by Wayne Flynt
“Yes!” I nearly shouted. “And what does that mean to all of you and to this production?”
After that, we three teachers could not shut the students up. Work on the production began.
The night of the Birmingham Pledge Award, the foundation scheduled a reception for contributors who wanted to meet Harper Lee. She stood at the head of a long line that meandered across the lobby, greeting each person with a handshake and conversation, even though she was eighty and must have been exhausted. Just then I saw the joint high school cast of Mockingbird walk into the auditorium and get in line, each costumed and made up as the characters they were playing. (The foundation director had invited them.) Although many donors still needed to be greeted, I raced to the end of the line, corralled the kids, broke into the queue, loudly excused my rudeness, and told Nelle to sit down on the couch behind her because I had a surprise: the cast of the play I had told her about earlier in the evening had come to meet her. She sagged onto the cushions with an overly loud “Thank God!” and grinned as Atticus Finch, Scout, Boo Radley, Miss Maudie, Tom Robinson, Calpurnia, and all the rest posed for photographs and engaged her in animated conversation.
Within minutes the sponsors had escorted her to the front row of the auditorium and me to my chair onstage. That was the evening when Dartie, Nelle, and I began the process of transforming acquaintanceship into something much deeper.
1
In the Beginning
In an opinion column published by Alabama newspapers in July 1992, I paid tribute to the remarkable Lee family of Monroeville, especially Harper. In passing, I mentioned that I had read To Kill a Mockingbird in the fall of 1963, while I was in graduate school, only months after the terrorist bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. That murder of four young girls had so outraged me that, having left Alabama to study at Florida State University, I vowed never to return home to live. But after reading Nelle’s novel—a luxury delayed for a few years by my doctoral studies—I began to reassess. It occurred to me that I knew many white people like Atticus Finch and Miss Maudie, as well as not a few blacks like Tom Robinson and Calpurnia. Nor was my state anything like H. L. Mencken’s legendary “Sahara of the Bozart,” a cultural wasteland. Alabama writers had claimed two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction since 1933 (including one for Mockingbird, in 1961) and several National Book Awards, an impressive total for one of the poorest, least educated, and most backward states in America.
Louise Conner, who had become our friend by then, sent the column to Nelle. The letter she wrote to me about it, dated October 1992 but mislaid and not mailed until August, was our first written communication—but since I had left by that time for a semester of research and lecturing in China, it lay unopened in a huge stack of mail until I returned home early in 1993. Nelle’s postscript, gently scolding me for referring to her as the oldest of the three Lee sisters when in fact she was the youngest (sixty-six at that time), set the tone for our later friendship: she was not one to excuse misstatements of fact, suffer fools gladly, silently dismiss literary misquotations, or allow anyone to invade her space without invitation. And if you did not want to know her candid opinion of anything, better not to ask.
When Alabama friends moved to Houston, Texas, in 1981, Nelle wrote the couple her impressions of their new town. The letter, headed “Dear Both”—which her friends showed to me years later and offered for inclusion in this book—captures the full dimensions of Nelle’s sardonic wit, her dislike of the Lone Star State (San Antonio excepted), and her zeal for antiquarian bookstores and all things British.
The public image of Nelle as a private woman—opinionated, uncommunicative, cool if not cold insofar as human relationships were concerned—is far from the truth. She was in fact empathetic, warm, nonjudgmental, and a wonderful conversationalist, often going out of her way to answer letters to children, teachers, and fans, to attend award ceremonies for high schoolers who wrote essays about Mockingbird, to host friends visiting New York City, and to read and critique manuscripts by other writers.
No single letter better captures these qualities than one I received from a member of the audience at a speech I gave about Nelle in Fairhope, Alabama. In it, Mary Cameron (“Cammie”) East Cowen described two encounters with the famous writer, thinking I might use them in a lecture I was scheduled to give at the University of Vienna. Cammie grew up in Mobile, where her parents owned and operated a well-known antiquarian establishment, the Haunted Book Shop, which had sponsored one of the first Alabama signings of Mockingbird. Based on this casual meeting, Nelle later hosted Cammie, who was passing through on her way to freshman year at Wellesley College, for a week in New York City.
