Mockingbird (6 page)

*   *   *

In their defense, Monroeville during the Depression in the 1930s was not much to be above. There was no library, nor were there many ongoing activities outside of church. There were no books to take home from school because the school had none to loan. Movies at the Strand Theater tended to be escapist westerns, adventures, or romances, because people wanted to forget their problems for a few hours. “This was my childhood,” Nelle said. “If I went to a film once a month it was pretty good for me, and for all children like me. We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn't have much money. Nobody had any money. We didn't have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imaginations most of the time.”
44
She might be overstating the case a bit here. During the Great Depression, when homeless men would rake leaves for a sandwich, the Faulks and the Lees barely felt the pinch. Truman's spanking-new clothes testify to that; and the Lees sent all four children, including the two girls, to private colleges. To invoke a word that's not often used any longer, the reason that Nelle Harper Lee acted up in class and did pretty much as she pleased may have been because she was the youngest and “spoiled.”
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“We were privileged,” she admitted. “There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade, and we were impatient with them for having to catch up.”
46

One day a glimpse of possibilities induced a moment of rapture in Monroeville children. In the fall of 1931, Nelle and her classmates thrilled to an announcement by the principal that everyone should go outside and look in the direction of Alabama Avenue. Poking its monstrous dark nose above the trees, a craft as big as a flying battleship churned into view. It was the eight-engine, 785-foot Navy dirigible U.S.S.
Akron
. One of the boys on the playground felt a sense of awe sweep over everyone: “And there it was, right before your eyes. A gigantic, sleek, grey giant silhouetted against an overcast morning sky. It was an eerie sight as it glided noiselessly, and so low to the ground that it seemed as if you could reach up and touch it.… [A] kind of mild hysteria set in and students bolted the campus, crossed the road, and chased the giant airship down the old M & R railroad tracks until it was out of sight.” The airship churned away, pointing like a compass needle to the future.

*   *   *

One way “apart people” with time on their hands could feed their imaginations was by reading. Truman's cousin Jennings Faulk Carter recalled how Nelle and Truman created a bond over books that put them in splendid isolation.

The year I began school, Truman and Nelle were knee-deep reading Sherlock Holmes detective books. Even though I hadn't learned to read with their speed and comprehension, we three would climb up in Nelle's big tree house and curl up with books. Truman or Nelle would stop from time to time to read some interesting event aloud. We'd discuss what might happen next in the story and try to guess which character would be the culprit. Sometimes Truman called me “Inspector.” Nelle was “Dr. Watson.”
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The Rover Boys
, a series written by Edward Stratemeyer, was a favorite too, despite the stories' ridiculously stilted dialogue—“‘Hello, you fellows!' shouted a voice from behind the Rover boys. ‘Plotting mischief?'” At least they featured a girlfriend-sidekick named Nellie. A better choice, in Nelle's opinion, was the Seckatary Hawkins series by Robert F. Schulkers, about a boys' club on the Kentucky River. The club's motto was “Fair and Square.” (From
To Kill a Mockingbird
: “Atticus opened his mouth to say something, but shut it again. He took his thumb from the middle of the book and turned back to the first page. I moved over and leaned my head against his knee. ‘H'rm,' he said. ‘
The Gray Ghost
, by Seckatary Hawkins. Chapter One…'”) Nelle wrote to the publisher requesting a club membership form. In her childish handwriting she signed the pledge: “I shall always be fair and square, possessed with strength of character, honest with God and my friends, and in later life, a good citizen.”
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Just as satisfying as reading stories to herself was hearing stories read aloud. “When we were a bit too young to read, Brother, who was a voracious reader,” Nelle said, “would read many, many stories to us. Then we'd dramatize the stories in our own ways, and Truman would always provide the necessary comic relief to break up the melodrama.”

*   *   *

Sometimes Nelle's friendship with Truman was tested, though—he could be a handful. Being insecure and easily upset, he strained everyone's patience. But Nelle wouldn't let him get under her skin, even when he marred a nice afternoon spent cutting out magazine pictures of kites by raging at her.

