Mockingbird (8 page)

*   *   *

But few people studying A. C. Lee while he was speaking about God and obedience in such uncompromising terms, in print and during Sunday services, could have guessed correctly what kind of parent he was under his own roof. The truth was, despite his reserve in public, he was a fond and indulgent father. At home, he encouraged Nelle to clamber up on his lap to “help” him read the newspaper or complete the crossword puzzle. And she did call him A.C., as Scout calls her father Atticus. They invented a word game, which they played together while Nelle toyed with A.C.'s pocket watch. One would think of a word and provide two clues: a letter and the total number of letters. Then the other would have to guess the word. Nelle's vocabulary shot up as a result. Scout recounts how her teacher, Miss Caroline, fresh out of college and eager to teach reading, “discovered that I was literate” and instructs her to “tell your father not to teach you anymore. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage.” Because Scout is one of the few girls in class, it's possible Miss Caroline's reaction of “faint distaste” arises also because she thinks a girl shouldn't be so bold.
87

Mr. Lee used a light hand when it came to disciplining his children, overlooking misdemeanors for the sake of teaching a lesson. He spared the rod, preferring to reassure Nelle—even if it meant being too lenient at times—that she was growing up in a home where she was loved. Perhaps he leaned far over in this direction to compensate for what his wife seemed incapable of giving.

“Nelle just trotted at her father's heels, up and down the street,” said Marie Faulk Rudisill.
88

 

three

Without “Finishing Touches”

Poor child, is it that she believes she is a freak, too?

—W
ISTERIA
, the carnival midget in
Truman Capote's
Other Voices, Other Rooms
(1948)

An era in Harper Lee's life seemed to end one winter night in January 1940. A bitter north wind rattled the strings of Christmas lightbulbs still hanging in trees on the courthouse square. It was so cold that her father was forced to throw extra coal in the furnace to keep their little bungalow warm. “For reasons unfathomable to the most experienced prophets in Maycomb County,” says Scout in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, “autumn turned to winter that year. We had two weeks of the coldest weather since 1885, Atticus said.”

Next door, Truman Capote's cousins, the Faulk sisters and their brother, were just getting ready for bed when the sound of frantic pounding on the front door sent Jenny Faulk downstairs again, expecting to find a lunatic on the porch. To her shock, the kitchen was ablaze and a neighbor was trying to force his way in to help.

Nelle heard the volunteer firefighter siren go off. The Faulk family, wearing only bathrobes and slippers, stumbled into the front yard, abandoning their home to the fire hose and the ax. Flames, leaping inside, pressed against the windows, shattered the glass, and burst upward into the darkness. The firefighters had trouble getting the hydrant at the curb to work properly because it was frozen.

Soon the whole house was a pyre, and the wind-driven flames roared through the trees toward the Lees' property, less than fifteen yards away. The “fire truck began pumping water on our house; a man on the roof pointed to places that needed it most,” says Scout in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. The paint on the Lees' white bungalow began to blister and slough off from the heat. Nelle's mother feared the worst; her husband and neighbors guided her to a house across the street to calm her. A scene transpired that was almost identical to the one described in the novel. “At the front door, we saw fire spewing from Miss Maudie's dining room windows. As if to confirm what we saw, the town fire siren wailed up the scale to a treble pitch and remained there, screaming.… We stood watching the street fill with men and cars while fire silently devoured Miss Maudie's house.”

The struggle lasted until 3:00
A.M.
By dawn, the Faulk residence, where Jenny Faulk had been known to welcome any “smear of kin,” was a carcass of blackened walls and bony icicles.
1
Even their smokehouse, stuffed with cured hams, bacon, and bagged sausage hanging from rafters, had collapsed. The exhausted volunteers trudged home. One of them removed his waterlogged wool overcoat and hung it on a hook outside his front door. Within a couple of hours, it was frozen like ice. He stood it on the porch steps, ghostly and uninhabited, to the delight of passing children.
2

The destruction of Capote's childhood home coincided with the beginning of Harper Lee's adolescence, leaving behind a kind of golden age she would yearn for in her fiction.

*   *   *

In September 1940, she entered Monroe County High School with the United States' entry into World War II only a year away. All around her, the engines of the nation's economy were finally revving up after years spent idling during the Great Depression. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Monroeville awoke from its sleepy, magnolia-shaded lassitude, roused by a sense of national purpose. The Lees found a number of ways to pitch in, doing more than many families. A.C. assisted his former law partner, J. B. Barnett, now president of the Monroe County Bank, in chairing local war bond drives; Alice volunteered for the Red Cross; Louise had settled down for the duration of the war in Eufaula, Alabama, with her infant son to await her husband's return from duty; and Edwin suspended his studies at Auburn University in 1943 to join the Army Air Corps. In addition, the governor appointed A.C. to the three-member state Alcohol Beverage Control Board. Knowing Lee's views about alcohol consumption, newspaper editors all over the state had a field day commenting about giving a teetotaler oversight for liquor. Mr. Lee, a strict Methodist, was, as everyone knew, “as dry as an old bleached bone.”
3

Nelle, only sixteen during the first full year of the war, navigated adolescence according to her own lights. Generally, she ignored conventions that applied to most girls. “You took her as she was. She wasn't trying to impress anyone.”
4
During a game of touch football on the courthouse lawn, she straight-armed a boy out of the way, who protested as he fell, “Nelle, we're playing touch!”

“Y'all can play that sissy game if you want to,” she shouted over her shoulder, “but I'm playing tackle!”
5
In a photograph taken during her sophomore year, she poses with her English class on the high school steps. Unlike nearly all the other girls, she isn't wearing lipstick, her hair doesn't look as if it's seen a curling iron recently, and her chin, held high, gives her unsmiling face a truculent expression.

