Mockingbird (33 page)

On awards night, April 8, Nelle went to a friend's house in Monroeville to watch the presentations. She didn't own a television because “it interferes with my work.” Horton Foote won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and the team of Art Directors/Set Decorators for
To Kill a Mockingbird
also received the top honor. Some days before the ceremony, Nelle had sent Gregory Peck her father's pocket watch, engraved, “To Gregory from Harper.” Now, as he sat in the Hollywood audience waiting for the envelope to be opened and the announcement made of who had been voted Best Actor, Peck clutched the watch. When Sophia Loren read his name as the winner, he strode onto the stage with A.C.'s watch still in his hand. One of the first people he thanked was Harper Lee.

She cried “tears of joy.”
65

A few days later, Truman returned to Monroeville from Switzerland to visit his aunt Ida Carter. About forty people attended a little party at the Carter home for both Truman and Nelle. But most of the attention, Truman couldn't help but notice, went to Nelle.
66

 

eleven

Unfinished Business

“All I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”

—H
ARPER
L
EE

After the end of the publicity connected with the film
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Lee was free to work as much as she liked on her next novel. Alice was handling her finances, and income from
To Kill a Mockingbird
and the Academy Award–winning film adaptation were like two tributaries of a stream flowing to Monroeville. “My advice would be for you to work out just how much money Nelle can take in the coming years,” Williams suggested to Alice, “without causing too much to be paid to the Government, and then when we know what her tax situation is, we can then make arrangement with the Atticus Company to let her have so much a year.”
1

Williams, Crain, and Lee were practically inseparable; when Nelle was in New York, they saw each other almost daily during the summer of 1963. On weekends, she often went up to their home in Connecticut. “Nelle is looking fine again, we are glad to report,” Williams reassured Alice, referring to the young author's fatigued state after the grind of her public appearances earlier that year.”
2

Williams, no doubt, recognized the importance of staying in Alice's good graces. Nelle discussed everything with her older sister. Alice scrutinized contracts and percentages, and weighed in on negotiations that affected Williams's bottom line. So keeping on the best of terms with the Lee clan was good business. In addition, Alice seemed able to snap her fingers and make Nelle scamper back to Monroeville, interrupting her sister's work and potentially delaying the second novel still more—another financial consideration from an agent's point of view. As it turned out, Alice jumped at an invitation and made arrangements for both herself and middle sister Louise Conner to visit in the fall and get to know these important friends of Nelle's.

Meanwhile, the civil rights movement reached a watershed that summer. In June, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, stood in front of a schoolhouse door at Nelle's alma mater, the University of Alabama, in a symbolic attempt to oppose the enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood. When federal marshals confronted Wallace, he stepped aside, but segregationists cheered his protest. At her home near the campus of the University of Alabama, Hudson Strode's wife, Therese, not sympathetic to the civil rights cause, felt dread about the course of events and voiced the sentiments of many white Southerners. “I have given up completely,” she wrote to a friend.

The white race is lost. The U.S. has become not only the champion but leader of the colored races. Now I understand why Plato rejected democracy, regarding it as little more than rule by the mob. And Greek mobs were neither black nor “mixed.”

Hudson walks in and out among it all like Daniel in the lion's den. We pay as little attention to it as possible.… Do not worry about us, darling Peggy. We live five miles from town in the midst of twenty acres of trees. Negroes are urban people. If these green, gentle woods were the Wilds of Africa, they could not regard them with more terror.
3

In August, a quarter of a million people participated in the March on Washington, which was climaxed by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “I have a dream” speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

But privately Nelle was wary of forcing too much, too soon. As she had said to reporters in Chicago during her promotional tour for the film, in answer to a question regarding the Freedom Riders, “I don't think this business of getting on buses and flouting state laws does much of anything. Except getting a lot of publicity, and violence.”
4
She was right about the white South having a culture that was sensitive to northern coercion. According to Alabama historian Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton,

Plain folk sensed that it was
they,
not the most prosperous whites, who were to ride buses, live in neighborhoods, and compete for jobs with blacks;
their
children who were to be seated alongside black children in schools. But the sight of white demonstrators from the North goaded them to even greater fury. Here came another wave of outsiders retracing the steps of all those old abolitionists, Yankee soldiers, school teachers, missionaries, and federal judges who had meddled in the affairs of their state. They were concerned that they would count for even less.
5

“Nelle didn't agree with the tactics being used to integrate the South,” said Kay Wells, a friend from Kansas who visited Nelle in New York. “She thought sending troops was only going to cause more trouble and anger people.”
6

In her private opinion, Lee was not speaking as the author of a “novel of man's conscience,” as she described it, “universal in the sense it could have happened to anybody, anywhere people live together.”
7
But as a Southerner, hers was “not an uncommon position for even progressive people to take,” according to Donald Collins, author of
When the Church Bells Rang Racist
, a history of segregation in the Methodist church. “They didn't object to the goals being sought, but rather the methodology that was being used. It was a way of not fighting the real issue.”
8

Meanwhile, national concern over law and order and civil rights was adding to
To Kill a Mockingbird
's foothold in public schools. Eight percent of public junior high schools and high schools nationwide had added the novel to their reading lists only three years after its publication.
9
Nelle marveled at the book's appeal to youngsters: “I find that hard to understand. The novel is about a former generation, and I don't see how this younger generation can like it.” Informed that she had done a wonderful job of writing for children, she replied, tongue in cheek, “But I hate children. I can't stand them.”
10

