The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (11 page)

By that point, the Lees had already begun assigning me Alabama history books to make up for my woeful ignorance of their local heritage. I noted in a fax to them that my copy of Pickett’s histor
y
was on the way. This was the book Nelle wrote about in an essay presented in Eufaula, Alabama, in 1983, and later published. “In what would occupy a few paragraphs of an American history survey,” she wrote, “Pickett took 669 pages to unfold a story that is more hair-raising than anything yet seen on television. Indeed, in today’s terms, it is almost as though Pickett trained a camera in relentless, unblinking close-up on a period of Alabama history that we seldom think about anymore, a
period that sometimes seems to live only in our place-names and on roadside markers.”

Throughout our friendship, the Lees assigned me history books to read that they deemed essential, including Carl Carmer’s
Stars Fell on Alabama,
W. J. Cash’s
The Mind of the South,
James Agee and Walker Evans’s
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
Harvey Jackson’s
Inside Alabama,
and Wayne Flynt’s
Alabama in the Twentieth Century.

Nelle recommended fiction as well, including Alabamian Mary Ward Brown’s
Tongues of Flame,
a collection of short stories. I lingered over the one about a Yankee reporter who makes a fool of himself by making assumptions about the small Southern town he is visiting. She’d blurbed Roy Hoffman’s
Chicken Dreaming Corn,
about an Eastern European Jewish family in the Mobile of the early 1900s.

Their reading tastes were varied and fascinating. It’s a safe bet that the Lee home was the only one in Monroeville getting a steady stream of British periodicals. They subscribed to several. Among them: the
Spectator,
the
Weekly Telegraph,
and the
TLS,
or the
Times Literary Supplement
.

Magazines would pile up on the floor by the reading chairs, on kitchen counters, on the bookshelves. American periodicals arrived in abundance, too. They got the
New York Times Book Review, New York,
and
Newsweek,
as well as
Vanity Fair.
And then there were the newspapers that Julia fetched from the front porch early each morning: the
Mobile Register,
often left hanging over the arm of the plaid sofa, and the
Montgomery Advertiser
.

A treat I always brought them from Chicago’s Midway or O’Hare airport was that day’s
New York Times
—handed to a grateful Alice or Nelle, or left in a plastic bag on their doorknob.

At times, when I’d see Alice or Nelle reading one of the papers, I was reminded of the scene in
To Kill a Mockingbird
after Sheriff Tate
comes to tell Atticus that Tom Robinson is being moved to the local jail that night. A crowd of local men stand in the yard, trouble brewing. Atticus thanks the sheriff and goes back inside.

“Jem watched him go to his chair and pick up the evening paper. I sometimes think Atticus subjected every crisis of his life to tranquil evaluation behind
The Mobile Register, The Birmingham News
and
The Montgomery Advertiser
.”

Nelle wanted to make sure I had read William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, to better understand the South. She liked Flannery O’Connor less, particularly the Catholic element in her books. Plus, O’Connor had once said that
To Kill a Mockingbird
was a good book—for children.

Alice was fascinated by crime stories. As a young woman she closely followed, along with most of the country, the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, charged with murdering a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy in 1924. Clarence Darrow defended the two young men who spent seven months planning the perfect crime. Alice recalled her anticipation each day, coming home from school as a thirteen-year-old, to read that day’s coverage of the trial.

But she loved English history most of all. In an early visit, Alice told me she was reading
The Asquiths
by Colin Clifford. It’s exactly the kind of book that intrigued her—a sweeping saga about the remarkable British family in the early 1900s, headed by Margot and Herbert Henry Asquith, who became prime minister. A fax she sent to me in Chicago ended with this:

“I almost feel that I am a member of that family! No fiction can match the story of their lives. That is why I love history and biography.”

Alice and Nelle’s shared interest in the Asquiths goes back a long way. In an essay Nelle described spending Christmas with her good friends Joy and Michael Brown and their young children in New York,
noting that “we limited our gifts to pennies and wits and all-out competition. Who would come up with the most outrageous for the least. . . . Bedlam prevailed until they discovered there was more. As their father began distributing gifts, I grinned to myself, wondering how my exceptionally wily unearthments this year would be received. His was a print of a portrait of Sydney Smith I’d found for thirty-five cents; hers was the complete works of Margot Asquith, the result of a year’s patient search.”

The books that Nelle read in childhood had a recurring theme—one of adventure and getting out of predicaments, without the moral tone of some earlier children’s books.

She later described her early reading life in a July 2006 letter that ran in
O, The Oprah Magazine,
that began, “Dear Oprah, Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn’t know how?”

Her family read aloud to her, she said, and her childhood friends circulated their scarce books among themselves. As time went on, they swapped books in order to acquire a full set of a series.

“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.”

Alice had me read
The Ballad of Little River
by Paul Hemphill, about a south Alabama black church burning in the 1990s. Nelle later took me to the area where the church was located. Friends Ila and Judy joined us, too. When we went to the Dixie Landing rural café, Nelle had me stuff my copy of the book in my purse. It was not a popular book around there. Only the top peeked out of my small purse. I rested my hand on it.

