The Mockingbird Next Door Read online

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  First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Marja Mills

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  Photograph Credits

  1, 6: Carla Mills (Collection of Marja Mills)

  2, 3, 4: Chicago Tribune, September 13th, 2002. © 2002 Chicago Tribune. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited

  5, 10: Collection of Thomas Lane Butts

  7, 8, 9: Marja Mills

  11, 13: Donald Uhrbrock / The Life Images Collection / Getty Images

  12: Courtesy of Preston B. Barnett

  14: © Bettmann/Corbis

  15: Courtesy of Alice Finch Lee on behalf of the Estate of A. C. Lee

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Mills, Marja.

  The Mockingbird Next Door : Life with Harper Lee / Marja Mills.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-698-16383-6

  1. Lee, Harper. 2. Mills, Marja. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Alabama—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3562.E353Z75 2014

  813'.54--dc23

  [B]

  2013039938

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  For my parents, Dave and Carla Mills

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of nonfiction. It is based upon notes, tapes, transcripts, interviews, and conversations from my time in Monroeville. Events and conversations are rendered as I remember them and verified to the best of my ability.

  Prologue

  In the summer of 2005, I was having coffee at Burger King with Harper Lee.

  By that time, we were friends and next-door neighbors in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. We’d first met in 2001, when I was on assignment for the Chicago Tribune. I had developed a rapport with Nelle, as her friends call her, and her sister Alice. Over time, the idea of my writing a book about the Lee sisters, with their guidance, had taken root in our conversations. With their blessing, I had rented the house next door.

  At the time of our Burger King visit, Nelle was growing increasingly resentful and anxious about a coming unauthorized biography and two Truman Capote movies in the works. I think the combination of those events encouraged her to open up to me even more. I wasn’t an unknown quantity but someone she knew and trusted, sitting across the table from her.

  I wouldn’t have been sitting there if I had included anything she had said was off the record in my newspaper article, or if I had pushed her to divulge things she felt were no one’s business. Even the fact that I’d never asked her to autograph a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird for me factored in. I didn’t feel I was entitled to more from her than she wanted to share. I wanted to hear as much as she was willing to share, of course. But I didn’t push it. That patience seemed to ease Nelle’s mind.

  “I know what you can call your book,” she told me, leaning in and stabbing her finger in the air, as she liked to do when making a point.

  “Having Their Say. I know they used it with the Delaney sisters but titles aren’t copyrightable.” Nelle beamed.

  Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years was a bestselling book about two African American sisters, one sweet and one salty, looking back on their lives.

  In this scenario, Alice, her elder sister by fifteen years—sharp and still practicing law in her nineties—was the sweet one. Nelle was the saltier one. I smiled. I didn’t take it as a mandate for the title but rather as a measure of Nelle’s enthusiasm.

  I was delighted they were ready to have their say, in any measure, and to look back on their lives. It has been a privilege to get to know the sisters, their family, their friends, their hometown, and their passions. With the Lees as my teachers, I learned more about literature, family, history, faith, friendship, and fun than I did in any classroom.

  This book is my attempt to tell the story of my time with the Lees and to honor all that they shared with me. I could not have done it without the trust, support, and encouragement of Nelle and Alice Lee and their closest friends.

  To the best of my ability, I have let them have their say. All humor and erudition should be credited to the Lees. Any errors are my own.

  Chapter One

  Do you want to take a trip? You can say no.”

  Tim Bannon, my editor at the Chicago Tribune, stood at my cubicle. He ran the daily features section on the fifth floor of the Gothic Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago and was pleasantly low-key by newspaper standards. Tim knew I liked to travel for stories, and that if the story took me to an unusual part of the country, so much the better. I had loved spending time at a monastery in rural Missouri for one story and at The Citadel, the military college in South Carolina, for another. Tim also knew I had been out sick a lot that year, 2001. In 1995, I had been diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune condition that frequently left me fatigued. I wanted him to know I was still able to do my job. I purposely accepted before finding out more.

  “Sure. Where to?”

  “Monroeville, Alabama.”

  Tim saw my quizzical look and smiled.

 
“It’s Harper Lee’s hometown. We know she doesn’t give interviews. But I think it’s worth going there anyway.”

  Enough said.

