Go Set a Watchman
Page 48

Dr. Finch’s voice softened. “It seems quixotic today, with jet airplanes and overdoses of Nembutal, that a man would go through a war for something so insignificant as his state.”
He blinked. “No, Scout, those ragged ignorant people fought until they were nearly exterminated to maintain something that these days seems to be the sole privilege of artists and musicians.”
As it rolled by, Jean Louise made a frantic dive for her uncle’s trolley: “That’s been over for a—nearly a hundred years, sir.”
Dr. Finch grinned. “Has it really? It depends how you look at it. If you were sitting on the sidewalk in Paris, you’d say certainly. But look again. The remnants of that little army had children—God, how they multiplied—the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to begin with—in some cases they became horrifyingly more. They were never destroyed. They were ground into the dirt and up they popped. Up popped Tobacco Road, and up popped the ugliest, most shameful aspect of it all—the breed of white man who lived in open economic competition with freed Negroes.
“For years and years all that man thought he had that made him any better than his black brothers was the color of his skin. He was just as dirty, he smelled just as bad, he was just as poor. Nowadays he’s got more than he ever had in his life, he has everything but breeding, he’s freed himself from every stigma, but he sits nursing his hangover of hatred….”
Dr. Finch got up and poured more coffee. Jean Louise watched him. Good Lord, she thought, my own grandfather fought in it. His and Atticus’s daddy. He was only a child. He saw the corpses stacked and watched the blood run in little streams down Shiloh’s hill….
“Now then, Scout,” said her uncle. “Now, at this very minute, a political philosophy foreign to it is being pressed on the South, and the South’s not ready for it—we’re finding ourselves in the same deep waters. As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons. I hope to God it’ll be a comparatively bloodless Reconstruction this time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look at the rest of the country. It’s long since gone by the South in its thinking. The time-honored, common-law concept of property—a man’s interest in and duties to that property—has become almost extinct. People’s attitudes toward the duties of a government have changed. The have-nots have risen and have demanded and received their due—sometimes more than their due. The haves are restricted from getting more. You are protected from the winter winds of old age, not by yourself voluntarily, but by a government that says we do not trust you to provide for yourself, therefore we will make you save. All kinds of strange little things like that have become part and parcel of this country’s government. America’s a brave new Atomic world and the South’s just beginning its Industrial Revolution. Have you looked around you in the past seven or eight years and seen a new class of people down here?”
“New class?”
“Good grief, child. Where are your tenant farmers? In factories. Where are your field hands? Same place. Have you ever noticed who are in those little white houses on the other side of town? Maycomb’s new class. The same boys and girls who went to school with you and grew up on tiny farms. Your own generation.”
Dr. Finch pulled his nose. “Those people are the apples of the Federal Government’s eye. It lends them money to build their houses, it gives them a free education for serving in its armies, it provides for their old age and assures them of several weeks’ support if they lose their jobs—”
“Uncle Jack, you are a cynical old man.”
“Cynical, hell. I’m a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses. Your father’s the same—”
“If you tell me that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely I will throw this coffee at you.”
“The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won’t be that way much longer.”
Dr. Finch grinned like a friendly weasel. “Melbourne said once, that the only real duties of government were to prevent crime and preserve contracts, to which I will add one thing since I find myself reluctantly in the twentieth century: and to provide for the common defense.”
“That’s a cloudy statement.”
“Indeed it is. It leaves us with so much freedom.”
Jean Louise put her elbows on the table and ran her fingers through her hair. Something was the matter with him. He was deliberately making some eloquent unspoken plea to her, he was deliberately keeping off the subject. He was oversimplifying here, skittering off there, dodging and feinting. She wondered why. It was so easy to listen to him, to be lulled by his gentle rain of words, that she did not miss the absence of his purposeful gestures, the shower of “hum”s and “hah”s that peppered his usual conversation. She did not know he was deeply worried.
“Uncle Jack,” she said. “What’s this got to do with the price of eggs in China, and you know exactly what I mean.”