In September, the exchange of letters between Williams and Alice Lee became more animated with excitement over their getting together at the Old Stone House. “It will soon be time for you and Louise to start on your trip,” Williams wrote to Alice. “We are all standing on tiptoe waiting to see you.”
11
Alice replied, “I do hope that the leaves are beginning to turn so they will put on a spectacle for us in October.… Don't worry about feeding us, just being at the farm with you is going to be exciting enough to keep us going, and we will start N.H. [Nelle Harper] on a reducing diet when we arrive!”
12

If Williams felt any trepidation about meeting Alice, now the head of the Lee family, and Louise, her anxieties were put to rest only moments after the sisters arrived. Alice presented Williams with a gift: a handmade apron sewn by her aunt Alice McKinley, her mother's sister in Atmore, Alabama. Williams wore it every moment she was in the kitchen. The New England weather was perfect for autumn, and the trees surrounded the colonial Old Stone House with a panorama of fall colors. The sisters stayed for a week and then attended to some business in Manhattan. In the city, they lunched with Jonas Silverstone, an attorney whom Williams had retained to handle the income from films and plays. He informed Alice to expect a check for Nelle in the neighborhood of fifty-eight thousand dollars—the equivalent of ten times the average annual salary of a wage earner in 1963.
13

Finally, though, it was time for the Lee sisters, including Nelle, to head back to Alabama. She was eager to get back to her new book. “You know that we always talk on the phone on Sunday night just to report on our weekend and find out ‘how you feel,'” Williams wrote to Nelle, “and this letter is just to say we are glad you are with Bear [Alice] but we sure
do miss you.
”
14

Alice by now was a single woman living on her own with a well-established career in the offices of Barnett, Bugg & Lee; but she still gave a tug to her youngest sister, when it was time, in Alice's judgment, for Nelle to come home. To an interviewer, Nelle said with a hint of defeat, “Well, I don't live here, actually. I see it about two months out of every year. I enjoy New York—theaters, movies, concerts, all that—and I have many friends here. But I always go home again.”
15
She was rich, almost forty, and had been a regular Manhattanite for fifteen years, but she had to return to a town without so much as a bookstore for stretches of six months or longer every year. Both her parents were dead; her former sister-in-law, Sara, had remarried and moved away after Edwin Lee's death; and Louise lived two hours from Monroeville, yet Alice insisted that Nelle “come home.”

Back in Monroeville, Nelle bent to the task of trying to write regularly. Requests for personal appearances and speeches were still pouring in, but she decided that since “I'm in no way a lecturer or philosopher, my usefulness there is limited.” At a dinner given in her honor at the University of Alabama, she warned her hosts to expect a “two-word speech,” and that if she felt talkative, she might add “very much.”
16

Even in a small town, however, demands on her time were hard to escape. “I've found I can't write on my home grounds. I have about 300 personal friends who keep dropping in for a cup of coffee. I've tried getting up at 6, but then all the 6 o'clock risers congregate.”
17
To get away by herself, she went to the golf course, forgiving her neighbors for their trespasses on her privacy. “Well, they're Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for a cup of coffee. But they wouldn't dream of interrupting you at golf.”
18
She liked to spend the hours on the golf course thinking about her novel. “Playing golf is the best way I know to be alone and still be doing something. You hit a ball, think, take a walk. I do my best thinking walking. I do my dialog, talking it out to myself.”
19

She had to know at least two chapters ahead what characters were going to do and say before she could make any progress. Even so, she was a slow writer. Her method was to “finish a page or two, put them aside, look at them with a fresh eye, work on them some more, then rewrite them all over again.”
20

As 1963 neared an end, Alice did a rough estimate of her sister's income and taxes. Nelle “nearly flipped,” Alice wrote Williams, about the tax implications of her income, “and she worried terribly for a short while, then she took off to the golf course and had a good time.”
21
Worrying about money, her second novel, and dieting—Williams congratulated her “on losing all those pounds”—was making her a little snappish. Truman wrote soothingly to Marie Dewey after Nelle groused that she was too busy to get together with her. “Don't be upset about Nelle. That's just the way she is. And always will be. It doesn't mean a thing. She
adores
you both.”
22

Before she had published anything, Nelle imagined the writer's life as the best possible for someone like her who loved independence and shunned conformity. Now she was discovering that expectations of success could be a ball and chain.

Come spring, Nelle returned to New York. She was eager to continue her stays at the Old Stone House, where she could be with friends but also left alone when she needed to work. “I have a place where I don't know anybody and nobody knows me. I'm not going to tell, because somebody would know.”
23
In Connecticut, her pattern was to write steadily for six days, then stop and take a break for two, which suggests that she worked approximately Monday through Friday, then let her pen rest when Crain, Williams, and a few of their in-laws arrived on weekends. Although writing “has its own rhythm,” she said, it was “the loneliest work there is.”
24

*   *   *

She also had to be back in New York because Truman needed her help with the final phases of
In Cold Blood.
For more than four years, he had been laboring on the manuscript. His childish handwriting filled more than a dozen school notebooks, every paragraph double-spaced and written in pencil. To keep from looking back at what he'd finished, he turned the notebook upside down for the next blank page. The work continued while he made return trips to Garden City, sometimes accompanied by Nelle, and to the Kansas State Penitentiary to interview Perry Smith and Dick Hickock on Death Row. Most of the book was finished by 1964, but appeals by the killers' attorneys forced the case upward through the legal system, even to the U.S. Supreme Court. Capote wrote to Bennett Cerf at Random House, “please bear in mind that I
cannot
really finish the book until the case has reached its legal termination, either with the execution of Perry and Dick (the probable ending) or a commutation of sentence (highly
un
likely).… Nevertheless, it is the most difficult writing I've ever done (my God!) and an excruciating thing to live with day in and day out on and on—but it
will
be worth it: I
know.
”
25