Mockingbird (11 page)

She decided she could do both, which probably struck her young mind as compromise; but it was also the first sign that writing mattered as much to her as fulfilling her father's hopes for “Lee & Daughters, Attorneys.” A profile of her in an October 1946 issue of the
Crimson White
described how she was coping with her dual responsibilities:

[She is an] impressive figure as she strides down the corridor of New Hall at all hours attired in men's green striped pajamas. Quite frequently she passes out candy to unsuspecting freshmen; when she emerges from their rooms they have subscribed to the
Rammer Jammer.…
[H]er idea of heaven is a place where diligent law students and writers ascend after death and can stay up forever without Benzedrine.… Wild about football, she played center on the fourth grade team in Monroeville, her hometown. Her favorite person is her sister “Bear.” … Lawyer Lee will spend her future in Monroeville. As for literary aspirations she says, “I shall probably write a book some day. They all do.”
18

She cared nothing about being perceived as a demure “Bama Belle.” There were only five women in the law school program, and Lee issued a call for more. “If you are an earnest student, not afraid of hard work (by that we mean hard, brother) and are of a high moral character (you have to get five affidavits to prove it) the Law school wants you!”
19
And because she courted controversy, her parody of “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” for the winter issue of
Rammer Jammer
included a reference to homosexuality. “Believe in Santa Claus! You may as well believe in fairies! Of course, there are fairies, but not the kind you read about in Anderson's fairy tales. While we are on the subject, I may as well disillusion you further. The authorities tell us that fairies cannot be seen. Don't you believe it! I saw two of them huddled together reading
The Well of Loneliness.”
20
For decades,
The Well of Loneliness
(1928) was the best-known lesbian novel in English.

In any case, she sallied forth with equal fervor both as the editor of the
Rammer Jammer
and as a law student. It was demanding, preparing for a day's classes in torts, real estate, and contract law; yet along with that, Lee managed the
Rammer Jammer
's staff of sixteen, too. Her quirkiness was a particularly good fit with the magazine's reputation, and she enjoyed acting eccentric. The yearbook photographer caught her hamming it up as a harried writer glaring at a typewriter, a cigarette burning perilously low in one hand. The southern novelist Elise Sanguinetti was a self-described “lowly person” on the staff—Nelle, she said, “was a lot of fun; she just made it go.”
21

Racism came in for ridicule again in her one-act play, published in the
Rammer Jammer
, “Now Is the Time for All Good Men.” A fictitious Alabama state senator named the Honorable F. B. MacGillacuddy, chairman of the Citizen's Committee to Eradicate the Black Plague, argues strenuously for the passage of a bill that is nothing more than a warmed-over post-Reconstruction gambit to disenfranchise blacks. It would require persons registering to vote to answer written questions about the U.S. Constitution to the satisfaction of the local registrar. The bill passes, but Senator MacGillacuddy is stunned when he fails the test, too. He appears before the U.S. Supreme Court, pleading, “I come to you on a matter of gravest importance. My civil liberties are being threatened. You boys all know me, I was in Congress with most of you. A diabolical group down in Alabama slipped one over on the honest, decent citizens of the state three years ago.… Whatta you going to do about it, boys?”
22
On the bench at the time was Associate Justice Hugo Black, a graduate of the University of Alabama Law School; when Justice Black was running for state office in the 1920s he was an outspoken member of the Ku Klux Klan.
23

*   *   *

As senior year approached, Lee's activities related to creative writing demanded as much time as law school. She was highly visible to the campus at large too as columnist, satirist, and editor. So it's surprising then she wasn't invited to join the fiction workshop run by her instructor Hudson Strode, who also taught Shakespeare. Strode was one of the best-known creative writing teachers in the country and his workshop was a forerunner of today's MFA programs. He recruited Elise Sanguinetti, a “lowly person” on the
Rammer Jammer
, but not Miss Lee. Why?

