Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  Robert Burns was taken to Tuscaloosa on September 28, 1977, and released from Bryce Hospital a few weeks later—less time than had passed between when he committed the murder and when he was found not guilty of having done so. He was back home in time to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family.

  At its core, the Burns trial had turned on two kinds of primitivism: belief in the supernatural and belief in vigilante justice. It wasn’t the first time that a white jury in Alabama had heard compelling evidence of murder yet reasoned their way to an acquittal. Vengeance is as old as violence, and many white southerners can trace their moral genealogy through family feuds and gentlemen’s duels, across rivers and oceans all the way back to medieval courts and biblical dynasties. Theirs was a society that not so long ago had written theft into legal treaties with Native Americans and bondage into legal deeds on the lives of African Americans; a society that until recently had believed the law elastic enough to bend without breaking, exempting lynching from the category of homicide. Like those killings, the murder of the Reverend Willie Maxwell had been witnessed by hundreds but still resulted in no conviction.

  That verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity in the Burns trial exemplified what Oliver Wendell Holmes had written in his book on American common law: “The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong. If people would gratify the passion of revenge outside of the law, if the law did not help them, the law has no choice but to satisfy the craving itself, and thus avoid the greater evil of private retribution.” When The Montgomery Advertiser cited that excerpt in its editorial about the Maxwell case, it said that people around Lake Martin, accustomed to living in fear of the Reverend, knew what Holmes was talking about, because the law had failed them. Yet when the jury acquitted Maxwell’s killer, that same newspaper lamented the decision. Vigilantism was both romantic and repellent: too practical to condemn, too dangerous to condone. But right or wrong, the case was now closed, and if some people had scruples about what had happened, almost no one outside his immediate family and thwarted law enforcement officers grieved the end of the long, strange career of the Reverend.

  Like the dam on the Tallapoosa River, the gates had closed on the Maxwell case, and ever so slowly the waters began rising. As the weeks and months passed, stories began to change, case files began to walk away, court records began to go missing. Some of these disappearances were deliberate. Would-be heroes wanted to be better known; the tarnished wanted to be left in peace; survivors of all kinds wanted the world to move on. Other losses stemmed from the inevitable ebb of memory and the erosive power of time. The present kept sliding over the past, and the past kept slipping further down, until the truth of what had transpired in the life and death of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, elusive even as it was happening, became like the stone foundations and submerged churches and sunken graves 150 feet down in a drift of silt at the bottom of Lake Martin. But before all of it vanished completely, someone came along and tried to salvage it.

  PART THREE

  The Writer

  | 15 |

  Disappearing Act

  It was the damnedest thing, but Maryon Pittman Allen couldn’t find a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird anywhere in Washington. Mrs. James Browning Allen was the second wife of the junior senator from the great state of Alabama, and in that role she was expected not only to attend the Ladies of the Senate Luncheon but to present the First Lady of the United States, Rosalynn Carter, with a book representative of her home state. It was obvious to Allen which book she should bring, since there was no Alabama tale more famous than the one about the adventures of a tomboy named Scout and her heroic lawyer of a father, Atticus Finch, but even though there were millions of copies of Nelle Harper Lee’s novel in circulation at the time, Allen couldn’t find a single one for sale in the nation’s capital.

  Allen was Lee’s age, and they had both dropped out of the University of Alabama around the same time. Lee had been a student at the law school and quit to write; Allen had been a journalism student and quit to have children. Her first marriage didn’t take and she had three mouths to feed, so she began working as a reporter for a handful of newspapers around Birmingham. That’s how she met her second husband, who was then Lieutenant Governor James Browning Allen, a widower with two children of his own. She heard church bells on her way to interview him for a story and hoped it wasn’t a sign, but four months later they were married, and four years after that they were moving to Washington for him to take his seat in the U.S. Senate. Allen didn’t like to make a big production out of her role as a Lady of the Senate, but she also didn’t want to embarrass her husband or her state, so she was determined to bring the right gift to Mrs. Carter. When she couldn’t find the book, she went looking for its author.

