Mockingbird (4 page)

In fact, on the whole block of South Alabama Avenue there were no real peers for Nelle. A little girl lived across the street from the Lees briefly, but she moved away. To the south of the Faulks lived Mrs. Powell Jones and her blind, ex-Confederate husband. Their house was best avoided. The Joneses were very old, and Mrs. Jones, an invalid in a wheelchair, shouted constantly at her beleaguered husband. Children passing by her property were not exempt from her imprecations, either. (Many Monroeville residents would later recognize in Mrs. Jones the model for Mrs. Dubose in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, who tormented Scout and Jem with her vicious taunts.) To the north of the Lees lived Mr. Hendrix, a druggist, and his wife. Their children were grown.

Under these circumstances, Nelle turned to Truman, who was overjoyed. By the second summer of their friendship, 1931, they were partners in adventure. The Faulk residence, where Nelle spent a good deal of her time, was better appointed than most of the houses in town. It was a capacious, high-ceilinged dwelling. The entryway was decorated with potted ferns on special occasions. There was a formal parlor, a dining room with china cabinets displaying “Dresden, Meissen, and sparkling pieces of cut glass,” a spacious kitchen where the cook, Little Bit, rustled up enormous meals; a bathroom, several bedrooms, and in every room a fireplace. In the backyard were two or three outbuildings for chickens and turkeys, as well as a smokehouse with hams, bacon, and bagged sausage suspended from the joists during autumn for curing. Also in the backyard was an in-ground birdbath, which the children called a “swimming pool,” beside a rock wall. These are the only two remnants of the Faulk home remaining, both of which appear in the novel as part of the property belonging to Dill's aunt, Rachel Haverford.

Virginia “Jenny” Faulk, who was in her midfifties, had built the house as a communal dwelling for her sister Callie, two years younger than she; their brother, Bud, who managed a little farm and had acquired the nickname “Squire” Faulk among the wags in town; and their elder sister, Sook, who, despite being white-haired when Nelle knew her, had the mind and disposition of a preadolescent girl.

Despite the outward signs of gentility, the Faulks lived in a stew of door-slamming, tearful arguments, accusations, shouting, delicious schemes to subvert authority, and mock remorse when one was caught red-handed. Though elderly, the four siblings fought like teenagers. Jenny carried the weight of the household on her shoulders and refused to budge on matters unless she deigned to let Callie have her way; Sook, rarely comfortable with anyone except children, gave away her position as the eldest in return for scraps of kindness and respect. Brother Bud, using his male prerogative, absented himself from the frays downstairs by relaxing in his room. The atmosphere was quite a bit different from the Lees' home, which proceeded day-to-day with an air of managed restraint.

Nelle's favorite among the squabbling siblings was Sook. A prolific baker of fruitcakes—she was later immortalized in Truman's “A Christmas Memory”—Sook kept a plug of Brown's Mule tobacco tucked in her cheek. She dabbed away the juice from her lips with a cotton handkerchief. She was addicted to morphine, prescribed following a mastectomy; and when her medicine bottle went dry, the children saw her grow skittish and distracted until someone fetched her a refill from the pharmacy.

She fed Nelle and Truman sugar cookies dipped in morning coffee and they ate like open-mouthed birds. They sat in her skinny lap making up long, fantastic tales. When the
Mobile Register
landed on the porch, Sook opened to the “funnies” and together the three of them read their favorite strip, “The Meditations of Hambone,” which lampooned, among other subjects, the Ku Klux Klan, the Republican Party, and all political elections. The
Montgomery Advertiser
, also widely read in Monroeville
,
often carried front-page stories by a reporter and columnist named Atticus Mullins, which may have been Nelle's first exposure to the distinctive first name she later gave the hero of
To Kill a Mockingbird.

The children's private retreat from grown-ups was the tree house in the chinaberry tree.
11
The friends' talents at playing complemented each other. Nelle was best at shooting marbles, while Truman excelled at swiping jacks off the sidewalk so fast that his hand was a blur. As a matter of fact, he was not uncoordinated—the label “sissy” was undeserved; he just wasn't interested in the kinds of things most boys were. But when he played, he was quick, agile, and determined, and could leap up on the rock wall and turn cartwheels. Though he was too small for his punch to pack a real wallop, kids at school called him “Bulldog” because he had an underbite, and he lived up to the moniker by head-butting adversaries and knocking them down. One afternoon in the lobby of the Lyric movie theater in Mobile, Bulldog sailed in a bit low and collided with the other boy's genitals.
12

So whether he actually needed her help or not, it was a point of pride for the roughest girl in school to be the bodyguard of her pipsqueak friend. In a funny way, they went together: She was tall for her age; he was small and delicate. She was too rough for the girls; he was too soft for the boys. That was how they appeared on the surface, anyway. But they also had a secret understanding about themselves. They were bound, said Harper Lee, “by a common anguish.”
13
For both children disappointed their mothers' hopes—they were just too different.

