Mockingbird (9 page)

Meanwhile, A.C. toiled away in the Alabama legislature, pursuing a political career that was not exceptional, but steady. During the years he represented Monroeville, he was proudest of making good on a campaign promise to push through a budget bill that put county fiscal systems on a pay-as-you-go basis, thus reducing deficit spending.
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He also sponsored a bill that substantially raised the pension amount awarded to several thousand Confederate soldiers and their widows still living in Alabama in the 1930s. These were not bills put in the hopper by a firebrand: they reflected his conviction that states' rights trumped federal power.

But as the 1938 election approached, he decided he would not run again. After more than twenty years on the public scene, he was one of the most prominent figures in southern Alabama. In his hometown, he was a guiding spirit as a highly regarded attorney, newspaper publisher, bank director, civic leader, and church deacon. Also, there was the other side of the ledger to consider: he was coming up on sixty years of age. His legacy was on his mind when his law partner L. J. Bugg died. With Bugg departed, there was a once-in-a-generation opening in the firm.

By then, Alice was twenty-six; she had moved away from Monroeville and was living on her own for the first time, working as a clerk in Birmingham, Alabama, in the newly created Social Security department of the Internal Revenue Service. But her father raised another possibility: she could take night classes at the Birmingham School of Law and come in as a partner. She hesitated to accept, wondering if she would be perceived as Mr. Lee's “little girl.” But he prevailed, and in July 1943, after four years of part-time study, Alice Lee became one of the few female lawyers practicing in Alabama. She acquitted herself well during her first case at the Monroe County Courthouse, too, and after that, she said, “I was treated as a member of the Bar and not as an aberration.”
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She never married or lived away from Monroeville for the rest of her very long life, which spanned almost the entire twentieth century and extended into the twenty-first.

Alice's family nickname, “Bear,” hints at her patience and stamina. To Nelle, she was something of a hero, although how Alice felt about furthering their father's plans after her younger sister later left for New York City and freedom created some friction between them. Alice had been asked to step into her father's shoes; and in her role as surrogate parent, she was determined as time went on to take charge of her rambunctious sister.

Initially, Nelle too had followed her family's wishes, as young people tend to do. In 1944, she enrolled at the former Women's College of Alabama, where Alice had spent her freshman year. (It had been renamed Huntingdon College, for the Countess of Huntingdon, a sponsor of the Wesleyan movement in England that inspired Methodism.) Wasting no time, she signed up for summer classes beginning the June of her high school graduation, with an eye toward studying law eventually at the University of Alabama. Her father viewed this latest development with undisguised pleasure, which was evident from a little joke he was fond of telling when someone asked about the family. The way things were going, he said, feigning bemusement, he might have to change the name of the firm from Barnett, Bugg & Lee to “A. C. Lee and Daughters, Lawyers.”
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But Huntingdon College, as it turned out, was a poor fit for his youngest; it was better attuned to young women who hoped to graduate with a “Mrs.”—more like Frances Lee had been at that age.

Huntingdon was a picture of propriety in the mid-1940s. As freshman girls arrived through the front gate, they saw directly ahead John Jefferson Flowers Memorial Hall, styled in the collegiate Gothic architecture of Cambridge and Oxford, complete with a few gargoyles on the center steeple. The foyer led to the chapel (mandatory attendance every morning in the 1940s) with open-air cloisters to the Green, which was a park-cum-playing field and the site of an annual May festival with a maypole and May Queen. To the left and right of Flowers Hall, extending along a low semicircular ridge, were the library and the student center with a tea room, two dormitories, and the infirmary.