433 East 82 Street
The Garden of Eden 10028
16 March 1981
My dear Both:
There are no chic people in Texas.
I spent some time in Houston a few years ago and found it to be the punishment for a mis-spent life, exactly my idea of what hell is like. No past, no future, just NOW in all its tastelessness. It’s worse than Los Angeles, because L.A.’s hellishness has a certain dotty charm in places, an Oz-like quality of wish-fulfillment. Houston was destroyed and sown with salt in 1959. It was rebuilt all of a piece in the image of Jesse Jones and men of similar vision: The Galleria and River Oaks doubled and redoubled, containing Misses Ima & Ura Hogg. Your standard of living will be greater than anything you ever dreamed of, but just try to have a decent conversation with your air-conditioner. On the other hand, it might not be that bad: you are so far above the average Houston billionaire that in no time you’ll be the cultural leaders of the town. Therefore, think not of what Houston can do for you, think of what you can do for Houston: teach them.
Venture out from Houston into the west Texas plains and you Alabama puritans will feel like old Roman voluptuaries. They are so clean-living out there they defy description. They are also rich.
San Antonio is the only town with any possibilities. It contains an old architect friend of mine whose wife lay down in front of bulldozers and thus preserved some of its character. They are rich.
Houston did have something once, but I got it: in a bookshop (the bookshop) I found to my astonishment four volumes of the old Strand Magazine, containing the original Sherlock Holmes stories, hot off the press! The fools sold the volumes for $4. In addition to not knowing the value of anything, they don’t even know the price.
Come home, all is forgiven.
With much love,
NELLE
P.S. If you think of trying to play golf on that course in the middle of town, don’t. A fifty-mile gale blows there at all times.
Harper Lee
433 East 82 Street
New York, N.Y. 10028
19 October 1992
Dear Mr. Flynt
You do not let the semi-junk mail you receive pile up to be disposed of every few months, as I do mine, so you stay out of trouble.
I was just going through the accumulation on my desk: at the bottom I found three addressed, stamped letters that I thought had gone out weeks ago. One of them was a note to you, dated 3 August, and I shall repeat what it said:
My sister, Louise Conner, sent me a copy of your article in The Birmingham News of 12 July.
To learn that a man of your gifts, by faith in one novel, chose to make his life in Alabama . . . makes its author feel humble indeed.
I can only say thank you for honoring the state with your presence; thank you for your most kind article; thank you for the generosity which prompted it.
Sincerely yours,
NELLE HARPER LEE
That’s what it said. It didn’t say that in addition to the gratitude my family and I feel, you made Louise chortle with delight at one small error: actually, she’s my senior by some years—I’m the younger. There was a brother between us who died at the age of thirty. His widow married again, and their children were brought up in Auburn.
That you are a noble man is the opinion of
all the Lees; that you are a forgiving man is something I hope to discover if ever I have the pleasure of meeting you.
From: Cammie East
Sent: December 31, 1998 6:42 PM
Dear Dr. Flynt
Thank you for your talk in Fairhope a few Saturdays ago. I enjoyed hearing what you had to say, and you may even inspire me to get off my kazoo and send a note to Nelle and Miss Alice, both of whom I love dearly but with whom I seldom communicate.
I mentioned it to John Sledge, who was much interested in the possibilities for the book page, and indeed may have contacted you by now.
I can offer you one little tiny tidbit about Miss Lee that may or may not be helpful at your congress of Vienna; I don’t think she’d mind my sharing it with you.
My father and Caldwell Delaney spotted the book right away as something remarkable, when it first came out, having read the pre-pub softback copy that Lippincott sent out (which is still one of my treasures). As I remember, they moved quickly and made arrangements to invite her to Mobile to speak at the library, and she agreed. Perhaps the library or its friends gave her an award—that part I cannot remember so clearly. I do remember that she began her talk in Bernheim Hall by announcing that she would first take off her shoes, which indeed she did, further scandalizing what I remember as some blue-haired ladies who weren’t too happy about the book’s racial themes to begin with. And that she was charming and dear, I thought.
