Mockingbird Songs

by Wayne Flynt

  My message was that I will be away from here from Sat. Nov. 3 to Tuesday Nov. 6. In Washington, yet.

  I guess it’ll be safe to confide in you that I’m getting the Medal of Freedom on the 5th. Stranger things have happened.

  Sunday

  Hey:

  I’ve been trying to head you two off at the pass w/phone calls (three of them wrong nos.) to tell you not to come the 1st wk of Nov. because I’m leaving for DCA Friday to be back Tuesday Nov. 6.

  It’s quite a journey for me, but I think worth it.

  I LOVE YOU,

  NELLE

  Wednesday

  1 November

  Dear Ones:

  Many thanks for your letter: This note before W-day is mainly to tell you (before I forget it so you can tell me) that my Monroeville (new) number will be: (251) 575-5673. It’s unlisted, so hang onto this.

  Will be back on 6 Nov., so please come if you can.

  Much love,

  NELLE

  October 30, 2007

  Dear Nelle,

  Well I was disappointed in your media spokesman again. Here you go and win the Medal of Freedom and all you could manage in the Birmingham News was your picture on page 1; but the story was on page 3. You could not even eclipse Coach Propst and the Hoover High School football scandal, which earned star billing on page 1. Perhaps a Nobel Prize for literature might eke out a narrow victory for front page space.

  And does your trip to D.C. eclipse your trip to the President’s box at Bryant Denny Stadium for the AL.–L.S.U. game? If so, how could you get your priorities so messed up?

  I couldn’t help but think of Mr. Faulkner’s response to a friend at the University of Virginia when learning that the great man had declined an invitation to join other Nobel Prize winners and other literati at the Kennedy White House. Faulkner explained that Washington was just too far to travel for dinner.

  Seriously, we are so proud of you we could burst! At last “W” gets one right. But even a blind squirrel can find an acorn once every six years. . . .

  We love you!

  Wayne and Dartie

  10–29–07

  Dear Wayne:

  I see from the Ozark–Dale County Public Library flyer on the Big Read that you will preside at the closing ceremony on November 13. Your subject intrigues me. Would it be possible for me to have a copy of your paper once it has been delivered? I would gladly reimburse you for any costs that might be incurred in reproducing it.

  What think you of the last big shot on November 5 at the White House? That doesn’t leave anything else to be had.

  N.H. will ride the Crescent and Susan Doss will accompany her.

  My best,

  Alice

  11/15/07

  Dear Alice,

  This seems to be my year for lectures about TKAM. I began with the “Big Read” in Huntsville in April. Then came Brooklyn Public Library, Columbus (GA), Enterprise–Ozark, Perry County in March, and Birmingham in April. . . .

  I will record my lecture this time, transcribe it, and send you and Nelle a copy.

  Dartie and I are delighted that she will be returning to Monroeville next week. I know there will be awkward moments, but I think she has made enough progress now to be fine. And she certainly wants to be near you.

  It was such a joy to follow the events in Washington, especially her ability to stand. That is real progress. And what a wonderful tribute the President paid her, Gregory Peck, and your father. At last the President has done something with which I agree. . . .

  Love,

  Wayne and Dartie

  Nelle’s Christmas card to the Flynts, 2007:

  Naughty or Nice—

  Which list are you on?

  This is not the card of my choice, but love anyway.

  NELLE

  January 14, 2008

  Dear Nelle,

  This letter is designed to fill you with guilt; that, of course, is what Baptists are famous for. But my strategy is even more sinister. Since you already feel badly that you have not written us (something we never expected from you anyway), I thought I might as well give you a real reason for feeling guilty instead of a false one. For during the time you have been in Monroeville, I have sent you only one piece of correspondence and even that was a two or three sentence Christmas card.

  Now there, don’t you feel better! Now you have a basis for your guilt, which is so much more spiritually satisfying.

