Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  Born in 1902, Clinton Jackson Coley was a native of Alex City and had grown in size and stature during the same years the town had. Ostensibly he was a banker and a probate judge, but for Lee’s purposes he was the finest historian in the county and among the best in the state. Almost single-handedly, Judge Coley had convinced Congress to turn Horseshoe Bend into a national military park and convinced the U.S. Postal Service to honor Alabama native Helen Keller with a stamp. The rumpus room of his house was filled with knickknacks from every era of Alabama history, and Judge Coley was the kind of man who could, in one breath, tell you how many families got their mail at the Nixburg Post Office when Mrs. Crawford was postmistress there and, in the next, ask if you’d heard about the local boy who’d gotten into a knife fight with John Wilkes Booth before the latter left Alabama and started down the deadly path that would intersect with Abraham Lincoln. He had files full of clippings on regional history and shelves laden down with monographs, memoirs, and amateur genealogies, and he owned a copy of every pamphlet, poem, article, and chapbook ever written about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. His great-grandmother had been buried in the cemetery on Highway 9 near where Shirley Ann Ellington had been found dead, and he could be counted on to tell the story of how, on the day of her grand, gaudy funeral, a sunny sky turned thunderous and lightning struck the silver shovel the grave digger was using, breaking it to bits—an admonition from the heavens, he insisted, about extravagance. It was talking with Judge Coley, Lee joked, that saved her from putting on five pounds at the cocktail party.

  When Lee wrote to the Cribbs in June 1978 to thank them for hosting, she said, “You simply can’t beat the people in Alex City,” then added a cautionary note: “If I fall flat on my face with this book, I won’t be terribly disappointed” since she had made so many friends in town. She sounded more confident, though, when she told them she would look forward to seeing them on her next reporting trip when she returned from New York that fall. “It was not good-bye,” Lee said, “because I’ll be coming back until doomsday.”

  | 22 |

  Horseshoe Bend

  Nothing writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never transform into words, and no matter how many pages of notes and interviews and documents a reporting trip generates, the one that matters most always starts out blank. In The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm called this space between reporting and writing an “abyss.” It is an awful place, and an awfully easy place to get stuck. Everyone told Harper Lee that the story she had found was destined to be a best seller. But no one could tell her how to write it.

  When Lee returned to New York from Alabama, it was to 433 East Eighty-Second Street, where she had lived for over a decade. To the extent that a building can resemble a person, Lee’s resembled her: unadorned and inconspicuous, it was in the middle of the city yet surprisingly removed from its bustle, and from the outside it revealed nothing. Almost no one knew that one of the most celebrated authors in America lived there, hidden in plain sight, with “Lee-H” listed on the buzzer board. For a while, she shared the first floor with two musicians, known then as Daryl and John but soon to become famous by their last names: Hall & Oates, who had no idea their neighbor was a novelist, much less Harper Lee.

  Others in the building over the years knew who Lee was, but they also knew not to acknowledge her masterpiece, and except to ask about her travels northward or southward, they did not pry into her personal life. On the top floor were the Malkos, with whom she marveled about the superintendent’s insistence on smoking while holding his oxygen tank and speculated about all the other neighborhood characters as well; below them on the third floor were the Bentleys, Sonya and Frank, whose children adored Lee, including their son who became her godchild; below them were Vivian Weaver and Elaine Adam, who had worked for the Council on Foreign Relations, and then as editors and typists for friends, including the writer Patrick Dennis, whose Auntie Mame was dedicated to them. “V.V. and Mme. A.,” as they were known, liked turning their apartment into a salon and made conversation as easily as cocktails. Lee wasn’t a recluse, but she socialized in other people’s spaces or met them at museums and restaurants around the city. She was as protective of her interior space as her interior life, and many of her closest friends knew her for decades without ever setting foot inside her apartment.

  For a woman of her means, that apartment was spartan, except for the private Bodleian Library she had managed to squeeze inside it. Once, after she’d had a nightmare about being evicted, she made an inventory of all her possessions for her friends Earl and Sylvia Shorris, who lived across the street. Should the dream ever come true, she warned them, the following would be dragged onto the sidewalk: “a dilapidated bed, a chair & table, about 3,000 books and the last two manual typewriters in the world—one of which won’t work.” In that event, she begged them, “rescue the typewriter.” The books were her real companions, and she’d been collecting them since childhood. There was the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy, together with the contemporary American writers she admired—among them, Mary McCarthy, John Updike, Peter De Vries, John Cheever, and Flannery O’Connor—plus histories, crime stories, law books, and her five favorite novels: Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Richard Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

  When Lee unpacked the enormous leather briefcase that Tom Radney had given her, together with the rest of her luggage from Alabama, she found herself in the midst of a veritable mountain of Maxwelliana. In addition to the official paperwork and records, there were pamphlets, programs, and informational brochures from around Alexander City, photocopied pages from a history of Alabama, and her notes and cassette tapes from the interviews she had conducted with, among many others, the Reverend’s neighbors and employers; his widow, Ophelia Maxwell; Robert Burns; the Reverend E. B. Burpo Jr., who had presided over Shirley’s funeral and had testified at the Burns trial; Al Benn; Mary Lou Maxwell’s sister Lena Martin; Mary Ann Karr; Sergeant Gray; Judge Jim Avary; and, of course, the Radneys.