After that session, she sent my parents a thank-you letter, in which she mentioned that she was working with some of the translators to produce international editions. I particularly remember that she mentioned that the Dutch one was having trouble understanding what a “spite fence” was, and that she was struggling to explain it. She also kindly and generously entertained me in New York for a week in September of 1963, when I was en route to Wellesley as a freshman and was foolish enough to believe that I had conquered the world. She put up with me nobly, put us both up at the Roosevelt and introduced me to the joys of 2 a.m. hamburgers ordered from room service, among other pleasures of the big city. I will always cherish the memory of her insistence that the two of us stand for hours on a New York sidewalk in a throng waiting for John F. Kennedy to ride by in his limousine as he went to speak at the United Nations. I kept insisting that she couldn’t really want to wait there all that time, and she kept insisting that I should see the president. He was running late, but we waited, and now he’s the only one I’ve ever seen in the flesh. And from what I’ve seen of most of the others, I think I’d just as soon keep it that way . . .
I will love her forever, even if I seldom communicate it.
Cammie East
2
Celebrity, Kinship, and Calamity
After our first exchange of letters in 1992–93, Nelle and I were out of touch for twelve years. During that time Dartie and I continued our friendship with Louise, only to lose her, in time, to illness and physical distance. After we saw Nelle at the Alabama Humanities Foundation awards ceremony, and she gave us Louise’s address and phone number, I wrote her our thanks, and she replied, addressing me as “Wayne” instead of the earlier “Mr. Flynt.”
The forthcoming movie she alludes to is Capote, staring Philip Seymour Hoffman in an Academy Award–winning performance as the narcissistic writer, with Catherine Keener portraying his longtime best friend, Nelle. Much of the movie focuses on the pair’s journey to Holcomb, Kansas, to investigate the gruesome murder of a farm family by two drifters, and the writers’ joint creation of a new genre of literature, “nonfiction fiction” (for which Capote unfairly claimed sole credit). Before she ever saw the film, Nelle was told about alleged factual inaccuracies in it, and in her letter she expresses outrage over them. Eventually she did see the film, and liked it, especially Hoffman’s portrayal of Capote. But she did find errors (for example, Capote is shown talking to one of the murderers in his cell, when in truth, Nelle says, they were allowed to speak to the prisoners only in the regular visiting area). Being herself, she wrote to the director, Richard Brooks, about his mistakes.
On September 16 I sent Nelle a copy of my newly published book Alabama in the Twentieth Century. In the last chapter, which details the accomplishments of Alabama writers, artists, and musicians, I had devoted a page to her.
The mutual friend whom I proposed we bring along on a visit was Kathryn Tucker Windham, a famous Alabama storyteller who lived in Selma and was a regular contributor to National Public Radio.
Nelle’s February 18, 2005, description of Hurricane Ivan reflected both her rage at reporters who treated Monroeville’s revered old courthouse as if it were more important than the town’s people and her contempt for the state’s political leaders, particularly State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who installed a huge granite copy of the Ten Commandments in the state’s highest judicial building as a prop for his delusional gubernatorial and presidential ambitions. Her own health and that of her two beloved sisters was nearly as great a concern to her as storms and politics.
Her annual Christmas cards to us were unique reflections of her love for art and fine stationery, of New York City and Great Britain.
May 15, 2004
Dear Ms. Lee,
Thanks so much for Louise’s address. I called twice, but she could never hear well enough to identify us. I have written as well, but I doubt that she will reply. Nonetheless, our quarterly visits to Eufaula to take your sister out to lunch, to watch the birds in her feeder, rock on the porch and swap stories constitute a memory bank from which we will make withdrawals for the rest of our lives. Louise is quite a woman.
