Mockingbird (7 page)

His fate sounded like a campfire tale, but the tale was essentially true. Sonny Boulware and two schoolmates, one of them the sheriff's son, had been hauled before Judge Murdock Fountain in 1928 for breaking school windows with a slingshot and burglarizing a drugstore.
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The judge decided that such enterprising young men could benefit from a year at the state industrial school. The two other boys' parents concurred, but not Mr. Boulware. He asked the judge to turn the boy over to him, promising that his Sonny would never trouble anyone again. (It's said by those who remember what happened that Mr. Boulware “was too proud to have his son sent to a correctional facility.”)
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After that, Son was rarely seen by anyone.
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At first, friends from high school would crawl on elbows and knees to his bedroom window to talk to him. Word got around that he would gladly do the football players' math for them. In return for his help, team members took him for rides in the darkness after midnight.

But eventually, his classmates grew up and moved on, and he was forgotten. Occasionally, as the years went by, he would appear on the porch at night, his presence only known by making the rockingchair creak and squeak. Children coming home from school held their noses while walking by, or crossed to the other side of the street to avoid inhaling evil vapors. Some neighbors reported hearing a parched voice from the Boulware place cry, “Caw, caw!” and incidents of peeping Toms were blamed on him. Nelle had seen him outside once, resting in the shade, and didn't find him so strange. But essentially, Sonny Boulware was erased from Monroeville forever. “Mr. Boulware ruined his son's life, I guess because it was shaming him,” said a friend of the Lee family. “That man was
mean.
”
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Or as the Finches' housekeeper Calpurnia says bitterly in
To Kill a Mockingbird,
when “Boo” Radley's father dies, “There goes the meanest man God ever blew breath into.”

Son Boulware never left the property again, until he was carried out on a stretcher in 1952, dead from tuberculosis. The marker placed at his grave in the First Baptist Church cemetery reads, T
O LIVE IN HEARTS WE LEAVE BEHIND IS NOT TO DIE
.

*   *   *

The splendid friendship between Nelle and Truman was interrupted suddenly in the mid-1930s, when Lillie Mae belatedly exercised her partial-custody rights and took Truman to New York City. Her second husband, a Cuban-American businessman named Joseph Capote, adopted him, and ten-year-old Truman took Capote as his surname. Lillie Mae, who was now calling herself Nina, enrolled him in prep school. From then on, until he was about eighteen, Truman returned to Monroeville only during the summers. He had always been an outsider, and now his connection grew more and more tenuous. In fact, he enjoyed letting people know he was different now, a New Yorker—a fact he liked to lord over everyone.

During one of his return visits, he ambled into a drugstore on the square one afternoon and sat down at the lunch counter, looking bored.
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He was dressed in his prep school jacket and tie, and he flicked his long blond hair out of his eyes. “I'll have an ice cream,” he said. The teenaged soda jerk behind the counter asked him what kind. Capote replied, “Oh, I don't know.… I guess I'll have a Broadway flip.” The teenager shoved Truman backward off the stool, spilling him on the linoleum floor. “There you go!” he said. Capote stood up, straightened his jacket, and left.
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His revenge came later. During an all-day rainstorm, he hired the only taxi in town and kept it for himself all day.

The Lees might have sent Nelle away to a private school, too. They were better off than most, and some parents in town who had the means sent their children to boarding schools in Birmingham and Montgomery. The Lees, however, knew their youngest was a nonconformist and bored with school already.
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There was a chance that at a private school, she might be pigeonholed as a hopeless troublemaker. The Lees were too tenderhearted to resign her to a lonely fate like that. Instead, it seems that her father took her in hand.

*   *   *

By now Mr. Lee was in his midfifties, and he didn't seem the type to minister to a rowdy child young enough to be his granddaughter. His favorite caddy on the golf course, Joseph Blass, had trouble imagining it. “He seemed much more of an intellectual than a physical man. The image of shooting the mad dog or of facing down the crowd of rough-necks has never quite rung true to me. The strong intellectual stand, though, seems very natural.”
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Truman's aunt Marie Rudisill agreed. “Mr. Lee was detached, not particularly friendly, especially with children. He was not the sort who came up to his children, ruffled their hair, and made jokes for their amusement.”
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As Scout says of Atticus, he “treated us with courteous detachment.”

