the sentence spoken by a positive character in a novel written by a progressive author only by bearing in mind that Harper Lee was writing in the 1950s and was not immune to every iota of condescension or stereotyping, just to a lot of it.
I find myself looking back, not so much on my first encounter with the novel, but on the movie, which appeared in 1962. I was 8. My mother was determined to take me to it, and we stood in a long line at the Tivoli theatre in St. Louis waiting for tickets. Suddenly my mother thrust me behind her and held me there, gripping my shoulder. When she released me, she bent down and explained that my grandmother had been passing by on the opposite sidewalk. “She wouldn’t like it,” my mother explained, “you coming to see this movie.” I knew then what we tend to forget, now: However inadvertently smug Miss Maudie may seem to our sensibilities, To Kill a Mockingbird was, for a time and in some places, controversial.
At my seat in the Missouri Historical Library, I thumbed through correspondence and reports whose language in some places can only be described as repellent. Of the Cocopa Indians, an anthropologist casually writes, “Their early extinction seems inevitable; and it would seem probable that they will have the distinction of melting away through voluntary adoption of unfit Caucasian customs without the aid of church or state.” Of so-called studies in anthropometry, a superintendent reports that “to judge from the Races present at the Exposition, those with the largest heads are the most intelligent, and those with the smallest heads the least intelligent.” The ethnic groups assembled in living tableaux at the Fair were arranged to display “Man from the plane of the animal to his distinct and exalted position as a progressive conqueror of lower nature.” Meanwhile, a letter drifted in to the Fair’s Executive Committee noting that “a rule … prohibits the carrying of colored passengers in the automobiles now in service at the grounds.”
Almost no one reading the reports in 1904 took offense at the use of the word extinction in regard to a group of people at the Fair whose tribe was threatened with forced assimilation and genocide; or with the casual grouping of peoples into Races with preconceived notions about head size and intelligence that confirmed the status quo; or with phrases like the plane of the animal or conqueror of lower nature. No one challenged the blaming of bigoted, exclusionary practices on a rule. More than a century after these sentences were written, their language still belongs to its time, yes; but we do not. Sitting in the quiet library, I found myself sometimes agog that such sentences could be set down in earnest.
And today? What will the readers of 2065 think when they look back on the language we use? The readers of 2115? Will they find us as enlightened as we find ourselves? Or will they forgive us, for we knew not what we were saying?