Tay hadn’t wanted to discourage her. Even though Nelle had never published anything, not even an essay or short story, her draft of a novel “was clearly not the work of an amateur,” Tay decided.19 In fact, it was hard to believe that Nelle was in her early 30s and had waited until now to approach a publisher. “[B]ut as I grew to know her better,” Tay said later, “I came to believe the cause lay in an innate humility and a deep respect for the art of writing. To put it another way, what she wanted with all her being was to write—not merely to ‘be a writer.’”20
At the end of the summer, Nelle resubmitted her manuscript to Tay, who wanted to work with her. “It was better. It wasn’t right,” Tay realized. “Obviously, a keen and witty and even wise mind had been at work; but was the mind that of a professional novelist? There were dangling threads of plot, there was a lack of unity—a beginning, a middle, an end that was inherent in the beginning.”21 Nevertheless, Tay was convinced that Nelle’s willingness to accept criticism meant the book could be molded into shape. In October, Lippincott offered her a contract with an advance of a few thousand dollars so she could continue writing full-time. She was elated and offered to begin paying back the Browns their Christmas “loan,” as she insisted on calling it. But Michael, more experienced about the ways of publishing, recommended that she wait.
* * *
As editor and author got down to the business of working together, Tay discovered that Nelle’s speaking and writing voices were very similar—funny, subtle, and engaging, perfectly suited for the novel with a Southern setting she wanted to write. Tay encouraged Nelle to keep writing in that vein about Monroeville and its people. But as the Lippincott editors had tried to explain, a short story—even a series of short stories with the same setting and main character—is different from a novel. A short story usually hangs by one incident or revelation. A novel, however, needs an overarching story, deep and big enough to encompass everything else, especially the ongoing development over time of related characters and themes. The engine of this unifying story has to include continuing tension arising from a major conflict too, enough to keep the reader turning the novel’s pages. What story could Nelle write about, Tay wanted to know, that could pull everything else together?
For many years now, ever since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, many readers, teachers, and scholars have assumed that Nelle chose to tell in her novel a version of the infamous Scottsboro Boys trials in 1931–37. But that’s wrong.
The Scottsboro “boys”—teenagers, none older than 19—were nine young black men accused of raping two white girls in boxcars on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis, as the train crossed the Alabama border on March 25, 1931. The public was fascinated by the story because of its sheer ugliness. During the first trial, in Scottsboro, Alabama, their legal representation came from an alcoholic real estate attorney and his incompetent assistant. Newspapers boosted their circulations by blaring the sexual and racist angles of testimony with headlines such as “All Negroes Positively Identified by Girls and One White Boy Who Was Held Prisoner with Pistol and Knives While Nine Black Fiends Committed Revolting Crime.” The jury found all of the accused guilty; the judge sentenced eight of the nine defendants to death, with the exception of a 12-year-old who was considered too young to die.
During a second trial, ordered by the United States Supreme Court, four of the accused were released after all charges against them were dropped. Eventually, all of the Scottsboro Boys were paroled, freed, or pardoned, except for one, who was tried and convicted of rape and given the death penalty four times. He escaped from prison in Alabama and fled to Detroit. After his arrest by the FBI in the 1950s, the governor of Michigan refused to extradite him to Alabama.
These events, most of which occurred when Nelle was about the age of her child-narrator Scout, would seem to be the historical foundation of To Kill a Mockingbird. The racial injustice during the Scottsboro trials is on display; the white juries’ fear of black-white sexual relations is obvious; and the courage of the two highly skilled attorneys who finally won the case for the Scottsboro Boys can be grafted onto Atticus Finch.
The trouble is, the scope of those trials was too big, too excessive for Nelle’s purposes. In her novel she wanted “to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world,” she later told an interviewer.22 The courtroom scene of Atticus defending Tom Robinson from a false charge of rape, for example, compresses a history of racial injustice into one hot afternoon. By comparison, the Scottsboro Boys case—a dragged-out national scandal involving nine young men and two women—was huge and too far removed from Nelle’s experience.
Nelle later stated as much years after writing To Kill a Mockingbird. In a 1999 letter to Hazel Rowley, author of Richard Wright: The Life and Times, Nelle said that she did not have so sensational a case as the Scottsboro Boys in mind.23 Most likely, she used a crime that shocked the readers of the Monroe Journal when she was a child and her father was editor/publisher of the newspaper. A black man living near Monroeville was accused of raping a white woman.