  When Lee had first read In Cold Blood, she would have been able to see clearly how it had been built from the work that she had helped with in Kansas. But reversing the process—looking at her own reporting notes and seeing the book inside them—was a very different matter. To begin with, she had to find a way to organize all her material. For Capote, she had sorted everything into ten tidy sections, but it wasn’t entirely clear how best to divide the Maxwell case up into its many parts. The setting was straightforward, but the crimes, the victims, and the trials were all hard to disentangle. The easiest way to tell any story is chronologically, but because there were police investigations, criminal trials, and civil proceedings, some of them running concurrently, the time line of the Maxwell case crisscrossed like a game of cat’s cradle.

  Worse, she needed a protagonist to place at the center of her story, but it wasn’t obvious who that might be. There was the Reverend Maxwell of course, but it was impossible to make a hero out of him, and much of his life, both before and after he was accused of murder, was underdocumented and alien to her. There was Robert Burns, but as showstopping as his funeral-home shooting had been, it was his sole contribution to the drama; he hadn’t even lived in town for much of the time that it was unfolding. There were plenty of lawmen—too many, in fact, because the deaths were spread across seven years, two counties, and a handful of law enforcement agencies—but there was no Agent Dewey, heroically solving the case and hauling the killers into the courtroom in handcuffs; in point of fact, none of the cases had ever officially been solved. The crime doctor was interesting, but his crime crew hadn’t solved any of the cases either, so they could hardly be considered heroic; even the general public’s growing interest in forensic science couldn’t justify making them the center of the story.

  Then there were the various prosecu
tors and defense attorneys. Lee had been writing lawyers since she could write, and while the district attorneys wouldn’t do, since no single one of them had been involved with all the cases, she liked a good defense attorney, and Tom Radney was a very good defense attorney. Moreover, Radney had represented the Reverend for ten years, and then represented his assassin, so he could easily carry the story from start to finish. He was also a complicated protagonist, the sort of morally complex character Tay Hohoff had encouraged her to avoid. Radney had profited immensely from his share of the insurance litigation, which had raised eyebrows around Tallapoosa County, and he had been essential to keeping the Reverend out of prison, which had drawn the ire of Coosa County, but Robert Burns’s acquittal had restored his standing around Lake Martin.

  Radney’s legal talents were matched by his political ambitions, and choosing him would give Lee an opportunity to write about the role of race in the political machine of Alabama and the justice system of America. The difficulty was that the Maxwell case was not exactly an ideal parable about race and justice; she knew all too well that the story of a black serial killer wasn’t what readers would expect from the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. While there are very good reasons to wonder if the investigations would have turned out differently had any of the Reverend’s alleged victims been white, it’s equally true that law enforcement officers in the South were often only too eager to convict African Americans for crimes, violent or otherwise. Moreover, the lawmen around Lake Martin couldn’t be accused of negligence in the case of the Reverend Willie Maxwell; they had tried zealously to convict him and used every resource available to them, yet failed again and again.

  Although Tom Radney wasn’t a perfect protagonist, he was, like Agent Dewey in Kansas, an exceptionally convenient one. He was one of the few people from Alex City who called to see how Lee’s book was going and he offered to do anything she needed to get it written: share memories, track down information, make connections for her, and lend her his service in any other way she needed. Lee found Big Tom generous with his time, but not an entirely reliable narrator of the events of the Maxwell case or his own life. That was often just out of carelessness, the way everyone sometimes misremembers things that happened years ago. “His memory for facts,” Lee would later lament of Big Tom, “caused me much dismay.”

  But Lee was bothered less by what he told the world than by what he told himself. His “psychological processes,” she would reflect, “were of clinical fascination to me.” However good a lawyer he was, she understood right away that no matter whom he was representing, he was first and foremost representing himself. And she had talked with enough people around Alexander City to know that his charms weren’t universally appreciated. She put the matter plainly a few years later, warning, “If accuracy is what you are after, check out everything he says; if a hero is what you want, invent one.”

