Mockingbird (3 page)

Nelle Lee, who had begun using the byline “Harper Lee” on articles she contributed to the University of Alabama campus newspaper, would have all this to remember whenever she looked back. Mr. Lee turned south out of the square and left Monroeville behind, the white dome of the courthouse receding in the rearview mirror. At Repton, he caught Route 84 to Evergreen, where the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, pulling a line of Pullman cars, would take on passengers. From there, his headstrong daughter could begin the 1,110-mile journey to New York City.

*   *   *

Nelle's first hurdle after arriving in Manhattan with a suitcase and typewriter was finding a decent place to live. The wartime housing shortage wasn't nearly over, and thousands of ex-GIs and their families were living in temporary Quonset huts in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, Fox Hills, and Staten Island. Some took whatever they could get. A Marine Corps veteran living with his wife in Queens had to settle for a place that was “seventy dollars a month, hardly furnished, stall shower, ice box. The door down to the basement got water rats. They were banging on the door.”
3

And then there was the sheer size of the city for a small-town girl to reckon with. Eight million people lived in the five boroughs. The skyscrapers of New York resembled colossal outcroppings of rock scraping the clouds. There were twenty bridges, eighteen tunnels, seventeen scheduled ferries, fifteen subways, and eleven thousand taxis. Was it rumor or fact that alligators lived in the sewers, dumped there when they grew too large to be pets?
4

Finally, Nelle found a cold-water flat in the Yorkville neighborhood on the East Side of Manhattan; by coincidence, it wasn't far from where Capote had rented his first apartment a few years earlier: “one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa, fat chairs upholstered in that itchy particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train.… The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.”
5
Nelle's place unfortunately came without a stick of furniture.

Yorkville was one and a half square miles of rathskellers, grocery stores, newsstands with papers in East European languages, Brauhauses, delicatessens, coffeehouses, flower shops, drugstores, and German-language movie theaters. Geraniums and catnip grew in window boxes; ivy and myrtle on brick walls; boxwood, yew, and laurel in tubs around sidewalk cafés. A few of the better restaurants, such as the Café Geiger, attracted tourists with loud polka music on weekends for plates of pigs' knuckles and sauerkraut, plockwurst, or Bavarian sauerbraten. In the cellar taverns, a regular topic of conversation was the fallen Nazi Party or, on a happier note, the legend of local boy Lou Gehrig. A block from Nelle was a branch of the New York Public Library.

It was a working-class neighborhood. Children dashed in and among cars after balls and shouted to friends to come out and play. During a recent garbage strike, some residents had protested by dumping their trash in the gutters. On windy days, cyclones of newspapers, bread wrappers, and cigarette cellophane whirled through the air. Squashed fruit rotted and stank and the flies were as big as raisins.
6

Nelle found a job fairly quickly—Capote thought he could find her one, but that didn't pan out. Instead, she worked in a bookstore, somewhat in the orbit of the literary world, at least. But if any famous writers came in while she was unpacking shipments of books, shelving them, and ringing up sales, she didn't have time to notice. And quickly, she learned one of the first lessons of living in New York: a job that barely pays the rent isn't worth it. At night, if there were no police walking the beat, she slapped parking meters, hoping to dislodge a nickel or a dime.
7

After a year or so of getting by, her finances improved when she was hired as a ticket agent at Eastern Airlines. She joined a union, the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, and instantly doubled her take-home pay. Still, for someone with three years of college, showing customers a diagram of available seats wasn't exactly riveting employment. And she was afraid to fly, strangely enough. But she moved over to British Overseas Air Corporation (BOAC), and because she adored Dickens and Jane Austen, it was exciting speaking familiarly about destinations such as London, Manchester, and Birmingham—the stuff of nineteenth-century novels.