  Allen knew that she and Lee had a mutual friend from their Tuscaloosa days, and she thought that he might know how to get a hold of her. Nearly everyone in the state would have recognized John Forney’s voice, and the half who were Alabama fans basically thought it was the voice of God: Forney had been calling the play-by-play for the Crimson Tide for over a decade. “John,” Allen said when the sportscaster answered, “do you know where Nelle Lee is? I’ve simply got to find a copy of her book.” After she explained why, Forney told her that Lee was in Alexander City.

  Allen knew Alex City well; her first husband had been born and raised there. In the years when her own father was building levees on the Mississippi River and living with her mother in a tent on its banks, her ex-father-in-law had been hobnobbing in the Alabama State Senate. After that, J. Sanford Mullins had gone to Alex City to serve for more than three decades as the town’s attorney. As best as Allen could remember, the most exciting thing that had ever happened around Lake Martin was her father-in-law climbing into the bed of a truck to deliver one of his speeches, unfailingly fiery numbers that could draw an audience from three counties. But the Oratorical Wizard of Channahatchee Creek had long since died, and she couldn’t imagine what would entice a world-famous author to Tallapoosa County. “What in the world,” Allen asked Forney incredulously, “is she doing in Alex City?”

  Lee was there writing, Forney said, but if Allen could give him a little time, he would try to get in touch with her. A few hours later, Forney called back and said that he’d tracked Lee down at the Horseshoe Bend Motel—maybe she knew it, it was that hexagon-shaped number on Highway 280—and that he had been given the go-ahead to give her the writer’s private telephone number. “It was like she was hiding behind damn trees down there,” Allen remembers, “but I got the secret number, and we talked for over an hour.”

  They talked about small-town lawyers, since Allen wondered if Lee knew anything about her ex-father-in-law, and they talked about journalism, since Lee was a regular reader of Allen’s syndicated column, “Reflections of a News Hen.” When Allen finally got around to asking why Lee was hanging her hat in Alex City, the author wouldn’t say much—just that she had been there for a few months, working on something that had to do with a voodoo preacher. Lee did say, though, that she would make sure that a copy of her novel got to the nation’s capital by May 15, 1978, in time for the luncheon.

  True to her word, Lee sent a first edition of her book, inscribed on the front page “To Rosalynn Carter,” along with a verse from one of the hymns to wisdom in the book of Proverbs: “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” Mrs. Allen presented the book to Mrs. Carter at the Ladies of the Senate Luncheon—which, as it happens, was the last of those Allen would ever attend. Two weeks later, after she and her husband had returned to Alabama for the summer recess, Senator James Browning Allen died of a heart attack at their beach house in Gulf Shores. Not long after that, Governor George Wallace appointed Maryon Pittman Allen to her husband’s seat, making her the state’s second female senator. Overwhelmed both personally and professional
ly, she forgot all about the Pulitzer Prize winner holed up at the Horseshoe Bend Motel.

  It was easy enough to forget about Harper Lee in those days. To Kill a Mockingbird had come out eighteen years before, and in all that time Lee had published almost nothing else. Three short essays for two glossy magazines, two tiny profiles that were favors for her friend Truman Capote, one satirical recipe for crackling bread in a novelty cookbook: in nearly two decades, that was the only writing she had put into the world. No second novel had followed the first, and she hadn’t given an interview in fourteen years. The last time she had so much as agreed to be quoted in print was another favor for Capote. In 1976, he had asked Lee to sit with him during an interview for People, which was running a profile of him. She had said a total of twelve words on the record, seven of which were, “We are bound by a common anguish.”

