by Wayne Flynt
I cannot understand a person who doesn’t read. That person misses one of the greatest joys of life.
I hope your travels will return you and Dartie to Monroeville soon. It’s always a joy to visit with you.
God bless,
Alice
May 8, 2011
Dear Wayne,
Did you know about the McCall Collection that was being presented to the University of Alabama as you were visiting down on the meeting here? I knew of the existence of the collection but knew nothing of its financial value. Some expert said 1.3 million. Others say it will make some changes in history.
If you are not familiar with the story of how it came to be let me know and I’ll write it to you.
You may make some changes in your summer plans and find yourself in Mobile more than you intended.
Devotedly,
Alice
May 10, 2011
Dear Alice,
I have read about the McCall Collection given to the University of South Alabama. The article I read summarized only a few items, all of which sounded fascinating. I presume it is heavily weighted toward the Gulf Coast, particularly Mobile. But given the importance of that city in antebellum Alabama, it will surely augment/change many parts of state history. I would very much like to know the story of how it came to be, so write me when you can. We hope to come down next week. A film (documentary) about Mockingbird is being made, and the producer wants me to talk about the worldwide significance of the book (I am tempted to tell them about you instead). I am having the Gregory Peck plate block of stamps framed for Nelle and will bring them. We will also stop by to see you.
I have included this op. ed. from the Press-Register for you and Nelle.
Sincerely,
Wayne
June 27, 2011
Dear Miss Alice,
. . . I have enclosed some clippings about Kathryn Tucker Windham’s memorial service. It was a wonderful celebration: funny; loving; joyful; touching. All that Kathryn was.
Rev. Donald Davis, her only peer as a story teller, was wonderful. He introduced the black carpenter who made her beautiful coffin of heart pine 20 years ago, and Charlie Lucas, who wrapped her body in a quilt made in Gee’s Bend and lovingly laid it in the coffin.
Davis said that when Kathryn asked him to deliver the eulogy (because he was a Methodist, Southerner, and Democrat), she instructed him to keep it short: “People want to tell stories before and after the service. So just have your say and shut up.” The spirit of Kathryn soared to heaven amidst Bluegrass music, stanzas of “I’ll Fly Away,” and much laughter.
Wayne
7/9/11
The Chilton County peaches were great—the first that I have had this season. Shortly after you left my nephew came in, spied the blueberries and asked please don’t eat them but save them until Marianne returns from visiting their new grandson. She would then make delicious blueberry muffins and all the family could enjoy them. Of course, I did as he requested.
It was great to have your visit, just not frequent enough. I can’t wait to get a copy of your memoir. Until it is read, it will displace the four that I am reading.
Mother Nature has promised us a rain today, but thus far has not fulfilled that promise. We had a shower day before yesterday which broke the drought, but it was not nearly enough.
I had asked for no party on Sept. 11th. After having had 99, what is one more? But sometimes things like that get out of hand. Since that day is Sunday, perhaps not too many people will cut short worship services to get here.
Whatever the day, you are invited and I look forward to seeing you then.
Fondly,
Alice
July 12, 2011
Dear Alice,
I am glad you liked the peaches and blueberries. The peaches were ordinary but the blueberries have been superb this year. I am glad you could share them with family. I would have brought more had I known.
We thought Nelle was in unusually fine spirits Friday: Laughing; telling stories; animated.
Thanks for the invitation to your birthday. You already know my present, presumptuous as it is. I will bring you a copy of my memoir, so don’t buy one.
We love you,
Wayne
December 1, 2011
Nelle: Nancy Anderson, an English professor at Auburn University in Montgomery, who (with Bert Hitchcock) wrote the wonderful essay about you for the on-line Encyclopedia of Alabama, asked me to give this information to you. She had an English student who has started a non profit press. The woman uses all the profits from the press to make books available to poor children in Alabama and Mississippi.
