Mockingbird (16 page)

On Thursday, November 9, 1933, the
Monroe Journal
reported that a white woman named Naomi Lowery told authorities that Walter Lett, a factory worker near Monroeville, had raped her. According to the newspaper, Lett “was captured on Saturday afternoon and taken into custody. Fearing that an attempt would be made to lynch the Negro by a mob following the news of the attack, Sheriff Sawyer took the Negro to the jail in Greenville for safekeeping.”
12
So far, the incident follows parallel incidents in
To Kill a Mockingbird
almost exactly.

After waiting six months in jail for the circuit court's spring term to begin, Lett was arraigned in the Monroeville County Courthouse on March 16, 1934, on a grand jury indictment for the crime of rape. He pleaded not guilty.
13
The case took an unusually long time to be decided because Lett had a strong alibi. It was not until 9:00
P.M.
that the jury of twelve white men returned its verdict of guilty. “Those are twelve reasonable men in everyday life, Tom's jury,” Atticus says in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, “but you saw something come between them and reason.… There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn't be fair if they tried.” Judge Hare set the date of Walter Lett's death by electrocution for May 11, 1934.
14

The verdict, however, didn't sit well with some of the leading citizens of Monroeville and the county at large. Apparently, there was more to the matter than had come out at the trial. Objections reached the statehouse in Montgomery, and Governor B. M. Miller granted a stay of execution. A second reprieve moved the date again to July 20. The reason for the stays, Miller told the
Montgomery Advertiser,
was that “many leading citizens of Monroe County” had written to him stating, “there is much doubt as to the man being guilty.”
15

One of the petitioners may well have been A. C. Lee. He was the editor and publisher of the
Monroe Journal
, a director of the Monroe County Bank, an attorney, and the incumbent state representative from Monroeville. If his name hadn't been among the “many leading citizens of Monroe County” calling for clemency, Lett's cause might have suffered.

To dispose of the problem, Governor Miller split the baby, commuting Lett's sentence from death in the electric chair to life imprisonment. But it was too late. Lett had been incarcerated four miles north of Montgomery on Kilby Prison's death row. Two months before his arrival, six prisoners had been electrocuted in the death chamber. The room had no soundproofing and inmates had heard nightmarish sounds of agony. While Lett waited his turn to die three different times, he suffered a mental breakdown. The prison physician wrote to the governor, “He now lies in an assumed state of catalepsy and demonstrates fairly definite features of schizophrenia.”
16
Miller asked the state physician inspector to examine Lett personally. “It is my opinion that the above named prisoner,” the inspector replied a few days later, “the man whose sentence you recently commuted, is insane.”
17
At the end of July 1934, Lett arrived at Searcy Hopsital for the Insane in Mount Vernon, Alabama, and he remained there until he died of tuberculosis three years later. Then a truck carried his body to Atmore and delivered it to his mother.

The potential of Walter Lett's trial to inspire sympathy, and its power to cast light on a racist judicial system, makes it a likely choice as the basis for Tom Robinson's trial in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Recommending it too is that the trial took place in the Monroe County Courthouse, which Harper Lee knew well.
18

But the Lett case, while supplying everything necessary for a good plot, lacked a central character that would be meaningful to Harper Lee—her father in the role of defense attorney. And there had been such a case, in fact, with similar themes; it occurred very early in A. C. Lee's career, when he had been appointed to defend two men accused of murder.

*   *   *

In 1919, William Henderson Northrup of Lower Peach Tree, Alabama, owned a general store near the Alabama River. His riverfront location put him in an advantageous spot for doing business. When travelers shoved off from the eastern bank of the river at Davis Ferry and crossed the two-hundred-foot span of brown water via rope ferry, there was Northrup on the other side—in the catbird seat for securing the business of folks needing to purchase a few things. Customers knew sixty-nine-year-old Northrup as a friendly man who had lost one arm in a sawmill accident when he was a teenager. (Tom Robinson had a similar impairment—“His left arm was fully twelve inches shorter than his right”—which Lee used, along with the circumstances of the Walter Lett case, to create the circumstances of Maycomb's rape trial.)

On Saturday morning, September 14—a clear day that promised to be another late-summer scorcher in the upper nineties—Northrup was discovered by an early customer lying on the floor of his store, dying from a blow that had cracked his skull and crushed his shoulder. He was incoherent and incapable of giving a description of his assailant or assailants. The motive for the attack was obvious, though—the cash drawer didn't have a cent in it. By the time the Monroe County deputy sheriff arrived, Northrup was dead. Later that day, the deputy sheriff arrested Frank and Brown Ezell, father and son, and locked them in the Monroeville county jail. A lynch mob gathered, so the prisoners were removed to another county for safekeeping.

To defend two black men on charges of murdering a white man, Judge Murdock McCorvey Fountain (the same who remanded custody of Son Boulware to his father) appointed a young attorney with a promising future in Monroeville, but no criminal trial experience: Nelle Harper Lee's father, Amasa Coleman Lee. He would have less than two weeks to cobble together a defense.

He did his utmost—including objecting to the fact that one of Northrup's sons was on the jury—but he lost, as he was destined to, given the times.
19
When the foreman returned to read the verdict, Lee copied it down. His handwriting becomes agitated and irregular before regaining its usual composure with the last few words: “We the jury find the defendants, Frank Ezell and Brown Ezell guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the indictment and we further find that they suffer death by hanging.” The date of execution was set for December 19.

