The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (2 page)

Through the experiences of Scout, Jem, and their best friend, Dill, Lee paints a vivid picture of small-town childhood in the segregated South. She also explores complex themes in the lives of her characters, from mental illness to addiction, racism, and the limitations society imposed on women.

The story of small-town childhood and racial injustice in Depression-era Alabama garnered glowing reviews and stayed on the best-seller list for nearly two years. In 1961, Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Academy Award–winning 1962 film version of the novel, starring Gregory Peck, became a classic in its own right.

It was a stunning debut. With time, Lee’s novel became something more: a national touchstone in a culture becoming ever more fragmented. In a 1991 survey, the Library of Congress asked readers which book most influenced their lives. Only the Bible outranked
To Kill a Mockingbird
. It has sold an estimated forty million copies or more and been translated into three dozen languages, from Swedish to Urdu. It is required reading for at least 70 percent of U.S. high school students.

The novel became a classic at the same time as it defied Mark Twain’s definition of one: “a book people praise and don’t read.” References to the work appear in movies, on television, in countless other books, and in comic strips, cartoons, and lyrics. People cite the novel as the reason they became writers or lawyers. The characters’ unusual names have a comfortable familiarity even to those who haven’t read the novel in years, or perhaps never did. Atticus Finch. Scout. Boo Radley. The unusual names from Depression-era Alabama now populate the glossy pages of
People
and
Us Weekly,
as celebrities, as well as plenty of regular folks, name their children Harper, Atticus, or Scout.

As the novel’s cultural influence grew, so did Lee’s mystique. A few years after the book was published, she essentially stopped giving interviews. The second novel she had once discussed never appeared. Her rare public appearances made headlines. Her speeches, when she did accept an occasional award, usually consisted of two words: “Thank you.” When she was loquacious, she went on twice as long. “Thank you very much.”

Given her long public silence, in fact, plenty of people assumed Harper Lee was dead. At age sixty-six in 1993, she made dry reference to that fact in the foreword to yet another printing of the novel. Lee told her readers that she was “still alive, although very quiet.”

By the time I was given my assignment in 2001, she was seventy-five. In the modern world, she was as beloved and unknown as a person can be. She divided her time between Manhattan and her Alabama hometown. That much was known. Her full name was Nelle Harper Lee but she was simply Nelle to the tight circle of friends who protected her privacy. Periodic “In Search of Harper Lee” articles over the years offered glimpses into the author’s life, if only from afar. One newspaper story described the log cabin exterior and linoleum floors of David’s Catfish House, on the outskirts of Monroeville, and passed along intelligence gleaned from a waitress. The author and her older sister, attorney Alice Lee, always sat at a back table. They were quite hard of hearing, both of them. The waitress could report, firsthand, that they squabbled about who got to pay for the other. Not much else seemed to be known about her life after writing one of the most cherished novels of the twentieth century.

Lee’s responses to the never-ending requests for interviews ranged from “no” to “hell, no.” Usually, her literary agency and publisher declined on her behalf. In Monroeville, Alice practiced law with their
father’s old firm, Barnett, Bugg & Lee, and also served as gatekeeper for her sought-after sister.

I expected that I would be turned away as so many reporters had been before. If nothing else, I could write about the small town that produced the author and inspired her fictional Maycomb. But first, I had to find it on a map. I pulled out my atlas.

Like Maycomb, Monroeville is a southern Alabama county seat located well inland. It is an out-of-the-way place, near no major airport or even the interstate. Nonetheless, the town of sixty-five hundred draws literary pilgrims from around the world. People want to visit the courthouse replicated in the movie. They want to run their hands along the polished banister of the balcony where a young Harper Lee watched her father try cases just as Scout does in the novel and the film. They want to walk past the spot where Lee climbed a chinaberry tree with her childhood friend and next-door neighbor Truman Capote. Devoted fans of the novel, the ones who can recite favorite lines by heart, want details. Do the tree’s poisonous yellow berries still fall to the earth along Alabama Avenue? Is the tree even still there, or those two childhood homes? Does the feeling Lee captured of a small-town, Southern childhood still exist?