The girls' education included practice in the social graces. At dinner, students sat at tables of eight with a female instructor at the head. The correct piece of silverware was supposed to be used for the proper course, and everyone was expected to take a serving from the dishes out of politeness, even if they didn't care for any. Now and then the instructor would peek under the table to make sure none of the girls had her legs crossed—feet
flat
on the floor. Once a month, usually on a Sunday, the girls were expected to come down to dinner in evening dress. An appropriate outfit for a Saturday in Montgomery consisted of a skirt, a cardigan, pearls, a black Chesterfield coat, white gloves, and a white scarf worn in blustery weather; “We must have looked like a bunch of penguins,” one alumna later said.
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In their rooms, the girls could wear whatever they chose, but the instant they stepped outside—even to go to class—they were expected to adhere to a dress code deemed appropriate for young ladies.

Nelle shared a room with two other girls in Massey Hall, where the housemother was Mrs. Hammond or “Mother Hammond,” a beloved figure on campus who enjoyed playing the role of nosy maiden aunt. When a young man arrived to pick up his date, Mrs. Hammond made a show of examining him up and down through her pince-nez as if she had never seen such a specimen in all her years. It was rumored she could smell beer at twenty feet.

There were many fine instructors at Huntingdon, but Nelle's favorite was Irene Munro, a graduate of Wesleyan and Columbia universities whose course on international affairs had extra relevance because of the war. In a number of ways, Professor Munro was like Gladys Watson. She peppered her lectures with sketches of notable people in arts and letters. She impressed upon her students the need to always think critically and emphasized that an education was not a commodity that could be purchased. “If you lost your lecture notes, would you forget everything you're learning here?” she asked regularly. “I certainly hope not.”
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Lee made friends with a junior in Munro's class and they studied together, but it struck the other girl that Nelle was different from most of the students. “I don't think that there were others at Huntingdon—whom I knew and had ready access to—who had these same interests.”
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It was true Miss Lee was probably better informed than most of her classmates about history and politics; after all, her father was a newspaper publisher and a former state representative. She also read a great deal. On the other hand, she was not as sophisticated, perhaps by choice, about politeness. The girls on her floor objected to her use of salty language, for instance. “We were taught that if you had to resort to ugly words, you had a very weak vocabulary and needed further English study. Actually we were not sure what a lot of bad words meant. We were ladies in every sense … at least, most of us were. So, a girl who used foul language was a misfit in every sense of the word. Nobody wanted to be around her.”
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Another criticism was her smoking—or, rather the way she smoked. Students were permitted to smoke in their rooms, but a girl passing by the door of Nelle's room did a double take when she saw Miss Lee at her desk puffing away meditatively on a pipe.

She skipped the monthly formal dinners rather than be forced to wear an evening gown. When Saturday night came and the girls left for a night of dancing, she found other ways to spend the evening, or she just went home for the weekend. “She wasn't like most of us. She wasn't worried about how her hair looked or whether she had a date on Friday night like the rest of us were. I don't remember her sitting around and giggling and being silly and talking about what our weddings were going to be like—that's what teenage girls talked about. She was not a part of the ‘girl group.' She never had what we would call in the South ‘finishing touches.'”
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At the end of first semester, her roommates kicked her out.

*   *   *

Against the larger canvas of the campus, however, she made a different impression. Seen from a distance, the traits that set her apart from the normal Huntingdon “penguins” were found intriguing. Walking across campus with her long stride, dressed in a simple navy cotton skirt, white blouse, and her brother's gift of a brown leather bombardier's jacket—he had enlisted in the Army Air Corps—she cut a figure that blurred gender distinctions. “She had a presence. I remember her better than I do anyone else at Huntingdon, except my roommate and maybe one or two other people. Everything about her hinted at masculinity. I think the word
handsome
would have suited her.… Having come from a family of privilege and money, she was unpretentious.”
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She was not incapable of making friends, either, if given the chance. A chat with her after class revealed a bubbling, subversive wit. From her vantage point at the edge of Huntingdon's lively social mainstream, she confided that there was nothing she disliked about the place; she just found the experience a little humorous at times. Her conversation was rich in observations of campus life, spun into stories. Exhaling smoke slowly from her cigarette, she would watch the face of her entertained listener with an amused expression. It took a while to get to know Nelle Lee, but those who did realized that she was comfortable in her own skin. Her cussing was unconscious; the clothes she wore appealed to her because they were practical; she laughed when one of her teasing remarks drew a comeback delivered with equal zest. But she would not seek others' approval. The notion that she should do so never seemed to enter her head. Her right to live as she pleased was not up for negotiation, even if it ran against the grain of the milieu at Huntingdon. It was nobody's business. “That was an era when you did the proper thing,” said a classmate. “And your mother was horrified if you didn't. That was never part of Nelle's persona—she didn't care! It must have taken a colossal amount of courage to be different.”
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*   *   *

