I Am Scout (3 page)

The Lees coped with Mrs. Lee's “nervous disorder,” as they preferred to call it, as best they could. Alice, the eldest child, shifted some of her father's burdens onto herself by acting as his substitute helpmate in practical affairs. Her nickname in the family, interestingly, was “Bear.” Louise, called “Weezie” by her siblings, concentrated on an active social life and swept problems at home into the background. Edwin, a natural athlete who stuck close to a few good friends, kept out of the way and was simply called “Brother.” Nelle (pronounced Nel), the baby sister, was “Dody,” for reasons known only to her family.

Mr. Lee responded to his wife's maladies and their effect on his family without complaint, probably reasoning that everybody had some kind of difficulty in life and on the whole he had much to be grateful for. But, Truman's aunt Marie observed, “I don't believe Mr. and Mrs. Lee were happy.”
30

*   *   *

Watching all this through a child's eye, Truman thought Mr. Lee was “wonderful”—A. C. Lee presented him with a pocket dictionary he cherished for years—but Nelle's mother, he said later, was an “eccentric character” and an “endless gossip.” When he was in the sixth grade, he made fun of her in his first known short story, “Old Mrs. Busybody.”

According to Truman, he submitted the story to the
Mobile Register
for a children's writing contest. “There was a children's page with contests for writing and for coloring pictures, and then every Saturday afternoon they had a party with free Nehi and Coca-Cola. The prize for the short-story writing contest was either a pony or a dog, I've forgotten which, but I wanted it badly.” He said that when the story appeared in the newspaper, he instantly became a notorious character on South Alabama Avenue. “I'd walk down the street and people on their front porches would pause, fanning for a moment. I found they were very upset about it. I was a little hesitant about showing anything after that. I remember I said, ‘Oh, I don't know why I did that, I've given up writing.' But I was writing more fiercely than ever.”
31

Truman was prone to telling lies (a trait of his that people learned the hard way) and it turns out he only submitted his story about Mrs. Lee as a school assignment. But one wonders if Nelle ever saw a version of her mother through her friend's eyes: “Mrs. Busybody was a fat old widow whose only amusement was crocheting and sewing. She was also fond of knitting. She didn't like the movies and took an immediate dislike to anyone who did enjoy them. She also took great delight in reporting children to their mothers over the slightest thing that annoyed her. In other words no one liked her and she was considered a public nuisance and a regular old Busybody.”
32
Over the next
27
pages of Truman's lengthy story, written in pencil, Mrs. Busybody puts up with a visit from her atrocious in-laws—they fight, drink, and make jokes in poor taste—until they leave on the train for their home in “Slumtown.” It was exactly the kind of situation that Mrs. Lee, raised in a polite girls' school environment, would have found extremely embarrassing.

If he dared show or describe “Old Mrs. Busybody” to Nelle, it probably would have been her first exposure to what writers learn over time: write about what you know. If people were hurt by it, as Truman claimed, Nelle also might have taken away a second lesson: lack of sympathy in a writer is a fault.

*   *   *

Because her parents were so different from each other—Mr. Lee, a man of business and outward-looking; Mrs. Lee, a reclusive and emotionally unstable woman—it's interesting to speculate about the kind of impact they might have had on Nelle.

She adored her father, that much we know. Although Mr. Lee's formality could be intimidating—a young businessman in the Rotary Club said he could never bring himself to call Mr. Lee “Coley,” even though Lee invited him to—he was an understanding father. Nelle often dropped into his offices for a visit. At home, she would climb into his lap to read the newspaper with him or help fill in the squares of crosswords. A playmate couldn't believe his ears when Nelle called her father “A.C.,” the way adults did.
33
Apparently, Mr. Lee's attitudes toward child raising were similar to that of the hero of Nelle's novel, Atticus Finch. He spoke to his children in an adultlike manner, extending them the privilege to think and reply like grown-ups. They loved him for this mark of respect.