“‘Stop that, Nelle. Keep your hands off my pictures. I hate you, Nelle. I really do.'

‘You shut up, you silly little shrimp, or I'll knock your silly block off.'”
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He couldn't push her far.

When this sort of pleading failed, he tried playing the victim, to shame her into letting him have his way. “She was bigger than Truman. Lots bigger,” said Jennings's mother, Mary Ida Carter. Nelle would hurl him to the ground, as if to demonstrate that weakness made one legitimate prey—“She was tough on me,” he said.

Unable to overcome her in physical contests, he tried other methods to manipulate her. Once, smarting from one of their fights, he concocted a fabulous scheme to make her jealous: he decided to run away with another girl who was older. They hitched to Evergreen, probably with the idea of getting on the train and lighting out for parts unknown. But they were spotted and brought home by suppertime.
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Yet despite their spats, separations, and grudging reconciliations, the two friends remained inseparable. They swam in the pond at Hatter's Mill Creek, where speckled trout tickled their legs. Sometimes they hiked the dirt road that led to cousin Jennings's farm. They dug in when Truman's aunt Mary Ida spread the kitchen table with homemade biscuits, jam, butter, and fresh milk to welcome them. And if there was nothing else to do, they could always walk to the town square. As Scout says in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, “There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.”
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But window-shopping was free. There were stores around the square—in the center of which was a grassy park with three enormous oaks—providing simple goods and services: hardware, jewelry repair, dry goods, and so on. At the pharmacy, cold drinks cost five cents. Expensive, but sometimes, a tin can on a string descended like bait from a second-floor window of the jail by the courthouse, meaning a prisoner up there needed someone to run an errand. In the bottom of the can would be money for cigarettes, and a tip left over.

The Barnett and Jackson Hardware Store was a dependable stop because the owner, Gus Barnett, had a wooden leg and never minded hiking up the cuff of his trouser to show it off. For pretty things, there was Meyer Katz's Department Store. Katz was a Russian Jew who had worked his way up from peddler in southern Alabama to patriotic merchant. “The only free cheese is in a rat trap!” he was fond of saying. He also had the distinction of selling the local Ku Klux Klan their sheets in the 1920s. When a member of the Invisible Empire, as they called themselves, said that maybe he shouldn't be purchasing his robes from a Jewish store owner, Katz replied, “That's all right because you know who I am and I know who you are. And you know that if you buy them somewhere else you will have to pay more for them.”
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(In
To Kill a Mockingbird,
Atticus recalls how the Klan paraded by “Mr. Sam Levy's house one night but Sam just stood on his porch and told 'em things had come to a pretty pass, he'd sold 'em the very sheets on their backs. Sam made 'em so ashamed of themselves they went away.”)

Also on the square was the Home Café, which in
To Kill a Mockingbird
became the O.K. Café, “a dim organization on the north side of the square.” Mrs. Dubose, trying to intimidate Scout, stops her with “What are you doing in those overalls? You should be in a dress and camisole, young lady! You'll grow up waiting on tables if somebody doesn't change your ways—a Finch waiting on tables at the O.K. Café—hah!”
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The Simmons Hotel advertised a fifty-five-cent brunch special on Sundays in the sunroom. Fifteen minutes before all was ready—chicken, mashed potatoes, okra, corn, gravy, cornbread, and pie—a black child wearing a white suit rang a handbell loudly like a town crier at the curb. The event was a treat for those who could afford it, although Sundays were special for everyone. Scout says, “Of all days Sunday was the day for formal afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets, men wore coats, children wore shoes.”
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And presiding over the square was the Monroe County Courthouse, open to the public during the week. A genial, moonfaced man named Judge Nicholas Stallworth had conceived it. He was convinced that Monroeville, the “hub of Southwest Alabama” needed a courthouse worthy of the distinction. In 1903, work got under way, until the blueprints disappeared and a new set had to be drawn. As construction proceeded, it was pointed out that the basement should have been scooped out first, causing another delay. As the costs continued to mount, predictions flew that the four-story citadel of brick, capped by a six-sided clock tower dome was going to be a financial fiasco at taxpayers' expense. They voted Judge Stallworth out of office and rued the day they had ever agreed to “Stallworth's Folly.”
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But when at last the courthouse was complete, there was nothing foolish about its interior. On the contrary, it was, as the
Monroe Journal
boasted, “one of the handsomest and most conveniently appointed in the state and one that would do credit to a county far exceeding Monroe in wealth and population.” Painted all white inside, with rows of wooden benches like pews, curving side aisles, and tall windows, the courtroom gave the impression of a small church with New England ties. (To this day, visitors tend to take off their hats when they enter, and to speak in a whisper.) The pine floor, tight as a ship's deck, was coated several times with black gum resin, to resist scuff marks from the boots of country folk. At the front was the judge's bench, on a dais enclosed by white balusters, where lawyers presented their forensic performances. To the right was the jury box.

