The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (23 page)

After a year or so of investigation and interviews, Nelle eventually dropped the project.

Nelle told me that her research uncovered information she
believed put her in personal jeopardy. She would not elaborate. She did say that she passed her notes along to a writer in residence at Auburn University, but he came to the same conclusions and also bowed out.

“Who was the writer in residence?” I asked.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said.

I didn’t pursue it. Alice echoed Nelle’s comments.

Certainly a nonfiction narrative of the case would have been fascinating. In a bizarre sequence of events, the part-time preacher, W. M. Maxwell, collected insurance money after five mysterious deaths that occurred over a few years.

In the first four cases, Maxwell was represented by attorney and former state senator Tom Radney Sr. When Maxwell requested Radney’s services for the fifth case, involving the death of his teenage niece, Radney refused. During the niece’s funeral, another uncle shot and killed Maxwell from the pew behind him.

At the subsequent trial, Radney defended the uncle, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Tom Radney Sr. died at age seventy-nine in 2011.

The defense attorney in the case, a main source for Nelle, later maintained that she struggled with the writing, and perhaps alcohol, and gave up.

Whatever the case with the Maxwell book, I had learned that alcohol could be a problem for Nelle.

That wasn’t my experience. I never saw her have more than a glass or two of wine with dinner. I also never got the kind of angry late-night calls from her that Tom had warned me about early on.

“I’ve thought about whether to say something about this to you,” he had told me. “I don’t know if you’ll get a call like that, but if you do, I don’t want you to drop dead of a heart attack. I’ve gotten them.
Alice has gotten them. Other friends have gotten them. And it’s really startling when it happens. And then that’s it. There’s no mention of it the next time she sees you.”

We were quiet for a moment, as I reflected on this.

“Well, I appreciate the warning. You’re right. I might have had a heart attack on the spot if I didn’t know that could happen.”

“She did it once to Hilda when I wasn’t home and I took her to pieces over that. She never did it again, not to Hilda.”

“She always speaks so sweetly about Hilda.”

“And she means it. I don’t know, really, what’s behind it. Some paranoia that comes with being famous and being afraid people will take advantage of you for your money or whatever. She accuses people, chews them out. The alcohol fuels it. I don’t know if it’s some kind of release valve for pressures she feels or what. We all have our problems and doing that, well, it’s one of hers.”

If Capote is to be believed on the subject, the calls went back many years.

It struck me as the flip side to her lust for life. With great passion comes temptation. With extraordinary gifts come demons. As disciplined as Alice was in her personal habits and routines, Nelle was a woman of appetites. It was part of what was appealing about her; her gusto for experiences and spirited debate and food.

She was never hugely overweight but often wished she were twenty pounds lighter. She once checked herself into the local hospital (“back when you could just check yourself in”) in order to subsist, with her doctor’s help, on fluids for a week. She dropped weight, but quickly regained it. Many years later, when I knew her, it was still on her mind.

“I shouldn’t eat this,” she would say about the dessert before her, “but I’m going to.” It was a point of commiseration between us, as I, too, wanted to lose a few pounds.

She could summon discipline, however. Nelle sympathized with the difficulty a friend of mine was having trying to quit smoking. We were getting back into my car after stopping at Rite Aid.

“You’ve never smoked, have you,” Nelle said. It wasn’t a question, and she was right. I hadn’t. “It’s terribly hard,” Nelle told me. “But it can be done. I went cold turkey.”

Chapter Twenty-three

I
was fascinated by the Lee family history, from a slave-holding ancestor on their mother’s side to the hardscrabble existence on their father’s. A. C. Lee’s life took him no farther than from Florida, where he grew up, to neighboring Alabama, where he raised his family. The distance was formidable nonetheless: He went from helping on his parents’ modest farm to reading law and becoming the attorney upon which Atticus Finch was modeled. Alice told me that her father refused to cultivate even a garden, so strong was his aversion to working the soil given his upbringing on the farm in rural Florida. A.C. never graduated from high school, much less college or law school, but “read” the law, as was the custom in the day.

The dark brown piano against the far wall, Alice told me, was the first major purchase their parents made as a married couple. Music mattered to Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Though some neighbors remember Mrs. Lee as a quiet woman who sat on the front porch for hours, seemingly at loose ends, Alice and Nelle described a mother whose piano playing would fill the living room, who loved to sing and read. Her more privileged background exposed her to the arts in a way she was pleased to pass on to her daughters.

The mental health of Frances Lee, and what that meant for Nelle’s upbringing, has been a matter of speculation both around Monroeville and in the press. It comes up in Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote, and would again in Charles Shields’s 2006 biography of Harper Lee. Frances had a breakdown after her second child’s failure to thrive. The ordeal with the infant Louise had not been previously reported. I wanted to know everything Alice was comfortable telling me. And she was ready to set the matter straight for the record, as this particular myth deeply bothered both sisters. In interviews before I moved to Monroeville, while I lived next door, and in the conversations that continued after, the story of Frances’s ordeal emerged, along with what it meant for Alice, Nelle, and the rest of the family.