But Frances Lee's “nervous disorder” made her less approachable as a parent. Eventually, as her disturbances grew worse, and neighbors began speaking about her suffering from “hardening of the arteries” and “second childhood”—common expressions for mental illness in adults back then—Mr. Lee took her to hospitals in nearby cities for treatments. Nelle, watching her mother decline over the years, would naturally have felt more secure with her father.

She probably chose him for her role model, too. After all, he was independent and influential. The moment he stepped off the front porch and headed for the town square, he was fulfilling a destiny of his own choosing. Mrs. Lee, on the other hand, was trapped in a situation unsuited to her abilities. In fact, as Mrs. Lee's condition deteriorated, she became a virtual prisoner inside her house. Despite having the amenities of an upper-middle-class home—a phonograph to play her favorite symphonies and a piano to practice all day if she wished—she was deeply and perhaps even dangerously unhappy there. After a while, “she was kept on the premises,” according to Truman's aunt Marie because she couldn't be trusted to go to Monroeville's town square alone.
34

So if Nelle—the tomboy, the roughhouser—resisted the normal expectations for her gender, perhaps it's because they seemed too limiting. “She was just like a boy!” enthused Taylor Faircloth, a resident of Atmore, Alabama, where Nelle spent summers visiting her mother's sister, Aunt Alice McKinley. “She would come down and stay sometimes three or four weeks in the summer.… She got rid of all her surplus hair in the summertime, and she could climb tall trees. When we played ‘capture the flag' at night, she held on longer than anybody!”
35

In the same ways, Scout expresses disdain for activities girls were expected to like: “Aunt Alexandra's vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born,” she complains in the novel.
36

Yet there may be one more reason, a dark one, why Nelle identified more with her father than with her mother: a pair of incidents that allegedly happened when she was a toddler that may have snapped the bond between mother and daughter forever. According to Truman, Mrs. Lee, during one of her emotional fits, twice tried to drown Nelle in the bathtub when she was two years old.
37
An acquaintance of the family said Nelle's older sisters, Louise and Alice, ran into the bathroom screaming and saved her.

Alice, when she heard Truman's remarks repeated on a popular radio program years later, angrily issued a public statement calling them “a pack of lies.”
38

But when Nelle created Scout and gave her a voice, her pen seems to have wandered back to that incident: “Our mother died when I was two,” Scout says, “so I never felt her absence.”
39
The coincidence of Mrs. Finch dying when Scout was two and the supposed attempted drowning when Nelle was two might explain why there is no mother in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. In her fiction at least, Nelle wiped the slate clean of her emotional conflict with her mother.

Only in Aunt Alexandra, the sole adult female member of the immediate Finch family, is there a possible suggestion as to how Nelle saw her mother: “Aunt Alexandra was one of the last of her kind: she had river-boat, boarding-school manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was born in the objective case; she was an incurable gossip.… Had I ever harbored the mystical notions about mountains that seem to obsess lawyers and judges, Aunt Alexandra would have been analogous to Mount Everest: throughout my early life, she was cold and there.”
40

Chapter 2

“Apart People”

Nelle was going on five years old the summer of 1930, when she began playing with Truman; he was almost six. “Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head,” she would later write of him, when he became Dill, the lonely boy next door in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
1

Whatever his imaginative gifts, however, at first glance Truman hardly seemed the ideal candidate for friendship with a girl like Nelle. She was a female Huck Finn, with large dark brown eyes and close-cropped hair. Whereas he—as surely as every child at Monroe County Elementary knew that night followed day—was a sissy, a crybaby, a mamma's boy, and so on.

To begin with, his clothes made him a target for other children's ridicule. It was the
1930
s, the Great Depression, when children went to school in hand-me-downs that had been patched and altered several times. A girl wearing a cotton dress carefully cut and sewn from a
50
-pound flour sack had nothing to feel ashamed of. Many children came to school without shoes, their dirty heels thumping on the pine floors. So when Truman's cousin Jennie, with whom he lived, outfitted him in Hawaiian shirts, white duck shorts, blue socks, sandals, and Eton caps from the best department stores in Mobile and Montgomery, he looked, as one teacher expressed it, “like a bird of paradise among a flock of crows.”
2
The implied insult to the other children could not be ignored. Boys socked him and rubbed cockleburs into his fine blond hair.

