The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (7 page)

One reporter at a Chicago press conference to promote the film took note of her weight and the fact that she didn’t curl her hair. “Chicago Press Call” included this description by a reporter for
Rogue,
a Chicago-based men’s magazine, in its December 1963 issue: “Harper Lee arrived. She is 36-years-old, tall, and a few pounds on the wrong side of Metrecal.” Metrecal was the Slim-Fast diet shake of its day. “She has dark, short-cut, uncurled hair; bright, twinkling eyes; a gracious manner; and Mint Julep diction.”

Asked if she found writing her next book slow going, Lee answered, “Well, I hope to live to see it published.”

Questions about her second book began to rankle. She wasn’t making the progress she hoped, and preferred not to disclose the specifics of the novel she had been working on for more than a year at that point. The expectations of a second novel were overwhelming.
When you start at the top, she told those close to her, there is nowhere to go but down.

Her decision never to publish another book took on the aura of a dramatic decision she had made early on after the overwhelming success of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Her choice to live out of the public spotlight and begin a half century of silence seemed equally stark.

But the decision not to publish again was far more gradual than that. As I got to know Nelle and her friends, I learned that, rather than a grand decision, the shape of her life was dictated by a series of small choices made at different points along the way. For many years, she thought there might be a second book.

At age thirty-four, Harper Lee had a stunning achievement behind her, and a world of promise before her. Naturally, she planned to write more. She would turn her keen eye once more to the complexities of character and community. In
To Kill a Mockingbird
and in future work she envisioned, the rich particulars of her corner of the Deep South could illuminate something universal.

“I hope to goodness every book I write improves,” she told an interviewer, only half in jest, in 1964. “All I want is to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”

Then: silence.

“There were so many demands made on her,” Alice recalled. “People wanted her to speak to groups. She would be terrified to speak.”

Lee withdrew from public view and never published another book.

And so for a half century now, readers and reporters alike have asked the question that drives any good mystery: Then what happened? She wasn’t telling, at least not publicly.

Chapter Five

T
he Lees’ onetime pastor and longtime friend Thomas Lane Butts called. He was back from preaching out of town, and he would come by the motel and drive me to dinner. Alice hadn’t wanted me to leave town without talking to him, as he was a close friend to both of the sisters. What was it he would have to say? And why were they asking a good friend to sit for an interview about Harper Lee, on the record, the very thing they usually discouraged?

As a Methodist minister assigned to different congregations in south Alabama and Florida over the years, Tom came to know Alice well back in the 1970s. Like the Lees’ father, she was deeply involved in the affairs of the Methodist Church in Alabama and northern Florida. Tom had been the pastor of the Lees’ church, First Methodist, for several years. Technically, he was then the pastor emeritus, although Alice chided him about his “alleged” retirement.

Tom and his wife, Hilda, became friends with Nelle Harper in the 1980s, when Alice fell into a coma, apparently from a virus that was not responding to antibiotics. Finally, after a few weeks, she regained consciousness. By then, her sister and the Butts had spent long hours
together at the hospital, getting to know one another over stale doughnuts and endless cups of coffee, worried sick about Alice.

There weren’t many people in Monroeville with whom Nelle could enjoy long conversations about her favorite writers and historians, people like Macaulay and British cleric Sydney Smith, his nineteenth-century contemporary. She found a kindred spirit in Tom, someone whose wit, intellect, and lack of pretense were a good match for her own. He and Nelle were just as happy fishing together and trading stories of their Alabama youth as they were discussing the King James translation of the Bible or Macaulay’s voluminous history of England.

Tom and Nelle grew up just one year and fifteen miles apart. But it was far from assured that their paths as adults would intersect the way they did. He was a country boy growing up in a sharecropper’s home in which the only book for many years was the Bible. She lived in town, the daughter of a lawyer in a family that loved to read. “In one way,” Tom said, “we grew up the same. But in another way, we didn’t.”

Tom’s family, in
To Kill a Mockingbird
terms, was closer to the fictional Cunninghams, poor folks who eked an existence out of the land, than the Finches, who derived a modest income from the law and socially were a notch or two above.

Among white families in Maycomb, the violent, foul-mouthed widower Bob Ewell and his passel of unkempt children are at the bottom of the heap. They even live next to—and off of—the town dump. At age nineteen, his oldest, Mayella, is trapped. Trapped by poverty, by circumstances, by her abusive father. She grows red geraniums in a chipped chamber pot, cultivating what little beauty she can in a bleak existence.

As a pastor, Tom had known versions of all three families. “I’ve been knowing Mayellas all my life,” as he put it.

Earlier that day, though I didn’t know it then, he had spoken with Lee about what to say, and what not to say, when I interviewed him. I later learned what the list included. He could talk about the book and their friendship, but she didn’t want him to give specifics for the newspaper story on where she spent time around Monroeville. Otherwise, those restaurants and even the homes of her friends might be subject to visits by reporters or tourists in search of a Lee sighting. Already reporters had been known to visit David’s Catfish House and Radley’s in hopes of encountering her. In her absence, they asked waitresses and other customers about the town’s most famous resident.

He was surprised that both Lees encouraged him to speak with me and, more so, to talk freely about most topics pertaining to them. It turns out he was as curious about me as I was about him.

I waited for him at the front entrance of the motel. He pulled up in a roomy gray Buick and stepped out to greet me. He was short, only five feet four inches, not much taller than I am. He was what used to be called a natty dresser. Italian leather loafers, a crisp shirt and designer tie, navy blazer pressed just so.

