8 Bombshell Excerpts from 'Go Set a Watchman'

Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee’s follow-up to her much-revered To Kill a Mockingbird, hit bookshelves on Tuesday.  The new novel reveals that Atticus Finch holds racist beliefs, a development that shocked readers who long considered the character to be among the greatest moral compasses in literary history.

Lee didn’t stop there. Here are eight excerpts from Go Set a Watchman that deliver even more shocking bombshells.

Atticus now kills and eats mockingbirds

I sat across the kitchen table from Atticus and watched silent as he drizzled honey and hot sauce onto the poor still bird that lay on his plate. He rubbed his hands and grinned at me with a sinister kind of glee.

“Ummmm Dad,” I started. “I thought you said it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. You made kind of a big deal out of it.”

“Yeah, I thought about that,” he said, digging a napkin bib into his shirt collar. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it? It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird ‘cause all it does is sing? Listen, sweetheart. That makes it fucking useless. There’s too many birds on earth and not enough in my tum-tum. How’s that for a needlepoint phrase?” He picked up his dinner fork. I ran out of the room, crying.

Atticus thought Scout was a boy for twenty years

Atticus held a circular disc of pills in his hand. “Aren’t you a boy?” he asked me.

“Dammit, Dad!” I said, snatching my birth control from him and wresting my purse from his other hand. “Stop going through my stuff!”

“Don’t change the subject,” he glowered. “I could have sworn I had… two sons.” Then he started to look around the room, as if searching for the other son.

“Dad, I’m a girl. A biological girl. I have always been a girl.”

“Wow,” he said, sinking into his armchair. “This is nuts.”

Scout now lives in a Los Angeles apartment with a ditzy blonde and a man pretending to be gay

In the wayward years of my twenties, I lived with Chrissy, a perky blonde woman, and Jack, a man who said he liked men so our landlord Mr. Roper would allow him to live with us.  I always did ask myself, what the hell kind of leasing policy was this? What business was it of Mr. Roper’s to demand proof of our sexual orientations? And if he had such conservative values, why would he allow a gay man as one of his tenants in the first place?  It made no sense. And yet we lived this way for seven years, always inviting neighbors to come knock on our door. “We’ll be waiting for you!” we would chime, ominously.

Tom Robinson’s trial turned out to be an isolated incident

I still think upon the time my father defended Tom Robinson, the black man wrongfully accused of bringing harm to a white woman. Though innocent, he died in police custody. Thankfully, that was the only time something like that ever happened in the history of the justice system.

The title refers to Jem talking with his mouth full

“Go set a watchman,” my brother said, chewing a big glob of biscuit and gravy the size of a softball.

“Huh?” I said.

He swallowed. “I said, ‘Go sell a Walkman!’”

“Oh,” I said. But I didn’t feel like it. “Nah,” I decided.

So we found Dill and did something else.

To Kill a Mockingbird took place on Earth the whole time

I saw the Statue of Liberty, standing tall on that island off the cobalt coast of Manhattan, and that’s when I knew. I felt hot tears at the bottoms of my eyes. “No,” I said. “No, no, no! It can’t be!”

Atticus put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t know how to tell you.” I turned and buried my face into his shirt. He put his arm around me. Sobbing, I pounded his chest over and over again.

“Ow,” he said. I pounded again. “OW,” he reiterated. “Goddamn you. I’m this country’s leading men’s rights activist. Show some respect.”

Atticus is just a figment of Scout’s imagination, who is a figment of Dill’s imagination, who is a figment of Boo Radley’s imagination, who is a figment of Calpurnia’s imagination

“Why?” I asked Calpurnia, our housekeeper. “Why would you make all of us up in your head and then arrange it so that we all made each other up and didn’t even realize it?”

“It started out as a little thought exercise,” she told me as I wafted like a ghost down the crevices of her mind. “I wanted to see if I could imagine a group of white people who truly had black people’s interests at heart.”

“And did this experiment succeed?” I asked.

At that point, she just threw her head back and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Scout dies with none of her private work exploited

As I write these final words, I am warm with the comfort that people will remember Jean-Louise “Scout” Finch as the woman who shared the story of her brave, true, and honorable father.  No opportunistic lawyers will find and publish my other writings I never ever intended for the world to see. No one will ever disregard my wishes in hopes of turning a profit. My legacy will remain intact, just as I intended.

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C.J. Arellano is a writer and director specializing in narrative video, branded content, prose, and nonfiction. He works as a video editor for Second City Works. Sift through his stuff at CJarellano.com!