The Mockingbird Next Door Read online

  Judge Biggs operated out of an office piled to the rafters with books and papers. He was an older, dark-haired man and he played his part with a certain theatricality. His official duties had to do with running the county. His unofficial duties included gleaning information from journalists who thought they were the ones interviewing him. We spoke very generally about the town, the book, and the Lees, whom he had known for a long time.

  I would come to learn that Biggs was one of the ways the Lees often knew who was in town and why. It was an early warning detection system. When they especially wanted to avoid someone likely to come knocking on their door, they occasionally would hit the road for their sister Louise’s home in Eufaula or, closer to home, a motel over in Evergreen, the neighboring Conecuh County seat.

  My next visit, per McCoy’s directions, would be to Charlie McCorvey, an educator and county commissioner who played the role of Tom Robinson every spring. At Monroeville Middle School, McCorvey greeted me warmly and asked who I had been to see so far. McCorvey was a large man with silver-rimmed glasses. Once a year, to play Tom Robinson, he would trade his button-down shirt and tie for worn overalls.

  Local people constitute the cast every year: lawyers and doctors, preachers and plumbers, businessmen and shop owners. And educators. In one particularly difficult scene, Bob Ewell berates Tom Robinson, spitting out the n word in his stream of racist vitriol. Hard to be the white actor saying it. Hard to be the black actor hearing it. Occasionally, African American friends would ask McCorvey if it made sense to depict the humiliation and violent end that his character suffered. But McCorvey’s instincts as an educator told him this was another form of teaching. “Some of these kids think the days of segregation and ‘yessuh,’ ‘nossuh’ are ancient history but they are not. This makes it more real to them.”

  Kathy McCoy also suggested I speak with a retired businessman named A. B. Blass. He went to school with Nelle, caddied for her father at the local golf course built by Vanity Fair, and now often spoke to the reporters who cycled through town.

  In his living room, Blass told me of the time in the early 1960s when A. C. Lee put a reassuring hand on Blass’s shoulder and said simply, “You did right, son.” Blass had stood up, in his way, to the Ku Klux Klan, which was threatening violence against band members the first year the parade was to be integrated. Blass canceled the parade rather than put the marching bands in harm’s way or allow the tradition of the segregated parade to continue.

  Blass had recounted a collection of Lee stories many times to many journalists, until they were stones rubbed smooth by time and the telling. His voice was almost hypnotic, low and slow. I had the sense from Kathy McCoy that the Lee sisters did not appreciate what A. B. Blass had to share about their family, though McCoy didn’t explain exactly what their objections were.

  As he spoke, I gathered that the reason might be that he described Nelle’s mother as an emotionally disturbed woman.

  “She was touched,” Blass said. “I remember as a little boy walking to school, I’d see her there on their front porch, talking to herself. I’d walk back the same way after school and she’d still be there sometimes, just talking to herself like that.”

  I’d learn later that the Lees took issue with this characterization, to say the least. I’d hear how they remembered Frances Lee as a “gentle soul,” a woman who played the piano and sang, loved crossword puzzles, and enthusiastically traded books back and forth with Truman Capote’s mother when she lived next door. Frances Lee did suffer a nervous breakdown at one point, after a harrowing experience, one the Lees had not discussed publicly. Her second child, Louise, cried in distress around the clock for months and couldn’t properly digest anything her desperate parents gave her. The baby recovered when a pediatrician found a special formula she could digest. As I came to know the Lees, the way their mother was depicted over the years was high on the list of things they wanted to set straight.

  Nelle, according to Blass, was a scrappy girl unafraid to cuss and use her fists, every bit as feisty as the fictional Scout Finch. Blass remembered A. C. Lee as a quiet man with an even temperament. His sense of propriety and civility was steadfast. Even when the heat and humidity bore down, Mr. Lee wore his business suit on the golf course. Blass thought it was a shame Nelle Harper no longer socialized with some of the people she had grown up with, himself among them. He suspected she didn’t appreciate his willingness to talk to the press about the Lee family. He was correct, I learned later.

