Mockingbird (26 page)

Regarding your successful book,
To Kill a Mockingbird,
you picked the kind of plot the Yankee element literally read.… You picked the same counterpart of Uncle Tom—the kind, harmless Negro accused/abused falsely by the arrogant whites.… You could write a book describing Southern whites killing Negroes and stacking them up like cordwood. It would make you another bestseller.… I've lived in the North five years. There are many good ones who mind their own business. Whenever you find the wiseacre who is going to remake the South—and never been here, they are filth and poison.
20

As sales of the book rose into the hundreds of thousands during the fall of 1960, Lee had the singular pleasure of a congratulatory letter from Hudson Strode, her former Shakespeare professor and director of the writing workshop at the University of Alabama. “I enjoyed the book very much indeed. It is fresh, and skillfully done, with delightful characters and the best possible ending.… I think part of your success lies in the shock of recognition—or as the Japanese might say, ‘the unexpected recognition of the faithful “suchness” of very ordinary things.' You have a wide, warm audience waiting for Number Two.”
21
(Privately, Strode wished she had been enrolled in his creative writing seminar, telling his students, she learned a lot from him through Shakespeare.”)
22

One day, to escape the attention for a few hours, Nelle used the excuse that Tay Hohoff was mad about cats to deliver to her an abandoned kitten with six toes on its forefeet. Nelle had found the kitten in the basement of her building, cuddled up to the furnace. She named it Shadrach, after the biblical character who endured Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace. After delivering it safely to the Hohoff sanctuary, a “beehive of books” scented with aromas of good tobacco and whiskey, Nelle sank into a big comfortable chair and muttered, despite the early morning hour, “I
need
a drink. I'm supposed to be at an interview right now.” After she left, Hohoff and her husband, Arthur, had a good laugh about how their young friend was finding out that literary success was not all it was cracked up to be.

For someone like Lee, who preferred solitude over parties, observing instead of participating, the onrush of instant celebrity resulting from
To Kill a Mockingbird
imposed a tremendous strain she hadn't expected. Capote, hearing of the effects of celebrity overtaking his friend, remarked: “Poor darling, she seems to be having some sort of happy nervous-breakdown.”
23
Somehow, in the space of a very short time, just a few months, Nelle had gone from having a private self that she could control, to a public persona that she could not. Unlike Capote, for instance, who said, “I always knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I wanted to be rich and famous,” Nelle didn't regard herself as an important person, and the attention being paid to her almost seemed to be happening to someone else. A revealing moment about her self-perception occurred during an interview with
Newsweek
in the lounge of New York's Algonquin Hotel. Catching sight of the Irish playwright Brendan Behan walking by, she confessed, “I've always wanted to meet an author.”
24

Just as long as the intense attention stayed primarily on the book, she could cope with it. Usually, her quick, folksy wit stood her in good stead during interviews. She was the first to poke fun at her heavy Alabama accent. (“If I hear a consonant, I look around.”) She deflected seriousness by claiming to be a Whig and believing “in Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Corn Laws.” Asked about how she wrote, she cracked, “I sit down before a typewriter with my feet fixed firmly on the floor.” Not even her appearance was off-limits, within reason; she admitted to being a little heavier than she would like to be (according to a friend, she put herself on a thousand-calorie-a-day diet of “unpalatable goop”).
25
Generally, interviewers, such as Joseph Deitch for the
Christian Science Monitor,
found her “instantly good company … a tall, robust woman with a winsome manner, a neighborly handshake, and a liking for good, sensitive talk about people and books and places like Monroeville, Alabama, her home town.”

