Scout Finch can't go home again

Reflections on home towns, Natalie Maines of The (Dixie) Chicks and Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman"

I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story do I find myself a part?’

— Alasdair MacIntyre

Every time I come home, I feel like I’m coming back to the world, and when I leave Maycomb it’s like leaving the world. It’s silly. I can’t explain it, and what makes it sillier is that I’d go stark raving in Maycomb.

— Jeane Louise “Scout” Finch

I. No place like home

Jeane Louise “Scout” Finch has returned to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama. But she is farther from it than ever.

She is no longer 6-year-old Scout. She is 26-year-old Jeane Louise. In the two decades since the days of discovering gifts from Boo Radley, Jean Louise has moved to New York City, started a relationship with her childhood best friend, Henry Clinton, and lost her brother, Jem. But she is about to lose even more.

Jean Louise is as much a product of Maycomb as the crops grown in the surrounding farms. Until WWII she was related by blood or marriage to nearly everyone in the town. Henry longs for her to marry him, to come home. But she resists.

Her first few days in Maycomb bring back memories of her childhood: playing church with Jem and their neighbor, Dill; swimming at Finch’s Landing; sneaking into a revival meeting. The pull of her hometown remains strong, but it is in constant tension with Jeane Luoise’s gnawing sense that she will always be a trapezoidal peg in a round hole:

Every time I come home, I feel like I’m coming back to the world, and when I leave Maycomb it’s like leaving the world. It’s silly. I can’t explain it, and what makes it sillier is that I’d go stark raving in Maycomb.

It is not until the discovery of a pamphlet that she realizes just how wide a gulf there is between her and her hometown. The pamphlet is filled with some of the most vile racism Jean Louise has ever read. More shocking than the pamphlet's existence is that she discovered it in her childhood home.

In the wake of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education., Maycomb, like many communities in the South, has created “citizen’s councils” to fight back against integration. She sneaks into the town courthouse to find nearly all the white men of the county, her boyfriend, Henry Clinton, and her father, Atticus Finch.

This revelation devastates her. She becomes physically ill. In the same courthouse where Atticus once defended a black man against spurious charges of rape, he is now sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with men who stand for everything she thought her father despised.

What do you do when you find yourself at odds with the people and communities that formed you?

II. Origin Stories

Ms. Martin’s kindergarten class. I am top row, center.

I was raised by two loving parents and a community of roughly 200,000 people.

In Lubbock, Texas, there are no hills and few trees. But there are my parents, both grandfathers, an aunt, uncle and cousin. There are also the teachers who taught me, the coaches who pushed me, the first bosses who managed me, the pastors who formed me.

The first time I entered my high school I was carried in a stroller. When I was six months old, my mother brought me to watch my dad coach the varsity basketball team. By the time I did attend Monterey High School, many of my teachers already knew me (even if I didn’t remember them). I never had the experience of being lost in a new high school—I had grown up there.

Some of my earliest memories are of napping as a toddler on a church pew. More than 1,000 people attended the church I grew up in. When I visit, I often can’t turn around without running into a family friend or someone who I’ve known for years if not decades. I come from a faith tradition that eschews instruments and uses only our voices to worship. A chorus of more than 1,000 people is a beautiful sound and something I often miss.

During the sacred communion in the church I grew up in, there is silence except for the unwrapping of individual crackers and grape juice containers. The rustling sounds like a light rain, punctuated by the sound of small children in the back. I know exactly where those parents with small children are sitting, because it is where my parents sat when I was a small child.

As Rachel Held Evans notes about the church she grew up in:

I was baptized by my father. And by my mother. By Pastor George, by my Sunday school teachers, by my sister… I was baptized by Alabama, by Reagonomics, by evangelicalism, by Parkway Christian Academy… I was baptized by Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace and Billy Graham. I was raised by the sort of people who turn fish stories into sermons and listen to Rush Limbaugh and sometimes love me the wrong way.

This is the community that formed me, that shaped me. I am every bit a product of Lubbock, Texas, as the cotton that grows in the fields surrounding the city. When I drive around town, I see so many of the people and places that made me who I am.

In the last several years, however, I’ve begun to see other things, things I hadn’t noticed before, things that bother me. When I walk around the neighborhood I grew up in, I spot several yard signs implying Donald Trump will win “for the third time.” On the corner not far from the house I grew up in, there was a large flag that read, “Trump Won 2020,” long after the votes had been counted and a new president was sworn in.