The woman’s name is Ashley Gordon. She plans to publish an anthology of essays which have already been published in magazines or literary journals. She wants to include your essay entitled “Dear Opry.” I told Nancy I would leave this with you and if you agree, I will give her your agent’s contact information. But it is entirely up to you whether or not you want to fool with this since Nancy only asked me to inform you of it.
Dartie and I saw Geoffrey Sherman’s musical production of Truman’s A Christmas Memory last night at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. I could not imagine how a musical could capture any of the wonderful sense of community and timelessness of small town life that Truman immortalized in his story. Amazingly, the music was consistent with the theme, though the girl who played a juvenile Nelle Harper was TERRIBLE. Obviously, no one has yet figured out what kind of 8 year old you were (a real hellion by our estimation). Conversely, both the boy who played the youthful Truman and the man who played the adult version (and narrator) were wonderful. The show was a fine launch of the holiday season for us. . . .
We will be along some time in the next several weeks to greet you and Miss Alice and to bring Dartie’s appropriate Christmas goodies offered on your behalf (no fruit cakes with whiskey, though; you know how much we dislike your depiction of Baptists, which is second only to your prejudice against Auburn fans)
Sincerely, your deeply humbled Auburn fans,
Wayne & Dartie
February 17, 2015
Dear Nelle (famous author of two known books & maybe more):
I told a reporter the story of “our” Seattle Harper, who when I called her a lady, quickly informed me that she was no lady; she was Harper Swann Flynt. She was 4 or 5 at the time. She is now 10. She went to a sleep-over at her best friend’s house last week, and the little girl’s mother said: “I understand you are no lady, Harper.” Actually, she reminds both of us of you. Are you, or were you ever, a lady, Nelle? Actually our little demon is now the sweetest 10 year old charmer we know.
Wayne & Dartie
March 1, 2015
Dear Nelle,
In the last USA Today Best-Selling Book List, TKAM has risen to #14 54 years, 7 months after publication.
I am also enclosing a promising report on treatment of macular degeneration from The Economist.
Finally, I also re-read Norman Maclean’s novel, A River Runs Through It. At the end of the novella, Norman explains his dead brother, Paul, to their father: “you can love completely without complete understanding.” Otherwise, I thought, only God could love us completely because only God understands us completely. Suddenly, after all these decades, I understood about Scout and Jem’s relationship to Boo Radley and your relationship to Truman and Sook’s relationship to Truman. Isn’t it wonderful when bright light breaks through the heavy clouds of the soul.
We are bringing chocolate down to Monroeville on Sunday, March 8.
Love you,
Wayne & Dartie
Postscript
My last letter to Nelle was written a month after I, along with the rest of the world, heard the stunning news that a copy of her first manuscript had been found and would be published. The publisher’s February 3 announcement of the book, which bore the cryptic title Go Set a Watchman (borrowed from Isaiah 21:6, King James Version, of course), spun her life into unfamiliar disorde
r. Evidence of what was to follow arrived two days later on February 5, when I spent nine hours talking with reporters calling from around the world.
Almost immediately questions arose about whether Nelle was too ill, physically and possibly mentally, to give informed consent to the publication of a book she had ignored for decades. In that frenzied climate, fueled by journalists as well as by Monroeville gossip, long-ago chatter about whether Truman Capote had really written Mockingbird was resurrected. Riding the crest of small-town resentment against Tonja Carter, the law partner Alice chose to carry on Nelle’s legal business during the final years of her life, the rumors reached a worldwide audience. As the tsunami of rumors surged, my son, Sean, wrote me his fears about the possible effects of the controversy on Nelle: “They’ll drag her out into the spotlight even if it kills her just so they can satisfy their curiosity. Reminds me of a 4th grade demonstration of a tortoise’s beating heart. We saw it beat. The tortoise died.”
