The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (12 page)

One of the more common criticisms of the character of Atticus Finch is that he did not do enough to fight the racism of Maycomb. His way was to do so rather quietly, and behind the scenes. A.C. and
Alice were cut from that Atticus cloth. Or, rather, Atticus was cut from the A.C. and Alice Lee cloth.

—

A
year after the Lee profile ran, I was on to other topics and continuing to struggle with my health. I was in the hospital and at home more and at work less. Periodic inflammation in the lining of my lungs wasn’t serious, but it was painful and tiring. Nausea was a problem. I’d had a few surgeries in recent years and now underwent a few more, one to repair a femoral artery damaged during a diagnostic procedure and a couple of others to repair stress fractures in my left foot that were slow to heal. I spent a fair amount of time on crutches or in a walking cast.

My editors were mostly understanding, but in 2003 they told me I needed to go on the
Tribune
’s medical disability plan. It was a blow. I didn’t want to leave a job I liked, even though it had become a test of will to work through the periods of wipe-out fatigue. I was hopeful I could return in a couple of months or a half year, tops. My list of story ideas, things I wanted to write about for the feature section, grew longer, but after a year of rest and additional treatments, I was no closer to being able to return. I still had good days but they were unpredictable.

But what if I was in Alabama for those good days? Alice’s willingness to share her stories with me in her nineties was a gift. It was also an unexpected opportunity to research and write at a slower pace on a project that felt tailor-made for someone like me. Nelle had already told me several things she thought I could write about and correct regarding “the forty-year file on Harper Lee.”

Just as Nelle’s retreat from fame was a series of small decisions, as
opposed to one sweeping pronouncement, their decision to let me into their lives as fully as they did had not stemmed from one grand declaration but, rather, was a gradual process. They kept encouraging me to come back south, and on each trip they would share more of their lives and their history with me. Slowly but surely, the idea of a longer sojourn in Alabama took hold.

Chapter Nine

E
ven before my move, I was becoming part of the Lees’ social circle and, as such, was included in their regular get-togethers. In early 2004, I was staying with Haniel and Judy Croft. Haniel was the retired president of what was then the Monroe County Bank. They invited Nelle and Alice and me to watch the Super Bowl on the big-screen television in their living room. We’d settle in to see the New England Patriots play the Carolina Panthers in Houston and then have dinner. “Marvelous,” Nelle said of that invitation.

I looked forward to it as much as they did that week, even though the only Super Bowl games I remotely enjoyed watching over the years were in Black River Falls. Those I enjoyed not for the football but for the sound of my grandfather’s deep voice mixing easily with my father’s and brother’s above the television commentary and the din of the crowd.

For years, Nelle and Alice had their own tradition for watching football games. They loved watching the Crimson Tide in particular. They had no television in the house, Alice told me, until Julia was hired in 1997 and insisted. Nelle had suggested the same more than once, but it took Julia to get a small set across the threshold. She was
not about to miss her game shows. After that, during football season, Alice would join Nelle in the back bedroom to watch the games. Before the dawn of the television age in the Lee home, the two sisters would make the seven-block drive to the Monroe County Bank building, below Alice’s law office, and watch the weekend’s best games in a conference room.

Sometimes Nelle watched University of Alabama games at the home of her high school English teacher, Gladys Burkett. This was in an old house on North Mount Pleasant Avenue, a few blocks off the town square. It was there that Nelle got to know Dale Welch. They met over football but bonded over books. “I think she appreciated that I was a teacher and a librarian. We had a lot to talk about,” Dale told me. A friendship quickly blossomed and soon they were meeting for coffee or lunch at Radley’s.

Like many in their circle of friends, the Lees were a mixed family when it came to football in Alabama. Their brother had attended Auburn. That gave it special status. But Nelle had attended the University of Alabama, and she and Alice gravitated to the Crimson Tide. If you ever want to drive down an empty thoroughfare in Monroeville, do so when Alabama is playing Auburn.

Their other great sports passion was golf. In fact, both Alice and Nelle had once played the game regularly at the Vanity Fair golf course. Nelle told a journalist in the early 1960s that the course provided her a quiet place to think. They particularly looked forward to the Masters every April. As Alice told me, “We usually root for the underdog.” Later that same spring, the Lees got a thrill cheering for Phil Mickelson at Augusta, where he won his first major at long last.

As was often the case in Monroeville, I was reminded on that Super Bowl Sunday that I was a foreigner. The temperature in snowy Black River Falls, my father’s hometown, barely reached into the twenties.
On Alabama Avenue in Monroeville, the Monroe County Bank time and temperature sign showed it was fifty degrees. We settled into the Crofts’ comfortable living room to watch the game. Haniel Croft took a wing-backed chair. His wife, Judy, and I were on a coral-colored sofa, Nelle across from me. Alice preferred a chair to sinking into a sofa. As soothing as the sounds of the three generations of menfolk in my family had been to me, my own voice sounded distinctly midwestern, almost clunky, in a room of softer Southern accents.

In lighter moments, my otherness—my Yankeeness—was a subject for good-natured joshing. Didn’t I know what butter beans were? Or that “mashing a button,” an expression I first heard from Judy, simply meant pressing a button? Not pushing it hard, again and again, as I had guessed. Or that the Civil War, as Alice never called it, might better be referred to as the War Between the States? We had a running debate. Which was more extreme: the oppressive heat of Monroeville in August or the bitter chill of Chicago in January? I thought Monroeville took the title in that one. The others were skeptical.