*   *   *

Nelle's mother's side of the family began in Virginia, resurfacing in Monroe County, Alabama, in the early 1800s, probably as part of the migration of farmers who could no longer afford good land along the mid-Atlantic seaboard. Nelle's grandfather, James Cunningham Finch, the postmaster, grew up on his parents' farm near Belle's Landing. His wife, Ellen Rivers Williams, came from a family that owned a plantation nearby, about halfway between Montgomery to the north, and Mobile to the south. The land was excellent, bordered as it was by the Alabama River, flowing south to Mobile Bay. The river would flood the Williamses' bottomlands at least once a year, and sometimes several times, depending on the rainfall. It was deep enough, too, that steamboats arrived to offload goods and take on the Williamses' cotton. Enslaved farmhands stood at the top of the hill and slid the four-hundred-pound cotton bales down a steep chute to stevedores on the deck, who stopped them before they fell overboard.

James Finch's family was not as gentrified as Ellen Williams's, but they tried to rear their two daughters in genteel circumstances. When Nelle's mother, Frances, and Frances's sister, Alice, reached fifteen, they were enrolled in the new Alabama Girls' Industrial School in Montevallo, a progressive boarding school for whites created by Julia Tutwiler, a feminist leader in Alabama educational and penal reform.

The school was unusual, because it was both a vocational and a finishing school. All the girls took English, Latin, and other basic high school courses. Then they could add elective classes, including stenography, photography, typewriting, bookkeeping, indoor carpentry, electrical construction, clay sculpture, architectural and mechanical drawing, sewing, cooking, and “other practical industries,” according to the school catalog. The catalog also expressly warned that “pupils are not here to enter society, but to be educated; therefore they are not allowed to correspond with gentlemen, and visits from them are positively prohibited under penalty of expulsion.”
14
Trips off campus into Montevallo were forbidden without a chaperone. All the girls wore the school uniform: a navy blue dress and a beret with a white tassel. Frances Finch distinguished herself by excelling in music and appeared as a pianist and vocalist in concerts and recitals.

With such an education, Frances Finch was an artistic, some might say slightly pampered, young woman. Throughout her life, family members often used the word
gentle
to describe her.
15
An ambitious husband for her—one her parents approved of, although he was a bit older than Frances—would appear on the scene before long.

*   *   *

Amasa Coleman Lee, born July 19, 1880, in Georgiana, a village in Butler County, Alabama, was the middle of nine children: six boys and three girls, two of whom died in childhood. His family called him Coley. It's highly doubtful that these Lees are related to the famous Virginia tidewater Lees that include Robert E. Lee, as encyclopedia entries about Harper Lee continue to claim. The history of Harper Lee's family in North America began with John Lee, Esq., born in 1695 in Nanesmonds, Virginia. Her grandfather Cader Alexander Lee was a private in the 15th Alabama Regiment of the army of the Confederate States of America, who fought in twenty-two battles including Gettysburg. When the 15th surrendered at Appomattox, Private Lee was one of only a few hundred remaining from the original fifteen hundred recruits. General Lee may have tipped his hat to one of his most valiant soldiers, as well he should have, but that's as far as current genealogical research will take us about the relationship.
16
Nelle's grandmother, the former Theodocia Eufrassa Windham, was sister to one of Cader Alexander Lee's kinsmen who had been killed early in the war at the battle of Malvern Hill in Virginia.

Young Coley Lee's upbringing was Methodist with a stringent dose of evangelicalism, which emphasized the authority of the Bible, personal conversion, and salvation by faith. The Lees frowned on drinking, card playing, gambling, and other diversions considered a waste of time. On Sundays, his father hitched up the horses for the three-and-a-half-mile trip from their farm to services at the local Methodist church. The message delivered there—to act according to the teaching of the Gospel—became Coley's central philosophy as an adult. Respectable Christians needed to be concerned about their Divine Father's work. But farm chores took precedence over philosophizing or book reading. Some winter evenings during the school year, Coley ran out of daylight before finishing his lessons. At sixteen, he passed the examination to teach, which he did for three years at a school near Marianna, Florida.

