Mockingbird (10 page)

 

four

Rammer Jammer

I shall probably write a book some day. They all do.

—N
ELLE
L
EE
, quoted in the University of Alabama's campus newspaper, October 8, 1946

Harper Lee arrived on the Tuscaloosa campus in the autumn of 1945 with an optimistic heart, and added her name to the Panhellenic Association's list of young women participating in Rush Week. Perhaps it was a good-faith gesture, going Greek, to satisfy her mother.

At Chi Omega, the members serenaded newcomers with fraternity and drinking songs. Nelle liked the humor; they invited her back. And a few days later, the Chi Os' Nu Beta chapter accepted her. It was a house that “specialized in blondes,” proclaimed the university yearbook, “long, short, thin and broad,” including a recent Miss Alabama. Social events figured importantly in the lives of the girls, so after one of them got to know Nelle Lee better, she “wondered what she saw in a sorority to join it.”
1

It was, after all, an exciting time to be a single woman on campus. World War II had officially ended in September, and the student body of 7,500 was suddenly awash in green and khaki with veterans. The girls greeted them with open arms, and more than just figuratively. The student newspaper, the
Crimson White,
added luster to their fantasies by featuring an undergraduate “Bama Belle” on the front page almost every week—lovely as a Hollywood starlet, sometimes with the enviable distinction of being a young man's fiancée. A few Bama Belles were married already and pictured in romantic settings with their husbands, suggesting that a princess had at last found her prince. During the war, men had been in such short supply that some college women had taken to calling each other Tom or Bill just to hear a man's name said.

But that was all over now, and the girls of Chi Omega prepared for action.

The sorority was a two-story brick house painted white and designed in the Jeffersonian Federal style. To the right of the main stairway was the sunroom; to the left, the dining room. A black butler served at table. Upstairs, the young women got ready for the day, and once they had left for class in the mornings, black maids scurried upstairs to dust, sweep, and change the sheets. None of the girls would have dared to come downstairs other than nicely dressed, and not just because there might be a young man or several down there. A masculine voice calling up the stairs, “Three for bridge!” was an invitation for anyone to play a few hands and socialize.

There was a country club atmosphere about the University of Alabama. Zelda Fitzgerald interrupting a football game in the 1920s to dance the Charleston on top of an automobile on the fifty-yard line captured the feeling: 'Bama was the demesne of smart, well-off white students, of whom Nelle Lee was one.

Yet she seemed so unlike other young women. She chain-smoked; she preferred men's flannel pajamas; she never came to breakfast because she hated eggs; she didn't like swing music and sang numbers by Gilbert and Sullivan in the shower. “She was a little mannish-looking,” recalled one of her sorority sisters. “When girls had long hair and did things with it, her hair was short.”
2
Another chose the word
matronly
to describe her: “A little bit thick in the middle. Nothing very stylish.” However, “she had beautiful large, dark brown eyes that were quite piercing.”

In the evenings, the girls chatted about their days and their beaux, but Nelle didn't. “She was just sort of a loner. She just sat there and looked. I don't remember any contact between her and anybody.” At mealtimes, “she never entered into any conversations with the girls at the table, but was more of an observer. I always had the feeling that she found us very shallow, silly, and young, in which case she was absolutely right.”
3
Most of the girls incorrectly assumed Nelle was a graduate student. She could be friendly, “but she was not going to bounce up to somebody and go, ‘Hiya, I'm
Nail
!'”

On weekend nights, when the other Chi O girls were bustling around, getting ready for dates or dances, Nelle never had any plans. No one recalled seeing her with a beau. Saturday mornings, she tromped through the living room, golf bag slung over her shoulder, heading out for a few rounds. The way she dressed for eighteen holes raised a few eyebrows—just jeans and a sweatshirt. “That wasn't the way we dressed.”
4
Nelle's style was pronounced “very different.” And some found that offensive.

One morning, as she was passing the Phi Mu house, some girls went to the windows and sang “Three Blind Mice,” the theme song of the dim-witted Three Stooges. Their voices were loud enough so that the target of their derision could hear every syllable. She looked like a drudge as she passed the fifteen houses on Sorority Row, one of the choirsters said, “long flat shoes, straight hair, a slight slump, probably because she carried a black, portable typewriter in one hand and a stack of books and papers in the other. I'm ashamed to admit that we made fun of her. Today she would be called a nerd.”
5

After a year living at the sorority house, Nelle moved out into New Hall, a female dormitory. She continued to take her meals at the house now and then, and attended chapter meetings too, but her sorority sisters lost interest in her: “I never saw her with anyone and wondered if she were lonely.”
6

*   *   *

Fortunately, it didn't take her long to find her way to the Alabama Student Union in search of opportunities to write. Up on the third floor was “the most casual colony” she was likely to find, she said, and they greeted her as one of their own. They were “the various editors, feature writers, proofreaders and kibitzers who sling together” the University of Alabama campus publications.
7

Their meeting space was a large room divided in half by file cabinets: on one side was the staff of the
Crimson White
, the campus newspaper; on the other, the writers and editors for the
Rammer Jammer
, the campus humor magazine, named for the thunderous cheer shouted by Crimson Tide football fans: “Rammer jammer, rammer jammer, rammer jammer!”

Nelle introduced herself to the
Crimson White
editor in chief, who was, she said, “a lanky, Klan-hating six-footer from somewhere in Mississippi.”
8
She offered her services as a stringer—someone to cover the odd meeting or event. But most of the news beats had already gone to journalism majors; also working against her was that she had no experience. Undeterred, she went around the file cabinets to the
Rammer Jammer
side; original submissions were needed there, and students interested in creative writing were fewer in number than campus journalists. Nelle got her hand in right away by submitting “Some Writers of Our Times” for the homecoming parody issue—a takeoff on
Esquire
magazine.