Nelle’s friends and family had noticed her growing problems with short-term memory but did not doubt her mental competence to give informed consent. Neither did officials from the elder abuse division of the Alabama Department of Human Resources, who investigated anonymous charges that Nelle was being mistreated. Not only did she pass whatever cognitive test they administered, she reportedly dismissed their intrusion into her private life by telling them to go to hell and leave her alone.
More particularly, Nelle’s nephew Hank Conner, unofficial Lee family historian, confirmed her enthusiasm for publication of the manuscript, which he said he had read a half-century earlier and thought inferior to Mockingbird. During a two-day visit several weeks before the publisher’s announcement, he said, he asked her multiple times if she was certain she wanted the novel to be published. Each time she replied that she did, finally satisfying the single person who understood the situation best and initially had been most skeptical.
During our first visit with Nelle on February 9, I was eager to administer my own memory test. As we tried to drive into the parking lot beside the assisted living facility, a vehicle from the state’s Department of Human Resources blocked our way, and a guard checked our identification before granting us admission. Inside the building, the twelve residents, Nelle among them, cowered in the commons area, none of them joking or talking as they usually did. After we wheeled Nelle to her room, I jokingly called her the “great one” and mentioned her new novel. She shocked us by asking, “What new novel?”
“Don’t talk like that, Nelle,” I said. “I mean your new novel that has just been announced by HarperCollins.”
“I don’t have any new novel,” she insisted. Now fully alarmed and wondering if the rumors of mental impairment could be true, I muttered, “Go Set a Watchman, Nelle. Your new novel.”
“Oh,” she replied with a grin. “That’s not my new novel; that’s my old novel.”
I was filled with relief. “Well, whatever you call it, it just reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list.”
“You lie!” she shouted, one of her favorite retorts when we bantered.
“I am an ordained Baptist minister. I don’t lie,” I responded.
She laughed. “Well, that makes it even worse.”
“You should be so proud, Nelle,” I said. “This is the most important story about American literature in half a century.”
There was a long pause. With sagging shoulders and eyes focused on her feet, she muttered softly, almost inaudibly, “I’m not so sure anymore.”
Publication on July 14 raised her spirits, as did our report during the day that the town was filled with reporters from around the world and, thanks to security at the Meadows, none of them could get near her. Early on the fifteenth we went by the Meadows to tell her that first-day sales had exceeded 700,000 copies, setting records for adult fiction at Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. Gleefully she replied, “I am a very rich woman!”
Dartie corrected her: “You have been a very rich woman for a very long time, Nelle!”
By the end of the first week, sales totaled more than 1.1 million, a record for an American novel.
Some critics declared Nelle’s new/old novel a searing and accurate account of racism in the 1950s. Some saw it as a flawed work that nonetheless previewed the talent that later came to fruition in Mockingbird. Others dismissed the novel as unfinished, preachy, too long on dialogue and too short on wordsmithing and characterization. Many liberal northern readers were appalled at Jean Louise Finch’s reconciliation with her racist father and uncle. Many conservative southern readers were appalled that Nelle had opened old wounds better left alone.
The controversy Watchman provoked set me to thinking about our quarter-century friendship with the three Lee sisters. I reread Nelle’s classic novel as well as her new one, and found in them what I had first discovered in the Bible: the most elemental meaning of innocence, judgment, justice, mercy, love, tolerance, forgiveness, and reconciliation, between races as well as generations. I also reread one of Nelle’s favorite novellas, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, based on the biblical parable of the prodigal son. The upright brother tells his minister father the sparse details of the murder of his younger, dissolute brother Paul. His father replies, “Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?”
“Everything,” Norman replies.
“It’s not much, is it?” his distraught father asks.
“No,” replies Norman, “but you can love completely without complete understanding.”
That sentence could have served as Nelle’s requiem, her last gift to her readers. They would have to love her without fully understanding her, for she would not be pulled into the spotlight for the sake of our curiosity.