In the evenings, she sat down to write. At first, the din of the city was hard to shut out. Bored taxi drivers blew their horns constantly; the sirens of fire engines made the windowpanes rattle, and radios blaring from open windows in hot weather created a bedlam of music, laughter, and talk up and down the open street. With time, however, she was able to settle into reveries at her desk—just a closet door propped up on blocks. For subject matter, she abided by the advice given to most novices: “Write about what you know.” She wanted to write about the comforting ripples of incident and character back in Monroeville. She wanted to catch the rhythms of life in a small southern town: the eccentricities, the humor, and how folks spoke of the past as if it had only happened yesterday. She was lonely.

There was a party-loving bunch of ex-Alabamians in New York, and she had found them. One of the chief revelers was Eugene Walter, a modern-day Puck from Mobile who kept a stuffed monkey under a glass bell jar. His book
The Untidy Pilgrim
—a comic novel about “Mobile madness,” a malady specific to the Gulf Coast—won the 1954 Lippincott Prize. He said he couldn't exist in New York except that all the Southerners “would get together about every ten days or two weeks and cry over Smithfield ham. There was a community, like a religious group except it wasn't a church. Southerners always, by secret gravity, find themselves together.… You always knew, if there was any kind of trouble, that was like [having] cousins in town.”
8
Nelle, accompanied by Truman, put in an appearance from time to time, toting a bottle of scotch, but to most everyone else in the room the quiet girl in scruffy jeans and a tomboy haircut lacked essential cool. The wife of Zoot Sims, the jazz saxophonist, took her measure and was not impressed. “Here was this dumpy girl from Monroeville. We didn't think she was up to much. She said she was writing a book, and that was that.”
9

*   *   *

The years passed. It was 1957; she had spent almost ten years trying to get published. She hadn't submitted a single thing, fearing rejection, except to an agent she had met through a mutual friend. He liked her work, but suggested a change of direction. “Have you ever tried a novel? This story about the woman with cancer ought to be in a novel. Why don't you write one about the people you know so well?”
10
That was what she was
trying
to do, but she felt hopelessly lost. She was floundering, revising, discarding, and starting over.

It was dark and cold outside that night in 1958, and the words on the page in the typewriter might as well have been in Swedish. The whole book—an amalgam of stories, anecdotes, anything she could use—no longer made any sense.

Suddenly, she yanked the page out of the typewriter, gathered up the chapters, the notes, the drafts, walked over to a window on the alley, and threw the entire mess of paper outside into the snow. The wind blew away some of the pages, taking with them words spoken by characters named Atticus, Jean Louise, Uncle Jack, Aunt Alexandra … never to be heard from now. She went to the phone to call the editor she was working with, an older woman, and tearfully explained what she'd done.

Then not many minutes later, a young woman on York Avenue could be seen hurrying down the steps of her building, chasing after pieces of typewriter paper. Her editor had chewed her out good, and “since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer … I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.”
11

 

two

“Ellen” Spelled Backward

Hell is eternal apartness.

—H
ARPER
L
EE
,
Go Set a Watchman
(2015)

“Get
offa
him!” Nelle roared. “Get off now!” She peeled the older boys from on top of their prey, uncovering Truman beneath flailing elbows and knees; he was lying on his back, red-faced and tearful, in the sandpit of the Monroeville Elementary School playground. The bigger boys had been playing a game called Hot Grease in the Kitchen, demonstrating their territorial prerogative by standing with arms crossed in front of the sandpit as they announced, “Hot grease in the kitchen, go round, go round!”
1

Every other child had been wise enough to obey the injunction, but not Truman, who saw a dazzling opportunity to get attention. He had run straight toward the bigger boys, breaking their line for an instant, but then they dragged him down and piled on. Pain, darkness, and muttered curses between clenched teeth enveloped him for a few seconds, until Nelle leaped in, hauled him to his feet, and escorted him away from his antagonists, glancing backward as if daring any of them to pursue.
2