The era before World War II had a good deal to do with Mr. Lee's reserve. Professionals such as doctors and lawyers were expected to display a degree of gravitas around others. Southern gentlemen felt an obligation to set an example to the common whites: advise them, get them out of trouble, and hold them to a moral standard that was part Christian, part southern tradition, and a good fit with Rotarian ethics for the public man.
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The impression Mr. Lee gave of being a bit stuffy was a function of the times, said a resident. “People seeing him in the normal course of affairs might interpret his formal habits of speech and behavior as signs of coldness and distance. For example, he and my father were good friends and golfing buddies, but I don't believe either ever called the other by his first name.”
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Younger members of the Kiwanis Club were too cowed by Lee's standing in the community to use his nickname, “Coley,” even though he welcomed it in the spirit of fellowship; they preferred instead paying a quarter into the club treasury each time they respectfully called him A.C.
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*   *   *

Mr. Lee was of slightly taller than average height, with flat, pugnacious features like a boxer's. But his large-eyed, impassive expression, accentuated by a pair of big round glasses, seemed permanently impressed on his face from his days as a bookkeeper. Every weekday morning, like clockwork, he could be seen coming down the steps of the Lees' bungalow dressed in a rumpled three-piece suit. Passing beneath the fig trees, crape myrtle, and pecans in the front yard, he turned left to walk the two blocks north to his law office above the bank in the town square. Had someone pointed him out as a minister, a scholar, or a professor, instead of one of the most prominent businessmen in town, it would have seemed appropriate. His mannerisms were those of someone always preoccupied with his thoughts.

Stopping to converse with him required patience. His manner of speaking was almost comically precise and deliberate. He did not make conversation as much as offer pronouncements that began with “ah-hem!” progressed to “uh,” and sometimes, for emphasis, ended with “ah-RUM!”
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It was as though every matter he was invited to discuss had a potentially grave aspect, and he wanted to limit his personal liability by choosing his words with absolute care. He much preferred listening to talking, often while sucking thoughtfully on a piece of hard candy. He also had a distracting habit of absentmindedly fumbling with things, including his watch, a fountain pen, or his special favorite: a tiny pocketknife that he flipped with his thumb and caught like a coin. Once a hardware store clerk waited while Mr. Lee selected and flipped different penknives until he found one with exactly the right weight and balance. It soothed him to do it.

He did not grope for words, however, when writing editorials for the
Monroe Journal.
In addition to being an attorney, in 1929 he had purchased a partnership in the newspaper. Founded in 1866, the
Monroe Journal
was not one of the more influential organs in a state that boasted the
Mobile Register,
the
Montgomery Advertiser,
the
Birmingham News,
and the
Birmingham World,
the most widely read black newspaper
.
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But the
Journal
was a dependable guide to goings-on in the county: a weekly farrago of mishaps, odd bits of local and national news, letters from readers, arrests, marriages, visits by out-of-town kin, births, and deaths. Residents of Monroe County looked to it as their source of local information and opinion. As the
Journal
's editorialist, Lee used the paper as a bully pulpit from which to address his favorite topics: taxes, overreaching government, drinking, hooliganism, and political corruption. As a businessman and a civic leader, Lee was intent on keeping the peace, because peace facilitated progress; but such a stance also put him in a bind.