Chapter Eight

W
hen I was in Chicago, we kept in touch by fax. I told Alice and Nelle, for example, about additional newspapers that had run my story. Alice was a regular correspondent, keeping me up to date on how she and Nelle were doing and what was happening in Monroeville. I began to get a deeper appreciation for the way in which meaningful friendships once blossomed via letters. It allows time to reflect, and to reveal oneself gradually.

In July 2003, I made it back to Monroeville. I saw Dale Welch and drove with Tom to see Alice honored in Mobile with the Alabama Bar Association’s second annual Maud McLure Kelly Award. The honor was named for the first female lawyer in the state.

This was the first and only time I saw Alice wear footwear other than her trademark white Reeboks. She had on white flats for the occasion. They complemented her lavender suit. She stepped more gingerly without the traction of the Reeboks.

I glanced around the room and saw lawyers and judges, and Lee friends and family. This was, everyone understood, a day to honor Alice while she was still alive to enjoy the tributes.

“I don’t see Nelle,” I told Tom.

“I noticed that. It’s a long trip by train, though. And I’m guessing she wanted the focus to stay on Alice today. Anytime she’s in a room, she is going to be the star attraction.”

Nelle’s best tribute to Alice was in the pages of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. All those years ago, she dedicated the novel to her and their father. The simple dedication was “for Mr. Lee and Alice in consideration of Love & Affection.” A. C. Lee, Nelle made it clear from the start, was the inspiration for Atticus Finch. And Alice, in Nelle’s words, was “Atticus in a Skirt.”

Tom took to the podium to introduce Alice, and to recount the legal career being celebrated that day. When it was time to deliver a sermon or give public remarks such as these, he lowered his voice an octave or two and put a little more English on the ball, linguistically speaking. He called this his “stained-glass voice.”

“Let me tell you something about the journey of this unusual woman, who is the uncontested, quiet queen of the courthouse, the Methodist Church, and the community where she lives.”

Both Alice and her father started their law careers later in life, after working in other capacities. A.C. was a bookkeeper for a lumber company before studying law. Alice graduated from high school in 1928 at the age of sixteen and went on to Huntingdon College in Montgomery. When the Depression hit, she returned to Monroeville before graduating. A.C. had purchased the
Monroe Journal
. She worked there seven years, doing whatever needed to be done, as she put it. She spent the following seven years in Birmingham. She went to work for the Internal Revenue Service in the newly created Social Security administration. From 1939 to 1943 she attended night school at the Birmingham School of Law. The bar exam, in 1943, was an ordeal. She told the audience assembled at this Mobile hotel for the Maud McLure Kelly
event of the four anxious souls taking the exam. Three young men, all 4-Fs, disqualified from service in World War II due to physical problems, and one Alice Finch Lee.

“I don’t recall a single one of us completing a single exam, a factor that caused considerable anxiety as we had no clue as to how it would affect the examination. Four examiners, sixteen exams, and at five
P.M.
on the afternoon of day four we were finished. It is my private opinion that Lance Armstrong, who is currently looked upon as the epitome of stamina and endurance, is no more fatigued at the conclusion of one of his races than we were at the end of day four.”

She passed.

“Something called the Victory Tax had just become law,” Tom told the crowd. “All income over six hundred dollars became taxable, and people who had never filed a federal tax return had to file. There was no CPA in Monroeville, but it was commonly known that Miss Alice had worked for seven years for the IRS, so people assumed she was well versed in income tax law. They didn’t know that her work for the IRS had been in the Social Security division and that she had never filled out an income tax return other than her own. Tax clients poured in. Miss Alice studied the tax code by night and did tax returns by day. She became the tax lady.”

As much as she was known for her legal work, Alice’s role in the Methodist Church was probably the defining work of her life. When Tom asked Alice for a list of offices she’d held in the Methodist Church, she said simply, “Well, I’ve never been the pastor.” She served on every committee they could come up with, much as her father had.

Tom took special pride in recounting her actions at a regional Methodist conference. “It was in the midsixties when the rhetoric of racism was loud and vitriolic. A committee report concerning the
problems about our racially divided church and society had come to the floor. Amendments had been made and debate had started. And the advocates of continued racism were poised and ready to try to drag the church deeper into institutional racism. But before their leader could get to the floor, a wee woman from Monroeville, Alabama, got the attention of the presiding officer of the conference. Miss Alice Finch Lee went to the microphone to make her maiden speech to the Alabama–West Florida conference of the Methodist Church. Her speech electrified the seven or eight hundred delegates there—I was there. It consisted of five words. She said: ‘I move the previous question’ and sat down. The conference applauded enthusiastically and voted overwhelmingly to support her motion and then adopted the committee report without further debate. The advocates of racism were left on the sidelines holding their long-prepared speeches. Miss Alice became the hero of the conference and from that day on the enemy of the racists. She’s always been a person of few words but important words said at the right time and the right place.”

It wasn’t an impassioned speech, but the Southern Methodist Church was deeply divided on the question of race in the 1960s. Alice’s stand carried quite a lot of weight with the congregation. It’s an example of the quiet work for equality that has been a hallmark of the Lee family. The sweeping change that came to the South in the 1960s was largely the work of the civil rights movement and its brave leaders. But people like the Lees played an important role behind the scenes. Of course, Nelle’s novel itself was influential for generations of Americans in how they understood the questions of civil rights.