“Miss Mills,” he said, and extended his hand. He was more formal than I expected there in the parking lot under the Best Western sign. Every now and then I felt I was glimpsing the Monroeville of another era.

“Have you been to the South Forty?” he asked me. I hadn’t. The restaurant was a fifteen-minute drive from Monroeville, near the tiny town of Repton.

The South Forty was a down-home place, with a rough-hewn front porch, light oak tables and chairs in a bright room, and the day’s specials listed on a whiteboard. We took a table against the wall in the back.

“I don’t know why Alice and Nelle have opened up to you the way
they have,” Tom told me. “They are two of the most interesting, intelligent women you will ever meet and they have remained so private all these years. I get after Nelle Harper about it. I say, ‘You need to be out there, teaching or talking to people.’ She says, ‘I value my privacy too much.’”

So why help out on a newspaper story now, and why me? The reverend speculated that the sisters were pleased by the One Book, One Chicago program and figured if there was going to be a story, it might as well provide some insight. The letter I sent to Alice’s post office box, letting her and her sister know I would be in town and why, might have helped pave the way, he said, since it struck the right tone: polite and not wheedling or demanding. They got a lot of the latter. Once Alice and I developed that quick rapport, other doors opened.

“I think after that first day or two you were here, word also got back that you were an intelligent, charming young lady who seemed like a thoughtful person as well.” They were kind words, though I suspect “right place at the right time” was a factor.

Whatever the reasons, the reverend said he was thrilled that Alice was willing to speak on the record at some length, that Nelle Harper had been willing to get together, and that both sisters had given him their blessing to speak to me.

Butts told me Nelle Harper liked to tease him if he missed a literary reference, such as the time he came up short on his knowledge of the writing of Sydney Smith.

“She’ll say, ‘Dr. Butts!’” He mimicked her mock outrage. “‘I thought you were an educated man.’” Once, on the way back from fishing at the home of a mutual friend, he was pulled over for a rolling stop at a stop sign. His passenger turned to him as the officer approached their car.

“Quick,” she said, according to his recollection. “Don’t you have a
clerical collar in the glove compartment or something you could put on?” She was kidding. Maybe.

Butts said he helped administer charitable donations, through the Methodist Church, that Lee didn’t want to carry her name. Neither sister talks much about their faith, he said, but their ties to the Methodist Church are strong. That is how they were raised.

“They are very traditional in some ways,” Butts said of Alice and Nelle Harper. “They tithe. They like good, old-fashioned preaching. They don’t believe in spending a lot on themselves, although they could.”

“And then, in other ways, they seem so different,” I said.

“Miss Alice is very calm and deliberate, and yet powerful in the statements she makes,” Butts said. “Whereas Nelle Harper has more hell and pepper in her. . . . She has that public reserve but her feelings get expressed rather graphically sometimes. An injustice stings her to the bone.

“And, of course, Alice is a very systematic person,” Butts added, “whereas Nelle goes at [a task] like she’s fighting a fire and then won’t do anything more about it for a month or two. When she’s going somewhere it’s always a last-minute struggle to get ready.”

If Alice had an event to attend or a trip to make, she was ready a week ahead of time. When Nelle Harper prepared to return to New York each year, she spent the last few days in Monroeville rushing around and muttering about all the boxes she had to ship, the bags she needed to pack, the loose ends she needed to tie up.

Like all of Nelle’s friends, I would come to know this quirk of hers. “Can’t talk. Fifty-eleven things to do before I leave,” was her flustered greeting when she was preparing to return to New York.

I asked Tom about Nelle’s life in New York, where she had a small one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. For many years,
Nelle had divided her year between her home in New York and Monroeville. She would say she was going south to look after Alice. Once Alice no longer drove, Nelle would take her to and from the office, “Driving Miss Alice,” as she said. Among her friends, the feeling was that Nelle needed Alice as much as, if not more than, Alice needed her.

Once home, they would get to clucking over each other, Alice telling Nelle to drive carefully and Nelle telling Alice not to work herself to death. The two women had this much in common: Sisterly admonitions aside, they did as they saw fit. As Nelle prepared to go back to New York, Julia teased her about that. “You know she’s going to be back to it,” Julia said, “as soon as your feet hit the street.”

Tom had spent time with her in New York the previous month. He served as guest preacher for a few Sundays at Christ United Methodist on Park Avenue, as he had done every summer for more than fifteen years. He stayed in the apartment of the regular minister, who was away on vacation with his family. Tom’s grandson, fifteen-year-old T. L. Butts, visited from Mobile.

Nelle, whom he described as a “rabid Mets fan,” nonetheless took the reverend and his grandson to the place the young man wanted to visit: Yankee Stadium. The three took the subway there and back and sat in the bleachers, apparently drawing not a single second look. “We go all around,” Butts said, “and no one even knows they are seeing one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century.”

Nelle Harper, he said, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt much of the time. She liked to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and took the bus there. Tom and Nelle would take a bus to the casinos of Atlantic City as well. They both loved a gambling trip, and they’d indulge on the Mississippi River, too. In Atlantic City, they played the machines, met up for lunch, went back to their favorite machines, and hoped they could find each other before it was time to go home.

Once, they located each other right before the bus would have left without them.

“Thank God,” Nelle told him. “I thought I was going to have to call Alice and tell her I’d lost you.”