Just how different she felt from girls her own age is suggested in Capote's
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, when her counterpart, Idabel, creates a weird moment of rapport with a circus performer named Miss Wisteria. Joel watches fascinated as Idabel, “borrowing [Miss Wisteria's] lipstick, painted an awkward clownish line across her mouth, and Miss Wisteria, clapping her little hands, shrieked with a kind of sassy pleasure. Idabel met this merriment with a dumb adoring smile. Joel could not understand what had taken her. Unless it was that the midget had cast a spell. But as she continued to fawn over tiny yellow-haired Miss Wisteria it came to him that Idabel was in love.

‘Poor child,' Miss Wisteria asks Joel, watching Idabel scamper off, ‘is it that she believes she is a freak, too?'”

*   *   *

Freakishness implies that there was no one a teenaged Harper Lee could identify with, no one she could emulate. Actually, there were two women who influenced her, both of whom possessed characteristics she admired.

There was Miss Watson, for example, her high school English teacher. Because the faculty of Monroe County High numbered only about a dozen teachers, students took Miss Watson's classes for three years—sophomore through senior English, which included a semester of British literature. Many students counted themselves lucky to have had a triple dose of “Gladys” (as some called her secretly). Her graduates who attended area colleges and universities were surprised to hear their English professors say, “Well, you must have taken Miss Watson.”
6

Tall and thin, she lived with her parents across the street from Nelle, in a two-story yellow house with a deep, wide veranda. Her father “Doc” Watson was a dentist, a three-hundred-pound giant of a man. In addition to being one of the best teachers in town, Miss Watson was an energetic gardener. Neighbors were accustomed to seeing her in her parents' yard pruning the lilacs, tending the potted succulents on the porch, and yanking out pernicious weeds in the grass, her fair face hidden beneath a big straw hat to keep off the sun. From her, Harper Lee created Scout's best adult friend, Miss Maudie Atkinson.

Of the characters in the novel, Miss Maudie is the most candid and also, for a woman, the least conventional. For forty years, Scout's Uncle Jack Finch has been shouting, “Marry me!” to her during his annual visits at Christmas. “Miss Maudie would yell back, ‘Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they'll hear you at the post office, I haven't heard you yet!'”
7
Her thoughts about racism, fairness, and human foibles—key themes of
To Kill a Mockingbird
—mirror Atticus's, putting her in the minority of Maycomb's residents. After Atticus says, “It's a sin to kill a mockingbird,” Harper Lee leaves it to Miss Maudie to explain: “Your father's right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

Her alter ego, Miss Watson, introduced an unusual amount of intellectual rigor to Monroe County High School. Her classes began in September with students receiving a blue grammar rules booklet she personally had selected—a sort of early Strunk and White
Elements of Style.
It was going to be their Bible, she told them—they should never lose it.
8
Grammar was not a pointless academic exercise, but a tool—the key to being clear in written expression. She called on students to read their compositions aloud. As she listened, she leaned forward, sucking on an earpiece of her pink tortoiseshell glasses and interjecting now and then, “That was good, very good.”
9
Little did her students know that she would have given anything to be a writer herself.
10

Sometimes when the class had grown weary, she read them a story, a poem, or scenes from Shakespeare.
The Canterbury Tales
was a favorite because she read passages in Middle English, which she was proficient at.
11
One has to imagine the effect on students who were the sons and daughters of farmers, laborers, and merchants hearing their teacher drop into a version of their native tongue that was seven hundred years old. Harper Lee became devoted to British literature as a result, spending time in the school library looking up topics Miss Watson had mentioned in class. A well-thumbed copy of
Pride and Prejudice
opened for her the intimate world of Jane Austen.
12
“I cling to the old gentlemen, like Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson,” she said later, “and to Jane Austen, writing, cameo-like, in that little corner of the world of hers and making it universal.”
13

*   *   *

A lifelong bond developed between Nelle and her sister Alice, too, though Alice was seventeen years her senior. Alice's disposition and outlook were very similar to her father's. To draw an analogy between life and fiction, Miss Maude is to Atticus what Alice was to A. C. Lee, although Nelle later reduced the comparison to “Alice is Atticus in a skirt.”
14
For their shared qualities, Harper Lee admired her sister as much as she did their father.

Physically, however, Nelle and Alice were as alike, Capote said, “as a giraffe and a hippopotamus.”
15
Alice was a polite, birdlike woman—traits that belied her forcefulness; Nelle, by the time she was an adult, had the carelessness and appearance of a man. Alice, always at the head of her class, graduated at sixteen from high school and enrolled at the Methodist-founded Women's College of Alabama in 1929, becoming the first member of her family to attend college. It was one of the happiest times of her life, she said.
16

But then her sophomore year she returned to Monroeville, called home by her father. He needed her help: Mrs. Lee was not well, and Louise, Edwin, and Nelle were then thirteen, nine, and three, respectively. In addition, he in 1929 had purchased a majority share of the
Monroe Journal
and was now the publisher. At eighteen, in addition to her household responsibilities, Alice joined the small staff as associate editor.

She was needed there because purchasing the
Monroe Journal
was part of Mr. Lee's larger plan to run for the state legislature. In an advertisement appearing in the newspaper, he assured the electorate that his candidacy was “not prompted by any political or selfish motive, but with the sincere purpose to contribute to the general welfare.” A Southern Democrat, an advocate of states' rights, and a fiscal conservative, in the August primary he thumped his opponent 281 to 116 (the Republicans had not bothered slating a candidate for seventy-five years), and in the November election he won the seat handily.
17
Alice continued to remain in Monroeville, “keeping the home fires burning.”
18
Her spirit and intelligence suited her for a larger arena, but her devotion to her father came first.