Although sidelined socially at Huntingdon, Lee contributed to the
Huntress
, the campus newspaper, and in April, she was inducted with seven other girls into the campus chapter of the national literary society, Chi Delta Phi. Also that spring, the second-semester edition of the Huntingdon literary magazine, the
Prelude,
featured her first two published pieces of fiction. They stand out not only because her storytelling voice comes through, but also because of the daring choice of subject matter.

“Nightmare” is about a child overhearing a strange commotion on the other side of a fence. It's a lynching—though, mercifully, Lee doesn't describe it; the child runs home and hides. A man passing by her window says, “Now maybe they'll learn to behave themselves.”
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The second story, “A Wink at Justice,” features a wise judge who knows the difference between the letter of the law and justice. It begins, “The tiny courtroom reeked of tobacco smoke, cheap hair oil, and perspiration,” anticipating the description of Scout and Jem arriving at Calpurnia's church in
To Kill a Mockingbird
: “The warm bittersweet smell of clean Negro welcomed us as we entered the churchyard—Hearts of Love hair-dressing mingled with asafetida, snuff, Hoyt's Cologne, Brown's Mule, peppermint, and lilac talcum.” The case in “A Wink at Justice” centers on eight black men arrested for gambling. Judge Hanks, who hears the case, is a dead ringer for A. C. Lee, right down to his mannerisms: “He carried a pocketknife which he twirled constantly, sometimes thumping it up and catching it. Fine lines ran down from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. I noticed that they deepened when he smiled. A pair of rimless glasses perched precariously on his short nose.”

Judge Hanks comes down from the bench and orders the accused to turn their palms up. “He went down the line inspecting each outstretched hand. To three of the men he said, ‘You c'n go. Git out of here!' To the other five he barked, ‘Sixty days. Dismissed.'” Then an unnamed “I” approaches the judge (Lee's struggles with shifting points of view dogged her writing even then). The narrator asks the judge how he reached his decision.

“Well, I looked at their hands. The ones who had corns on 'em I let go, because they work in the fields and probably have a pack of children to support. It was the ones with soft, smooth hands I was after. They're the ones who gamble professionally, and we don't need that sort of thing around here.”
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Taken together, the two stories introduce ideas that would preoccupy Harper Lee for the rest of her writing career: childhood, a fatherly figure, racism, and the difference between law and justice.

*   *   *

After moving into a single room, Lee spent a lot of time alone. Sometimes seen at the library studying, she seemed “reclusive” to others. But she had no intention by then of staying until the end of her sophomore year to finish her requirements; she applied as a transfer student for the law program at University of Alabama. The departure after freshman year suggests that she had had enough of Huntingdon.

One of her instructors, a professor of history and economics mentioned to his teaching assistant that he was sorry to see Miss Lee go. “Several students were doing outstanding work and she was one of them. He was disappointed because he thought she had a lot of promise. He was interested in the girls he thought would go far.”
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In June, the girls exchanged yearbooks for friends to sign. Lee scribbled a quick piece of farewell verse in one that ended, “you were so swell / and now I'll leave you / with love & all that hell!” The girl to whom it was written thought, “Hmm, typical Nelle.”
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