  Seriously, we know writing letters is a chore for you. Nor do we measure friendship by the quality or quantity of correspondence (though you are one heck of a fine letter writer). Besides, we will see you soon in the flesh, as the apostle John would say.

  Meanwhile, here is the newspaper clipping I mentioned to you about your obscure book. And here also is the schedule of Jane Austen films on APT.

  Sincerely,

  Wayne

  Monroeville, AL

  5 March ’08

  My dear Ones:

  At my request they took down the THURSDAY sign from the bulletin board & replaced it with WEDNESDAY, much to their embarrassment. Truly, I was beginning to get upset when you walked in. I knew you hadn’t come yesterday.

  Such is this hive of activity that the current day of the week is a note worthy event and it takes this long to tell you about it.

  I TREASURE EVERY MOMENT of your visit. Present tense because it will stay with me for a long time.

  NHL

  9 April ’08

  [To Dartie]

  You are a founding member of the Society of Usual Suspects with all the privileges accruing thereto. There are no rules, no officers, no fees. You may call a meeting by saying the immortal lines from Casablanca . . . .

  “Round up the usual suspects.”

  This will cause your conferees to emerge from their various lurking-places. Your membership badge accompanies this.

  HARPER LEE

  PRIME SUSPECT

  Dear Prime Suspect (AKA NHL):

  I am greatly honored to be among the founding members of the Society of Usual Suspects. It is exactly the kind of privileged group I wish to belong to. (Perhaps it will redeem me from the audacity of resigning from the Auburn Women’s Club without having to die to be removed from its roll.)

  My first action as a privileged member is to call a meeting with the Prime Suspect for lunch on Thursday, the thirty-first of April at 11:00ish in the morning. I will be the one in the hat and membership badge. (I will bring a close friend [Wayne Flynt] who will not be wearing a hat or badge.) We will confirm all this with you by telephone. I look forward to our visit.

  Dartie Flynt

  May 27, 2008

  Dear Nelle,

  Well you certainly were a garrulous “famous person” 10 days ago in Montgomery. Instead of “You have left me speechless. Thank you!,” you actually poured out 13 words by my count: “Thank you.” Long pause. “I think that I will hang out my shingle this afternoon.” If you don’t be careful, pundits, critics, journalists and “Nelle-watchers” in general will stop referring to you as “silent Nelle.”

  I was pleased that the presider mentioned the “usual suspects” so they can all receive the attention they deserve. At first, I was unsure why you created this secretive cabal. But after last Friday I believe I have solved the puzzle: any attention deflected on them is less directed at you. What a devious devil you are!

  Seriously, it was a great day, and we appreciate your allowing us to participate. This Sunday we plan to drive over to Selma to make sure Kathryn receives all the attention that 90 years on this planet entitles her to. . . .

  I hope that all goes well with you and that your therapy is progressing nicely. We will see you soon in Monroeville.

  Love,

  Wayne

  11 July ’08

  My dear Both:

  For the peaches, blueberries & cake I thank you; but for your benign & saintly selves I thank you most of all! You are two of the treasures of my life and I love you,

&n
bsp; NELLE

  P.S. August? It can’t come soon enough!

  July 21, 2008

  Dear Nelle,

  You remind us of a mature romance: it may come late but it is nonetheless rejuvenating and welcome. Every time we come to Monroeville, we return with three hours of conversation about you, Alice, and all the Lees. I assure you that you have enriched our lives more than we have enriched yours. Just watching you and Dartie laugh with such gusto and talk with such conspiratorial glee is one of the highpoints of my life.

  We now have my mother moved to assisted living, her house sold, and our lives as normal as they are likely to be. She has adjusted well and seems relieved to no longer have to drive, cook, or clean.

  See you soon.

  Wayne

  30 (or 31—I’m bats—July)

  Dear Wayne:

  The only thing I have to report is that Tom Carruthers said he couldn’t recall the word “ineluctable,” which I used to describe the passing of days here. He said he hadn’t heard it in so long he couldn’t remember it.