On the appointed day, a large crowd assembled outside the county jail across from the courthouse. Some of the curious had brought umbrellas to ward off the cold, steady rain, but many just stood waiting with their collars turned up. Inside the jail, Frank and Brown Ezell stood on an iron grating, anchored into the wall about ten feet above the first floor and reached by a ladder. In the middle of the grating was a trapdoor with a pair of leaves, each approximately two feet wide by four feet long. From a beam eight feet above the prisoners' heads hung a rope ending in a noose. The sheriff and his assistants positioned Frank Ezell over the trap door. The crowd outside strained to hear if he had anything to say. He said he was innocent and denied having anything to do with the crime. Then a hood was placed over his head and the noose snugged around his neck. His hands were tied behind his back.

On a signal, the doors divided and he dropped straight down and stopped with a neck-breaking jerk at knee level with the men standing below. A local physician stepped forward and listened to his heartbeat. Minutes passed until the doctor pronounced him dead. Then Brown Ezell, after asserting that he had acted alone and deserved his punishment, joined his father in death within the hour. The sheriff came out and announced to the crowd that both men had paid the penalty and were indeed dead.
20

But that was not the end of it. Not long after the sentence was carried out, in New York City, Clyde McCall Northrup, the murdered man's eldest son, received a package postmarked Monroeville. Thinking perhaps that it was an early Christmas gift from relatives, he removed the wrapping and opened the box. Inside, wrapped in newspaper dotted with dried bloodstains, were two heavy hanks of hair—the scalps of Frank and Brown Ezell—and a note reading, “Justice has been done in Alabama.”
21

Attorney Lee never took another criminal case; he remained a title lawyer for the rest of his professional life. How deeply he felt about the almost perfunctory hangings of the Ezells was left to his daughter to allude to in what would become
To Kill a Mockingbird
. The hanging of Atticus Finch's first two clients “was probably the beginning of my father's profound distaste for the practice of criminal law.” But through the character of Atticus, Harper Lee highlights her father's decency when he was a young, well-intentioned lawyer; and for plot, the Walter Lett case offered an incendiary issue: a sexual transgression against a white woman.

*   *   *

With the core components of her novel in place, she set to work revising again in the winter of 1957–58. Hohoff's role continued to be providing “professional help in organizing her material and developing a sound plot structure. After a couple of false starts, the story line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision—there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in Nelle's own vision of it—the true stature of the novel became evident.” The time frame became the middle of the Depression, between the summer of 1932 and Halloween night 1935, when Maycomb County is so poor that the energy of life itself seems to be on hold. Hohoff remembered:

We talked it out, sometimes for hours. And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country.…

We saw a great deal of each other during this period, and, if conditions make it possible, I believe such close, frequent communication can be of enormous benefit to the author, the book, and incidentally to the editor. But of course writing is the loneliest of activities. Harper Lee literally spent her days and nights in the most intense efforts to set down what she wanted to say in the way which would best say it to the reader.… It's no secret that she was living on next to nothing and in considerable physical discomfort while she was writing
Mockingbird
. I don't think anyone, certainly not I, ever heard one small mutter of discontent throughout all those months of writing and tearing up, writing and tearing up.
22

Colleagues of Hohoff's say she took nothing else on—no other manuscripts—for six months while she worked with Lee.

Capote later said that the first two-thirds of the book, the portion about Scout, Dill, and Jem (Nelle, Truman, and Nelle's brother, Edwin, probably) trying to coax Boo Radley out of his house, “are quite literal and true.”
23
Supporting this is the way actual incidents reported by the
Monroe Journal
during those years became part of the fabric of the story. For instance, in February 1933, when Nelle was six years old, a Mr. Dees fired a shotgun at somebody prowling in his collard patch (a black man, and the shot killed him), a parallel to the episode in which Nathan Radley fires a load of buckshot in Jem Finch's direction while Jem is retrieving his pants from Boo Radley's backyard.
24
In May 1934, a rabid dog bit two adults and two children, prefiguring the scene in the novel of Atticus shooting a mad dog.
25
As Capote said, “Most of the people in Nelle's book are drawn from life.”
26

However, he had nothing to do with the actual writing of the book, although some Monroeville residents believe the legend: “I've heard they were up there at the old Hibbert place, which is right north of Monroeville—out there in the woods. They just went out there, there's an old farmhouse, and they went out there and wrote and wrote and wrote.”
27
Tay Hohoff's son-in-law, Dr. Grady H. Nunn, said that such a deception wouldn't have occurred to Lee.

I am satisfied that the relationship between Nelle and Tay over those three years while
Mockingbird
was in the making developed into a warmer and closer association than is usual between author and editor. I believe that special association came about at least in part because they worked, together, over every word in the manuscript. Tay and [her husband] Arthur became Nelle's close friends, sort of family, and that friendship continued beyond the publication of the book. I doubt that the special closeness could possibly have happened had there been an alien ghostwriter, Capote, involved.
28

Also, given Capote's inability to keep anybody's secrets (as friends who read his posthumous novel
Answered Prayers
discovered to their horror), it's preposterous that he wouldn't have claimed right of authorship after the novel became famous. He did say, which Lee never denied, that he read the manuscript and recommended some changes because it was too long in places. “Yes, it is true that Nelle Lee is publishing a book. I did not see Nelle last winter,” Capote wrote to his aunt Mary Ida Carter, “but the previous year, she showed me as much of the book as she'd written, and I liked it very much. She has real talent.”
29

*   *   *

For all her talent, Lee couldn't shake her difficulty with first and third person. Here's the adult Jean Louise speaking:

When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia) were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose's house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell.