The secret of their closeness was mysterious to others, but they understood it. Besides liking each other, Nelle later referred to their bond as sharing a “common anguish.”11
* * *
A look at each of their family lives suggests why. It’s likely that Nelle, as a daughter, and Truman, as a son, were not their mothers’ ideals in those roles. After all, deliberately or not, Nelle rebelled at what her mother valued. She would not go willingly into the “pink cotton penitentiary,” as Scout calls it, of girlhood. The charms of Miss Tutwiler’s Alabama Girls’ Industrial School—dressmaking, cooking, and the like—would not have held her attention long. Nelle couldn’t even accept her teachers’ instructions without asking a slew of questions. Hence, Mrs. Lee and her stubborn daughter lived in two different worlds.
For his part, Truman fell short of his mother’s hopes in a similar way. Lillie Mae thought a boy should be rough-and-tumble. He acted effeminate. And as he grew older, his mother openly resented this. “Lillie Mae continually attacked him for behavior she thought effeminate and improper,” said Truman’s aunt Marie. “She rode him constantly.”12 Truman’s aunt claimed to have overheard his mother railing at him about his masculinity: “‘Truman, I swear, we give you every advantage, and you can’t behave. If it were just failing out of school, I could take it. But, my God, why can’t you be more like a normal boy your age? I mean—well, the whole thing about you is so obvious. I mean—you know what I mean. Don’t take me for a fool.’” Actually, he was quick, agile, and determined. One of his best stunts was leaping up on the rock wall between his house and Nelle’s and turning cartwheels. And he lived up to the nickname of Bulldog more than once by head-butting adversaries and knocking them down. A friend saw him do it in the lobby of the Lyric movie theater in Mobile, only that time Bulldog sailed in a bit low and hit the kid between the legs.13
In any case, both Nelle and Truman were not their mothers’ ideals. But there was little they could do about it. They were who they were. A “common anguish” based on failing to win approval from their mothers would have united them, but it would have been painful, too.
* * *
Truman had his own explanation for the bond between them. He said it was because they were “apart people.”14
What he meant is captured by a glimpse of the two friends at the Strand movie theater in the town square one Saturday afternoon. According to a Monroe County Elementary School classmate who saw them, they were immersed in a game they had invented. One would spell a word, but leave out a few letters; the other would have to guess the complete word. While they were playing, kids were shouting, teasing, and noisily finding seats. Yet Nelle and Truman were concentrating so hard on their game that they were lost to anything else. “They were a little above the rest of the kids in town.”15
In their defense, as bright children they turned to each other because there wasn’t much else to do. There were no books to take home from school because it had none to loan. Pictures at the Strand movie theater tended to be Westerns, adventures, or romances, because people wanted to forget their problems for a few hours. In most households, the world funneled into the living room via radio or newspaper only.
Not even school offered an oasis for imaginative children. On the first day of first grade, Truman proudly recited the alphabet all the way through and got whacked on the palm by the teacher with a ruler.16 Children weren’t supposed to come to school knowing how to read. It was this incident, or a similar one involving Nelle, that inspired the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird when Scout complains to Jem about her first-grade teacher: “that damn lady says Atticus’s been teaching me to read and for him to stop it.”17
Looking back, Nelle summarized what her early years were like in a town that could offer little to stimulate the mind. “This was my childhood,” Nelle said. “If I went to a film once a month it was pretty good for me, and for all children like me. We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn’t have much money. Nobody had any money. We didn’t have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imaginations most of the time.”18
* * *
One way “apart people” with time on their hands could feed their imaginations was to read. Truman’s cousin Jennings recalled how Nelle and Truman’s mutual love of reading created a bond that put them in splendid isolation.
“The year I began school Truman and Nelle were knee-deep reading Sherlock Holmes detective books. Even though I hadn’t learned to read with their speed and comprehension, we three would climb up in Nelle’s big tree house and curl up with books. Truman or Nelle would stop from time to time to read some interesting event aloud. We’d discuss what might happen next in the story and try to guess which character would be the culprit. Sometimes Truman called me ‘Inspector.’ Nelle was ‘Dr. Watson.’”19
The Rover Boys was another favorite series, despite the stories’ stiff dialogue—“‘Hello, you fellows!’ shouted a voice from behind the Rover boys. ‘Plotting mischief?’” At least they featured a girlfriend-sidekick named Nellie.
Then, said Nelle, “As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts.… The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed—he swapped his sister’s doll buggy.”20
* * *
Mr. Lee, seeing that Nelle and Truman had fallen in love with words, encouraged them with a special gift. When they were old enough to write stories of their own, he gave them a typewriter. It was the 1930s equivalent of a word processor: a rugged, steel-encased black Underwood No. 5.
Most children probably would have begun by creating original fairy tales. But an invasion of fairies in down-and-out Monroeville seemed far-fetched. Anyway, their favorite books featured real-life places. Why couldn’t Monroeville—their neighborhood, in fact—do just as well as a setting? This would also fit with another of their favorite activities: people watching. They knew more about “Doc” Watson, the dentist, and his family who lived across the street, for instance, than they would ever know about trolls and so on.