  I had most of what I needed for my newspaper story after a few days, within the constraints of the Lees and their close friends not granting interviews. Terrence and I would head home soon. But first, I had to at least request an interview with Harper Lee or her sister Alice in person. If anyone answered the door, I would be polite, and then I would be gone.

  Terrence drove our rental car to the older neighborhood of redbrick houses across from the big, rambling junior high that used to be the high school; Harper Lee studied there when it was newly built.

  Alice Lee’s home wasn’t listed in the local phone book. A researcher in the Tribune’s reference room—the morgue, to old-timers—easily pulled the number from online records. One thing I hadn’t found in my file full of articles and background materials was a photo of the Lee home. In one of the most frequently reproduced photos of Lee as a young woman, she is in a rocking chair next to her father. The photos accompanied a 1961 Life magazine feature about Lee at home. The interior of the white screened porch, on the side of the house, is visible but you can’t tell what the house looks like from the street. According to the articles I read, even the location of the house was kept secret, at least by some of the residents who declined to disclose its whereabouts to various tourists and journalists.

  I felt uneasy about knocking on their door. But I needed to be able to tell my editors I at least tried.

  Chapter Two

  Terrence didn’t pull into the Lees’ driveway. He idled the car along their quiet street.

  “Well,” I told him, “I’ll probably be right back.”

  It was early evening, and still light out. The air was warm and still. We knew Alice Lee probably would be home after her day at the law office. I walked up a few wooden steps and knocked on a white wooden door. Its old brass knocker had “Alice F. Lee” engraved in feminine script. I took a step back. Nothing.

  I pressed the doorbell, stepped back again, and waited. Nothing. All right then. At least I tried. I’d wait another minute, then join Terrence in the air-conditioned car and call it a day.

  Just before I turned around to go back to the car, a tiny woman using a walker came to the door. She had large glasses and wore a tailored light blue skirt and matching suit jacket. Her gray hair, parted on the side, was clipped neatly in place with a single bobby pin. I introduced myself. She leaned in to hear better. I raised my voice and repeated who I was and why I was there.

  “Yes, Miss Mills. I received the materials you sent. And the letter.” Her voice was a raspy croak. She had read what I sent about Chicago’s library system picking To Kill a Mockingbird for One Book, One Chicago. From her sources, she knew I had been making the rounds. I had read about Alice Lee, Harper Lee’s much older sister. She was eighty-nine years old and still a practicing attorney. From the clips I’d seen, I knew she often ran interference for her sister, politely but firmly declining interviews. I was surprised when she invited me in.

  Across the threshold, a musty smell greeted me. A large oak bookcase, shoulder-high and to my right, dominated the small entryway. Just beyond a short hallway was a small telephone nook. A little white chair was pulled up to a waist-high ledge with the telephone.

  “Please come in,” she said.

  I followed Alice Lee into the living room. Books were everywhere. They filled one bookshelf after another, stood in piles by her reading chair, and were stacked on the coffee table and most available surfaces, for that m
atter.

  She saw me taking all this in. “This is mostly a place to warehouse books.” She smiled and her eyes crinkled at the corners. I strained to catch what she was saying. It wasn’t just the raspy voice that made that difficult. I was still learning to decipher the local accent, more pronounced in the older people I met. Of course, around here, I was the one with the accent. “When I hear a consonant,” Harper Lee once said, “I look around.”

  “Pull up that chair, won’t you?” With her hands still resting on her walker, she nodded at a low wooden rocker by the piano on the far wall. The living room was compact. I carried the chair four or five feet and set it near hers. She stood by a gray upholstered recliner and a side table piled with papers.

  I was thrilled to be invited in, but I felt a rush of regret, too, for bothering her, especially now that I saw for myself how petite and vulnerable and, well, ancient, she appeared to be, with so little hearing and the gray metal walker. “For balance,” she told me.

