I Am Scout (7 page)

*   *   *

Into this whirl of social activity arrived Nelle on the Huntingdon campus as a full-time student in the autumn of
1944
. Credits from two summer courses, added to the
12
semester hours she was awarded for high scores on four entrance exams in mathematics, social science, natural science, and English, resulted in her starting college as a second-semester freshman.
22

She was assigned to a triple room in Massey Hall where the housemother was white-haired Mrs. Hammond, or “Mother Hammond,” a much-loved figure who enjoyed playing the role of nosy maiden aunt. She wore pince-nez—glasses without temple bars—which pressed the sides of her nose like Teddy Roosevelt's. When a young man arrived to pick up his date, Mrs. Hammond made a show of examining him up and down as though she had never seen such a specimen. It was rumored she could smell beer from
20
feet away.

As she settled into her triple room, Nelle was the same as other adolescents in relishing her newly found freedom. She no longer had to cope with problems at home stemming from her mother's illness; hardly anyone on campus had a preconceived notion about Nelle Harper Lee from Monroeville, except for a few high school classmates who had also enrolled there. (These included Nelle's friend Sara.) A life of independence, fun, books, and ideas—all the things afforded by higher education—awaited her at last. The first quarter she made the honor roll.

There were many fine instructors at Huntingdon, but Nelle's favorite was Irene Munro, whose course on international affairs had extra relevance because of the war. In a number of ways, Professor Munro was like Gladys Watson. She was tall and aristocratic, a graduate of Wesleyan and Columbia. She and her husband spent every summer at their place in Massachusetts because, she said, they liked the “intellectual energy” of New England. She peppered her lectures with thumbnail sketches of people who had spent their lives in the arts and letters. She impressed upon her students the need always to think critically and emphasized that an education was not a commodity that could be purchased. “If you lost your lecture notes, would you forget everything you're learning here?” she asked several times. “I certainly hope not.”
23

In class was a junior, Jeanne Foote, who struck up a friendship with Nelle when they agreed that Munro's class was their favorite. Jeanne brought her readings for the class to Nelle's floor in Massey Hall, and the two young women stayed up late discussing them, camped out in the reception area so they wouldn't disturb anyone. “Those conversations were very important to me,” said Jeanne. “I don't think that there were others at Huntingdon—whom I knew and had ready access to—who had these same interests.”
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It was true that Nelle was more sophisticated than most of her classmates about politics and economics because her father was a newspaper publisher and a state representative. And except for her six years in Birmingham, Alice had lived at home, so the level of dinner table conversation at the Lees' was probably higher than in most small-town households in Alabama. On the other hand, Nelle was not
really
sophisticated—at least not in the eyes of most Huntingdon young women, and in ways that mattered to them. Acceptability was measured by how closely one followed rules of taste, manners, and politeness. And by those standards, Nelle's behavior got on the nerves of some of the girls in Massey Hall.

To begin with, her roommates objected to her swearing, a trait of hers since childhood. Catherine Helms, who lived a few doors down in Massey, remembered getting steamed every time Nelle cursed. “We were taught that if you had to resort to ugly words, you had a very weak vocabulary and needed further English study. Actually we were not sure what a lot of bad words meant. We were ladies in every sense … at least, most of us were. So, a girl who used foul language was a misfit in every sense of the word. Nobody wanted to be around her. I never heard any of my friends use four-letter words. No one in my family did.”
25

Another annoyance was Nelle's smoking—or, rather, the
way
she smoked. Smoking was equated with sophistication, and students were permitted to smoke cigarettes in their rooms. But a girl passing Nelle's room did a double take when she saw her puffing away on a pipe!
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The image couldn't have been more at odds with an environment devoted to enhancing girls' femininity.