* * *
On Thursday, November 9, 1933, the Monroe Journal reported that Naomi Lowery told authorities that a black laborer, Walter Lett, had raped her the previous Thursday near a brick factory south of Monroeville.24
Both Walter and Naomi were luckless types, floating on the surface of the economic hard times. In his early 30s, Walter had done less than ten years in the state prison farm in Tunnel Springs, Alabama, draining swamps and cutting roads through wooded areas. The length of his sentence suggests that he was convicted of drunkenness or fighting. Naomi, 25, had drifted into Monroe County with her husband, Ira, and son. They were too poor to afford even a radio.25
Regardless, Naomi was white, and her word mattered more than a black laborer’s. Walter desperately protested that he didn’t know his accuser and that he was working elsewhere during the time of the assault. It may have been that he and Naomi were lovers, or that she was involved with another black man. If a white woman became pregnant under those circumstances, it was not uncommon for her to claim rape or to accuse someone other than her lover.
For six months Lett awaited trial until the circuit court’s spring term commenced in the Monroe County Courthouse.
He was arraigned on March 16, 1934, on a grand jury indictment on a capital crime of rape, which carried the death penalty. He pled “not guilty.” Ten days later, circuit court judge F. W. Hare—who would later jump-start Alice Lee’s career—and a jury of 12 white men heard Walter’s testimony. The case took an unusually long time to be heard and decided. It was not until 9:00 P.M. that the jury returned to the courtroom with its guilty verdict and fixed “the punishment at death by electrocution.”26
However, the verdict didn’t sit well with some of the leading citizens of Monroeville and the county at large. Objections reached the statehouse in Montgomery, and on May 8, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Governor B. M. Miller granted a stay of execution. Governor Miller reset the date of execution for June 20. A second reprieve moved the date again, to July 20. The reason for the stays, Governor Miller told the Montgomery Advertiser, was that “many leading citizens of Monroe County” had written to him stating, as he expressed it: “I am of the opinion and conviction that there is much doubt as to the man being guilty.”27
One of the petitioners may well have been Mr. Lee. He was the publisher and editor of the Monroe Journal, a director of the Monroe County Bank, an attorney, and an elected representative from Monroeville. If his name wasn’t among the “many leading citizens of Monroe County” calling for clemency, Walter’s cause might have suffered. In response, Governor Miller commuted Walter’s sentence from death in the electric chair to life imprisonment.
But it was too late. Walter had been incarcerated on death row in Kilby Prison, near Montgomery. While Walter waited his turn to die three different times, he suffered a mental breakdown. The prison physician wrote to Gov
ernor Miller on July 20: “It is our opinion that he is a mental patient and that his place is not here.”28 Governor Miller asked the state physician inspector to examine Walter personally. “It is my opinion that the above named prisoner,” the inspector replied a few days later, “the man whose sentence you recently commuted, is insane.”29
On July 30, Walter arrived at Searcy Hospital for the Insane, in Mt. Vernon, Alabama. He remained confined to the state mental hospital until he died of tuberculosis, in August 1937.
* * *
The potential of Walter Lett’s trial to inspire sympathy, and its power to cast light on a racist judicial system in a small town, made it the better choice for Nelle’s novel than the Scottsboro Boys trials. Moreover, she knew the details of it well, as do many older people who still live in Monroeville. And in her imagination, she could see the hero, the attorney in charge of a fictionalized version of Walter’s defense, fitting inside the Monroe County Courthouse with ease. She had seen him there many times. It was her father, Mr. Lee.
In fact, Mr. Lee had defended two blacks accused of murder, in November 1919. He was just a 29-year-old attorney with four years’ experience when he was appointed by the court to argue his first criminal case. He did his utmost, but lost, as he was destined to do, given the times.30 Both his clients were hanged. He never took another criminal case.
But now, as a writer, Nelle could use this episode in her father’s life to create a character—Atticus Finch, who could defend someone similar to Walter Lett, the character Tom Robinson. By using her father as the model for Atticus, his virtues as a humane, fair-minded man would be honored.
* * *
With the major elements for her novel in place, Nelle set to work on To Kill a Mockingbird in the winter of 1957. As any successful novelist must do, she needed to create a convincing landscape for her reader to enter. So the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird is Maycomb, Alabama, a town similar to Monroeville. The time is the Great Depression of the 1930s. Maycomb County is so poor that the energy of life itself seems to be on hold. “People moved slowly then,” Nelle wrote. “They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.”31
Nelle’s time frame is a three-year period in Maycomb between the summer of 1932 and Halloween night 1935. Truman Capote later said the first two thirds of the book—the portion about Scout, Dill, and Jem (Nelle, Truman, and a combination of Nelle’s brother, Edwin, and Truman’s cousin Jennings, probably) trying to coax Boo Radley out of his house—“are quite literal and true.”32
To populate the streets of Maycomb, Nelle thought back on the inhabitants of Monroeville in the early 1930s: officials, merchants, churchgoers, and even the local ne’er-do-wells. After the novel was published, some folks believed they recognized themselves and neighbors. Truman made no bones about telling friends, “Most of the people in Nelle’s book are drawn from life.”33
Nelle Harper Lee in the late 1950s when she was writing To Kill a Mockingbird, but calling it Atticus. (Papers of Annie Laurie Williams, Columbia University)
An interesting twist about To Kill a Mockingbird is that there are two first-person narrative voices: the first is Jean Louise Finch, nicknamed “Scout.” She talks, thinks, and acts like a six- to nine-year-old girl—albeit a very bright one—who perceives her world and the people in it as only an insatiably curious (and talkative) child could. The second narrator is Scout, too, now an adult looking back on events with the benefit of hindsight. Sometimes the voices will alternate. For example, the adult Scout will set the stage:
When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia) were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose’s house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell.