  Well, the days do go by with ineluctable sameness, but I feel most fortunate that they go by for me at all, lorn lone creature that I am. I probably wrote you all this before, but then I seem to have written everything else before—what? Before God & the doctors decreed that I should lose most of my marbles as well as most of my short-term memory.

  I can remember Mrs. Gummily though, and marvel at the creative power of her Creator. I guess Dickens was our greatest novelist although I don’t like to admit it—Thackeray was just as good in his own way . . .

  There go I, like John a ‘Dreamer’—lone & forlorn with everything against me.

  If you hate my handwriting as much as I do, you’ll wish I’d quit at the first line, so ’bye.

  With much love to you & to the incomparable

  Dartie—

  NELLE

  9

  Adulation and Isolation

  Life moved on from loss and inconvenience, for both Nelle and me. Our November visit to the Seattle Flynts, who then came to Alabama for the Christmas holidays, furnished a new cycle of little Harper stories to amuse her namesake. (In her reply, Nelle mistakenly refers to author P. G. Wodehouse as P. E. Waterhouse. But then, she may have meant the confusion as satire.)

  The occasion of Nelle’s birthday on April 28 always brought her a horde of visitors either in town already for the Alabama Writers Symposium or down just for the celebration. She made sure to remind me of her birthday each year because I had twice misremembered the date by a couple of days. I think her letter was a not-so-subtle reminder that she might not be the only one in her social circle with short-term memory problems.

  In 2010 my friend John Shelton Reed, the noted southern writer and sociologist, then serving as chancellor of the prestigious and exclusive Fellowship of Southern Writers, asked me to inquire whether Nelle would accept election to the organization. I doubted it. Her physical problems restricted out-of-state travel; her 2008 trip to the White House to accept the Medal of Freedom had been an exception, with the journey even more arduous because she refused to fly and so had to take a train. In 2011 she declined to make the trip again when President Barack Obama awarded her the National Medal of the Arts. Although Bush had declared Mockingbird to be his favorite book, he’d apparently forgotten that in an earlier presidential interview he had reserved that distinction for the Bible. Obama had better standing, having been seen purchasing a copy of the novel for daughter Malia while the family vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard.

  To persuade Nelle to accept the invitation of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the only strategy I could think of was to invoke the playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, one of her dearest friends. He’d written the screenplay for Mockingbird, and his death, in March 2009, had deeply affected her. Pitching Nelle on the fellowship idea, I began by reciting a litany of famous southern writers and historians who’d been members: Robert Penn Warren, Reynolds Price, William Styron, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Shelby Foote, Andrew Lytle, Cleanth Brooks, Wendell Berry, Ernest Gaines, C. Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin, and, of course, Horton Foote. Nelle was unimpressed until I mentioned Foote, who for years before his death had begged her to accept election. On my second try, she finally consented, for Foote’s sake, but stipulated two conditions: that she not be required to speak or attend, and that I accept for her and speak on her behalf.

  And so, when the fellows and their fans assembled in Chattanooga, all hoping for a sighting of the literary icon, they got me instead. I talked, as much as I dared, about the Lee family and its most famous daughter, and why the fellows had made a wise choice in electing her.

  I enclosed copies of my speech in letters to Nelle and Alice. When we brought the framed award to Monroeville, she added it to the eclectic collection of visuals already gracing the walls of her small apartment: photos of her with President and Mrs. Bush, a Steve Breen cartoon of an American eagle intensely reading Mockingbird on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, a photo taken by Kathryn Windham of an African American woman holding a rooster, and a commemorative block of stamps honoring Gregory Peck that we had once framed for her.

  We delivered the award on a trip to attend her birthday celebration as well as the Alabama Writers’ Symposium. Our reward was Nelle’s good-natured grousing that we had neglected her in order to attend “a silly conference.” That pretty much summarized her low regard for literary critics and their craft. (I sometimes wondered whether our friendship could have survived had my scholarly field been literature rather than history.) Dartie later sent Nelle a photo taken of the two of them during our visit.

