by Wayne Flynt
During that same August, I lectured to ninety passengers aboard the iconic 1927 steamboat Delta Queen. I began my talk about Nelle by asking how many of the passengers—few of whom were from the South—had read To Kill a Mockingbird. Nearly all had. Then I asked how many had read James Joyce’s Ulysses. Two or three raised their hands.
That fall, Nelle remained in Monroeville longer than usual to be honored by the Birmingham Pledge Foundation and to watch the casts from the Fairfield and Mountain Brook high schools perform their joint stage production of Mockingbird. James E. Rotch, who established the foundation, asked me to introduce her at the award presentation, which would be attended by several thousand of her admirers. The introduction, “Atticus’ Vision of Ourselves,” drew on the essay I had written for the EOA, Nelle’s careful scrutiny and critique of it, my own reading of the Bible and theology, and my lifelong involvement in social justice causes.
Nelle’s letter describing her reaction to my introduction arrived weeks later, and revealed some of her thinking on a couple of topics that are important in understanding her. The first was her lifelong affection for New York City and her voracious intellectual and literary curiosity.
The other important topic is Nelle’s religious belief. Despite her disdain for both my Baptist ministerial identity and institutional religion in general—which had so often disappointed her, despite the Lee family’s fidelity to it and her own high regard for the works of British novelist and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis—she asked me to deliver the eulogy after her death. The eulogy, she specified, should be solely about her novel and the enduring moral values it conveyed. There was to be nothing about her personal or private life. So insistent was she on this point that she instructed me to send a copy of “Atticus’ Vision” to Alice for safekeeping and implementation. To be on the safe side of her heavenly displeasure, I also sent copies to Ed and Hank Conner, conveying her strict instructions to read it as I had written it, in the event I was deceased or unable to do so.
When Nelle alludes to the “greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins,” she is comparing Perkins, the renowned Scribner’s editor who worked with Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, with the Christian saint and chief editor of the Flynt family—my wife, Dartie, who edited my drafts of “Atticus’ Vision” and did not spare my feelings when critiquing my writing.
The last letter in this chapter is from Alice Lee, writing to thank us for a gift of roses, which we harvested from our seventy-seven bushes at the end of the long 2006 Alabama growing season. We gave them to Alice when we visited on December 2.
July 24, 2006
Dear Nelle,
We are all delighted that you plan to be in Montgomery on August 21. Dr. Regina Benjamin is such an inspiration: a woman who never forgets where she came from or the people who have been left behind. That the Academy of Honor is recognizing her is a sign of how far this state has come since the Academy began as a way of honoring conservative white males in the 1960s.
I am enclosing my essay on TKAM that will be included in the Encyclopedia of Alabama when it goes on line in December 2007. I tried hard to make sure I got the story correct, but if you find a glaring error, let me know. I hate writing encyclopedia entries: standardized form; turgid prose; everything truncated and over-simplified. But the last encyclopedia concerning Alabama (by Thomas McAdory and Marie Bankhead Owen) appeared in the early 1920s, so it is past time for an update. Just return the essay in the envelope when you finish reading it.
Since I was retiring, the folks at the Humanities Foundation insisted I was the only person who could call in enough I.O.U.’s to make the project work. We have now raised more than one-and-a-half million dollars, have a headquarters funded by Auburn, have recruited a wonderful staff, have commissioned more than 500 articles by scholars from around the world, and will launch our venture next December. As “general editor,” I exercised my vast powers to preempt a few articles (the overview essay on Alabama, the essay about poor whites, and TKAM). Bert Hitchcock and Nancy Anderson (A.U. and A.U.M. English profs.) authored the essay about you. . . .
After the EOA goes on-line electronically, I am sure the University of Alabama Press will publish a print version of the best material. Frankly, I care so little for electronically derived information that I will rely on the printed medium. But I know my way is not the wave of the future. It is quite ironic that I, of all persons, who know so little about computers and so dislike email, should be the general editor. But at least I have recruited a remarkable group of people who understand the technology. . . .