As a result of this line of thinking, the residents of South Alabama Avenue unknowingly became characters in the first stories of Truman Streckfus Persons and Nelle Harper Lee, authors, one of whose earliest efforts (since lost) bore the interesting title “The Fire and the Flame.”21 One writer would dictate the story slowly while the other typed, and then they would switch places. Looking back, Nelle was of the opinion that small-town life “naturally produces more writers than, say, an environment like 82nd Street in New York. In small town life and in rural life you know your neighbors. Not only do you know everything about your neighbors, but you know everything about them from the time they came to the country.”22
And there was certainly no lack of interesting people to cast as characters on South Alabama Avenue. At the top of the list were Truman’s elderly cousins, the Faulks. Jennie Faulk had built the rambling, two-story house next door to the Lees as a shared dwelling for her three siblings: sister Callie, two years younger than she; brother Bud; and sister Sook, who, despite being white-haired, had the mind and personality of a 14-year-old girl. (Sook is the fruitcake-baking “aunt” portrayed in Truman’s novelette A Christmas Memory.) She was rarely comfortable with anyone except children, and she drew Nelle, Truman, and Jennings to her. They spent many happy hours sitting at her feet being fed, like open-mouthed birds, cookies dipped in coffee, or they perched in her lap and made up long, fantastic tales.
To the south of the Faulks lived ex–Confederate Captain and Mrs. Powell Jones, whose house was best avoided. The Joneses were very old; Mrs. Jones, an invalid in a wheelchair, was addicted to a powerful pain-relieving drug called morphine. Neighbors heard her screeching at her husband about her medicine. Children passing by received a good dose of her unpleasantness, too. (Many Monroeville residents would later recognize
Mrs. Jones as the model for Mrs. Dubose in To Kill a Mockingbird, who tormented Scout and Jem with her vicious taunts.)
But for sheer mystery and speculation, no source was richer than the tumbledown Boleware place just two doors south of the Lees’, past Captain and Mrs. Powell Jones’s place, its backyard flush against the playground of the elementary school. It was a dark, ramshackle structure with most of the paint fallen off. What went on inside was a matter of guesswork, because the shutters were always closed, as if the house were asleep. Children held their noses while walking by, or crossed to the other side of the street, to avoid inhaling evil vapors that might be steaming from cracks in the house’s boards.
This cabin outside Monroeville in the 1930s is similar to the one Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird would have lived in. (Library of Congress)
Nelle’s next-door neighbor Truman Capote, in the 1920s, with his elderly cousin Sook. “Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head,” Nelle would later write of Truman as Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird. (Photographer unknown)
The owner was Alfred R. Boleware, 60, a merchant and a big man in town, but a know-it-all and cheapskate. He and his wife, Annie, had three children—Mary and Sally, both in their late 20s, and Alfred, Jr., a few years younger than his sisters, who was nicknamed “Son.”23
Mr. Boleware wouldn’t spend a dime on his house, or its raggedy yard of tangled pecan trees, broken scuppernong arbor, and weedy garden. But his sagging estate belonged to him, and no one was permitted to put a foot on it without his permission. A well-hit ball from the schoolyard that landed in the Bolewares’ weeds might as well have rolled into a minefield. Everyone knew better than to retrieve it. When the pecans ripened and fell, old man Boleware stood in the backyard, arms crossed, as if daring any pipsqueak on the playground to risk life and limb by stealing one.
Adding to the mystery of the Boleware house was the legend of Son, who was said to be languishing inside, a captive in his own home, tied to a bed frame by his father. His fate sounded like a campfire tale, but it was essentially true. He and two schoolmates—Robert Baggett and Elliott Sawyer, the sheriff’s son—had been taken before Judge Murdoch McCorvey Fountain in 1928 for breaking school windows with a slingshot and burglarizing a drugstore. Judge Fountain decided that such enterprising young men could benefit from a year at the state industrial school. Baggett and Sawyer’s parents agreed, but Boleware proposed something else for his boy. He asked the judge to turn Son over to him, because he could guarantee that his lad would never trouble the community again. Something about the look in Boleware’s eye persuaded Judge Fountain, and so Son went home with his father.24
After that, Son Boleware was rarely seen by anyone ever again. At first, friends from the high school would crawl on elbows and knees to his bedroom window to talk to him. Word got around that he would gladly do homework for the football players. In return for his help, they took him for rides in the darkness after midnight.
But years passed and all the young people Son had known in high school moved on, and he was forgotten. His shadowy figure appeared on the porch after dusk now and then. Some neighbors reported hearing a parched voice from the Boleware place cry “caw, caw!” and incidents of Peeping Toms were blamed on him. Once, Nelle saw him resting in the shade and didn’t find him so strange. But, essentially, Son Boleware was erased from Monroeville forever.
“Mr. Boleware ruined his son’s life, I guess because it was shaming him,” said a friend of the Lee family. “The man was mean.”25 Or as Calpurnia, the Finches’ housekeeper, says bitterly in To Kill a Mockingbird when the body of “Boo” Radley’s father is taken away in a hearse, “There goes the meanest man God ever blew breath into.”26 In 1952, Son died of tuberculosis. The marker placed at his grave in First Baptist Church cemetery reads, TO LIVE IN HEARTS WE LEAVE BEHIND IS NOT TO DIE.