*   *   *

Born on Halloween in Cairo, Illinois, Hudson Strode grew up in Demopolis, Alabama, and considered himself a Southerner. After graduating from Columbia University, he had tried a career as an actor but Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, one of the foremost British Shakespeareans of the day, told him he was too short. Strode also had a high, squeaky voice. Lessons from a voice teacher eventually dropped his register two octaves into a rich, smooth baritone “that he used brilliantly in his famed class on Shakespeare's tragedies, making Hamlet's voice boom through Morgan Hall.”
24
To improve his carriage, Strode walked the banks of the Black Warrior River on the edge of campus balancing a book on his head. He wore ascots instead of ties and draped a Burberry overcoat around his shoulders like a cape. He smoked a pipe. He was a bit of a character.
25

His workshop received an average of twelve hundred manuscripts annually from students eager for one of fifteen to twenty-five spots available. “If you were chosen,” one of his students remembered, “he made you feel as though you had already accomplished a writing feat; you were among the few. At his table, you were sitting with the great.”
26
The workshop met two nights a week at a big table on the fourth floor of the library. Helen Norris, who was to be Alabama's poet laureate from 1999 to 2003, respected his judgment. “He was always right when a story needed more development. He had a marvelous sense of what he needed more of: ‘Well, I need something
more
there.'”
27
Thomas Hal Phillips, later a novelist and screenwriter, revered him. “To me, he was
the
master. Once, as we were about to cross campus from his Shakespeare class to the library, I was going down the steps with three or four other people right behind him. I referred to him out loud as ‘the master.' He stopped and dressed me down and said I shouldn't call him that. But I defended myself by saying I meant it, I
believed
it.”
28
Consequently, if Lee, a future Pulitzer Prize winner, was in Strode's Shakespeare course and he was aware of the quality of her writing—in and out of class—then why wasn't she among the twenty-five students in his workshop?

The simple answer might be that she didn't make the cut. With submissions pouring in, she would have had about a one in forty-eight chance of being accepted, according to Phillips, who was also Strode's teaching assistant and reviewed many of the applications. Or perhaps she didn't have the requisite fifty sample pages of manuscript ready. Sanguinetti said that Lee didn't have time to write lengthy fiction; her output was limited to articles for the
Rammer Jammer.
29

There's one more possibility: that she didn't take Professor Strode seriously. He was a disappointed actor who declaimed passages from Shakespeare in class, probably thinking his students would enjoy seeing scenes performed; but Miss Lee, said Norris, dismissed him as “pompous. She would be almost rude to him.”
30
One day, as he was holding forth in his mellifluous voice, she drew a caricature of him as Hamlet addressing Yorick's skull. It was so good that the class secretly passed it back and forth, sputtering with laughter.

Teachers, though, are not as obtuse as some students would like to think; and if Professor Strode was aware that Miss Lee ridiculed him, he would not have been inclined to recruit her for his little band of hopeful writers that met two nights a week. She couldn't have expected he would. Years later, she acted rather resentful when reporters asked her whether she'd taken Hudson Strode's famous workshop and she had to answer no.

*   *   *

Lee closed out the 1946–47 school year in June by severing her ties with the
Rammer Jammer.
One year as editor in chief was enough. Besides, her law school classes were all-consuming and she was forced to spend most evenings studying at the library until midnight. She still had a year to go after her senior year because law at Alabama was a five-year program. The stress must have been considerable, and her teetotaling father would not have been to pleased to learn that she was drinking hard liquor in an effort to relax.
31

Classes ended in May, and she went home by train. An important family event was coming up: her brother, Edwin Coleman Lee, was marrying Sara Anne McCall, Nelle's friend and classmate since childhood.