By the time he was twenty, Coley was introducing himself as A. C. Lee. Eager for advancement, he relocated to Monroe County in Alabama, where sawmills were chewing into the piney woods, filling the air with their earsplitting shriek and the vinegary smell of fresh-cut lumber. He was a man on the go in those early years, which was fairly typical of the generation that came after the War Between the States. As the southern historian Edwards Ayers wrote, “Investors began to put money into sawmills, textile factories, and coalmines. Young people of both races set out for places where they could make a better living. Railroads connected the landscape, cutting into clay banks, running across long sandy and swampy stretches, winding their way through wet mountain forests. Enthusiastic young editors talked of a ‘New South.'”
17
Deprived of victory on the battlefield, ambitious white Southerners looked to a New South to regain their pride.

A. C. Lee took a series of better-paying jobs as a bookkeeper, which brought him to the Bear Creek Mill at Finchburg, Alabama. While attending church one day, Lee, who was thirty, met the postmaster's daughter, nineteen-year-old Frances Cunningham Finch. They married in the bride's home on June 22, 1910.

As a provider, A.C. did not disappoint the new Mrs. Lee. In 1912, two years after their marriage, he accepted a position as financial manager for the law firm of Barnett & Bugg in Monroeville, which was then a small, segregated town of 750 residents.

Monroeville hadn't changed much from the days of the War Between the States, when a Confederate soldier passing through wrote to his folks that he had arrived in the “most boring place in the world.”
18
But in the early 1900s, the town finally seemed about to live up to its potential. The year the Lees arrived, the first locomotive of the Manistee and Repton Railroad reached the downtown on freshly laid tracks. The railroad was the brainchild of Lee's employers, Barnett and Bugg, along with a third investor. The county newspaper, the
Monroe Journal,
proclaimed that the Manistee and Repton intended “to establish freight and passenger rates with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which will be a great convenience to all concerned.”
19
The M&R did indeed begin hauling freight and passengers east from Monroeville to Manistee Junction, where it joined like a tributary the mighty Louisville and Nashville Railroad. And from there, it was possible to go to just about any major hub in the United States.

A. C. Lee's career flourished in Monroeville. First, he acquitted himself well as a financial manager. Then by reading for the law under the tutelage of his employers, he passed the bar examination in 1915. Steadily, he was ascending the rungs of respectability: from teacher in a country school, to bookkeeper, to financial manager, to attorney. The firm changed its name to Barnett, Bugg & Lee.

He was in every respect a New South man who had fought his way up from poverty—a replacement for the old ruling aristocracy that reluctantly yielded, as the historian W. J. Cash said, to the men of “Rotary, the sign-manual of the Yankee spirit, the distillate, as it were, of the Yankee mind,” though every “Southern gentleman expressed contempt for money-grubbing Yankees as a way to ease his own mind about Yankee success.”
20
By the time he was forty, Lee would have his finger in every pie in town: the bank, the newspaper, the Chamber of Commerce, Kiwanis, and the local Methodist church. The New South meant economic growth and local pride.

*   *   *

The Lees had four children: Alice Finch Lee, born in 1911; Frances Louise Lee, born in 1916; and Edwin Coleman Lee, born in 1920. But the birth of their youngest, Nelle Harper Lee, on April 28, 1926, put an unexpected wrinkle in the upper-middle-class home life the Lees enjoyed. By naming her “Nelle”—her grandmother Ellen's name spelled backward—it was as if they had introduced a changeling into the quiet and sober Finch-Lee line. (Nelle's middle name, Harper, was a tribute to Dr. William W. Harper who had ministered to mother and child after baby Louise failed to thrive and Mrs. Lee suffered a nervous breakdown.
21
) Deliberately or not, she rebelled at everything her mother valued. Nelle would not go willingly into the “pink cotton penitentiary” of girlhood, any more than would her fictional self, Scout Finch.
22
Miss Tutwiler's Alabama Girls' Industrial School would not have been the place for her. She couldn't even accept, without squabbling with her teachers, the three
R
s offered at the public school down the block. Consequently, Frances Lee and her headstrong daughter lived in two different worlds.