* * *
Nelle and Truman had more than enough to write about on South Alabama Avenue, whether they chose to exaggerate their material or not. Soon, the Lees and the Faulks saw them lugging the Underwood No. 5 back and forth between houses. The tree house would have been the ideal spot to write, but the 20-pound typewriter was just too heavy to shove up there.
So it was that the two children began the journey that would change their lives in many ways, but would also separate them further from children their age. Now they were writers. Sometime later, a little girl came over to Truman’s house to play games. But after an hour, she went home. She told her mother that Truman and Nelle spent so much time talking and arguing at the typewriter that they forgot all about her.27
* * *
Nelle and Truman’s friendship was interrupted suddenly in the mid-1930s when Lillie Mae, belatedly exercising her partial custody rights, took Truman to New York City, where she was living with her second husband, Cuban-American businessman Joseph Capote. From then on, until he was about 18, Truman Capote, as he renamed himself, returned to Monroeville for summers only. His father, Arch Persons, saw him less and less.
Meanwhile, Nelle Lee grew into a strong-willed, independent young person. We get a glimpse of her in Truman’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Nelle is the model for 12-year-old Idabel Tompkins—a forceful personality, quick with a dirty joke, haughty, and angry about the constraints of her gender.
When the main character in the novel, Joel, expresses embarrassment about undressing in front of Idabel, she retorts:
“Son,” she said, and spit between her fingers, “what you got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I’ve fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I’m a girl; you’ve got to remember that, or we can’t never be friends.” For all its bravado, she made this declaration with a special and compelling innocence; and when she knocked one fist against the other, as, frowning, she did now, and said: “I want so much to be a boy: I would be a sailor, I would…” the quality of her futility was touching.28
Chapter 3
First Hints of To Kill a Mockingbird
Nelle entered Monroe County High School in September 1940, a year before the United States entered World War II. Generally she continued to ignore conventions that applied to most girls. Although she had a boyfriend or two, everyone in her high school class of 120 students knew she didn’t make much of an effort to entice them. In a photograph taken her sophomore year, in spring 1942, she stands with her English class on the steps of the high school. Unlike nearly all the other girls, her hair doesn’t look as if it’s seen a curling iron recently, and her chin, held high, gives her unsmiling face a slightly defiant expression.
She had outgrown her overalls, but she was not about to allow any male, teenage or adult, to take advantage of her. One day, Truman’s footloose father, Arch Persons, drove up the dirt lane to Jennings’s house out in the country, eager to show off his new red Buick convertible. Everyone greeted him, including Nelle and Truman. Jennings said that Arch only nodded at his son, but he “immediately noticed Nelle, who by this time had grown into a tall teenager about as big as he was. Truman and I saw Arch’s clawlike hand slip way down Nelle’s back as he hugged her. Nelle stiffened, acted surprised, then backed away.”
Arch let them each practice driving down to the mailbox at the end of the lane and back, until finally he took off with Nelle alone in the car. “A few minutes later Arch returned, minus Nelle and holding a handkerchief over his nose,” Jennings said. It was bleeding.
Later Jennings asked Nelle what had happened. She shrugged. “I drove up to the mailbox and he got fresh. So I hit him in the schnozzle. Then I got out of the car and walked home.”1
Classmates at Monroe County High School decided that Nelle was unusual: someone whom it wasn’t all that easy to warm up to, but who was definitely a person to be reckoned with. “You took her as she was. She wasn’t trying to impress anyone,” said a classmate.2
Doing what was expected just struck her as illogical sometimes. One day, Nelle and her friends Anne H
ines and Sara Anne McCall stopped to watch some boys their age choose teams for a pickup game of football on the courthouse lawn. Nelle insisted, over the boys’ protests, that they put her on a team. One of the captains, A. B. Blass, Jr., gave in and put her on his side, figuring she’d quit after a play or two. The center hiked the ball, and A.B. handed it off to Nelle. As she took off, one of the opposing players ran around the end to intercept her. Instead of dodging, she straight-armed him and continued sprinting downfield toward the goal line.
A.B. put his hands on his hips disgustedly. “Nelle, we’re playing touch!”
The sophomore class of Monroe County High School. Nelle (second row from the top, farthest right) adored her English teacher, Gladys Watson (top row, center). (Photographer unknown)
“Y’all can play that sissy game if you want to,” she shouted over her shoulder, “but I’m playing tackle!”3
On the other hand, she was not against all normal behavior. She was polite and well-mannered to adults, using “sir” and “ma’am” when spoken to. And her parents expected her to attend college. She looked forward to it, in fact. It was the same for most of her upper-middle-class friends. Nelle’s friend Sara already had chosen to attend Huntingdon College, a Methodist women’s college in Montgomery. A.B., the touch football quarterback, could talk of nothing except applying to the school of his favorite college team, the University of Alabama.
I Am Scout Page 3