For this hastily planned trip, I’d submit, meekly, the standard request for an interview, knowing that was as likely as a blizzard in August. Then I’d fly down and try to give Chicago readers a sense of the town that produced Harper Lee and annually sells out the two-act play adapted from the novel.

For One Book, One Chicago, the library system was gearing up for an onslaught of interest in the book. The city’s seventy-eight libraries were stocking their shelves with nearly two thousand additional copies of the novel, including some Spanish and Polish translations. Lee
declined the city’s invitation to speak, but sent a rare statement in support of the program. She wrote, “When the people of Chicago assemble in various parts of the city to read and discuss
To Kill a Mockingbird
, there is no greater honor the novel could receive. People of all backgrounds and cultures coming together to put their critical skills to work—nothing could be more exciting!”

Like millions of others, I had read the book in school, as a shy fourteen-year-old who loved English, feared math, and ran on my high school cross-country team in Madison, Wisconsin. From the first pages, I was transported on a snowy afternoon to the red clay streets of an Alabama county seat during the Depression.

Now I had an assignment, a plane ticket, and a colleague, photographer Terrence James, also assigned to the story. I hadn’t worked with Terrence before but I’d seen him around the paper. He was African American, wore black jeans and boots, and had cornrows to his shoulders. He seemed enthusiastic about this assignment, as I was.

Terrence and I got better acquainted on the flight to Atlanta. We mapped out our assignment, where we wanted to go, and whom we wanted to see. In Atlanta, we rented a car for what turned out to be a nearly six-hour drive to Monroe County. Atlanta was a rookie mistake: I could have booked a flight into Montgomery, Mobile, or Florida’s coastal Pensacola. All were closer. But the Atlanta flight was cheaper. It didn’t look as far on the map as it turned out to be. The drive, however, gave us a chance to put Monroeville in a geographic context we could picture. Parachuting in, as journalists often do, you miss something.

We got off the interstate about a half hour from Monroeville. Along Highway 84, the foliage gets thicker. Elsewhere, in fact, kudzu drapes over hundred-year-old oak trees. It crawls up ravines. It creeps
across the caved-in tin roofs of abandoned country shacks. It forms an intricate web of green so dense it seems to be hiding something.

We drove up hills, wound around curves. Trucks with bundles of freshly cut lumber thundered past. Terrence gripped the steering wheel tighter. We saw the “patchwork sea of cotton fields and timberlands” Lee describes in the novel. Large machinery now does the picking. It’s faster and cheaper. In
To Kill a Mockingbird
times, rows of men, women, and children did the picking. It was oppressively hot, back-breaking, finger-stinging work, plucking the tufts of cotton off the plant and putting them into burlap sacks.

We passed the occasional gas station and general store with “Coca-Cola” in fading white script on peeling red paint. We stopped at one of them. It was the kind of place that looked like it might still have Coke in those little six-and-a-half-ounce green bottles, the kind my grandfather used to have at his one-man Coca-Cola bottling operation in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. I checked. No, even here it was cans and plastic bottles only. Next to the cash register and the March of Dimes box was a giant plastic jar of hard-boiled eggs in vinegar. Beside that was another big jar with something vaguely pink floating in the brine. Pickled pig’s feet. I’d never tasted either. I’d stick to Diet Coke for now.

As we got closer to Monroeville, NPR faded. Now the choices were country music, conservative commentary, or fiery preaching on a couple of stations. Around every other bend was a redbrick church or a tiny white one with a steeple stabbing blue sky and a cemetery out back. Most of the churches were Baptist, but we also saw ones that were Methodist, First Assembly, and Pentecostal.

In a clearing between a redbrick school and woods dripping in kudzu, we spotted a basketball court. Young men playing. Young women watching.

Terrence slowed the car and looked at me.

“Yes, let’s,” I said.

We pulled into the area of trampled grass where other cars were parked, our rental conspicuously shiny and new among the old wide-bodied Chevrolets held together with spare parts and ingenuity. People stared openly at Terrence and me as we walked to the sidelines. Terrence carried a large camera around his neck. He is fairly tall. I stand fully five feet three and a half inches, with blue eyes, blond hair, and what’s charitably called alabaster skin, a whiter shade of pale. Mine was the only white face in the crowd.