That was the summer Dill came to us.34
Then six-year-old Scout describes the actual moment Dill appeared and drama replaces explanation. The narration provided by the adult Scout is like a voice-over in a film.
A few critics later found fault with this technique. Phoebe Adams in The Atlantic dismissed the story as “frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult.”35 Granville Hicks wrote in The Saturday Review that “Lee’s problem has been to tell the story she wants to tell and yet to stay within the consciousness of a child, and she hasn’t consistently solved it.”36 W. J. Stuckey, in The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Look Backward, attributed Nelle’s “rhetorical trick” to a failure to solve “the technical problems raised by her story and whenever she gets into difficulties with one point of view, she switches to the other.”37
The setting of To Kill a Mockingbird mirrors almost exactly the neighborhood where Harper Lee grew up. (Yoko Hirose, illustrator)
It may be that Nelle had trouble deciding which point of view was better. She rewrote the novel three times: the original draft was in the third person; then she changed to the first person, and later rewrote the final draft, which blended the two narrators, who live both in the “present” of the novel and look back in time, too.38
In addition to her struggles with the novel’s point of view, the effort of making progress on the story was so awful she almost gave up. A perfectionist, Nelle was more of a “rewriter” than a writer, she admitted later.39 She “spent her days and nights in the most intense efforts to set down what she wanted to say in the way which would best say it to the reader,” said Tay.40 While working out of her apartment in New York, she lived on pennies, according to friends. No one “inquired too closely into what she ate,” although now and then, another of Miss Watson’s protégés living in New York invited Nelle over for a square meal and the chance to talk about how things were going on the book.41 Then, for months at a time, Nelle returned to Monroeville to help care for her father, who had been in poor health since the deaths of his wife and son. During those visits, she went to the country club in Monroeville and found a room where she could write without interruption.
When it was necessary, Nelle and Tay met to discuss the book’s progress. Tay remembered, “We talked it out, sometimes for hours. And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of thinking.”42 (She concurred with Nelle about changing the title to To Kill a Mockingbird, from Atticus, and about Nelle calling herself Harper Lee. Nelle never liked it when people mispronounced her name “Nellie.”)43 Tay’s main concern was the structure of To Kill a Mockingbird. In her view, Nelle needed “professional help in organizing her material and developing a sound plot structure. After a couple of false starts, the story-line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision—there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in her own vision of it—the true stature of the novel became evident.”44
Even now, nearly 50 years after To Kill a Mockingbird appeared, the rumor persists that Nelle Harper Lee didn’t write the novel herself. Truman Capote, so goes the whisper campaign, wrote large portions—or maybe all of it.
Tay Hohoff’s son-in-law, Dr. Grady H. Nunn, said such a deception wouldn’t have occurred to Nelle.
I am satisfied that the relationship between Nelle and Tay over those three years while Mockingbird was in the making developed into a warmer and closer association than is usual between author and editor. I believe that special association came about at least in part because they worked, together, over every word in the manuscript. Tay and Arthur became Nelle’s close friends, sort of family, and that friendship continued beyond the publication of the
book. I doubt that the special closeness could possibly have happened had there been an alien ghostwriter, Capote, involved.45
Also, given Truman’s inability to keep anybody’s secrets, it’s highly unlikely that he wouldn’t have claimed right of authorship after the novel became famous. He did say, which Nelle never denied, that he read the manuscript and recommended some edits because it was too long in places.
Without question, the hard work of creating To Kill a Mockingbird fell squarely on Nelle, though “she always knew I was in her corner,” said Tay, “even when I was most critical.”46
Nevertheless, one cold night in New York City the effort of writing and rewriting almost got the better of Nelle. She was seated at her desk in her apartment on York Avenue, rereading a page in her typewriter over and over. Suddenly she gathered up everything she’d written, walked over to a window, and threw the entire draft outside into the snow. The manuscript of what would become one of the most popular novels of the 20th century landed in the slush. Pages of it blew down an alley. Then she called Tay and tearfully explained what she’d done. Tay told her to march outside immediately and retrieve the pages. They had worked too hard to give up now! Feeling exhausted, Nelle bundled up and went out into the darkness, “since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer … I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.”47
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