People I love, I admire, I respect post things on social media that I cannot square with the values they taught me. As Jean Louise wonders as she listens to the people of her hometown:

We were both born here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder what you saw and heard.

As a product of Lubbock, I can empathize with a sense of loyalty to the Republican Party, even though it’s a loyalty I no longer share. But what I can’t get my head around is the devotion to a man who seems to defy every Christian value my community taught me.

When I was a child in the 90s, Bill Clinton was president. The same fervor aimed at (rightly) denouncing a man for his affair with a college-age intern is now aimed at defending a man who had an affair with a porn star.

The questions that haunt Jean Louise are the questions that haunt me:

Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.

III. Lubbock or Leave It

Around the time I was born, Natalie Maines of The (Dixie) Chicks was attending O.L. Slaton Junior High in Lubbock, where I would go many years later. Her uncle, Steve Maines, lives in the same neighborhood as my parents. We’ll see him occasionally walking around and he’ll address my dad as “coach.”

Natalie comes from a long line of musicians. Not since Buddy Holly had someone from our hometown reached that level of national fame and recognition. We loved Natalie. She was a rock star in one of the most successful country music acts of all time. We were so proud of her.

Until she made an off-hand remark about being ashamed that President George W. Bush was from Texas. We loved Bush. He was one of us. Don’t remind us he was born near Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew up in West Texas and had been our governor. When he spoke, he sounded like us. He represented us in every way we could be represented. You can’t say things like that, and certainly not on foreign soil. It was a deep betrayal.

So we burned her CDs. We demanded radio stations never play her songs again. If loving her had been a uniting sentiment, hating her would be, too. She was no longer one of us.

I have thought a lot about Natalie Maines in recent years. When she had her fall from grace, I was attending O.L Slaton Junior High. It was a given that she was the bad guy in this story. As an adult, my views are more nuanced.

Part of what made Natalie a lightning rod was the fact she was a country music singer from Texas. Had Madonna or Cher made the same comment, there might have been an uproar but not the same impact on sales. Madonna and Cher aren’t from Texas. Country music fans in the South likely wouldn’t heavily identify with these two women.

But Natalie was a different story. She was “one of us” and that made her comments inexcusable in the eyes of many.

It would be years before The (Dixie) Chicks would put out another album, “Taking the Long Way.” And Natalie would come out swinging. One of the hit songs was “Not Ready to Make Nice,” which laid bare Natalie’s feelings about the fallout from her Iraq War comments in 2003. But less remarked upon was Track 7 titled “Lubbock or Leave It.”

It hurts to watch this video. It’s hard to watch thousands of people cheering and singing along to lyrics mocking your hometown:

Dust bowl, Bible belt

Got more churches than trees

Raise me, praise me, couldn’t save me

Couldn’t keep me on my knees

…

I’m on my way

To Hell’s half acre

How will I ever

Get to Heaven now?

But part of what hurts is some of these lyrics are true:

On the strip the kids get lit

So they can have a real good time

Come Sunday, they can just take their pick

From the crucifix skyline

When I was growing up, Lubbock was the largest “dry” city in the U.S. until residents voted to allow alcohol sales within the city in 2009.¹ Just outside the city limits was “The Strip” where alcohol was sold. Teen alcohol use is not unique to Lubbock, but I did know plenty of friends growing up who would drink on Saturday nights and then rouse themselves the next morning to attend church. I once visited another church in town and saw the preacher’s kid from my home church there with bloodshot eyes. He had plenty of alternate churches to choose from to avoid being caught.

I can’t begin to imagine what Natalie went through in the aftermath of her comments about President Bush, especially feelings of rejection from her hometown. It clearly led her to a very bitter place. It is a very understandable reaction. At the time, it appeared she completely rejected her hometown (but privately did not, more on that later).

When you find yourself at odds with the people who raised and formed you, that pain can be very deep. And some respond by rejecting everything associated with that place, those people, that group altogether.

IV. “New York [or Austin] Has All the Answers”

“Ugh, well I’m sure you were glad to get out of there.”

This was a common response I would get while attending a progressive church in Austin when I told them where I grew up. This response came from church members. From ministry staff. From the lead pastor. I would have just met these people and they were making clear what they thought of my hometown.