Whites were afraid of blacks getting out of control, forgetting their place; unless examples were made, some might take it into their heads to victimize whites who were alone in the back county or traveling on deserted roads.
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Heinous crimes—and ones in which blacks were accused received particularly gruesome attention in newspapers—triggered cries for swift justice, and Southerners tended to be skeptical of official authority.
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From the
Monroe Journal
in 1892: “Mr. Richard L. Johnson, an aged gentleman from the north who moved into the community only a short time previously, was called to the door and brained with an ax, his daughter outraged and the bodies of both consumed in their burning home. Four Negro suspects were arrested, and being confronted with circumstantial proof of guilt, were said to have confessed participation in the crime. They were lodged in the jail. In the dead hours of the night, a mob stormed the prison, took the miscreants therefrom and meted out punishment.”
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A willingness to believe the worst, added to a perverse sense of what constituted law and order, resulted in otherwise upstanding citizens attending lynchings with a clear conscience, like a posse out West riding out and hanging an outlaw. “Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know,” Atticus tells Scout.

Violence also addressed maladies southern white men shared as a result of the War Between the States—wounded pride, loss of honor, loss of caste, loss of face.
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The southern white man has “freed himself from every stigma,” says Uncle Jack Finch in
Go Set a Watchman
, “but he sits nursing his hangover of hatred.”
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Yet there were many who, like A. C. Lee, opposed nursing a “hangover of hatred” because disorder was not in the community's interest. Monroeville had only one police officer in the 1930s, and liquored-up mobs might destroy property; workers who resorted to rowdyism at every provocation made poor employees. According to one historian, membership in the Alabama Ku Klux Klan actually declined steeply from 115,000 in 1925 to 1,349 in 1930, because those who were otherwise in sympathy with its platform—Americanism, Protestantism, and the supremacy of the “Caucasian race”—“condemned its use of the mask, intimidation, and violence. Its own excesses virtually destroyed it, especially in the South; in fact, opposition to the hooded order was more serious and outspoken in the South than anywhere else.”
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A. C. Lee belonged to the camp intent on keeping the peace for the sake of progress and social uplift. Nor was he merely talking through his hat about the importance of law-abiding behavior. One night in August 1934, just weeks before a state election, a hundred Klansmen gathered in the parking lot of Monroeville Elementary School to make a show of force. Marching up South Alabama Avenue in serried rows toward the courthouse, the hooded figures passed the Lee property. A.C. came down off the porch, his suspenders hanging in loops to his knees and confronted the local Grand Dragon. After an exchange of words in the street that lasted a few minutes, a compromise was reached. The marchers dropped the militant pose and walked the rest of the way like pedestrians.
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But it must be emphasized here that although Mr. Lee, on whom Harper Lee later based Atticus Finch, was a better educated man, a more enlightened man than most, he was no saint, no prophet crying in the wilderness with regard to racial matters. In most ways, he was typical of his generation, especially about issues surrounding blacks, the law, and segregation. He was a Southerner—the son of a Confederate soldier—and his heritage, even his religion as it was then practiced, shaped his views.
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On Sundays, A. C. Lee the public man took a few moments to be alone with his thoughts during services at the Monroeville Methodist Episcopal Church. Congregants noted that he preferred to sit in front by himself. Later during the service, in his capacity as church deacon, he would rise to lead his fellow worshippers in long improvised prayers, tapping the pew with his penknife to create a cadence for his deep, somnolent voice.

Lee's beliefs reflected the core of southern Methodism in the first half of the twentieth century, built as they were on the conviction, as he wrote in the newspaper, “that the destiny of this world in the years before us is very largely in the hands of the rather small percentage of mankind that have come to accept the Christian religion, and have recognized that in reality this is our Father's world, and that the way of life He has provided is the only way that holds any promise of endurance. And that way of life includes the acceptance of his rules and regulations for all creation, including mankind.”
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In a roundabout way, segregationists and apologists for slavery found justification in words like these. Their argument ran something like this: “Every man was in his place because He had ordained it so. Hence slavery, and indeed, everything that was, was His responsibility, not the South's.… And change could come about only as He Himself produced it through His own direct acts, or—there was always room here for this—as He commanded it through the instruments of His will, the ministers.”
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This philosophy provided balm to many an uneasy mind, which preferred to believe that Southerners had “bled for God and Womanhood and Holy right; not one has ever died for anything so crass and unbeautiful as the preservation of slavery.”
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