And to many of the girls in Massey Hall, Nelle's appearance was the last straw. She did not wear an ounce of makeup, only brushed her hair instead of curling it, and evinced no interest in indulging in any kind of beauty regimen. By contrast, looking through the pages of Huntingdon's yearbook, her classmates were attuned to the latest hairstyles and fashions of the Swing Era.

Not even the approach of a social event could force Nelle to conform. She skipped monthly formal dinners rather than be forced to wear an evening dress. When Saturday night came and the girls left for a night of dancing, she found other ways to spend the evening. Or she just went home for the weekend. The campus newspaper,
The Huntress,
fails to mention her name except two or three times, despite pages and pages about student skits, engagement announcements, visits by students to friends' homes, class and club elections, and meetings of campus organizations.

By midyear, the verdict was all but in: Nelle was different, and not in a fun or delightful way, but in a manner that ignored convention, which could be interpreted as a kind of insult to everything these young ladies stood for.

“I didn't have anything in common with her because she was not like most of us,” said Catherine. “She wasn't worried about how her hair looked or whether she had a date on Friday night like the rest of us were. I don't remember her sitting around and giggling and being silly and talking about what our weddings were going to be like—that's what teenage girls talked about. She was not a part of the ‘girl group.' She never had what we would call in the South ‘finishing touches.'”
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At the end of first semester, Nelle's roommates kicked her out.

*   *   *

Against the larger canvas of the campus, however, she made a different impression. Viewed from a distance, traits that set her apart from the normal Huntingdon “penguins” seemed intriguing. Walking across campus with her long stride, dressed in a simple navy cotton skirt, white blouse, and the brown leather bombardier's jacket her brother Edwin had given her (he was a flyer with the Eighth Army Air Corps), she cut a figure that blurred gender distinctions. “I noticed her physically,” said Mary Benson Tomlinson, another freshman. “She had a presence. I remember her better than I do anyone else at Huntingdon, except my roommate and maybe one or two other people. Everything about her hinted at masculinity. I think the word ‘handsome' would have suited her.”
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Nelle's athleticism caught the attention of team captains. For volleyball games, she was first pick when choosing sides. The solid
thunk!
of her spikes over the net resounded across the green. Her soccer kicks sent the other team running pell-mell after the ball.

She was not incapable of making friends, either, if given the chance. A chat with her after class revealed a bubbling sense of humor. “Every time I think about her, I always think about laughing, I always think about humor,” said algebra classmate Martha Brown. Tina Rood, another classmate, agreed: “She really sort of became a recluse—even in school she did her thing—I just remember her as fun, and funny! I can still see her telling wonderful stories with a cigarette dangling from her lips.”
29

It took a while to get to know Nelle, but those who did realized something about her. She just wanted to be comfortable in her own skin. Her cussing was unconscious; the clothes she wore appealed to her because they were practical; she laughed when one of her teasing remarks drew a comeback delivered with equal zest. But she would not stop to seek others' approval. Her right to live as she pleased was not up for negotiation. It was nobody's business. “That was an era when you did the proper thing,” said Catherine. “And your mother was horrified if you didn't. That was never part of Nelle's persona—she didn't care! It must have taken a colossal amount of courage to be different.”
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Despite this, she was not unaware of other people's feelings. On February
12
,
1945
, half an hour before the girls were to come down in formal attire for a Valentine's Day dinner, a tornado tore through Montgomery, dragging a funnel for
13
miles that killed
26
people and destroyed
100
homes. The lights stayed off in Massey Hall until almost bedtime. By then, a girl in Nelle's dorm was too upset to sleep and kept looking out the window. For the next several days, fear of another tornado kept her awake.

“One afternoon,” said the girl's roommate, Mary Nell Atherton, “Nelle came down to the room because she'd heard my roommate was so afraid she couldn't sleep. She told her, ‘I'd be glad to stay up with you and keep you company, because I can't sleep, either.' Nelle was very concerned about people, but she was not one to mix and mingle that much.”
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*   *   *

Although Nelle was sidelined socially at Huntingdon, she more than made up for it by contributing articles to
The Huntress,
the campus newspaper. In April, she was inducted with seven other girls into the campus chapter of the national literary society, Chi Delta Phi. Also that spring, the second-semester edition of the Huntingdon literary magazine,
The Prelude,
featured two sketches written by Nelle.