  The interior of the house was as modest as the exterior. An old plaid couch with skinny wooden arms was pushed against one wall. A floor lamp and another side table piled with books and papers were between the couch and the recliner. Along the far wall was an old brown piano. Above it hung a painting of the sea that was more angular, more modern, than the rest of the living room. Another wall had a fireplace flanked by two upholstered chairs. Glass and porcelain knickknacks formed a silent sentry atop the white, wooden mantel.

  She slowly lowered herself into the chair, then let go and dropped the last few inches. She managed a dignified plop into her seat. As we spoke, I heard someone rustling around in the back. The kitchen was just off the square dining room, which, in turn, was just around the corner from where I sat with Miss Alice. No room was very far from another.

  Some of the bookshelves in the dining room were waist high, others a bit lower. Pushed against any wall that had room for them, they had the haphazard zigzag of a city skyline. But the window above one of them looked out on a deep, dark backyard with towering trees.

  Alice answered my questions about the book, the town, their family, her famous sister. I scribbled in my reporter’s notebook, putting a star by quotations I thought I might include in my story.

  Big homes or expensive clothing didn’t interest her sister, Alice told me. “Those things have no meaning for Nelle Harper,” Alice Lee said. “All she needs is a good bed, a bathroom, and a typewriter. . . . Books are the things she cares about.”

  Her sister teased Alice about the time she began storing books and newspapers in the oven. She didn’t cook and had run out of bookshelf space.

  A pleasant aroma was coming from the back of the house. I couldn’t place it. It was the scent of baking bread, only fainter.

  Could that be Harper Lee in the kitchen? The possibility was electrifying. Was she listening to our conversation? Would she make an appearance? I thought it better not to ask.

  Meantime, I could feel a sheen of sweat on my face. No air-conditioning on here. Alice easily got cold but not hot, she told me. She had grown up without air-conditioning and rarely felt the need for it.

  “I hope it’s not too warm for you,” she said. Her voice was almost a croak.

  “No, not at all. Thank you.”

  I waited until she glanced away to quickly swipe my hand across my forehead and wipe it on my pants.

  I had stepped into another era without AC, computers, or cell phones. The Lees had only recently purchased a television. A manual typewriter rested on a chair in the dining room. Nelle used it to answer some of the correspondence that still poured into their post office box.

  “She doesn’t even have an electric typewriter,” Alice said. “We do not belong in the twenty-first century as far as electrical things are concerned.” She paused. “Hardly even the twentieth.”

  I mentioned that in To Kill a Mockingbird, the word scuppernongs had sent me to the dictionary.

  She got a gleam in her eye.

  “Follow me.”

  She led me to the kitchen. It looked unchanged from the fifties. The floor was black-and-white-checked tile. The cabinets were painted white. Stacks of papers, bowls, and cracker boxes and various piles of just stuff crowded the counters.

  My unspoken question about who was doing the cooking there was answered. A tall black woman with wisps of graying hair stood at the stove. She poked at the frying pan with a spatula. She was making fried green tomatoes.

  Alice made the introductions. When her sister—Nelle Harper—was in New York, Alice explained, Julia Munnerlyn was her live-in help. She looked after Alice, stayed overnight, drove her to and from work, and fixed the simple meals Alice preferred. And her favorite food, fried green tomatoes.

  I would come to learn that one of Julia’s sons, Rudolph Munnerlyn, was Monroeville’s police chief, the first African American to hold that position.

  “She wanted to know about scuppernongs,” Alice told her. Julia slipped the breaded green tomatoes out of the pan and onto a plate with a paper towel to absorb the grease. She worked with the deft hand of someone who has done that a hundred times before. She had kind eyes, watchful eyes, and a warm smile for the stranger in the kitchen. She reached into the small, white refrigerator and retrieved a big bowl.

  Julia put the bowl on the counter to my left and set out a paper towel.

