Christmas Tales of Alabama (3 page)

Illustration by Kelly Kazek
.

In 1886, the Kellers knew they had to find a better life for their wild daughter. They talked with Alexander Graham Bell, who recommended the Perkins Institute for the Blind. There the Kellers found Anne Sullivan. Anne, who had become nearly blind from an eye disease, arrived at Ivy Green in March 1887. The strict teaching methods employed by the young woman bothered the Kellers, but they agreed to give her time. After all, they had no other course of action.

Captain Keller, who fought with the Confederate army, was a gruff and stern man who did not get along well with Anne. Everyone in the household wondered at her methods, repeatedly making symbols for letters into the palm of Helen's hand. Helen, who could make no sense of the movements in her hand, only grew more frustrated when Anne would spell D-O-L-L and thrust a doll into her hands.

What did it mean? Finally, Helen threw the doll, breaking it.

That April, while Helen was washing her hands at the pump behind the house, Anne spelled W-A-T-E-R, W-A-T-E-R.

Suddenly, Helen knew. The letters spelled the word for the cool liquid flowing through her hands. She ran from object to object, motioning to Anne to spell the word for her. She pointed to Anne: T-E-A-C-H-E-R.

The world of Helen Keller, though still sightless, was alight with possibilities. By December, Helen had a broader vocabulary and an understanding of her place in the greater world around her. She was ready to celebrate her “first” Christmas.

Anne would later write, “For weeks we did nothing but talk and read and tell each other stories about Christmas.” Helen and Teacher devised surprises for Helen's parents and others in the household, which gave the little girl great joy. Helen wrote in her memoir,
The Story of My Life
, “The mystery that surrounded the gifts was my greatest delight and amusement. My friends did all they could to excite my curiosity by hints and half-spelled sentences which they pretended to break off in the nick of time.”

Soon, Helen could comprehend the concept of gifts and decorated trees. For the first time, she understood she was invited to parties to share in games with other children. At the party at the local school, Helen was given the honor of distributing gifts, a job she took seriously. After handing out treats to each child, Helen noticed that one little girl, Nellie, did not receive as many gifts as the other children. She signed to Teacher: “I will give Nellie mug.”

Anne later wrote, “She had chosen her prettiest gift and the one which had pleased her most to give a little stranger.” That night, the excited Helen hung two stockings, just in case Santa Claus could not find the first.

Illustration by Kelly Kazek
.

Illustration by Kelly Kazek
.

She woke her family early the next morning, frantically spelling “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” She found surprises on the table, chairs and at the door and on window sills. “I could hardly walk without stumbling on a bit of Christmas wrapped up in tissue paper,” she later recalled.

It was one of the happiest times of the girl's young life. She couldn't know then that she would learn to speak, graduate from college and become a world-renowned author, lecturer and celebrity. That first Christmas instilled in Helen a love for the wondrous holiday and formed the basis of her belief that blind people could, if they chose, truly “see” the world.

In a 1906 essay in
Ladies' Home Journal
, she wrote of a party for students at the Perkins Institute:

I hear some one ask, “What pleasure can Christmas hold for children who cannot see their gifts or the sparkling tree or the ruddy smile of Santa Claus?” The question would be answered if you had seen that Christmas of the blind children. The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart. We sightless children have the best of eyes that day in our hearts and in our finger-tips. We were glad from the child's necessity of being happy. The blind who have outgrown the child's perpetual joy can be children again on Christmas Day and celebrate in the midst of them who pipe and dance and sing a new song!

T
HE
G
IFT
T
HAT
C
HANGED THE
W
ORLD
'
S
L
ITERARY
L
ANDSCAPE

In 1956, Joy and Michael Brown were a hip, young cosmopolitan couple. Michael, a composer and writer originally from Texas, had begun his New York career as a successful cabaret singer at Le Ruban Bleu before he began writing for revues and Broadway musicals. The
Hollywood Reporter
would call Michael “a prodigious talent,” and he would later have successes composing what were known as “industrial musicals” for large corporate presentations at world's fairs and writing children's books. Joy was a professional ballerina.

In the early 1950s, the Browns had befriended Nelle Lee, a Monroeville, Alabama native who had come to New York in 1949 in hopes of becoming a writer. She had attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery and then law school at the University of Alabama, but she dropped out to follow her dream in New York. There she reconnected with her childhood friend Truman Capote and met others in writing and literary circles. So far, though, she hadn't written anything publishable. She'd spent seven years working at an airline reservations desk in a downtown office. At Christmas, she became wistful for her family and Christmases past. In 1956, Lee was unable to get enough time from work to travel home, so the Browns invited her to spend Christmas at their Manhattan townhouse.

Lee would later describe the couple in an article in
McCall's
: Michael was brilliant and an eternal optimist. Joy was beautiful and a loving mother who enjoyed cooking for her brood. The couple and Lee shared interests in writing, reading and film. They swapped books, went to movies and shared jokes. At Christmas, she and Michael and Joy would see who could buy the silliest, most inexpensive gift and save the real gifts for the couple's young sons.

This one Christmas would be different. Nelle arrived on Christmas Eve to spend the night and was awoken the next morning by one of the children. The Browns had a surprise for Nelle. Perhaps the couple had an inkling that the special gift would change Lee's life forever, but could they have known it would change the world's literary landscape?