  To Kill a Mockingbird had made Lee extravagantly wealthy, but you wouldn’t have known it to look around her life. When she was in New York, she lived in a small, rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side; when she went back to Alabama, she stayed with one of her sisters in a modest brick ranch house in their hometown of Monroeville. No matter where she was, she avoided the press, her fans, and anything that seemed too literary; she tried to live her life as if she had never published one of the most popular novels in American history. In 1962, the year the film adaptation of her book came out—the one that earned Gregory Peck an Oscar and further fixed her portrait of a small southern town in the nation’s collective memory—Lee told a reporter for The Mobile Register that she wanted to disappear, and she basically had.

  Now, alone in a motel in the middle of nowhere, with the world no longer watching, she was nearly as free as she had been in the tiny flat where she had written To Kill a Mockingbird. That was what she chose not to tell Maryon Pittman Allen that day on the phone: Harper Lee was in Alexander City because finally, all these years later, she was going to write another book.

  | 16 |

  Some Kind of Soul

  For the first thirty-four years of her life, she went by Nelle. It was “Ellen,” backward: the name of her maternal grandmother, Ellen Rivers Finch. Her middle name, and the one she would make famous, was the surname of a pediatrician in Selma who had saved her older sister’s life. When it came time to publish a book, Lee chose to leave one of her two family heirlooms off the cover. “We must confer on which name/names I’m to ‘come out’ under,” she wrote to her agents the summer before To Kill a Mockingbird was published. “I’ve signed myself ‘Harper Lee’ simply because the spelling of my first name is peculiar, and most people call it ‘Nellie’ when they read it (on checks + job applications)—something I can’t abide. I lopped it off just to avoid confusion.” As it turned out, that choice only swapped one kind of confusion for another, setting Lee up for a lifetime of having some readers assume she was a man. But the chain-smoking tomboy who played football with the boys and slept in men’s pajamas was used to confusing those around her.

  Born in 1926, a year after the Reverend Maxwell and six years before Tom Radney, Nelle Harper Lee was the fourth child of Frances Cunningham Finch and Amasa Coleman Lee. Even by the elastic standards of southern eccentricity, the Lees were a curious bunch. Descended from a Confederate soldier, but not that one, Amasa, who usually went by A.C. and sometimes by Coley, was raised on a farm in Florida and had just a few years of formal education. He knew early, though, that he did not want to spend his life in the fields; instead, before he was out of his teens, he passed the examination required to become a teacher, then began working in the schools he’d barely gotten to attend. After that, he became a sawmill clerk and later a bookkeeper, which is what brought him to Monroe County, where he met his wife, a Finch of the Finchburg Finches. The couple married in 1910 and eventually settled in Monroeville, where A.C. managed a neighboring railroad line for a local law firm, Barnett & Bugg.

  The seat of Monroe County, Monroeville had originally been called Centerville, but that name was enough of a lie that the town finally changed it. Supposedly, the surveyor tasked with finding the center of the county had been persuaded with liquor to move it a few extra miles, but after the death of President James Monroe, the residents gave up on the ruse, and voilà: Centerville became Monroeville. By the 1930s, the town had just over thirteen hundred people—a little more than Nixburg, but a lot fewer than Alexander City. Far from both the river and the railroad, Monroeville was hard to get to and easy to get stuck in.

  While A. C. Lee was working for Barnett & Bugg, he began teaching himself law, and he kept working there once he had passed the state bar exam—a thing you could do back then without first earning a degree. After he made partner, the firm became Barnett, Bugg & Lee, and it prospered, even during the Great Depression. In 1929, when so much of the country was going bankrupt, A.C. bought the local newspaper, The Monroe Journal, which he owned until 1947, and won a seat in the Alabama House of Representatives, which he held until 1938.

  Money does wonders for misfits. Thanks to their father’s prominence, the Lee children could be as odd as they pleased. That oddness started with their ages: Nelle, the baby of the family, was six years younger than her closest sibling, a brother named Edwin Coleman Lee; a decade younger than her sister Frances Louise Lee, known as Louise; and fifteen years younger than her oldest sister, Alice Finch Lee. The long gaps between children were partly a result of the difficulties their mother had experienced after Louise nearly died in infancy. The stress had left her with a “nervous disorder” too difficult for local doctors to treat, so she went away to a specialist in Mobile. It would be nearly a year before she found her way home to Monroeville.