We explained why we were there. We were just chatting, mostly. This was our first chance to get acquainted with the area, see what people had to say about life in this part of the country. Had they been assigned
To Kill a Mockingbird
in school? A few had. Most had not. This also was the first of many times I was glad we had our bases covered between the two of us: male and female, black and white. Of course, once we opened our mouths and spoke, our accents lumped us together in one important way. We were Yankees.

As we spoke with the young men and women, the harshness of the sun gradually faded. I glanced at my watch. It was 6:35
P.M.
This was what photographers call the golden hour, the magical interlude when everything is bathed in a soft light and, in the words of the painter James Whistler, “common things are touched with mystery and transfigured with beauty.”

Terrence crouched down to photograph a couple of the pickup ballplayers from that vantage point.

A light rain began to fall. In the muggy August air, it was gentle relief. As it picked up, Terrence returned the lens cap to his camera. I closed my notebook against the falling drops. One of the young men waved at us. “Come back anytime.”

Terrence and I made our way back onto the two-lane highway to Monroeville. We’d have to find our way in the dark to the Best Western on the outskirts of town and then be up early to cram as many interviews as possible into our first day there.

Nearing the city, the feeling of a place out of time ends abruptly. Familiar chains pop up. At the Best Western, our rooms had an uninspiring view of parking lot and fence. Across a large field, the lights from David’s Catfish House glowed softly.

For dinner, I fed quarters into the outdoor vending machines. I retrieved peanut butter crackers from the well of the snack machine, and held a blessedly cold can of Diet Coke to my forehead. I smelled an odor I could not place. It wasn’t coming from the big garbage can in the alcove; it was carried on the faint breeze blowing over the field. It smelled like paper mill with a sour finish, like boiling cabbage. It was fertilizer, I later learned.

This was a poor county in a poor state. Where were the jobs now that the Vanity Fair plant had scaled way back? The apparel manufacturer set up shop here in 1937, and it became the town’s economic engine, propelling it out of the worst of the Depression. There were a lot of jobs for men and, for the first time at these wages, women. But most of the manufacturing work had gone elsewhere in recent years. The money tourists spent on meals and motels didn’t begin to make up for the jobs lost to cutbacks and closings. Monroeville suffered an unemployment rate of 18 percent.

Terrence rapped on my door. Monroe County was dry, going back to Prohibition. Conecuh County was not. Terrence suggested we get libations back across the county line. We had passed Lee’s Package Goods, no relation to the sisters, and doubled back to stop in. The place was a cross between forlorn and forbidding. It had peeling paint and bars on the windows. Other than the
WELCOME TO MONROE COUNTY
sign and the store, there was nothing much around here except fields.

The jangle of the bell on the door announced our arrival. A heavyset young white woman behind the counter looked our way. So did a middle-aged Asian woman who appeared from a back room. They didn’t smile at us. They just looked at us without expression. Under harsh lights they sized up their customers. We must not have looked like too much trouble.

After we returned to the motel, we shared a quick drink in this dry county.

“Half a glass is good, thanks.” I wanted to go over my notes before tomorrow.

“Half a glass.”

Terrence poured my wine into a water glass from the bathroom counter, which faced out into this standard-issue motel room.

He offered a toast.

“To Monroeville.”

“To Monroeville.”

We clinked glasses. Not rotgut. Not great.

In my room, I pulled out my paperback copy of the novel and climbed under the covers. I was tired from our trip, but before I made my acquaintance with Lee’s hometown, I wanted to get lost again in the rhythm of her language. I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep right away anyway.

This edition, published by Warner Books, had a simple illustration on the cover: the silhouette of a bird flying away from a tree. In the knothole of the tree, someone had stashed a ball of yarn and a pocket watch.

Just a few weeks earlier, it had been shiny and new, its spine unbroken, its 281 pages crisp and untouched. Now pages were turned down
at the corners. Passages were highlighted in yellow and sentences underlined in black ink with scribbled notations in the margins.