After the other gifts were opened, Lee was urged toward the sparkling tree, where she found an envelope tucked in the branches. It bore her name. The note inside, which would later be accompanied by what was to Lee a large sum of money, said: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”

Lee wasn't sure what it meant. Michael responded that it meant exactly what it said. The couple wanted to show they thought their friend had talent and give her the opportunity to hone her craft. They weren't expecting a novel or even a published article. They simply wanted Lee to have the chance.

Lee objected that it was too much, too big a risk. After all, she argued, the Browns were doing well at the time, but the writing business had its ups and downs and the couple had two children.

Finally, the Browns said Lee could consider it a loan if she wanted as long as she accepted it. Realizing it was given from love, she relented. She would accept.

For a year, she wrote, producing a manuscript about the wrongful prosecution of a black man that, though still rough, caught the attention of an editor at J.B. Lippincott. It included a setting based on her hometown of Monroeville and characters based on family, friends and neighbors. Truman Capote was cast as the young boy, Dill, a friend of the main character, a tomboyish girl named Scout Finch.

After several turns at editing, the book was finally ready.
To Kill a Mockingbird
would be published in 1960, and Nelle Harper Lee's life would never be the same.

The wild success of the book, a subsequent Pulitzer Prize and the 1962 film starring Gregory Peck overwhelmed Lee, who began refusing interviews and wrote only the 1961 essay for
McCall's
as a love letter to the Browns and a few other articles.
To Kill a Mockingbird
would be her only novel—but what a novel.

Its impact was felt worldwide and especially in Lee's South, where racial tensions were building in the 1960s. The
New Yorker
called the book “totally ingenious,” and a
Time
magazine reviewer wrote that the book taught the reader “an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life.”

It is now purported to be the most widely read book in the world, after the Bible.

Would the world have had the gift of
To Kill a Mockingbird
if not for a thoughtful and generous present to a friend from Michael and Joy Brown? Perhaps not. Though Lee had been writing since arriving in New York, she had yet to find success in publishing, and without that year to focus, who knows if her talent would have been tapped?

Michael Brown's successes continued. He created the
World of Chemistry
, a show that combined live actors interacting with those on film in a genre that became known as an “industrial musical,” for Dupont to present at the New York World's Fair. It was seen by more than five million people. Brown would later write another musical for Woolworth's.

Brown's children's book series about Santa Mouse has sold more than three million copies and is listed by
Publishers Weekly
as one of best-selling children's series of all time. Joy Williams Brown was the artistic director of the Margot Fonteyn Academy of Ballet and formerly a principal dancer for Roland Petit in Les Ballets de Paris, and in the 1970s, she was the American member of the Royal Academy of Dance.

The Browns eventually had three sons, and they continue to live in New York.

T
RUMAN
C
APOTE
'
S
S
OUTHERN
C
HRISTMAS

Many people remember Truman Capote as the pale-faced little man whose high, nasal voice was oft-imitated—and not in a flattering manner. In his foray into acting in his later years, Capote played a caricature of himself in the film
Murder by Death
.

Those who had known him from childhood knew that Truman Capote, the brilliant writer with the glamorous lifestyle, was more than a caricature. Abandoned by his parents and bullied as a child, Truman developed a cloak of confidence and self-importance that he would wear like armor against pain the rest of his life.

In the South, we embrace our eccentrics: the strange aunts, the oddball cousins, the small-town resident who comes out only at night. Though Truman may eventually have felt abandoned by the high-society friends whose secrets he revealed in his stories, and while he often alienated those who chose to love him, he was a true son of the South. He could never extricate himself from those tangled roots.

The South—and his memory of it—was a constant among the many shifting currents in the turbulent life of the boy who was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans on September 30, 1924. Some believe Truman's stories that are set in the South are among his finest works. The characters, based on members of his unusual and dysfunctional family, leap from the pages in all their flawed glory, leaving the reader wondering how such simple stories could evoke such complicated emotions.

One of the most enduring of these beloved writings was “A Christmas Memory,” which first appeared as a short story in
Mademoiselle
magazine in 1956 and was eventually published as a slim volume, along with the short stories “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “One Christmas.”

“A Christmas Memory” is a love story, though not in any typical sense. It tells of the pure love between a small boy and his naïve and childlike elderly cousin, who was simply called “friend” in original publications but who was later identified as “Sook.”

Sook was the nickname of Nanny Rumbley Faulk, one of the many relatives who lived with Truman's mother's cousin, Jenny Faulk, in Monroeville, Alabama, in the 1920s and 1930s. Jenny owned the family's dry goods store on the downtown square, which was the extended family's sole means of support. Whenever family members were in dire straits, orphaned or abandoned, Jenny would bring them to the rambling family home, where she was living with her three unmarried siblings: Sook, Callie and Buddy. She had reared Truman's mother, Lillie Mae, after her parents died. Truman lived with Jenny and the cousins until he was seven years old. Lillie Mae, who was seventeen when Truman was born, soon divorced his father, Archulus Persons. Lillie Mae left her young son in Monroeville and went to New Orleans, where she would meet her second husband, Joseph Capote. Joseph would adopt Truman and give him his name, but the relationship was always strained. After Truman went to live with his mother and stepfather, he continued to visit Monroeville each summer, spending time with Sook and a neighbor named Nelle Harper Lee, who also would find fame as a writer.