The assumption, of course, is that I also despise my hometown like they do. But I don’t. I’m not ready to reject the community that formed me. Nor am I ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the faith communities I was raised in.

At the extreme end, othering people looks like the virulent racism in Maycomb that fights to enshrine segregation and subjugation. But at the other end of the spectrum is the subtler kind of othering that puts large swaths of people into a box—based on where they’re from, their politics, their expression of faith—and casts them aside as if everyone from that group is irredeemable.

It’s a sneering attitude that Jean Louise chafes against, too:

New York? I’ll tell you how New York is. New York has all the answers... The city lives by slogans, isms, and fast sure answers. New York is saying to me right now: you, Jean Louise Finch, are not reacting according to our doctrines regarding your kind, therefore you do not exist. The best minds in the country have told us who you are. You can’t escape it, and we don’t blame you for it, but we do ask you to conduct yourself within the rules that those who know have laid down for your behavior, and don’t try to be anything else.

Jeane Louise is aggravated at how Northerners have a fixed idea of what a Southerner is. People from places Jeane Louise was born into are reduced to an uncharitable stereotype and there’s an air of superiority among those in New York City where she now resides.

Putting people in boxes to reject them misses all the nuances within a community and all the people who have differing views. Like my elementary school teacher who shared on Facebook about being an LGBT ally. Or the time my hometown newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, featured a gay couple on the front page as an example of foster families. Or my friend Nan from DFW, who is the director of Texas Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty. She is trying to leverage her relationships within her community to advocate and raise awareness, including op-eds in The Dallas Morning News.

Even Jeane Louise has to be reminded by her uncle that there’s more complexity and nuance than first appears:

That’s the one thing about here, the South, you’ve missed. You’d be amazed if you knew how many people are on your side, if side’s the right word. You’re no special case. The woods are full of people like you, but we need some more of you.

V. Taking the long way

When I heard Natalie Maines was being inducted into the West Texas Walk of Fame, I was shocked. I was also a little angry. Had the members of the West Texas Walk of Fame not heard, “Lubbock or Leave It?” Had they not heard the lyrics like:

Oh boy, rave on down loop 289

That’ll be the day you see me back

In this fool’s paradise

But Natalie Maines was coming back to this fool’s paradise. And in an interview with a local radio station the day of the ceremony, she revealed she had come back to her hometown many times since “the incident.”

That night, in the auditorium of her hometown high school, Lubbock High, she got to join her father and uncle in the West Texas Hall of Fame. She spoke of how she loved Lubbock, loved growing up there even if she didn’t always fit in. She gave a shout-out to her elementary school, her teachers at O.L. Slaton, and the many others who shaped and formed her.

After everything that happened, Natalie seemed ready to make nice.

Natalie cannot escape where she was born. It is a part of her, just like it is a part of me. Just like it is a part of Jeane Louise Finch. When you find yourself at odds with the communities that formed you, you can react by casting everything aside, throwing out both the harmful and the life-giving aspects of what came before.

But after the pain and bitterness subside, perhaps a better way forward is— borrowing a phrase from Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr—to “transcend and include.” Take what is valuable, life giving, meaningful and bring it with you into the next chapter of your life. Take the valuable relationships, the fond memories, the positive values your community gave you and transcend the harmful behaviors and toxic traits that serve no good purpose.

As theologian David Benner writes:²

Identifying and embracing your lineage is an important part of any pathway to greater wholeness because it involves remembering your own story. All the parts of your journey must be woven together if you are to transcend your present organization and level of consciousness… Too many people live that life of dis-identification, and I did not want to share their anger and “stuckness.” This was the way in which I came to know that everything in my life belongs, that every part of my story has made important contributions to who I am. And the same is true for you.

After she has fought with her father over his regressive views, and after begrudgingly coming to understand more of what motivates him (while still not agreeing), she sees that she’s able to hold onto her love for him, despite their strong differences of views. She is her own person, and seeing her father’s failures is what has been the most painful. But perhaps now she can love the full person—not just the ideal.

We are left to wonder what happens to Jeane Louise. Does she move back to Maycomb? Does she return to New York City and occasionally visit? Whatever path she decides, she will always know she has a place in her hometown, as a beloved child of the community.

1. Amarillo Globe News, 2012

2. David G. Benner, Human Being and Becoming: Living the Adventure of Life and Love (Brazos Press: 2016), 118-119.