Monroeville offered the safest harbor for getting away from the attention. (This although the Boulware family was making noises about suing over the likeness between Son Boulware and Boo Radley. The Lee sisters adopted a policy of brushing aside comparisons between characters in the novel and Monroeville residents. “They come right up to me and stuck their noses right in my face and declared there's nobody in the book that's real,” said Capote's aunt Mary Ida Carter.)
26

Not too many years earlier, the town's remoteness had been one of Nelle's chief reasons for wanting to stay in New York; now it guaranteed some peace of mind. Reporters and interviewers, after studying maps of Alabama where two-lane roads meandered like blue and black threads, opted to telephone the Lee residence instead of stopping by. When the phone rang, it was Alice who answered, refusing to allow her sister to take the call if it was about the novel.
27
The world and its demands could wait on the Lees' doorstep. Inside, Nelle liked to curl up with a book. Alice wouldn't even permit a television in the house, lest it disturb the quiet.

When word went round in Eufaula, however, that Nelle Harper Lee was coming to visit her sister Louise, a line of dessert-bearing ladies got busy. One woman, Solita Parker, with a reputation in the neighborhood for being a wit, pretended to be jealous that Monroeville had been chosen for the novel's setting. She firmly announced that Eufaula ought to chip in and rent Nelle an apartment, because there were so many peculiar characters in Eufaula to write about.

“Oh, you want a kick-back on stock in the publishing company,” Nelle teased back.

“No,” said the woman, “I just want to
read
the book.”
28

That kind of pleasantry and the feelings of gratification it inspired were exactly what Nelle had expected from publishing a novel. Here in these familiar surroundings, with people who spoke, thought, and joked as she did, she could be what she wanted—a Southerner satisfied with joining the tradition of regionalist writers south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Here she could give free rein to her personality. To a cookbook editor's request for a recipe that would “demonstrate food as a mean of communication,” Nelle provided one for crackling bread—a backwoods staple—couched in the style of tongue-in-cheek southern humor that mixed formal talk with nonsense.

“First, catch your pig,” she instructed. “Then ship him to the abattoir nearest you. Bake what they send you back. Remove the solid fat and throw the rest away.” Having wasted most of the pig, the cook was then supposed to add the fat to meal, milk, baking powder, and an egg, and bake the dough in a “very hot oven.” The result, Nelle promised, would be an authentic dish: “one pan crackling bread serving six. Total cost: about $250, depending upon size of pig. Some historians say by this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.” To the editor, she concluded, “I trust that you will find the above of sufficient artistic and social significance to include in the cookbook.”
29

It was a response that friends would recognize as “typical Nelle”—offbeat, skeptical, thought-provoking. Friends from her days at the University of Alabama described her to the
Montgomery Advertiser
as “a warm though independent-minded girl who took great delight in deflating phoniness wherever it appeared.”

To requests for more information about herself, she responded coyly. At Huntingdon College, the librarian Leo R. Roberts tried to compile a profile of the former freshman in response to journalists, alumnae, and Nelle's admirers who were clamoring to know more about the author whose book had sold more than half a million copies in six months. Roberts, probably a little nonplussed by the lack of information about Nelle in Huntingdon's archives, finally wrote to her in January 1961 requesting some facts about her background.

“I'm afraid a biographical sketch of me will be sketchy indeed; with the exception of M'bird, nothing of any particular interest to anyone has happened to me in my thirty-four years,” she replied. After supplying a few details about her family, she deadpanned, “I was exposed to seventeen years of formal education in Monroeville schools, Huntingdon College, and the University of Alabama. If I ever learned anything, I've forgotten it.”
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*   *   *

In September 1960, she agreed to a book signing at Capitol Book and News Company in Montgomery. Seated at a table next to a vase of white carnations and wearing a fresh-cut corsage pinned to her dress, she was the center of attention. Less a literary event than a combination celebration and reunion, the book signing was an occasion where people “crowded into the bookstore because they saw her picture in the paper, wondered if she were kin to so and so, heard that her book was good, knew her at the University of Alabama, knew someone who used to know her somewhere or had read the book and enjoyed it and came to say so.”
31

