Mockingbird (2 page)

1960 July: Civil rights sit-ins at Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina.

1960 August:
To Kill a Mockingbird
is 7th on the
New York Times
bestseller list.

1961 May: Harper Lee awarded Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

1962 January: Gregory Peck visits Monroeville; meets A. C. Lee, the man he will play in the film version.

1962: Monroeville Chamber of Commerce films A. C. Lee holding a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. “We are looking for Atticus Finch.” “Yes, I am Atticus.”

1962 April: Amasa Coleman Lee dies.

1962 October: James Meredith becomes first African-American student admitted to University of Mississippi. Violence necessitates deployment of federal troops.

1962 December: Premiere of film
To Kill a Mockingbird
in Hollywood. The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards.

1963 May: Crowds jam Birmingham, Alabama, theater to see
To Kill a Mockingbird
; during nearby civil rights protests in the city, Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor employs dogs, clubs, and cattle prods to disperse four thousand demonstrators.

1963 June: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, voter registration workers, ambushed and killed in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

1963 August: Quarter of a million people join March on Washington; King delivers “I Have a Dream” speech.

1964 July: President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs 1964 Civil Rights Act.

1964 December: Combined sales of
To Kill a Mockingbird
reach eight million.

1965 April: Perry Smith and Richard Hickock hanged for Clutter murders.

1966:
To Kill a Mockingbird
banned by Richmond, Virginia, school board.

1966:
In Cold Blood
published. Capote appears on cover of
Time
magazine.

1969: Christopher Sergel adapts
To Kill a Mockingbird
into a play.

1970: Maurice Crain, Lee's agent, dies.

1971: Annie Laurie Williams, Crain's wife, closes the office.

1974: Tay Hohoff, Lee's editor on
To Kill a Mockingbird,
dies.

1984: Truman Capote dies.

1990: Monroeville begins annual performances of
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

1999:
Library Journal
votes
To Kill a Mockingbird
the best novel of the century.

2007: Lee inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May, an honor society of two hundred and fifty architects, composers, artists, and writers; she suffers a stroke in June; Lee receives Presidential Medal of Freedom in November.

2010: Fiftieth anniversary of the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

2011: Unpublished manuscript of
Go Set a Watchman
found in Monroeville.

2013: Lee files a lawsuit against her literary agent.

2014: Alice Finch Lee dies, age 103.

2015
: Go Set a Watchman
published.

February 19, 2016: Nelle Harper Lee passes away at age 89 in Monroeville, Alabama.

 

Introduction

Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird
, published in 1960, became one of the most beloved novels of the twentieth century. Lee's fellow Southerner and contemporary Flannery O'Connor was mystified by its success. “It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are buying a children's book.” O'Connor, one of the finest short-story writers in American literature, failed to appreciate Lee's caustic sense of humor and subversive social criticism. In the same category is another classic often mistaken for a children's book,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

There will always be a place on library shelves for good stories, and
To Kill a Mockingbird
certainly is one. It draws the reader into a deep fictional landscape. Readers return to
To Kill a Mockingbird
because they want to walk the dusty streets of 1930s Maycomb, run madly through Boo Radley's backyard at night, or watch the trial of Tom Robinson play out to its disastrous end. Lee's storytelling voice is strong.

Also, the novel's emphasis on justice and compassion is timeless. You don't need to be a Southerner, or for that matter an American, to understand its importance. A harmless man, Boo Radley, is feared because he's peculiar. A good man, Tom Robinson, is denied the protection of the law because he isn't white. The primitive fear of otherness is the root of most of the world's evils.

And finally,
To Kill a Mockingbird
has the hallmark of all great works of literature: it reads you, the reader, as you read it. Great books and stories probe your convictions; silently, they ask what
you
stand for. As Atticus Finch leaves the courtroom—defeated but still true to himself—we wonder what it would be like to have people get to their feet out of respect for us, and what we would have to do to deserve it.

Consequently, no one could have anticipated how painful Atticus's moral fall would be when
Go Set a Watchman
, Lee's first published novel after fifty-five years, appeared in 2015. The hero of Depression-era southern Alabama, its moral compass, has turned into just a pleasant old man by the late 1950s when the novel is set, agreeing in spirit with Alabama Governor George Wallace, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” And because
Go Set a Watchman
arrived in bookstores, by coincidence, just two weeks after a white supremacist murdered nine people in a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, the overlap added to the disappointment—feelings of betrayal, even—that ran deep among many of Lee's admirers. “You double-dealing, ring-tailed old son of a bitch!” Jean Louise shouts at her father.

*   *   *

The purpose of this revision of
Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee
is to complete the picture of the author and her work, and to consider how she could have written two such completely different novels. In the ten years after the original version of this biography was published in 2006, Lee was more in the public eye than ever during the previous half century. Two films arrived in theaters:
Capote
and
Infamous
, with distinguished actresses playing her. Then Lee unknowingly signed over the copyright to
To Kill a Mockingbird
and had to fight to get it back. She also sued the Monroe County Heritage Museum in her hometown of Monroeville, alleging that the museum had profited from unauthorized use of her characters. More threats of litigation challenged the publication of a memoir in 2014 by a journalist who wrote about becoming her next-door neighbor and friend. Later that year, in November, Lee's sister, Alice—her confidante, protector, and financial adviser—passed away at age one hundred and three. Three months later came the announcement that
Go Set a Watchman
, a supposedly lost novel, had been found.