As I spent time with this circle of friends in Monroeville, I was aware of a mutual wariness of the sensibilities on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line, at least as we had experienced them. I was a blue state woman in a red state town and reminded almost daily of the cultural differences. In my piece for the
Tribune,
Tom had called Nelle socially liberal but politically conservative. She later chided him for the comment. Her politics were not that black and white.

It still surprised me how many public events here began with a Christian prayer. I was accustomed to prayers being private or an ecumenical blessing at most. My father’s family is Methodist and my mother’s is Catholic but I was raised in a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I was pretty sure my Methodist credentials, from the church my extended family belonged to in Black River Falls, were held in higher
esteem than my upbringing in a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Madison.

This was a day just to kick back and enjoy the warmth and ease of that group. Lamps cast a glow on the wood paneling in the room. The large oak bookcase and cabinetry that housed the big-screen television was the painstaking work of Nelle and Judy’s friend Ila Jeter’s husband, James. On one side, he used tiny screws to affix a small metal plate engraved with the date, his name, and the names of the friends for whom he spent long hours making it. He did the same for the Lees with the wide, chest-high bookcase that dominated their entryway. In a place of honor, on a corner display shelf of the Crofts’ cabinetry, was their copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
with Nelle’s inscription.

For many years after the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
Nelle willingly signed thousands of copies of the book. Alice once told me she had even given herself tendonitis in her wrist from the long hours she spent fulfilling autograph requests. It was one of the many ways she tried to be a good steward of the tremendous affection her novel had engendered. The book exerted an unusually strong personal pull on readers and Nelle didn’t want to disappoint her public. The volume of requests, letters, and books sent to the Lees’ small post office box in Monroeville was overwhelming and showed no sign of stopping even four decades after the book’s initial publication. Alice toted them all home in plastic grocery bags.

“Did you ever think about hiring an assistant to help with all this?” I asked Alice.

“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t work too well, because there is no uniform way of handling it. Each thing, almost, is different.”

Their generosity was not always met in kind. In the 1990s, a local shop owner took advantage of Nelle’s efforts to help out Monroeville brick-and-mortar establishments by signing books to be sold there.
The shop owner sold some of them, marked up, on eBay, Nelle discovered. She was outraged. Some book buyers did the same. After that, she mostly stopped signing books. Behind the scenes, she still autographed books in special cases, but she had a public policy of no longer signing books.

Before the game got under way, I grabbed another Diet Coke from the kitchen and took my place near the Crofts’ son Kenny. He loved to be a part of any gathering and he loved football. So today, as his father said, he was in high cotton. Kenny, with the unusually flexible joints characteristic of Down syndrome, sat cross-legged with his knees all the way to the Oriental rug on the floor. He was a yogi in Auburn’s orange and blue.

Kenny looked up at Nelle as she began to read aloud from Doris Jay’s “Rocky Hill News” column in that week’s
Monroe Journal
. This was, hands down, Nelle’s favorite part of the paper. The column detailed the comings and goings of an extended family who lived in the area known as Rocky Hill, southwest of Monroeville.

“‘Jan. 1: Dale and Brenda Jay had dinner with his parents Thursday.’” Nelle read this first sentence matter-of-factly. “‘Jan. 5: Calvin and Doris Jay made a trip Monday to Atmore on business.’” Here she began to falter. “‘Jan. 7: Philip Jay had dinner Wednesday with his parents.’” The chuckle was building. Nelle took off her glasses, leaned her head back, and let loose with a deep laugh. She had the rest of us laughing, too. This wasn’t mocking laughter. It was the kind of affectionate amusement I’d come to recognize, an appreciation of what was both absurd and deeply human about this kind of thing.

Nelle collected herself and continued. “‘Dale and Brenda Jay visited Wednesday afternoon. Doris, Lisa, M. C. Cauly, and children visited with their grandmother, Effie Lee Dunn, recently.’” Nelle was gone again. When her laughter subsided into controllable chuckles, she
delivered the news of January 10. “‘Dale and Brenda Jay attended a singing in Mobile Saturday night. Joe Shiver has an appointment with his doctor in Mobile. He accompanied Slick Linam to the doctor earlier in the week in Pensacola.’”

One more visit to parents plus three more medical appointments and Nelle had taken us through the rest of the “Rocky Hill News.” Her laughter was contagious. Kenny joined in. I did. And Haniel, with his low chuckle.

“Oh, bless their hearts,” Nelle said. She was still chuckling when she set down the
Journal
and rose to duck into the other room for a minute. She gave Kenny’s crew cut a playful rub on the way out.

Then the ads for erectile dysfunction began. This was the first Super Bowl in which Viagra and its like were staples of the commercial breaks. The ads are so common now that the surprise and unspoken embarrassment we shared at the time seem almost quaint. I gave silent thanks that Alice’s poor hearing meant she wasn’t much interested in straining to catch the commercials. It was jarring when prescription drugs were first advertised heavily on television. But now this? Nelle walked back into the living room a couple of minutes into the commercials. She stopped and peered at the screen. “Is that an ad for . . . ,” Nelle began to ask, puzzled. She paused. Got it. Judy glanced down at Kenny and then at me. I shrugged my shoulders.

It was a relief when the television screen flashed back to the football field. We stopped talking, mostly, to listen. The crowd was loud. Commentators pressed one hand to their earpieces as they speculated the game could turn on the Panthers’ running game.

At halftime, the Panthers were leading, 14–10. Janet Jackson took center stage with Justin Timberlake. They rocked out to her “All for You” and the infectious “Rhythm Nation.” Singing the final line of his
own hit, “Rock Your Body,” Timberlake yanked at Jackson’s bustier. What happened next apparently was not planned. “I’m going to have you naked by the end of this song,” he sang, and, rip, there was Jackson’s right breast. The television cameras quickly cut away.