These short pieces of fiction, perhaps the first of Nelle's ever in print, stand out in the magazine, not only because the voice of a writer comes through, especially in the handling of Southern speech, but also because of the rather daring choice of subject matter: racial prejudice and justice, themes that would appear one day in
To Kill a Mockingbird.

In “Nightmare,” for instance, a Huntingdon girl is daydreaming in class. The droning voice of the teacher sends her into a reverie in which she sees herself as a “child crouched in the red dust peering through a broken board in a fence, her body stiff and shivering although it is August. She hears someone on the other side of the fence break into a low wail. Then comes the sound which she will hear in her dreams the rest of her life … Karrumph … Karangarang!” The child runs home and hides in her bed, but hears someone say as he passes under her window, “[D]idn't take him long … neck was pretty short … best hangin' I've seen in twenty years … now maybe they'll learn to behave themselves.”
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To her Southern classmates raised in upper-middle-class circumstances, Nelle's decision to write about the hanging of a black man may have seemed in poor taste and outside the bounds of a college literary magazine. She may have submitted it as a bid for attention. Or she may have recognized that a subject with elements of conflict and social significance was worth writing about.

In her second story, “A Wink at Justice,” also a clear forerunner of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
she takes a different tack. This time, in contrast to how bigotry permits injustice, she shows justice administered by a wise judge.

“The tiny courtroom reeked of tobacco smoke, cheap hair oil, and perspiration,” the tale begins, anticipating a similar description from
To Kill a Mockingbird
: “The warm bitter sweet smell of clean Negro welcomed us as we entered the churchyard—Hearts of Love hair-dressing mingled with asafetida, snuff, Hoyt's Cologne, Brown's Mule, peppermint, and lilac talcum.”
33
A swift overview of the courtroom borrows elements from the courtroom in her hometown of Monroeville she knew so well.

Then the judge enters, Judge Hanks—a dead ringer for A. C. Lee, right down to his mannerisms: “I saw a squat little man with his collar open at the neck and his tie askew. His vest was unbuttoned and his shirt was alarmingly wrinkled. He carried a pocketknife which he twirled constantly, sometimes thumping it up and catching it. Fine lines ran down from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. I noticed that they deepened when he smiled. A pair of rimless glasses perched precariously on his short nose.”

The case to be decided involves eight black men arrested for gambling. Judge Hanks comes down from the bench and orders them to turn their hands palms up. “He went down the line inspecting each outstretched hand. To three of the men he said, ‘You c'n go. Git out of here!' To the other five he barked, ‘Sixty days. Dismissed.'” After court is adjourned, the unnamed narrator approaches the judge and asks how he reached his decision.

“‘Well, I looked at their hands. The ones who had corns on 'em I let go, because they work in the fields and probably have a pack of children to support. It was the ones with soft, smooth hands I was after. They're the ones who gamble professionally, and we don't need that sort of thing around here. Satisfied?'

“‘Satisfied,' I said.”
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*   *   *

As the end of her freshman year drew near, Nelle's reputation as a loner had jelled. The girls in Massey Hall had noticed that ever since changing rooms, she was often holed up, either in her room or at the library studying.

When word got around that she would be transferring to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, northwest of Montgomery and only another couple of hours away from Monroeville by car or train, one of her instructors, Dr. Gordon T. Chappell, professor of history and economics, expressed regret to his teaching assistant, Ann Richards. “He had mentioned several students that were doing outstanding work and she was one of them,” she said. “He was disappointed that she wasn't coming back to Huntingdon because he thought she had a lot of promise. He was interested in the girls he thought would go far.”
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