But the boys knew better than to try that. Though she was only seven years old, Nelle Harper Lee was a fearsome stomach-puncher, foot-stomper, and hair-puller, who could talk mean like a boy.
3
Once, three boys had taken a shot at her, charging at her one at a time like knights galloping toward a dragon. Each one ended up facedown, spitting gravel, and crying “Uncle!” Watching the mêlée was George Thomas Jones, a sixth-grader in 1933. “In my mind's eye I can still see the fire in those big brown eyes as they stared dead ahead, her teeth clenched in jaws set as only could be akin to a full-blood bulldog. Her tiny hands balled into tight fists as she strode defiantly from the playground back toward her fourth-grade classroom.”
4
Truman later based the character “Ann ‘Jumbo' Finchburg … a sawed-off but solid tomboy with an all-hell-let-loose wrestling technique” on his friend Nelle in his short story “The Thanksgiving Visitor.”
5

No one could dispute that Nelle was quick on the draw out on the playground, but she outstripped nearly all others in the classroom, too. Her vocabulary was prodigious, her skepticism a constant bother to teachers accustomed to obedient children. Classmates would turn around to watch in awe whenever Nelle began asking her usual slew of impertinent questions.
6
Mrs. Leighton McNeil was astonished to hear little Nelle greet her at the start of a new school year as “Leighton.” When the child was upbraided, she expressed confusion. At home, she called her father by
his
first name. “The second grade was grim,” Scout says in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, “but Jem assured me that the older I got the better school would be.”

Further proof of Nelle's peculiarity was her taking on the job of guardian angel to Truman Streckfus Persons—as Capote was known then—because Truman, as every child at Monroeville Elementary knew, was a sissy, a crybaby, a mama's boy, and so on. Moreover, if he had worn a sandwich board to school with the words “Hate Me” painted on it two-feet tall, the advertisement would have been redundant. His clothes extended that invitation from a block away. It was the 1930s, the Great Depression, when children went to school in hand-me-downs that had been patched, taken down, taken up, or taken in several times. A girl in a dress made from a fifty-pound cotton flour sack had nothing to be ashamed of. (Manufacturers printed patterns on the inside just for that purpose.) Many children came to school with no shoes, their dirty heels thumping on the smooth pine floors. Truman, however, whose cousin Jenny Faulk owned a women's hat store in Monroeville, wore Hawaiian shirts, white duck shorts, blue socks, sandals, and Eton caps purchased 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.”
7
The implied insult to the other children could not be ignored. Boys gave him his comeuppance by rubbing cockleburs into his fine blond hair and bruising his milky-white skin.

*   *   *

Nelle was five years old the summer she became acquainted with Truman, who was almost six and living with his late-middle-aged cousins next door, the three Faulk sisters and their brother. Barefoot, Nelle balanced like a tightrope walker along the top of the low rock wall separating the Lee and Faulk properties. (It's still there, falling into ruin.) Beside the wall grew a twin-trunk chinaberry tree supporting a tree house. From this outpost, Nelle could spy on Truman ambling among the lilacs and azaleas. “Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head,” she would later write of him, when Truman became Dill, the lonely boy next door in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
“[H]e preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies.”
8

Some of Truman's loneliness gradually abated because of Nelle: “I had a very good friend by then though, so I really wasn't totally alone all the time.”
9
Whatever his imaginative gifts, however, at first glance he hardly seemed the ideal candidate for friendship with a girl like Nelle. She was a female Tom Sawyer with large, dark brown eyes and close-cropped hair. Besides, she already had a playmate: her ten-year-old brother, Edwin. As a big brother, Edwin was a little sister's dream. Friends saw him horsing around in the backyard with Nelle, and he was good to her.
10
But when he left for an afternoon game of baseball on the courthouse lawn, she was out of luck. Next oldest in line was Nelle's sister Louise, a freshman in high school. An attractive girl and a smart dresser, Louise participated in 4-H and youth activities at the Monroeville Methodist Episcopal Church. But she was too old to play with Nelle, as was Alice, the Lees' eldest daughter, who was in her early twenties and working full-time at the
Monroe Journal.