The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (9 page)

“Heavens, no,” she said, laughing.

“I can’t make any promises,” Tom said.

It was their usual give-and-take. Nelle fumbled to fasten her seat belt by the car’s interior light. She feigned indignation. “Tom, what in the world?”

He reached over and guided the seat belt into the buckle.

Nelle rolled her window the rest of the way down and reached over to put her hand on Ernie’s sleeve. “You take care of yourself, Ernie. Thank you for a wonderful time.”

Ernie nodded and glanced at the backseat. “You find your way back here now, you hear?”

Nelle and Tom chatted the whole way home about people they had in common with Ernie: who had been feuding with a neighbor, who had remarried, who had come into a small inheritance, and whatever happened to his cousin?

The names didn’t mean anything to me. But I listened to the easy banter between the two, even as I got sleepy in the backseat. Tom was right. Nelle was in her element here.

We followed our headlights through the dark back to Monroeville.

—

O
n that trip, I was able to spend more time with Alice and Nelle. Once they passed, Tom pointed out, the tangle of myths and half-truths that have flourished amid Nelle’s decades-long silence would only grow. He worried about that.

“When she and Alice go, people are going to start ‘remembering’ things as they didn’t happen, or outright making things up, and they won’t be here to set the record straight. So keep taking notes, girl.”

One afternoon, I had a message from Nelle. Since I would be in town awhile longer, would I like to go for breakfast? If so, she would swing by the motel the next morning and get me. Once again, I found myself waiting in the glass vestibule of the Best Western, not sure what to expect.

She was right on time. She pulled up in a dark blue Buick sedan and motioned for me to get in.

“Good morning.”

“Morning,” she said. “Have you been to Wanda’s?”

I hadn’t. We made a left onto Highway 21 and, a short distance later, just past the intersection with 84, turned into a large gas station parking lot. Behind it was Wanda’s Kountry Kitchen, a low-slung diner painted yellow. Nelle glided into a parking spot and glanced over at me.

“It’s not fancy. But it’s good food. More or less.” She gave a wry smile. “You’ve discovered Monroeville’s dining options are limited?” This was a statement more than a question.

A sign posted near the front door had the silhouette of a video camera and a warning:
THESE PREMISES PROTECTED AGAINST BURGLARY, HOLDUP AND VANDALISM.

Nelle opened the door for me. “Proceed.”

I proceeded. Cigarette smoke greeted us, and the din of regular customers at their usual tables. A gentleman with an enormously round belly and scraggly beard was holding court, loudly, at a table of several men. In one corner, a group of older women was deep in conversation, flicking cigarettes in a couple of ashtrays in the middle of the table. Half of the other tables were occupied. To our left, the woman behind the counter looked up.

“Anywhere,” she told us.

Nelle and I slid into two empty places along the far wall. Our
waitress was a slim woman in her fifties or sixties with a tanned, lined face. She set two large plastic menus in the middle of the table.

“Hi, hon,” Nelle said.

“How y’all doing this morning?”

“Tolerable.”

“Coffee?”

“Please,” Nelle said.

I studied the menu. It was standard fare: eggs and hash browns and hotcakes, along with that Southern staple, grits. Nelle barely glanced at the menu and set it aside. The waitress returned with the coffee carafe and filled our cups, the thick white mugs of diners everywhere. Small curls of steam rose from the mugs.

“Bless you, hon,” Nelle said. She wrapped her hands around the mug.

Now Nelle was spooning a couple of ice cubes from her water glass into her coffee. She looked over at me. “Do you need a minute?”

“No. That’s all right. You go ahead and I’ll be ready.”

The waitress pulled out her pad.

“I’ll have two eggs, over easy,” Nelle said. “And a side of sausage. And a biscuit.”

“Gravy?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

I was pretty sure ordering my trying-to-be-healthy usual—scrambled egg whites, a piece of wheat toast, and a side of fruit—violated the spirit of this place. It could mark me as a city girl or a granola head, neither a popular demographic around here. I set down my menu.

“I’ll have the same, please. But with bacon instead of sausage, please.”

