“My Childhood Is Ruined!”

This chapter proposes to take the notion of ruined childhood seriously, as it is indeed one of the major themes put forward by Lee in Watchman. In the series of verbal confrontations that she initiates afterward, which might well be summarized as versions of "My childhood is ruined!" Mockingbird, in fact, demonstrates the ways that childhood, standing in for the nation, comes into racialized innocence designed specifically to register the ever-present anxiety of whiteness while averting ruin with the promise of futurity. Jean Louise's self-diagnosed "color blindness" is revealed to be much less a factor of not-noticing blackness than a "holy ignorance" of whiteness and its power structures. Alongside Jean Louise, readers receive some version of Coates's message to his son that opens this chapter: all is not okay, it is far from clear how it will ever be okay, but necessity of finding "some way to live within the all of it" demands engagement and resistance-to whiteness from "whites".