I predict TKAM will be one of the most frequently referenced entries, so I want to be accurate.
Wayne
31 July ’06
Dear Wayne:
Your letters are never less than wonderful, a word I use sparingly, but not about anything you write.
What a project! It sounds absolutely first-rate in concept and will be, of course, with you doing most of it (as it appears to me). How lucky for the state of Alabama that you’ve retired: your retirement is like everybody else’s full career, and to have you going at full speed makes us fortunate indeed.
Hooray!
I have noted some small things on the entry about me that I’ve penciled 1, 2, etc. on the manuscript but written out on an accompanying page. If some of the comments seem acerbic, they aren’t meant to be. It’s just old age, 46-year-old rumors, academic assumptions, & general crabbiness that provoked them.
I so look forward to meeting the Flynt tribe in Montgomery! It’s the one thing I’m really excited about! (You’ll soon learn that Alabama’s 100 can be a boring lot, sometimes, especially ex-governors who get the floor and natter on about their achievements, or the world’s most successful real estate mogul telling how he did it.)
I’m told that the present chairman, Tom Carruthers, is the fellow responsible for bringing some enlightenment to the Academy—i.e., suggesting that women, scholars, & super citizens should be included, to say nothing of writers and people in the arts. Heretofore, with one exception (Nell Rankin, the token EVERYTHING—female, artist, good citizen, etc., elected in the 70’s and alone until the 90’s!) the membership was composed by men who wished their grandfathers had been Republicans. Tom has brought the organization to its present deplorable condition: we are taking in a poor black woman who works out of a pick-up truck, and an old professor from Auburn, of all places who has done nothing but write revisionist history, and whom I would have nominated but Kathryn Windham beat me to it.
Much love,
NELLE
1. I’m glad people love it in spite of these major failings. I wonder what their reaction would have been if TKAM had been complex, sour, unsentimental, racially unpaternalistic because Atticus was a bastard. TKAM would have received great critical acclaim (which it did anyway) and not’ve had a second printing, but I’m content with patronizing opinions & mere popularity.
2. “ . . . story may have been based . . .” The story was not based on the Scottsboro case or the Walter Lett case. Because the two took place at the same time TKAM was set, this is an easy, “Harper Lee must have been thinking of . . .” sort of speculation so loved by academics.
3. TKAM was not formed by “a series of short stories.” It grew out of one short story.
4. The novel sold 2 ½ million copies during its first year . . . is wildly wrong. I love the “ . . . also won the Pulitzer Prize for 1961” afterthought!
5. I’m glad the public embraced TKAM in spite of the Modern Library list of the 100 greatest novels!
6. For “set in Monroeville, Alabama” read “small Alabama town.” TKAM’s popularity has caused Monroeville people to claim ownership down to the most insignificant character. “That was my Aunt Clara. She always said, ‘Aw, shoot!’” was the most far-out attempt to be a part of the “in” crowd. Had TKAM sold 2,000 copies, I could go home again!
August 25, 2006
Dear Nelle,
I can’t
tell you how grateful I am for your typical gracious attention to my family. They were all enchanted by the grand lady and still talk about the experience in a near mystical way. And as I observed your similar attention to so many others, I began to understand why you protect your privacy so firmly.
I promised to send you a copy of my remarks, so here it is. I look forward to seeing you on the 13th in Birmingham. Jim Rotch has invited the casts performing TKAM at all-black Fairfield H.S. and all-white Mountain Brook to the ceremony, and they are ecstatic at the opportunity just to see you. Do Methodists declare sainthood? If so, you may be on the way.
Wayne
8 September ’06
Dear Wayne:
Herewith another list of things to thank you for:
1. I’ve only just received the letter giving your account of the fortunate passengers on the Delta Queen—how I wish I had been among them! (The neighbor who forwards my mail to Monroeville elected to go to Italy for a month’s vacation just as I came home & just as your letter arrived in NYC. The next mailing from her will contain threats to cut off things.) To wander along those waterways and be guided by Wayne Flynt is my idea of time spent in perfection—what a rich history, what a masterful interpreter of it! I sort of wish you hadn’t told me of what I missed.