I wondered if Nelle had invited me to breakfast to ask me
something specific or just to continue our conversation. Those eyes of hers, brown and penetrating, could be unnerving but at the moment they were sparkling. She smiled broadly.

“Have you had sawmill gravy?”

“No, I haven’t.” Sawmill gravy . . . sawmill gravy. I should know what this was. Was it mentioned in
To Kill a Mockingbird
? This was lumber country, after all, sawmill country.

“You’re in for a treat.”

Nelle was draining her cup as we spoke. When the waitress stopped by, Nelle tapped lightly on the side of her mug. “Keep it coming, would you, hon?”

I’d studied Nelle, subtly, I hoped, at the Best Western, at the catfish pond, and now here at Wanda’s. Each time her humor and her down-to-earth demeanor struck me.

There was an edge there, too, though, of suspicion or impatience, and I didn’t want to set it off. Tom had warned me she had a temper. When something set her off she could get creative with her cursing, her salty “Conecuh County English,” in Tom’s words.

“Have you been back to the courthouse?”

“Yes, I was there and I stopped in the history room in the library. I spent some time with Dale Welch.”

Nelle’s expression softened.

“Dale’s a good egg. She was a librarian, you know. And she taught. She’s a reader, unlike most of the people around here.”

As I was recounting my conversation with Dale, our food arrived, and I had my first look at sawmill gravy, poured over my biscuit. It was thick and white with bits of sausage. I had never learned to like gravy of any kind. At holiday time, my family knew not to pass the gravy boat my way. But if this was part of local culture, and possibly a test of
my willingness to partake, I was going to eat it all and look like I was enjoying it, no matter what.

It was viscous stuff. I swallowed hard.

Nelle dug into her own biscuit and eggs with gusto. That surprised me a bit, because I’d read so much about her reserve. But that was at public events, I suppose. In person, her heartiness was appealing: her relish of the food and coffee; that big laugh; her obvious affection for Alice and Julia and Dale and Tom. I had assumed I would have to keep my distance from the famously private Harper Lee but I couldn’t help but enjoy her company. She might have been prickly but she was a delightful companion.

I did some more reporting around town for a couple of days. As I was walking from the car to my motel room one afternoon, I felt a lupus flare taking hold, worse than usual. I didn’t know if I’d be able to make the long drive to the airport the next day. It meant a trip to the local emergency room.

I knew this sensation. It was mounting. I’d been pushing through the fatigue. I recognized the characteristic shooting pains in my fingers and toes

I’d been more tired the last few days but now it was what the doctors call wipe-out fatigue. Walking to and from the rental car felt like trudging through molasses. Even lying in bed I felt slammed.

I faxed the Lees that I would have to cut my stay short and thanked them for the time they’d spent with me. Because of their failing hearing, faxing was our most reliable mode of communication. I apologized for rushing off—this was a standard-issue lupus flare, for me, and once I got treatment at the ER I’d be fine and on my way. I’d fax them once I was in Chicago, and keep them posted as I put together the stories.

I drove the short distance to the hospital and filled out the
paperwork to be evaluated in the emergency room. A nurse took me to one of the private areas and drew blood. I conferred with the white-smocked doctor making his way from one curtained area to the next. We agreed this was probably a flare that could be treated. I’d get home and then deal with my doctors there if needed.

The nurse started an IV and I started figuring whether it would be realistic to try to drive to the airport later that day. I was resting on a gurney when I heard a voice.

“Child, what have you done to yourself? Heavens.”

I knew that husky voice. Nelle had materialized by the gurney.

I was stunned, and embarrassed. I didn’t want her to go to this trouble or to see me like this. I stood up to greet her and blushed on the spot.

She gave me a quick hug and then stood back, taking the measure of how I looked.

I was hoping the hospital’s tile floor would open up and swallow me. Knowing how the Lees felt about journalists, I had taken extra care not to impose on their time and goodwill. For their sake, and mine, it was best I be professional, together, and outa here. This had no place in that picture.