  “For the seeds.”

  She and Alice beamed at me.

  “Try one,” Alice said.

  Both women were amused that this local fruit was exotic to me.

  “A friend brought these by the other day,” Alice said.

  The scuppernongs did indeed look like big grapes. They were reddish purple, plump, and sweet with just a bit of tartness as well. As I slipped the seeds into the paper towel, I was trying to take it all in: the scuppernongs; the two women; the considerably cluttered, somehow comfortably dated interior of this house. Chances were I’d never see it again.

  They told me that scuppernongs grow on vines, and were plentiful around here. Both were in good humor. The affection between the two women was obvious.

  Poor Terrence was still out in the rental car. But I knew he knew the longer I stayed, the better.

  “Would you care for a little tour of the house?”

  “Well, sure. Thank you.”

  Julia dipped a second batch of slices in breading and, with a practiced hand, slid them into the frying pan.

  Despite the walker, Alice was light on her feet. She stepped carefully but quickly. Her walk across the fairly narrow kitchen was almost a skitter.

  I realized I was still holding the crumpled paper towel.

  “Is there a . . .”

  “I’ll take that,” Julia said. She threw away the paper towel and returned to the stove.

  Julia soon finished making the fried green tomatoes and covered the plate with a paper towel.

  I nodded at Julia. “Very nice to meet you.”

  She gave me a warm smile, still looking amused. “Nice to meet you, too.”

  I followed Alice into the rather dark hallway, with wooden floors, on the other side of the kitchen. It led to the home’s three bedrooms. First, immediately on the left, was a small bathroom with pink tiles. A pair of women’s stockings hung to dry. Above the sink, a dental appointment reminder was tucked into the side of the mirror.

  Across the hallway was a compact room with a spare bed. This was the only bedroom with a window on West Avenue and the blinds were drawn. The room held additional bookshelves and, on a small table, the fax machine that was Alice’s lifeline to friends and family now that her severely limited hearing made phone calls impossible. It was Alice’s quickest link to her sister in New York and even her friends just down the street.

  Every week, she told me, Nelle faxed her the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. The puzzles were a shared pleasure, one they
had in common with their mother.

  Alice began to tell me about their family. Frances Lee had died in 1951. Nelle was only twenty-five then and still adjusting to life in New York City. She worked as an airline reservations clerk and wrote on the side. To Kill a Mockingbird wouldn’t be published for another nine years. Only six weeks after Frances Lee died unexpectedly that summer, following a surprise diagnosis of advanced cancer, Alice, Nelle, and their middle sister, Louise, lost their only brother, Ed. He was found lifeless in his bunk one morning at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. Only thirty years old, he’d had a brain aneurysm and left a wife and two small children.

  The sorrow of those events still flickered across Alice’s face as she recounted them a half century later. When she spoke of the shock of the two deaths, Alice dropped her gaze, and her already raspy voice grew scratchier.

  “Daddy was a trouper,” she said. “He lost his wife and his son in a short period but he kept going.” And so did Alice. At work at their firm, the two of them took refuge in the purpose and routine of their shared law practice.

  The following year, Alice and A.C. moved to this house from the family’s longtime home on Alabama Avenue where Frances Lee gave birth to Nelle in an upstairs bedroom, where Nelle and Ed climbed the chinaberry tree in the yard, where A.C. pored over the Mobile Register and Montgomery Advertiser every day and indulged his fascination with the crimes detailed in magazines such as True Detective.

  But Alabama Avenue was growing more commercial, and the tranquillity of West Avenue appealed to father and daughter. A.C. had suggested the move to West Avenue before the events of that terrible summer, but Frances wasn’t interested. She didn’t want to leave the street where she had friends for a wooded area being newly developed. She’d been out there, to visit a friend who had just had a baby. The memory prompted an affectionate chuckle from Alice. “She said she didn’t want to move out there with all the owls and bats.”