I actually hate that title. Heroes don’t need to be vindicated. But maybe the “vindication studies” brand has caught on.

I have written an account of Atticus as an Americanized Southern Stoic to teach you how to teach To Kill a Mockingbird. You should annoy your kids’ teachers by sending them a copy, and you should give it to your kids to save them from being dragged down by one-dimensional race-class-gender-sexual-orientationism. Only a very subtle and reserved scholar should tackle the issue of sexual orientation in To Kill a Mockingbird and the “sequel” (that’s really a misbegotten rough draft) Go Set a Watchman. I’m not that guy, and, of course, neither book is much about sex of any kind. That’s one reason among many that TKM is America’s most edifying (yet quite realistic) children’s book.

Now GSW is just not a very good book, and it never should have been published, especially in a rather misleading way for the mass market. That’s not so much because it lessens our opinion of Atticus, but because it makes Harper Lee look like less than she became. Now my opinion of GSW — despite its very uneven writing (good on description; weak, as far as I can tell, on psychological insight) — will go up if it turns out to have, as they say, more subtlety than appears at first. For me, the hero of the book is Henry (Hank). He was a perfect gentleman as the suitor to the awkward Jean Louise (the fictional Harper Lee) in high school (the account of the prom is funny and touching) and remained in her persistent pursuit years later. He worked his way up from his white-trash origins to work as an attorney with Atticus, who now regards him as almost a replacement for his deceased son Jem. Atticus, of course, prides himself on being part of a meritocracy of virtue, not of social class, and he has seen the great merit in the very good-natured, able, and industrious Hank.

Now Jean Louise lashes out against Atticus and Hank for attending a meeting of the Maycomb [White] Citizens’ Council and for being segregationists generally. She calls them weak and hypocritical. Hank tries patiently to explain to her that for him to be a force for good in the community, he must comply with various conventional expectations. A Finch, he goes on, has the privilege of being eccentric without losing social status. And that’s the way Jean Louise has been her whole life. But Hank doesn’t have that privilege. Eccentric behavior — being a fervent integregationist, not attending church, and so forth — would marginalize him, keeping him from being a man in full — an attorney, political leader, husband, father, and so forth — in the place he loves. Jean Louise denies that she’s treated like an exception to the rule, but without giving any real evidence. She doesn’t really stop to consider what’s true in what her gentleman says — really, on her behalf. Her wise uncle (“Dr. Finch”) calls her a minor — but real — “bigot.” I could go on here to explain why Jean Louise loves — but doesn’t love in exactly the right way — Hank, adding, of course, the good reasons why she’s repulsed by the thought of spending her life hanging with the housewives of Maycomb.

I want to say that Hank, the democratized Southern Stoic, is the future of Maycomb, a place to which Harper Lee returned with the privilege of being at home and homeless. At the end of the day, Jean Louise chooses against the New Yorkers she describes as suspicious, hateful, ideological, and mannerless, and for the always imperfect decency of the people with whom she grew up.