And I’m glad my nit-picking caused no offense—my bio is safe in your hands; ignore my carpings, just correct the errors—a few that are rusty with time. I trust you not to give me the resentments Mr. Shields assumed that I harbored!
2. Something I’d so been looking forward to, of course didn’t happen, spending a few hours with you and that wonderful family of yours. I got just enough of a tease to want MORE. I was gently handcuffed from the beginning, a beginning in the archives building that lasted until the academy meeting started and then . . . having to creep back to the seat where Debra Wilkins had put me—not with the Flynt family. If you think I was purposely avoiding you, please know that I didn’t have a prayer.
The glimpse I did get told me that Harper Flynt is bright, feisty, a tomboy & rabble-rousing little girl who is satisfactory in every way and whose name delights me. And beautiful—unlike the other Harper. Her parents, grandmother & Uncle looked so attractively intelligent that I simply wanted to break loose and be with you, but of course, I couldn’t. Promise me that somehow we can get together.
3. Kathryn Windham is being offered up to this year’s Harvest Festival, crowned with fruits of the earth, for nominating you for membership to the Academy. The two people there who wondered why were given no doubt about “why” when they heard you. In the five years of new members’ addresses, yours was far away the most impressive I’ve heard, and that includes Cathy Randall’s house-grabber of three years ago. Wayne, you are magic. The academy is blessed by your presence.
With you in it, it truly means “Alabama’s best.” Slowly, I think we are going from B’ham real estate tycoons to include our best from all callings, and your election brings the endeavor to a new and successful happening: college presidents, yes—history professors, well, hey, this guy Flynt can actually speak our language! He understands that history is us—dollars & cents! He shows us that we can make more money if we’re better citizens! Let’s get us another professor!
The danger there, of course, is getting just any other professor. The one we have, we can’t duplicate: superb intelligence and true charity are so rare, that only one professor in the South has this startling combination, and I’m lucky enough to be in his presence come Wednesday.
Love,
NELLE
I have a new light—yet one more! It’s sort of blue, like the light T. J. Jackson gave off. Lets me write smaller.
September 17, 2006
Dear Nelle,
Well you certainly provided an early Christmas for 50 teenagers from Fairfield and Mountain Brook High Schools. For a woman renowned for her “aloofness” and “shyness” you were mighty warm, kind, generous, and social. So much for stereotypes! . . . . Knowing how excited they were at the prospect of meeting you, I doubt any of them slept much that night.
I am sorry the organizers kept you moving so frantically all day, but at least you saw a side of Alabama that didn’t exist a quarter century ago: determination to face up to our history, to claim it and profit from it. If our generation can’t rise to the challenge of change, perhaps those young people and their generation can.
I can come down to Monroeville with Sean and Shannon in November after Thanksgiving, or bring them down before or after Christmas with their siblings from Seattle. We are determined to have a short visit, to cause no commotion, and to leave early. So tell me what fits your schedule best. . . .
I enclose a copy of my presentation from Wednesday night [see page 17].
Sincerely,
Wayne
6
An Author Shapes Her Own Identity
I experienced lots of deadlines, unrealistic expectations, and pressure in my career as teacher, historian, speaker, and writer. None, not one, even came close to the events of September 13, 2006. When Jim Rotch, founder of the Birmingham Pledge Foundation, asked me to present the tribute to Nelle at the ceremony honoring her lifetime of work on behalf of racial reconciliation, I accepted without thinking of the consequences: thousands of Nelle’s adoring Alabama fans filling the auditorium; forty or so of the finest young thespians in the state expecting as much from my performance as from their own; only twenty minutes to render a life from the fragments of a single novel. The moment I stood up at the podium, I knew I should have said “No way.” But I rushed on in. Given the deepening of our families’ friendship in subsequent months, including a holiday visit to Alice’s house in Monroeville and to the Lees’ maternal Finchburg plantation home, it was a risk worth taking.