  A couple of weeks earlier, the Chicago Public Library had chosen the elusive author’s To Kill a Mockingbird as the first selection in its One Book, One Chicago program. The idea was to get Chicagoans in every corner of the city reading and discussing the same book. It didn’t hurt that To Kill a Mockingbird happened to be the favorite of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, as he told me a couple of months earlier for a story I wrote about his reading habits. That he was a reader at all surprised some folks. His press conferences were hard to follow. He didn’t necessarily exit the same sentences he entered. But he loved books, and he especially loved To Kill a Mockingbird. In that, he was part of a phenomenon that began in 1960 and continues to this day.

  When the novel was published in July of that year, Harper Lee was a few months past her thirty-fourth birthday. From the beginning, Lee was a collection of contradictions. She was an Alabama native whose love of the state’s back roads was matched only by her love of New York City streets. Her public shyness masked a wicked wit. During the publicity engagements for the novel’s publication, when she wasn’t averting her gaze, her dark eyes could alternate between a penetrating stare and a mischievous gleam. She was a distinctive blend of engaging and elusive.

  Lee labored for several years to produce the novel. She coaxed the story out of a Royal manual typewriter in her small Manhattan cold-water flat and on visits home. Atticus Finch is a principled attorney and the widowed father of two children. As the novel begins, his tomboy daughter, Scout, is about to turn six. Her older brother, Jem, is almost ten. With their father, they endure the suspicion and outright hatred directed at Atticus when he defends Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell, in their segregated town. In the novel’s climactic scene, Bob Ewell, father of Mayella, comes after the children. Boo Radley, the neighborhood recluse who has frightened and fascinated the children in equal measure, saves them.

  Through the experiences of Scout, Jem, and their best friend, Dill, Lee paints a vivid picture of small-town childhood in the segregated South. She also explores complex themes in the lives of her characters, from mental illness to addiction, racism, and the limitations society imposed on women.

  The story of small-town childhood and racial injustice in Depression-era Alabama garnered glowing reviews and stayed on the best-seller list for nearly two years. In 1961, Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Academy Award–winning 1962 film version of the novel, starring Gregory Peck, became a classic in its own right.

  It was a stunning debut. With time, Lee’s novel became something more: a national touchstone in a culture becoming ever more fragmented. In a 1991 survey, the Library of Congress asked readers which book most influenced their lives. Only the Bible outranked To Kill a Mockingbird. It has sold an estimated forty million copies or more and been translated into three dozen languages, from Swedish to Urdu. It is required reading for at least 70 percent of U.S. high school students.

  The novel became a classic at the same time as it defied Mark Twain’s definition of one: “a book people praise and don’t read.” References to the work appear in movies, on television, in countless other books, and in comic strips, cartoons, and lyrics. People cite the novel as the reason they became writers or lawyers. The characters’ unusual names have a comfortable familiarity even to those who haven’t read the novel in years, or perhaps never did. Atticus Finch. Scout. Boo Radley. The unusual names from Depression-era Alabama now populate the glossy pages of People and Us Weekly, as celebrities, as well as plenty of regular folks, name their children Harper, Atticus, or Scout.

  As the novel’s cultural influence grew, so did Lee’s mystique. A few years after the book was published, she essentially stopped giving interviews. The second novel she had once discussed never appeared. Her rare public appearances made headlines. Her speeches, when she did accept an occasional award, usually consisted of two words: “Thank you.” When she was loquacious, she went on twice as long. “Thank you very much.”

  Given her long public silence, in fact, plenty of people assumed Harper Lee was dead. At age sixty-six in 1993, she made dry reference to that fact in the foreword to yet another printing of the novel. Lee told her readers that she was “still alive, although very quiet.”

  By the time I was given my assignment in 2001, she was seventy-five. In the modern world, she was as beloved and unknown as a person can be. She divided her time between Manhattan and her Alabama hometown. That much was known. Her full name was Nelle Harper Lee but she was simply Nelle to the tight circle of friends who protected her privacy. Periodic “In Search of Harper Lee” articles over the years offered glimpses into the author’s life, if only from afar. One newspaper story described the log cabin exterior and linoleum floors of David’s Catfish House, on the outskirts of Monroeville, and passed along intelligence gleaned from a waitress. The author and her older sister, attorney Alice Lee, always sat at a back table. They were quite hard of hearing, both of them. The waitress could report, firsthand, that they squabbled about who got to pay for the other. Not much else seemed to be known about her life after writing one of the most cherished novels of the twentieth century.