Nearby was her father, eighty-two-year-old A. C. Lee, looking very old as he watched quietly with his large owlish eyes through big glasses. His wife, Nelle's mother, Frances, had been dead for almost a decade. (A.C. himself would die in two years, still in the harness at the law office.) His suit vests, once buttoned tightly over a healthy paunch, now hung loose. The knuckles of his right hand turned white when he pressed hard on the crook of his cane to rise from his chair and shake someone's hand, perhaps an old acquaintance from his days as a state legislator. “I never dreamed of what was going to happen. It was somewhat of a surprise and it's very rare indeed when a thing like this happens to a country girl going to New York. She will have to do a good job next time if she goes on up.” And then—still marveling, apparently, that Nelle had strayed from the narrow but dependable path of a nine-to-five job—he added, “I feel what I think is a justifiable measure of pride in her accomplishment, and I must say she has displayed much determination, confidence and ambition to give up a good job in New York and take a chance at writing a book.”
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*   *   *

And because of the influence of his two daughters, and the passage of time, A. C. Lee had changed his views about race relations, too. Formerly a conservative on matters of race and social progress, he became an advocate for voting rights in his final years.

Part of the reason for his change of mind was the influence of events that no thoughtful American in the 1950s could ignore. Autherine Lucy, a black student, attempted to enroll at Harper Lee's alma mater, the University of Alabama, but violence on the campus for three days forced her to flee. Despite a court order to readmit her, the Board of Trustees barred her from campus. The former Alabama state senator J. M. Bonner, whom A. C. Lee probably knew from his own career in the statehouse, wrote to the
Tuscaloosa News,
“I call now on every Southern White man to join in this fight. I proudly take my stand with those students who resisted, and who will continue to resist the admission of a Negress named Lucy.”

A contest of principles was gearing up in the South, and a civic-minded man like A. C. Lee could not fail to recognize it happening in his own backyard. In 1959, the Ku Klux Klan forced the cancellation of the annual Monroeville Christmas parade by threatening to kill any members of the all-Negro Union High School band who participated. Influencing A.C., too, was Alice, more progressive than he in matters concerning race. At a critical moment in the reorganization of the United Methodist Church, her beliefs about integration, honed over the decades, electrified an audience of hundreds of fellow worshippers.

During a meeting in 1964 at Huntingdon College of the Alabama–West Florida Conference, one of the few regional holdouts against integrating black Methodists with whites, a committee report concerning the “problems of our racially divided church” and society came to the floor. “A Call to Christian Thought and Conduct” called upon “Christians to uphold the law, repudiate racial hatred and violence, support freedom and equality for all, and apply compassion and understanding to those with whom we differ.”
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A motion to amend the church bylaws in favor of integrating congregations had been made, and the question was open for discussion. Those who were against were prepared with countermeasures—perhaps even a walkout, if necessary, depriving the meeting of a quorum.

For years, Alice had been impatiently waiting for such a moment.
34
Taking the floor microphone, she said: ‘I move the previous question,' and sat down. The conference applauded enthusiastically and voted overwhelmingly to support her motion, voted to close discussion, and then proceeded to adopt the committee report without further debate. The advocates of racism were left holding their long-prepared speeches. “Miss Alice became the hero of the conference and from that day the enemy of the racists.”
35

By the time
To Kill a Mockingbird
was published, A. C. Lee was involved in redrawing congressional district lines. In 1962, while a reporter from the
Montgomery Advertiser
was interviewing Nelle at her home in Monroeville, Alice and A.C. stopped by on their way to the offices of Barnett, Bugg & Lee. The elderly lawyer interrupted to speak earnestly to the reporter about the importance of reapportioning voting districts to provide fairer representation for black voters. “It's got to be done,” he said.
36
And then he continued on his way. It's interesting to speculate what he might have accomplished had he lived longer. When Monroeville residents politely stopped him on the street to ask him to sign his daughter's book, they often said, “But please don't sign it ‘Mr. Lee'—sign it ‘
Atticus
.'”