In her letter asking me to save the tribute to present as eulogy at her memorial service, she included an uncharacteristically romantic request to scatter her ashes above Manhattan if she died in the Big Apple. Although I never invaded her privacy by asking, I’ve always suspected that the desire she expresses in one letter, to die in the city and to have her ashes “scattered to the 4 winds of Manhattan,” was inspired by the writer Damon Runyon’s unusual funeral arrangements. When he died in 1946, three years before a literary, starstruck woman arrived in the city from Monroeville, Alabama, his body was cremated, and, according to his instructions, a DC-3 flown by World War I hero Eddie Rickenbacker (illegally) scattered his ashes in the sky above Manhattan. Nelle loved Manhattan and identified with Runyon, a journalist and short story writer who had fled his birthplace in the Little Apple (Manhattan, Kansas) for New York City. In his new home he celebrated the world Nelle also came to adore: Broadway; baseball; gambling; drinking; writing; living amidst America’s most exciting literary culture; liberation from the restrictions of small town America.
One of those restrictions had to do with food. Whenever she got the chance to make fun of Monroeville’s culinary offerings, she did; with typical hyperbole, she regularly warned us against expecting a decent meal; according to Nelle, the town had no satisfactory food on Mondays, or on Saturdays, or on Sundays—or pretty much any other day.
9/26/06
Dear Wayne:
Hang onto “Atticus’s Vision of Ourselves” because I want you to read it at my memorial service, should I die in Monroeville. (If you aren’t around, someone else will read it.) One hymn—The Lord’s My Shepherd Crimond Tune [an older musical setting to the lyrics of a favorite traditional hymn]—and that’s it. (If I die in NYC my ashes will, without ceremony, be scattered to the 4 winds of Manhattan).*
Because my bodyguard (will you believe it?!) whisked me away like I was Al Capone evading machine guns, I had no chance to tell you and the greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins that there is simply no way to thank you for the loving kindness, perception, generosity and genius of your latest gift to me, tendered in one of the finest speaking voices I ever heard and believe me, I was sitting close enough to hear you this time
!
I did not realize that the B’ham News had contributed so much to the decline of print journalism—from the next day’s account, you’d think that nothing really happened but the 2 schools’ appearance. It was really upsetting that the awards ceremony was so ill-reported. They just plain missed the greatest presentation speech ever given for anybody and the audience’s reaction to it. It sounded like Auburn had already stomped on Alabama this year. The lack of reportage made me wonder if a reporter was there.
One further note: sheer panic makes me charming & gracious. I’m so terrified by these things that I’ll be anything I’m asked to be if I can just get through it without revealing the idiot behind the smile. Every time, I say it’s the last—be it hon[orary] or other award—and every time it takes the better part of a week to get over the stage fright. (Nowadays I follow a mantra of great egotism: I’m older than anybody here, I know more than anybody here, so why should I be so afraid of anybody here? It works for about 15 minutes.)
How about after Thanksgiving for a visit? Our calendar looks clear of doctors’ appointments from Nov. 28 (Tues.) through to Dec. 3, I think. Haven’t ckd. w/Alice’s appointments; I suggest late Nov. or early Dec. because things get bizarre around here the closer Christmas gets—you may think us too old for much, but somehow it’s frantic before we are hauled to Gainesville (23–29 this year) for Christmas.
May I warn you of something if Louise hasn’t already: Alice neither knows nor cares about keeping house. (If somebody gives her a picture, she’ll clap it on a wall, or prop it up somewhere.) The only things she cares about are a comfortable chair, a good reading light and enough books & mags. She has these things. You will shift for yourselves.
Thusly warned, I will tell you that we are so looking forward to any Flynts who will make the arduous journey to here! They will be received with great warmth, though scant comfort. We will try to make up for this with catfish, which is about all you can get in Monroeville. (Don’t come on a Monday or Saturday. There is nothing to eat.)