  Lee’s responses to the never-ending requests for interviews ranged from “no” to “hell, no.” Usually, her literary agency and publisher declined on her behalf. In Monroeville, Alice practiced law with their father’s old firm, Barnett, Bugg & Lee, and also served as gatekeeper for her sought-after sister.

  I expected that I would be turned away as so many reporters had been before. If nothing else, I could write about the small town that produced the author and inspired her fictional Maycomb. But first, I had to find it on a map. I pulled out my atlas.

  Like Maycomb, Monroeville is a southern Alabama county seat located well inland. It is an out-of-the-way place, near no major airport or even the interstate. Nonetheless, the town of sixty-five hundred draws literary pilgrims from around the world. People want to visit the courthouse replicated in the movie. They want to run their hands along the polished banister of the balcony where a young Harper Lee watched her father try cases just as Scout does in the novel and the film. They want to walk past the spot where Lee climbed a chinaberry tree with her childhood friend and next-door neighbor Truman Capote. Devoted fans of the novel, the ones who can recite favorite lines by heart, want details. Do the tree’s poisonous yellow berries still fall to the earth along Alabama Avenue? Is the tree even still there, or those two childhood homes? Does the feeling Lee captured of a small-town, Southern childhood still exist?

  For this hastily planned trip, I’d submit, meekly, the standard request for an interview, knowing that was as likely as a blizzard in August. Then I’d fly down and try to give Chicago readers a sense of the town that produced Harper Lee and annually sells out the two-act play adapted from the novel.

  For One Book, One Chicago, the library system was gearing up for an onslaught of interest in the book. The city’s seventy-eight libraries were stocking their shelves with nearly two thousand additional copies of the novel, including some Spanish and Polish translations. Lee declined the city’s invitation to speak, but sent a rare statement in support of the program. She wrote, “When the people of Chicago assemble in various parts of the city to read and discuss To Kill a Mockingbird, there is no greater honor the novel could receive. People of all backgrounds and cultures coming together to put their critical skills to work—nothing could be more exciting!”

  Like millions of others, I had read the book in school, as a shy fourteen-year-old who loved English, feared math, and ran on my high school cross-country team in Madison, Wisconsin. From the first pages, I was transported on a snowy afternoon to the red clay streets of an Alabama county seat during the Depression.

  Now I had an assignment, a plane ticket, and a c
olleague, photographer Terrence James, also assigned to the story. I hadn’t worked with Terrence before but I’d seen him around the paper. He was African American, wore black jeans and boots, and had cornrows to his shoulders. He seemed enthusiastic about this assignment, as I was.

  Terrence and I got better acquainted on the flight to Atlanta. We mapped out our assignment, where we wanted to go, and whom we wanted to see. In Atlanta, we rented a car for what turned out to be a nearly six-hour drive to Monroe County. Atlanta was a rookie mistake: I could have booked a flight into Montgomery, Mobile, or Florida’s coastal Pensacola. All were closer. But the Atlanta flight was cheaper. It didn’t look as far on the map as it turned out to be. The drive, however, gave us a chance to put Monroeville in a geographic context we could picture. Parachuting in, as journalists often do, you miss something.

  We got off the interstate about a half hour from Monroeville. Along Highway 84, the foliage gets thicker. Elsewhere, in fact, kudzu drapes over hundred-year-old oak trees. It crawls up ravines. It creeps across the caved-in tin roofs of abandoned country shacks. It forms an intricate web of green so dense it seems to be hiding something.

  We drove up hills, wound around curves. Trucks with bundles of freshly cut lumber thundered past. Terrence gripped the steering wheel tighter. We saw the “patchwork sea of cotton fields and timberlands” Lee describes in the novel. Large machinery now does the picking. It’s faster and cheaper. In To Kill a Mockingbird times, rows of men, women, and children did the picking. It was oppressively hot, back-breaking, finger-stinging work, plucking the tufts of cotton off the plant and putting them into burlap sacks.

  We passed the occasional gas station and general store with “Coca-Cola” in fading white script on peeling red paint. We stopped at one of them. It was the kind of place that looked like it might still have Coke in those little six-and-a-half-ounce green bottles, the kind my grandfather used to have at his one-man Coca-Cola bottling operation in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. I checked. No, even here it was cans and plastic bottles only. Next to the cash register and the March of Dimes box was a giant plastic jar of hard-boiled eggs in vinegar. Beside that was another big jar with something vaguely pink floating in the brine. Pickled pig’s feet. I’d never tasted either. I’d stick to Diet Coke for now.