  * * *

  —

  Lee did want accuracy, but when she tried to start writing, she found that facts were in short supply. To begin with, it was difficult to reconstruct the life of a sharecropper’s son. History isn’t what happened but what gets written down, and the various sources that make up the archival record generally overlooked the lives of poor black southerners. Lee could trace Tom Radney’s entire career, along with his family’s success and service, in The Alexander City Outlook, but when she went looking for anything about the Reverend Maxwell, she found only his crimes. That was in keeping with the way black lives in the South and elsewhere had been treated—not merely criminalized but criminally neglected, including in her father’s own newspaper, which had frequent mentions of the Lee family but only the occasional “Negro News” column. There were black newspapers, of course, but not even those had mentioned Maxwell until after his death; reporters from The Afro-American and Jet had covered the story only after the Reverend was gunned down. A writer trying to fix the life of the Reverend Willie Maxwell on the page was mostly at the mercy of oral history, which could be misremembered or manipulated or simply withheld from an outsider. There were also things no oral history could have told Lee except a confession from the Reverend.

  Day after day, Lee sat down and tried to make a book out of, or around, those gaping holes. She had once fantasized about a kind of secular monastery for writers, where, supported by the government, they would be locked away with nothing but bread and water. Her own disciplines were less draconian: she liked to sleep late, start writing around noon, take a break for dinner, then carry on until deep into the night. She tended to write longhand first, and then, at the end of every day, she typed a fresh copy of her draft—“picking out the nut from the shell,” she called it—on the Olivetti typewriter she’d finally bought to replace her faithful old Royal. “I work very slowly,” Lee acknowledged. “A good eight-hour day usually gives me about one page of manuscript I won’t throw away.” But her necessities were few, “paper, pen, and privacy,” she once joked, later amending the list only slightly: “A tremendous pot of coffee helps, but is not essential.”

  Lee liked to claim that other people, too, were not essential. “You depend entirely upon yourself and no one else,” she had once said of writing, but in fact To Kill a Mockingbird had come into being through the extensive editorial direction of Tay Hohoff. “If the Lippincott editors hadn’t been so fussy and painstaking,” Maurice Crain once wrote, “we wouldn’t have had nearly so good a book.” But Crain and Hohoff were both dead, leaving Lee without the literary helpmeets who had once guided her from draft to publication. By the time she sat down to write her true-crime book, she had outlived her literary agency (Crain and Williams had passed along most of their clients to McIntosh & Otis, a firm started by one of Annie Laurie’s friends) as well as her publisher (Lippincott had been acquired by Harper & Row, which would eventually become HarperCollins).

  Lee valorized solitude, but the sociability of reporting was better for her, not least because it countered her depressive tendencies. But here she was, alone again with her typewriter and nothing to do but write. Every day, her to-do list consisted of the same single item: write a book. Even on days when she did manage to get something done, she could never cross it off. Making the story of the Reverend into the book she was now calling The Reverend wasn’t turning out to be as straightforward as it seemed, and soon the optimism of “coming back” that she had expressed when leaving Alexander City faded into the pessimism of “doomsday.”

  Among the many already-written books keeping Lee company in her apartment was a copy of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which she had read, as she put it, umpteen times. Crusoe had been shipwrecked twenty-eight years, and Lee must have identified. The same number of years had passed since she had moved to New York, yet there she was surrounded by loneliness, struggling with a book that didn’t seem to want to be written, on what must have felt, at times, like her own Island of Despair. Her father, like Crusoe’s, had wanted her to stay home, but she had gone adventuring instead. Now she was alone in her apartment, notching her days.

  * * *

  —

  What Lee had long hidden from the world, she couldn’t hide from her family. Her sisters, as ever, watched over her, and three years into working on her new book, she accepted an invitation from the middle one, Louise Conner, to come stay with her in Eufaula, a hundred miles from Alexander City and not far from the Georgia line. Weezie was sixty-four and had lived in Barbour County since Nelle was ten. General Sherman started east of Eufaula on his march to the sea, so it still has one of the largest historic districts in the state, full of Gothic Revivals, Greek Revivals, classical revivals, and just about every other architectural style worth reviving. Back when it was settled, the town had been perched on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, but forty years after the Martin Dam tamed the Tallapoosa, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a dam near Eufaula to make the Walter F. George Reservoir, and a year after that a wildlife refuge was established to prote
ct the storks, falcons, bald eagles, and alligators displaced by the hydroelectric project. Between the refuge, the reservoir, and all of the historic buildings, Eufaula was, according to Harper Lee, “the loveliest town in the state.”

  Louise, who had opened her home on Country Club Road to Lee many times before, was used to being “the sister of the author” and had long since reconciled herself to sharing her childhood with the entire world. She had given a few interviews right after To Kill a Mockingbird was published and had confided to some friends her shock at Nelle’s instant celebrity. “My baby sister that we thought would have to be supported all her life could buy and sell us all at the drop of a hat,” Louise wrote to one friend, marveling over how Nelle turned down work to avoid climbing income tax brackets and needed an unlisted telephone number to keep reporters and her legions of fans at bay.