I Am Scout (5 page)

“Mr. Boleware ruined his son's life, I guess because it was shaming him,” said a friend of the Lee family. “The man was
mean.
”
25
Or as Calpurnia, the Finches' housekeeper, says bitterly in
To Kill a Mockingbird
when the body of “Boo” Radley's father is taken away in a hearse, “There goes the meanest man God ever blew breath into.”
26
In
1952
, Son died of tuberculosis. The marker placed at his grave in First Baptist Church cemetery reads,
TO
LIVE
IN
HEARTS
WE
LEAVE
BEHIND
IS
NOT
TO
DIE
.

*   *   *

Nelle and Truman had more than enough to write about on South Alabama Avenue, whether they chose to exaggerate their material or not. Soon, the Lees and the Faulks saw them lugging the Underwood No.
5
back and forth between houses. The tree house would have been the ideal spot to write, but the
20
-pound typewriter was just too heavy to shove up there.

So it was that the two children began the journey that would change their lives in many ways, but would also separate them further from children their age. Now they were writers. Sometime later, a little girl came over to Truman's house to play games. But after an hour, she went home. She told her mother that Truman and Nelle spent so much time talking and arguing at the typewriter that they forgot all about her.
27

*   *   *

Nelle and Truman's friendship was interrupted suddenly in the mid-
1930
s when Lillie Mae, belatedly exercising her partial custody rights, took Truman to New York City, where she was living with her second husband, Cuban-American businessman Joseph Capote. From then on, until he was about
18
, Truman Capote, as he renamed himself, returned to Monroeville for summers only. His father, Arch Persons, saw him less and less.

Meanwhile, Nelle Lee grew into a strong-willed, independent young person. We get a glimpse of her in Truman's first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
(
1948
). Nelle is the model for
12
-year-old Idabel Tompkins—a forceful personality, quick with a dirty joke, haughty, and angry about the constraints of her gender.

When the main character in the novel, Joel, expresses embarrassment about undressing in front of Idabel, she retorts:

“Son,” she said, and spit between her fingers, “what you got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I've fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I'm a girl; you've got to remember that, or we can't never be friends.” For all its bravado, she made this declaration with a special and compelling innocence; and when she knocked one fist against the other, as, frowning, she did now, and said: “I want so much to be a boy: I would be a sailor, I would…” the quality of her futility was touching.
28

Chapter 3

First Hints of
To Kill a Mockingbird

Nelle entered Monroe County High School in September 1940, a year before the United States entered World War II. Generally she continued to ignore conventions that applied to most girls. Although she had a boyfriend or two, everyone in her high school class of
120
students knew she didn't make much of an effort to entice them. In a photograph taken her sophomore year, in spring
1942
, she stands with her English class on the steps of the high school. Unlike nearly all the other girls, her hair doesn't look as if it's seen a curling iron recently, and her chin, held high, gives her unsmiling face a slightly defiant expression.

She had outgrown her overalls, but she was not about to allow any male, teenage or adult, to take advantage of her. One day, Truman's footloose father, Arch Persons, drove up the dirt lane to Jennings's house out in the country, eager to show off his new red Buick convertible. Everyone greeted him, including Nelle and Truman. Jennings said that Arch only nodded at his son, but he “immediately noticed Nelle, who by this time had grown into a tall teenager about as big as he was. Truman and I saw Arch's clawlike hand slip way down Nelle's back as he hugged her. Nelle stiffened, acted surprised, then backed away.”

Arch let them each practice driving down to the mailbox at the end of the lane and back, until finally he took off with Nelle alone in the car. “A few minutes later Arch returned, minus Nelle and holding a handkerchief over his nose,” Jennings said. It was bleeding.

Later Jennings asked Nelle what had happened. She shrugged. “I drove up to the mailbox and he got fresh. So I hit him in the schnozzle. Then I got out of the car and walked home.”
1

Classmates at Monroe County High School decided that Nelle was unusual: someone whom it wasn't all that easy to warm up to, but who was definitely a person to be reckoned with. “You took her as she was. She wasn't trying to impress anyone,” said a classmate.
2

Doing what was expected just struck her as illogical sometimes. One day, Nelle and her friends Anne Hines and Sara Anne McCall stopped to watch some boys their age choose teams for a pickup game of football on the courthouse lawn. Nelle insisted, over the boys' protests, that they put her on a team. One of the captains, A. B. Blass, Jr., gave in and put her on his side, figuring she'd quit after a play or two. The center hiked the ball, and A.B. handed it off to Nelle. As she took off, one of the opposing players ran around the end to intercept her. Instead of dodging, she straight-armed him and continued sprinting downfield toward the goal line.

A.B. put his hands on his hips disgustedly. “Nelle, we're playing touch!”

The sophomore class of Monroe County High School. Nelle (second row from the top, farthest right) adored her English teacher, Gladys Watson (top row, center). (Photographer unknown)

“Y'all can play that sissy game if you want to,” she shouted over her shoulder, “but I'm playing tackle!”
3

On the other hand, she was not against all normal behavior. She was polite and well-mannered to adults, using “sir” and “ma'am” when spoken to. And her parents expected her to attend college. She looked forward to it, in fact. It was the same for most of her upper-middle-class friends. Nelle's friend Sara already had chosen to attend Huntingdon College, a Methodist women's college in Montgomery. A.B., the touch football quarterback, could talk of nothing except applying to the school of his favorite college team, the University of Alabama.