So much has happened; there's so much more to tell. Although one thing is constant: this revision, like the earlier version, was written without Lee's permission, encouragement, or assistance.

    —
C
HARLES
J. S
HIELDS
Charlottesville, Virginia
2016

 

one

The Making of Me

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.

—E. B. W
HITE
,
Here Is New York
(1949)

On a snowy night in the winter of 1958, in a one-bedroom cold-water flat at 1539 York Avenue between Eighty-first and Eighty-second streets, Nelle Harper Lee sat crying at her desk. Rolled into her typewriter was a page from a novel she'd been working on for almost ten years, about growing up in a little southern town. Thinking she was close to finishing, she had accepted a loan from friends—“an act of love” that would be “the making of me” she had called it—and spent the small advance from a publisher to stay home and write full-time.
1
That had been months ago. Beside the typewriter lay the unfinished manuscript with sentences and paragraphs crossed out, and her editor's comments and suggestions written in red pencil in the margins.

When she had arrived in New York City from Alabama in 1949, she had been twenty-three. Her send-off from her hometown of Monroeville had not been festive. Her mother was easily thrown off-kilter by emotional and health problems. Her father was disappointed that his youngest child had burned her bridges by dropping out of law school at the University of Alabama a semester short of graduation. He had entertained an old man's hopes that she would join his law firm, where he had been a partner for more than twenty-five years. Instead, she was leaving to go to New York to write, an ambition that must have sounded obstinately romantic.

He was not a worldly man, but stereotypes of Southerners ran rampant in the North, and she would likely be perceived as just another hick coming to the big city. On the Fred Allen radio show, heard nationwide, a Connecticut-born actor was convulsing audiences with his portrayal of a blustering, pontificating southern politician named Senator Beauregard Claghorn. “When in New York ah only dance at the Cotton Club,” intoned Claghorn solemnly. “The only dance ah do is the Virginia reee-ahl. The only train ah ride is the Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” Just as popular was
The Jack Benny Program,
whose bandleader, Phil Harris, was from Tennessee and pretended to be drunk. His signature song—a jazzy number called “That's What I Like About the South”—sold millions after it was featured in a hit movie of 1945,
I Love a Bandleader
.

Won't you come with me to Alabamy?

Let's go see my dear old mammy,

She's frying eggs and broilin' hammy,

That's what I like about the South!

Moreover, it was unlikely that lightning would strike twice in the same place: Monroeville had already produced one literary star Nelle Harper Lee's age.

As a child, she had been as close as a sister to the boy next door, Truman Capote. They had played, wrestled, fought, and even written childish stories together. He was something of a sensation now in the literary world, writing for the
New Yorker
, and his first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
(1948) had received an ecstatic review in the
New York Times
: “Only twenty-three now, precocious, self-confident and genuinely gifted, Mr. Capote has been getting himself a reputation by his short stories.… In a few years he has mastered a bewildering variety of jobs and acquired an amazingly finished literary technique … emotional, poetic, symbolical, filled with sibilant whispering and enigmatic verbal mysteries.”
2
No doubt Nelle's desire to emulate her friend was drawing her to New York, but a town of two thousand souls was not likely to produce two published writers in the same generation.

It seemed, however, that nothing could change her mind. After dropping out of law school, she had lived at home and worked as a waitress, saving her money for the day when she could strike out for New York. Finally that day had arrived, and now the family's black Chevy was being loaded for the trip to the train station in Evergreen, an hour away. After she bade everyone adieu, father and daughter drove down South Alabama Avenue, where she had played tag as a child, caught fireflies in jars, shot marbles, and stolen fruit from neighbors' trees. On their way out of town, they passed rickety picket fences, hundred-year-old trees, and homes where people had been born, lived, and died without ever feeling the need to venture far.

To a pair of young eyes like Nelle's, though, Monroeville was just a dusty old hamlet. Even after electric power had arrived in 1923, the town seemed reluctant to leave the nineteenth century. When she was a child, the sawmill whistle at noon announced when it was time for the midday meal; when it blew again, at five o'clock, wives checked their progress on making supper. The metallic clink of blacksmiths' hammers rang from several shady alleys because horse-drawn wagons were still in use. Folks shared “pass-around perennials” to save on expense: calla lilies, coreopsis, dianthus, gladiolas, phlox, and fragrant chocolate vines. In hot weather, a friendly wave from a porch beckoned passersby to come on up for a glass of sweet tea. For conversation, there was news from church, and gossip was always welcome. With as many as ten households on the same telephone party line, everyone eavesdropped on everybody else's business anyway. In times of sickness or trouble, neighbors brought over covered dishes—casseroles, biscuits, collard greens, and ham—whatever they could spare. In the late summer, the air sometimes sparkled at dusk with sawdust from the mills. In winter, the red clay streets turned sloppy, and cars splashed along in axle-deep tire ruts. The week before Christmas, farmers tended not to mind trespassing on their land, so long as anyone hunting for just the right pine tree to decorate respected the fences and closed the gate behind them when they left. About the time everyone turned in for the night, Monroeville's sole watchman began his quiet rounds in the square.