Instead, here I was, a pale-faced girl in a hospital gown, shaky and embarrassed that Nelle had gone to the time and trouble of driving to the emergency room.

“You’re so kind to come out here. But really, this is just standard stuff. I’ve dealt with it before.”

She looked at me skeptically.

“They’ll do some labs, see where things are. They’ll probably give me a little bit of IV steroids and I’ll be fine.”

She glanced over at the nurses. She lowered her voice and leaned in
closer. “If anyone asks, I’m your mother-in-law. Otherwise they won’t let me stay back here with you. Only relatives. Rules.” She spit out the last word. I smiled.

Before long, Nelle was on her way, and I was on the mend.

In Chicago, I faxed the Lees on my first day back at work to let them know I was feeling better. As it turned out, ongoing health problems and other assignments conspired to delay the publication of the stories even longer. Finally, in September 2002, I began final fact-checking on the articles we were preparing to publish.

I wanted to spell out in the story that Nelle consented to be photographed. Otherwise, I thought, readers would wonder why a story in which she had no comment, as usual, was accompanied by
Tribune
photos clearly taken with her permission. Not at all usual.

Nelle questioned if that explanation was necessary but gave her consent in a one-page, typewritten letter spit out of a
Tribune
fax machine.

In the letter, she did two seemingly contradictory things. She made clear her low regard for newspaper reporters. She also indicated she might be open to talking with me some more.

I sat at my desk and read the fax. As would happen many times in the years to come, I was unsure, and anxious, about what Nelle would have to say this time around. I needed to honor my agreement with her and Alice. At the same time, I had to write a journalistically sound article, not a puff piece.

She began with kind words. I had returned to work after a short stay in the hospital. She and Alice were endlessly patient as my health problems slowed the process of getting the story ready to be published.

She wrote that she was “appalled by the viciousness of lupus” and was encouraging about the way I’d dealt with setbacks.  “You are a
most remarkable young lady. Bless you” I was to make it “Quaker plain” that she declined to comment for the story.

For my edification, she outlined the decline, as she saw it, of journalistic standards. “The files on one Harper Lee,” in fact, were a useful case study of the fall. She had no patience for New Journalism. She lamented the passing of an era she said I was too young to remember, one in which a reporter’s first and only job was to get the facts right, not to inject personal opinion. After reflecting on her treatment in the press, she began the next paragraph, “Therein you should see the possibilities of another story.”

I remembered the case in general in which the U.S. Supreme Court widened freedom of the press, making it more difficult for public officials to win libel or defamation cases against news organizations. I looked up the specifics. The
Sullivan
case focused on civil rights coverage in the segregated South, but its ruling applied more broadly to what some perceived as a lowering of standards regarding both accuracy and malicious reporting. Plaintiffs had to prove “actual malice” by reporters and editors, the hard-to-prove action of setting out, deliberately and knowingly, to publish inaccurate reports in an effort to defame public officials.

I didn’t agree entirely with her view of my “once reputable profession” but I knew what she meant. And as a practical matter, I was hugely encouraged that she was bothering to teach me what she saw as the relevant history of my career. I read the letter a second time. I appreciated the comments about dealing with lupus. More important, in the story soon to go to press, I could state that she had consented to be photographed and thereby resolve that issue.

And those magic words, unlikely as they were coming from Harper Lee: “You should see the possibilities of another story.”

—

T
he main article, with a few sidebars, was to run Friday, September 13, 2002. I flew to Montgomery Thursday afternoon, as planned, with the preprinted feature section in hand. After so much time, theirs and mine, spent reporting the story, I wanted to face them after they read it, whatever their reaction. And I didn’t need to be asked twice when they encouraged me to come back when I could.

Friday, at Barnett, Bugg & Lee, I found Nelle slouched in a chair in Alice’s office after a morning running errands. Alice sat, as always, facing the doorway, her deeply veined hands folded on her desk’s little return table. We exchanged greetings and the usual catch-up on weather, travels, health. Nelle nodded at the copies of the
Tribune
I held in my hands.

“You are a brave woman,” Nelle said. “You have come to face your accusers.”