Alice was healthy as a baby; Louise was not. As she failed to thrive, A.C. and Frances grew more alarmed. They were at a loss for what to do and exhausted. “Mother collapsed,” Alice said, “because Louise was not getting any nourishment and she was crying twenty-four hours a day and she was losing weight. Mother thought she was losing her baby and also did not get any rest. She could not get away from that crying child. Well, you see, what was happening, the baby was starving to death and the doctors there did not know what was wrong. They tried her on all the kinds of baby food that you had then.”

Nothing worked. A.C. was working during the day. At home, he tended to his wife, five-year-old Alice, and baby Louise. “I don’t know how he held up under it,” Alice said, “because he couldn’t rest, either, with this crying baby.” In desperation, they sought out a specialist. “Well, they finally got to Selma and this famous pediatrician, Dr. William W. Harper. He diagnosed the problem,” Alice said, “and put the baby on a complicated formula, which almost from the first taste,
Daddy said, she retained it and ate it and stopped crying.” Frances was relieved but exhausted. She was distraught, showing signs of what the family then, and now, called “a nervous disorder.”

“Well, Mother had had it,” Alice said. “She just absolutely collapsed. And my grandmother in Finchburg kept us.”

Again, the Lees found themselves dealing with a serious illness and sought the help of a specialist. That took gumption in an era when mental illness so often was confused with character defects. People with depression, anxiety disorders, and other conditions usually went without a diagnosis or treatment. Not Frances, who received a specialist’s care in Mobile, first in the hospital and then as an outpatient.

In truth, Dr. Harper came to the rescue not only of baby Louise but of a family of four, with Frances driven to mental collapse and A.C. struggling to work, sleep-deprived, and care for his ailing wife and two small daughters. In this way, as well as others, the Lee family was quietly ahead of its time. Frances, according to Alice, was able to regain her emotional equilibrium.

Not only was A.C. ahead of his time, Frances was as well, doing what it took to recover. She lived away from the family for a year, staying with relatives near Mobile.

A.C. was living a life that resembled Atticus’s in more ways than his law practice. For a time, he was a single father day to day, looking after Alice and baby Louise with the help of a black woman—like Calpurnia in the novel—and neighbors who knew one another’s business, for better and for worse.

A few years later, with Frances’s health long since stabilized, she and A.C. planned two more children. Louise was five when Ed was born. Five years later, the Lees had their fourth and last child, a girl.

So deep was A.C. and Frances’s gratitude to Dr. Harper that when
Louise’s baby sister was delivered in an upstairs bedroom on Alabama Avenue, the parents gave her the middle name Harper.

Nelle Harper Lee arrived on April 28, 1926.

All those sons and daughters named Harper, after Harper Lee, should know their name is a link not only to the author but to an otherwise-forgotten Selma pediatrician who, in 1916, saved a desperately ill infant named Louise Lee.

The Lee sisters, after all these years of staying quiet, began taking aim at the myths about their mother and other stories as well. At Nelle’s request, I went on a reconnaissance mission one day to the Old Courthouse. According to the exhibit, A. C. Lee gave the young Truman a dictionary, the one displayed in a glass case. Whenever Truman heard a word he didn’t know, he pulled the dictionary out of his pocket and looked it up.

It’s a charming story—with one problem. “Nonsense,” Nelle said when I showed her the picture I snapped of the dictionary. Her father did no such thing, she said. “That never happened.”

Alice told me she was so disgusted with a book by Capote’s aunt Marie Rudisill that she burned it with the autumn leaf piles in the backyard. Rudisill followed that one,
Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him,
with another,
The Southern Haunting of Truman Capote
.

Learning about the Lee family, now and going back several generations, meant learning about the black women who were part of those households.

One Sunday, Tom accompanied Alice and me on a long drive through Burnt Corn, Finchburg, Scratch Ankle, and some other communities. Alice pointed as we passed a small white church on the way to Finchburg.

“That church there was a landmark to me when I was little. That
was my grandmother’s cook’s church. Henepin’s church. I played with Henepin’s daughter, named Fanny Lee, named for my mother.”

Alice wanted to make sure I understood that the history of race relations in the South was not as simple as it was often portrayed. She told me, “Like with Julia. You would not have dared raise a child to be disrespectful to them. My grandmother would have chewed me out. When I grew up we always had a cook and most of the time a nurse for the little folks and my mother would have really taken us to pieces if we were rude or disrespectful to those people.”

From the backseat, Tom Butts interjected his own experience. “I got a whipping once for sassing an old black man. There was respect but also strict boundaries.”

Tom’s later experience as a preacher near Mobile who supported integration would include finding a cross burning in his yard. That was 1957, but as late as 1984 he found a KKK card tucked in his door that read, “We are watching you and we don’t like what we see.”

Alice recalled the loyalty of the men and women who had worked for their family. “The morning that my father died it was an early Sunday morning on the fifteenth of April, 1962. It was a Palm Sunday that year. I had not been home an hour before the black lady who worked for me showed up in a white uniform: ‘Miss Alice, I’ll do anything for you I can.’ You don’t forget that kind of loyalty.”

Chapter Twenty-four