  Because of their age differences, all four of the Lees grew up feeling a little like only children. By the time that Nelle learned to read, her oldest sister had left for college; the year that she got a bicycle for Christmas, her second-oldest sister got a husband. By fourteen, she already had a nephew. She was closest with her brother, while her older sisters were more like mothers to her. Her actual mother, made into an aesthete by years of boarding school, taught Nelle to play the harpsichord, got her hooked on crossword puzzles, and read aloud to her, but only when she was well, and she wasn’t well often. Frances had terrible allergies that made a misery of life in the agrarian South, which, with its coal trains and cotton gins and dusty seasons, could be as bad as the industrialized North, and her mental health never fully recovered from the collapse she suffered after her second pregnancy. She sometimes went away for long stretches, and when she was in Monroeville, she didn’t manage the household, delegating that job to her older daughters and a series of African American maids. The Lee children all say that their mother was gentle and kind, but their patience with her fragile health was not shared by their town or their times. Neighbors gossiped about Frances playing piano at odd hours, shouting from the front porch, repeating herself often, and, conversely, sometimes staring off in silence, incapable of the pleasantries expected of southern women.

  With her mother ill and her father at work all day and intermittently away at the legislature in Montgomery, Nelle’s early years were low on supervision. But that wasn’t unusual for children in Monroeville, who were allowed to find whatever trouble they could, so long as they came home in time to wash their hands before supper and tame their cowlicks before church. It was an era when young people were not merely permitted but expected to entertain themselves. Those who had the rare ten cents to pay for a movie were obliged to reenact the entire thing for all the other kids afterward. (Nelle, too young to see Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein when it came out, was terrified by one of her sisters’ rendition, and amazed, many years later, by its accuracy.) Mostly, though, the things they did for fun they did for free. They turned cornfields into the battlefield of Gettysburg, and cattails into the jungles of West Africa. If they stared at the ground, they were leading brigades of ants over field and mountain; if they looked to the sky, th
ey were flying like Amelia Earhart or Lucky Lindy across the Atlantic. When there were enough of them together, they played electricity, ostrich tag, looby loo, hot grease in the kitchen, and witch in the ditch; when they were alone, they got bored, and got used to it.

  Even when life wasn’t boring, it was seldom all that exciting. Monroeville was the kind of town where if your sister served cake on a Friday, she would be featured in the newspaper for having “entertained,” and if your friend’s eighth birthday party included fruit punch and prizes, it might merit its own headline plus five column inches. Open almost any issue of The Monroe Journal from the 1930s and 1940s, and you’ll find a mention of the Lees—not just because their father owned the paper and authored many of its editorials, but because there were plenty of pages and not enough news to fill them. Louise went all the way to the National 4-H Club Camp in Washington, D.C.; Edwin and the rest of the championship football team were feted with a banquet; the Epworth League of the Methodist Church met for a lecture on the Crusades, followed by an address on the state of the world, delivered by a twelve-year-old Nelle, titled “What Is the Cause of This Confusion?”

  Those were what passed for big days in a small town. For children, only school cut into the number of hours you had for doing nothing. The sleepy-eyed, towheaded Nelle went to the public schools of Monroe County, which were still segregated; it’s unlikely that she or any of her siblings ever set foot in the town’s Rosenwald School, one of the five thousand designed by Booker T. Washington and funded by the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald for the education of black children in southern states. Nelle’s own school was right by the Lee house, but her classmates never made her feel at home. She wore the wrong sorts of clothes; her hair was too short; she wrestled with the boys and didn’t like playing with the girls. When neighbors looked out their windows, they often saw Nelle, clad in overalls, running around whooping as if she were one of the Red Sticks fighting Old Mad Jackson in the Creek Wars.