From the second-floor gallery, Truman and Nelle sometimes watched Mr. Lee below as he presented cases. In fact, Nelle only seemed to have two favorite pastimes, Truman complained: either hanging around the courthouse and playing pretend golf.

Until, that is, the flint of their imaginations was sparked by an act of thoughtfulness: Nelle's father gave them a typewriter to share—a black, steel-chassised Underwood No. 5 with keys that made a satisfying “Clack! Clack!” Just operating it was fascinating. “Ding!” The tree house would have been the ideal office, but the typewriter was too heavy to get up there. Instead, they sat under the big yellow rose bushes in the Faulks' backyard. Truman would bring his tattered copy of Webster's dictionary, and together they would sit for hours, tapping out stories.
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A girl from school tried to join in, but discovered that three's a crowd. “Nelle grabbed some paper and put it in the typewriter. Truman started telling a story, and while he talked Nelle typed it. Well, they would not let me help with the story, so I just grabbed my paper dolls and went home!”
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Before long, the residents of South Alabama Avenue unknowingly became dramatis personae in the first stories of coauthors Truman Streckfus Persons and Nelle Harper Lee.
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Looking back, Nelle was of the opinion that small-town life “naturally produces more writers than, say, an environment like Eighty-second Street in New York. In small town life and in rural life you know your neighbors. Not only do you know everything about your neighbors, but you know everything about them from the time they came to the country.”
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One of their earliest efforts (since lost) bore the provocative title “The Fire and the Flame.”
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And there was certainly no lack of interesting people in the vicinity to write about. As a source of mystery and speculation, for instance, nothing beat the tumbledown Boulware place just two doors south of the Lees'.

It was a dark, ramshackle house with all the paint gone from the boards. What went on inside was a matter of conjecture, because the shutters stayed closed as if the house were asleep. The owner was Alfred R. Boulware, sixty, a merchant and an influential man in town but a cheapskate. Boulware wouldn't spend a dime on his house, or its raggedy yard of tangled pecan trees. Regardless, his sagging realm belonged to him and nobody was permitted to put a foot on it without his permission. A well-hit ball from the schoolyard over the fence into Boulware's weeds might as well have landed in a minefield. Everyone knew better than to retrieve it. Even the pecans that fell from the trees were his, and he stood in the backyard, arms crossed, as if daring any kid to steal one.

He had three children—Mary and Sally, both in their late twenties, and Alfred, Jr., who was nicknamed “Son.”
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Every weekday morning Mary and Sally emerged looking fresh as daisies. They waved to Nelle and Truman like beauty queens on parade floats, and then continued on their way downtown to their respective jobs, Mary as a dental assistant and Sally as a secretary. This unaccountable behavior left Nelle and Truman astonished, because Son Boulware, whom nobody had seen in years, had become a southern Frankenstein's monster—a prisoner in his own home, tied to a bedstead.