In the early morning hours of February 19, 2016, seven months after the publication of Watchman and barely two months before her ninetieth birthday, Nelle Harper Lee died peacefully in her sleep at the Meadows. The following day I delivered as Nelle’s eulogy “Atticus’s Vision of Ourselves,” the tribute I had written years earlier for the Birmingham Pledge Foundation’s gala awards ceremony. So satisfied had she been with my interpretation of Atticus and her own literary legacy of racial tolerance and understanding that she insisted I change not a single line. I complied though with one addition: a sentence to demystify her hero as required by her own depiction of his flaws in Go Set A Watchman. As for a discussion of the private life of the author or her father, that would have to wait for another time. Nelle was buried in the small cemetery adjacent to the Monroeville United Methodist Church next to her father, mother, brother, and sister. At last she found rest and peace.
Appendix:
Eulogy for Nelle Harper Lee
“Atticus’s Vision of Ourselves”
Birmingham Pledge Foundation Lifetime Service Award to Harper Lee, 9/13/06
And Eulogy Delivered at the Funeral of Nelle Harper Lee, 2/20/16
We gather tonight to honor a person, a writer, her father, her family, and her novel. That is a bit more than I can manage in fifteen minutes, so I will stick with the novel. But it might help us all to remember that we are honoring both a person and a writer, and they are different. Persons have a right to be persons separate from being writers.
Every book, be it fiction or nonfiction, is the projection of the writer’s vision and values, so in some sense we cannot separate them. A work of fiction might seem an exception to this generalization, but I don’t think so. As writer/storyteller Garrison Keillor once said, “Fifteen minutes after an accident, no two people can agree on the details of what happened. If it were not for the truth of fiction, there wouldn’t be any truth at all.”
So what truth have people around the world teased out of the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird?
Racial justice. Tom Robinson is a symbol of three centuries of apartheid and injustice toward Africans and African Americans. Don’t expect me to accomplish in a few minutes what ethicists, philosophers, sociologists, psycholog
ists, theologians, and historians have not been able to do in the past three centuries: untie the complex knot of racism in the world. Harper Lee could not figure it out. Nor could Atticus Finch, who asks in the novel: “Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand.” But there is a difference between Atticus and many of us. The inability to explain is not an excuse for spiritual amnesia. Just after his troubled query about racism, Atticus adds: “I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town.” Beyond our embedded love for our communities, Lee seems to be saying, is our obligation to follow our own internal ethical compass. “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule,” Atticus explains, “is a person’s conscience.” And that is precisely why Atticus Finch emerges as such a profoundly important figure in American literature. If the jurors represent us at our cautious, timid, fearful worst, Atticus is humanity at its best. And that is one reason the novel endures. In an age of antiheroes—political and corporate corruption, excesses of all kinds by celebrities and athletes; a world populated by Madonna, Paris Hilton, Abramoff, Scanlon—Americans have lost their pool of real-life heroes. So they seek them now in literature. And in Atticus Finch, they have found their favorite hero, the person more than any other they aspire to be like and they want to represent them at their best. Miss Maudie tries to explain all this to Jem: “I simply want to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”
Class. Although the year that the book was published, 1960, ushered in a new and violent age of civil rights upheaval in America and primed the reading public to understand the work as a race novel, I believe it is just as much about class. Lee describes two poor white families, the poor but proud Cunninghams and the poor but not proud Ewells. The Cunninghams are the deserving poor whom we can and should help. Scout explains the difference by telling her first-grade teacher about her friend, young Walter Cunningham: “The Cunninghams never took anything off anybody, they get along on what they have. They don’t have much, but they get along on it.” Not everyone in her family has Scout’s insight or her compassion. Her aunt Alexandra thinks differently, in conjunction with the traditional social and class distinctions so deeply rooted in America: “The thing is [Scout] you can scrub Walter Cunningham until he shines, you can put him in shoes and a new suit, but he’ll never be like Jem. Besides, there’s a drinking streak in that family a mile wide. Finch women aren’t interested in that sort of people.”