In addition, he was undersized, which he could do nothing about. Compared with his classmates, he was the smallest by far—doll-like, with a baby's pudgy gumdrop softness. Even Nelle, who was younger, “was bigger than Truman. Lots bigger,” said another of Truman's aunts, Mary Ida Carter.
3

And much to other children's disgust, Truman threw tantrums like a two-year-old. In the throes of one, he would scream until he turned purple, fall down, and kick his legs in the air. No amount of cooing, patting, or hugging could calm him until his rage had passed.

The adults in his life knew the reason for his flare-ups. He would go almost insane with anger because the worst thing that could happen to any child had happened to him. His parents didn't want him. Worse, they didn't mind if he knew it, either.

Truman's mother, Lillie Mae, a “rare beauty” in Monroeville, and his father, Archilus Julius Persons, a hustler and disbarred attorney, dumped their only child with his cousins, the Faulks—three single ladies and their bachelor brother, all middle-aged and elderly—who lived next door to the Lees. Freed from the burdens of parenthood, Arch had sped away in a rented, chauffeured limousine in pursuit of get-rich-quick schemes, while Lillie Mae had flown to New York to live the high life. A “discontented small-town beauty,” Lillie Mae “would appear in [Truman's] life for a day or two,” wrote a journalist describing Truman's childhood, “wafting the perfume of motherhood over him, then disappear.”
4
Once, out of desperation, Truman drank a bottle of his mother's perfume to try to make her part of him.
5

Considering the differences between Truman and Nelle—“he was too soft for the boys, and she was too rough for the girls,” as a neighbor boy later remarked—the chances of their becoming friends seemed far-fetched.
6
He was “shrimp-o,” and “that funny boy,” and sometimes “Bulldog,” because, added to everything else, he had an underbite that gave him a Halloween pumpkin grin. Nelle, on the other hand, had “fire in those big brown eyes as they stared dead ahead,” recalled a classmate after watching her win another fight with boys.
7

But Nelle took on Truman as her closest playmate, and he followed her around the school playground like a little fish swimming in her wake. At home on South Alabama Avenue, they raced to play with each other. Truman's aunt Marie recalled seeing them climb into the tree house on Nelle's property, or bent over a game on the sidewalk. Nelle was best at shooting marbles. Truman excelled at swiping jacks off the sidewalk so fast that his hand was a blur.

They fought, too, of course. As a friend, Truman could be a handful. Throughout his life he would test the devotion of those who tried to care for him, Nelle included. But she wouldn't let him get under her skin, even when he marred a nice afternoon spent cutting out magazine pictures by raging at her.

“Stop that, Nelle. Keep your hands off my pictures. I hate you, Nelle. I really do.”

“You shut up, you silly little shrimp, or I'll knock your silly block off.”
8

He couldn't push her far.

When his rages failed, he tried shaming her into letting him have his way by playing the victim. He pulled tantrums on her. But she had older siblings and didn't have an only child's expectation of special treatment. In response to his bawling she would hurl him to the ground as if to demonstrate that crybabies were losers.

“She was tough on me,” Truman later said.
9

Yet despite their spats and grudging reconciliations, the two friends remained inseparable. They swam in the pond at Rickard's Mill, in Beatrice, where fish tickled their legs. Sometimes they hiked the dirt road that led to the farm of Truman's cousin Jennings, whom Truman nicknamed “Big Boy,” even though he wasn't much older than Truman. Jennings's mother, Aunt Mary Ida, welcomed them with homemade biscuits, jam, butter, and fresh milk. Although Truman “felt like a turtle on its back” in Monroeville, he could count on Nelle as his steadfast friend there.
10
Her faithfulness was something she never hesitated to prove.