“Some Writers of Our Times” poked fun at the notion that in order to write, you must be tormented.

A factor in the development of creative talent is that a soul is required. Now there are several classifications of souls, namely: The Frustrated Soul, The Somnambulistic Soul, and The Warped Soul. (The W.S. results in the most profit these days.) But no matter what kind of soul the budding writer has, it must be flaunted before the eyes of his readers.… The element of frustration is another
must
. If a person is not frustrated, what would he have to write about? He must love himself to an unbearable degree, curse God at regular intervals, be scorned by the one person he loves better than himself. Then he will have the material with which to produce the most provocative novel of the century.
9

Lee also scoffed at the trend of setting novels in “small towns, preferably Southern villages” (as both her novels would be!).

And he certainly must not omit his reflections upon the way justice is so casually administered by the crooked Judge in the broken down courthouse. Yes, it is to the writer's advantage if he comes from such surroundings. He has a chance to expose to the public the immoral goings-on in an out-of-the-way village, have himself hailed as the H. W. Beecher of the day, and instigate a movement which would do away with small towns forever.

She can't resist including a little in-joke, too. Among her acquaintances is an intense southern writer, a “blonde young gentleman” with a “soft voice” who lisps. “Honey, I'm thuck. My novel ith about a thenthitive boy from the time he'th twelve until he ith a gwown man”—a hint about Truman's first book,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
(1948), which Lee had seen in drafts.
10

Already she's showing signs of mastering a key element of good writing: using a voice that the reader can hear. Such a voice also goes under the heading “style,” but essentially it's the art of making the reader feel engaged with another person. A
Crimson White
staffer recalled overhearing Lee on the other side of the file cabinets—the
Rammer Jammer
side—and years later, when she read
To Kill a Mockingbird,
she said, “I could just hear her talking in the book.”
11
In the December issue, the magazine's masthead listed her as a staff member.

The following summer, she stayed on campus, catching up on a few credits but also because she knew that the
Crimson White
would be strapped for writers. Pages were hard to fill while the university was dozing from June to August. For the editorial page, she began submitting “Caustic Comment,” an irregular column that delivered doses of self-parody, exaggerated descriptions, and long-winded gags. John T. Hamner, a student journalist at Alabama, was struck by the tone of “bright, brittle, sophomoric but sharp humor.… Her specialty was debunking, taking quick sharp jabs at the idols and mores of the time and place.”
12
The column was at its strongest when Lee took aim at inane advertisements on the radio, or the amount of red tape students had to endure; it was at its weakest when she got on her high horse about something. Also, a personal trait she didn't bother to rein in was her fondness for cursing, which prompted a few complaints from readers, including this one: “Irony is delightful; sarcasm is fine; ‘Caustic Comment' is the best reading there is—but so much more fun if not slapped on like red paint on an old barn.”
13

But she was not to be denied when it came to tackling controversy. And in the South, particularly on a campus like the University of Alabama—in the words of a former student, “a profoundly conservative community”—there were few topics considered more impolite than racism. “There were a few faculty members who expressed reservations about some of the prevailing political and social orthodoxies, but they received little student support and were generally regarded as harmless eccentrics. The one subject never discussed, in my experience, was race relations. The prevailing view was that there was no reason to upset the status quo, and most were willing to continue existing conditions indefinitely.”
14

To Lee, who was making a career of nonconformity, that was an invitation to let fly, as she did in a review of
Night Fire
(1946), a novel by a university instructor named Edward Kimbrough:
15
“Almost since the time the first slaves were shipped into the South by the Yankees, various authors have taken it upon themselves to probe, explain and hash over the problems that came with them. The South has been repeatedly embarrassed by the Smiths [in reference to Lillian Smith, author of
Strange Fruit
], Faulkners, Stowes, et al., who either wrote delicately of the mint julep era or championed the dark eddies of ‘niggertown.'”

Lee praised
Night Fire
for its realism, relishing Kimbrough's portrayal of “Turkey Littlepage, who is reminiscent of all the county sheriffs in South Alabama and Mississippi. Mean, utterly stupid, and with violent prejudices, Turkey tramps through the pages of
Night Fire
as a living memorial to all the miserable incompetents the South elects as enforcers of the law.”

Such language was not often seen in print on campus. But, among the “casual colony” of young journalists working on the newspaper, Nelle's contempt for “miserable incompetents” being elected to public office wasn't unique. That summer, Governor Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi was campaigning for the U.S. Senate. With the November elections just a few months off, he declared, “I call upon every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the nigger away from the polls. The best way to keep a nigger from voting is to have a little talk with him the night before.”
16
The “Klan-hating” editor in chief of
Crimson White
countered in his final editorial, “When a shrewd politician will boast of his Klan membership, the average citizen may rest assured that the power of that organization is pretty great.… Now is the time to stamp out this malignant growth. If we have any legacy to leave our successor, we would make it a thoroughgoing hatred of Alabama's—and the nation's—Ku Klux Klan.”
17

*   *   *

Come September of her junior year, Lee might have stayed on as a contributor to the
Crimson White
newspaper. Recently a lengthy article she wrote for a national magazine has come to light—discussed in Chapter 8, “‘See NL's Notes'”—that demonstrates she was a natural journalist. But the
Rammer Jammer
was a better place to showcase her talents as a creative writer. Also, she had scored quite a coup after one year on the magazine: she was offered the spot of editor in chief. It would be a heavy responsibility. Finished with her prelaw classes, she had been accepted into the law school.