  In the middle of May Nelle mentioned in a letter that she’d begun to reread C. S. Lewis, an old favorite of hers and mine. What Dartie and I did not know at the time, but realized later, was that this was the last letter from Nelle we would ever receive.

  8 October ’08

  My dear Wayne:

  You will, I trust, be my mouthpiece at the 6 November to-do [her induction into the Fellowship of Southern Writers]. If I did not have you, I would perish. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful (yes I do), but I shall never understand why people knowing my incapacity, will bestow honors upon me & wish me to attend the ceremonies. Oh, well!

  Much love,

  NELLE

  18 October ’08 [3 weeks after my mother’s death]

  My dear Wayne:

  What a terrible time for you! At our age (or at least at mine) we are no strangers to sadness, but it doesn’t hurt any less. Rather more, I think. Whoever said the older you are, the better you are at “taking it” he (or she) was wrong—it’s the reverse.

  MUCH LOVE,

  NELLE

  January 6, 2009

  Dear Nelle,

  Well the firestorm named Harper has come and gone. I wish there were some way to eliminate the years from 2–5 from the chronology of childhood. She is prissy, whiney, won’t eat normal food that others eat, and is generally a pain in the butt. And if that is the evaluation of her loving grandfather, you can imagine what others must think of her. The only redeeming fact is that she will be different tomorrow than she is today.

  Dartie struggled through the holidays with a terrible chest cold, recovered, and has now relapsed into an even worse cold. She is off to the doctor tomorrow. Nonetheless, she enjoyed our delightful two grandsons, her sons, and a multitude of seldom-seen relatives.

  I actually finished revising two chapters of my memoir [later published as Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives] so I counted the holidays a success both in good cheer and productive writing. I also read Madison Jones’ new novel The Adventures of Douglas Bragg. It is quite a change from all his other works—a blend of John Kennedy O’Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces and the various light-hearted romps of Clyde Edgerton (Raney, Walking Across Egypt, In Memory of Junior). Very funny, but more a string of anecdotes than a substantive novel. I will probably read a little history now
and return to writing the memoir.

  I hope Miss Alice feels better now and that you have escaped the dread miasma. Give her our regards.

  Sincerely,

  Wayne

  25 January ’09

  My dear Both:

  I should be strung up & flogged at the Masthead for not having written you; I am afflicted with ineluctable laziness—the days pass here with deadly same-ness and I complain when I should be counting my blessings, two of which are Wayne & Dartie. You have brightened my life & every time you appear you bring a silent message of joy (what is it? “Joy cometh in the morning . . .”). I think it’s from Ecclesiastes or somewhere. I do know that it was a P. E. Waterhouse title.

  I love you.

  N.H.

  14 February ’09

  My dear Dartie,

  Thank you for the picture of the world’s most beautiful lady with the world’s plainest!!

  Hope you are enjoying the hours of solitude you must have with the Prof. writing his memoirs. Let’s just hope they have the ring of truth even if they are fiction.

  It’s Hebrews 13:8 (King James) with a vengeance here—hope your life is filled with excitement!

  Much love,

  NELLE

  1 March (??)

  at any rate, it’s Sunday

  My dear Wayne:

  Is there some sort of function at which we should be present on 28 April? It’s not your birthday, wedding anniversary or anything important. It is, however, my birthday; otherwise I would not have the shred of memory I have about something taking place.

  If you know, or ascertain please advise. With much love from Dartie’s co-conspirator!

  March 10, 2009

  Dear Nelle,

  I enquired among your usual suspects, and one of them (Cathy Randall by name) divulged that State Archivist Ed Bridges is indeed planning some sort of birthday event for you and all your pals. We plan to be there for sure if only to amuse, entertain, and harass you lest you hear too many superlatives and come to believe they are all true.