Incidentally, the Lee legacy goes on in the Flynt family. Our son, who is a graduate of the Design and Art Center in Pasadena, CA, and now a designer/artist for Microsoft, and his wife (a brilliant young woman from the tiny coal town of Morris, AL) have wiped the sexist/racist dust of Alabama off their feet in their journey to a more liberal land in Seattle. But when they presented us with the first female offspring in three generations of Flynts, they named her Harper in your honor. I guess old places and people hold tenaciously onto us despite all our efforts to disengage. A piece of fine irony I believe.
Sincerely,
Wayne
2 August ’04
NYC but soon home.
Dear Wayne:
Forgive me for not writing you—I’ve spent these months in NYC going to eye doctors for them to tell me they “can’t do anything” and to Lighthouse International to get magnifying glasses, electronic Readers, etc. If you know anyone with macular degeneration (the profession’s euphemism—coined in 1962—for senile blindness) tell them the Lighthouse shop has every gadget there is for the visually impaired (Blind is now a no-no word, like sin). Will be home next week.
[Louise’s son] Hank Conner says that his mother will not communicate by telephone. She has long since stopped writing, and her sisters have given up trying to reach her. She was so fond of you and your wife that I hoped a call or letter from you would trigger a response. You were two of her nearest & dearest, and if she will not respond to you, I’m afraid we have lost her, that nothing will bring her out of this awful thing she’s in.
I am so greatly honored by my namesake. Your children have a chance to change her name before she learns it but I hope I won’t give them reason to. Please convey to them my gratitude. They may indeed want to change it if what I’ve heard is correct: that a docu-drama will be made of Truman Capote’s Kansas adventures and I’m to be in it. I’m told that the idea is that Truman fell in love with Perry Smith, one of the killers, & had an affair with him. No he didn’t. I was there and the film-makers weren’t.
Best ever,
NELLE
September 16, 2004
Dear Nelle,
We were distraught to learn your analysis of Louise’s condition . . . The last time I visited her at the facility in Eufaula, there was some of the old, witty Louise; but she was also unusually reticent and withdrawn. We often had sat in the roc
king chairs on her porch and watched the birds eat from her feeder. Sometimes we wouldn’t talk, only watch and ponder. But soon she would be off again, discussing the British Open or quizzing me about why people in Alabama seemed so afraid of change. At the home, however, the periods of silence increased until I finally felt like an intruder even for being there . . . I know . . . what a special and unique person she is, and we will always treasure the days when we shared meals at her favorite soul food restaurant in Lumpkin, Georgia, or the little Chinese restaurant in Eufaula.
We were no less distressed to learn you have macular degeneration. We do know people who suffer from it. In fact, the man who taught Dartie and me ballroom dancing suffers from the disease. Yet he is one of the finest dancers I have ever seen and even travels alone to Rome to meet his wife when she visits Europe on business. He has had it ever since we have known him and manages quite well. I suppose the disease affects people as Parkinson’s does my wife: horrible shock at the diagnosis, followed by depression and anger, then by resignation, then by resolution and a determination to live life as we all ought to live it anyway: existentially. I love the Sermon on the Mount for people like ourselves. We are given only assurance of this one day anyway, so we rejoice in this existential moment. No one, after all can count on more than that.
I hope you will accept this [book as a] small token of the great esteem in which I hold you. I explain your relationship to the story in the preface and hope I do justice to you in the final chapter (which by the way, is my favorite chapter). There were so many people who have meant so much to me . . . that I wanted Alabamians to know they have much to take pride in beyond college football. I regret that the book was so long, but . . . it took . . . awhile to process half a century of observations about a place I care about so deeply. . . . At least I hope my grandchildren, Dallas and Harper, will grow up in Seattle with their grandfather’s perception of the people from whom they come rather than the stereotypes of rednecks and ridge runners, of Roy Moore and Fob James, of fundamentalist religion and narrow-minded intolerance and gratuitous meanness. Since you represent precisely what I want them to take pride in (as do their parents), I am quite certain they knew exactly what they were doing when they named her. . . .