Edwin was seven years older than Sara and, according to friends, hadn't given her a second look when they were growing up together, because she was still in elementary school when he enrolled as a freshman in industrial engineering at Alabama Polytechnic Institute.
32
Later, she went to Huntingdon College the same year as Nelle, but by then Edwin was serving with the Eighth Air Force. In June 1944, he participated in the Normandy invasion, flew support for General Patton's Third Army in Europe, and received the Purple Heart. In 1946, Captain Lee returned to Monroeville. He and Sara fell in love; the wedding was set for Saturday, June 28, 1947, in Monroeville.

The weather was hot, so the guests were relieved that the ceremony at the Methodist Episcopal Church was scheduled for six o'clock in the evening. Inside the church, garlands of southern smilax and tall baskets of Snow Queen gladioli decorated the aisle and altar. The bride wore a dress with a high collar, full skirt, and long train that was a modern adaptation of an antebellum wedding gown. The maid of honor was later to become the mayor of Monroeville; Nelle was a bridesmaid. The reception was held outside, at the bride's home. Frances Lee, by now quite overweight and needing to make regular visits to Vaughn Memorial Hospital in Selma, found it best to let well-wishers come to her where she was seated at the groom's table.

Everything would have been ideal for patriarch A. C. Lee, almost seventy, except that shortly after arriving home for the summer, his youngest daughter had broken some unwelcome news. She had only enrolled in law school because “it was the line of least resistance,” meaning she knew how much her father wanted her to join Alice at the firm. But she didn't like law school; couldn't imagine pursuing law as a profession.
33

The exact words she used aren't known; but to several of her female classmates (those who remember her), Nelle Harper Lee from Monroeville appeared to be lonely and frustrated. “She never made a great effort to get to know anybody; she had her mind on what she had her mind on.”
34
In criminal law class, “she would not have been noticed except for the fact that she was in a large class of males. She was habitually dressed in a baggy pullover, with a skirt and loafers, her hair pulled behind her ears, and no makeup. To say that she was reclusive is an understatement. She was very quiet, spoke to no one—except when the instructor called on her to respond. Even then, she did so with as few words as possible.”
35
Outside of class, she was discourteous. “Lawyers sort of have to conform, and she'd just as soon tell you to go to hell as to say something nice and turn around and walk away.”
36

Truman Capote claimed she had a secret sorrow, but omitted the details; only that “She had a great love affair with one of her professors at college, and it did something to her. It didn't end up well. It was a law professor. I don't know if [the pain] still exists now.”
37
Capote was a gossip, though, and maybe his story should be discounted; except that a female law student who knew Lee heard the same rumor.
38

Love affair or no, Lee's overriding desire was to quit law school before taking a degree and to become a writer instead: a starry-eyed plan it must have seemed to her father—someone who had never had anything handed to him in his career—and the end of his hopes for seeing “Lee & Daughters, Attorneys” become part of his legacy to Monroeville.

 

five

To New York City by Way of Oxford

“She got an itch to go to New York and write.”

—A
LICE
L
EE

A. C. Lee might have tried to persuade Nelle to return to Monroeville after graduation by pointing out that if writing was what she cared about, she could take over the
Monroe Journal
from him and Alice. She could do a service by her family, the town, and the county if she did. Moreover, becoming a lawyer wasn't necessary; although a law degree—a degree of any kind—was always good insurance.

But that plan didn't satisfy his headstrong daughter either, and an episode that summer, about the time of Edwin Lee's wedding, is worth mentioning. One day in the offices of the
Baldwin Times
in Bay Minette, Alabama, the paper's publisher, James Faulkner, received an unexpected visit from A. C. Lee. Lee got right to the point. “I understand you are interested in establishing a newspaper in Monroeville.” Faulkner replied that he wasn't, because the town couldn't support two competing papers.

“Well, how would you like to buy one already in existence? I'll sell the
Monroe Journal
to you right now for fifteen thousand dollars.” The
Journal
was his to sell because of the four original partners in the enterprise, one had died and the Lees, father and daughter Alice, effectively owned most of the newspaper now.