So Nelle's college plans did not surprise her classmates. Nor would they have been surprised, really, to learn about her admiration for two adults who had begun to exert a powerful influence over her plans. Both were women with a go-it-alone attitude. The problem was that they had selected different career paths. This dilemma over which direction to take would eventually be one of the most critical decisions of Nelle's adult life: choosing writing or law.

The first of her two role models was her high school English teacher, Miss Gladys Watson. Like an apprentice learning the craft of writing, Nelle willingly submitted herself to Miss Watson's instruction. Tall, blond, and angular with hipbones that protruded under her warm-weather dresses, Miss Watson lived with her parents across the street from Nelle in a yellow two-story house with a deep, wide veranda that ran around three sides. Her father, “Doc” Watson, was a three-hundred-pound giant of a man. Miss Watson, outside of being one of the best teachers of two generations of students at Monroe County High School, was also a quilter and a gardener. Neighbors were accustomed to seeing her in her parents' yard pruning the lilacs, tending the potted succulents on the porch, and yanking out weeds in the grass, her fair face hidden beneath a big straw hat. She remained single until late in life, preferring to devote her time to reading and teaching.

Because the faculty of the high school was small, students had Miss Watson for three years—sophomore through senior English, which included a semester of British literature. Looking back, most of her students counted themselves lucky to have been given a triple dose of “Gladys,” as a few called her behind her back.
4
“I adored her,” said Sue Philipp, a friend of Nelle's. “She was very strict. She gave you two grades. One was for your grammar in a paper—and you got a whole letter taken off for any mistake and that included commas. So I would usually get a ‘C' for grammar and an ‘A' for writing.”
5
English professors at state universities in Alabama were known to remark to some of their most proficient undergraduates, “You must have taken Miss Watson.”

Her classes always began with students receiving a blue booklet of grammar rules, a sort of early Strunk and White
Elements of Style,
which Miss Watson had personally selected. It was going to be their bible, she told them; they should never lose it.
6
Grammatical writing also was the key to developing a clear
style
of writing. She had students read their compositions aloud so that everyone could hear how good writing had three Cs: clarity, coherence, and cadence. As she listened, she leaned forward, sucking on an earpiece of her pink tortoiseshell glasses and saying in an encouraging voice now and then, “That was good, very good.”
7
In her heart, little did her students know, she would have given anything to be a writer herself.
8

Sometimes, when her students had grown weary of gerunds and so on, and their writing hands ached, she would read them a story, poem, or scene from a play instead. She was a gifted reader of Chaucer in the original fifteenth-century English. As she recited
The Canterbury Tales,
the travelers in the tales lived again as they visited the taverns, shrines, and waysides of England of the Middle Ages.
9

Nelle worshipped her. From the time Miss Watson came into her life, she became devoted to British literature. After school, she spent time in the library looking up in an encyclopedia the topics Miss Watson had mentioned. And there was also one well-thumbed copy of
Pride and Prejudice
in the library's collection that opened for Nelle the intimate world of Jane Austen.
10

Whether Miss Watson perceived Nelle as a budding writer is hard to tell, especially since Monroe County High School had no school newspaper or yearbook to showcase the talents of stellar English students. But if being in print really mattered to Nelle, she easily could have been—in her father's newspaper, the
Monroe Journal,
of which he was part owner. Mr. Lee wouldn't have turned down a submission from his hopeful daughter. However, except for a poem titled “Springtime,” which Nelle composed when she was
11
, no byline of hers appeared in the
Journal.
11
After Truman moved away, she wrote only in secret, though not in a journal. Her desk at home contained personal essays, short stories, and limericks. But she never dared share them with her parents or siblings. “Not even the family knew the content of these writings,” Alice would later say, “as they were destroyed.”
12

*   *   *

Nelle's second role model was her sister Alice. Alice Finch Lee, the eldest of the Lee children, reminded many Monroeville residents of her father made over. In most families, a son was the heir apparent to a business, store, or farm. But Alice broke the mold. She seemed destined and determined to follow in her father's footsteps.

Alice and Nelle were as similar, Truman once cracked, “as a giraffe and a hippopotamus.”
13
Alice was a petite, birdlike young woman who wore black glasses like her father. She was obedient in school, conservative, and the essence of tact. All through school she remained at the head of her class, and she graduated from Monroe County High School in
1928
at age
16
. That fall, she enrolled in the Women's College of Alabama, a Methodist institution in Montgomery, enjoying the privilege of becoming the first member of her family to attend college. Her freshman year,
1928
–
29
, was one of the happiest times of her life.
14

Unfortunately, it was also her only year in college in Montgomery. The stock market crash in October upended her plans—at least that's what she told friends. The truth was, her father had other plans for her. For years he had pushed ahead without the support of a helpmate because of his wife's poor health. Now that Alice was entering adulthood—and was clearly a very capable young woman—he began to shift more and more of his professional duties to her. And she quickly rose to meet his requirements.