by Marja Mills
On her extended visits home from New York, Nelle had a new place to call home. As a girl, she liked to watch her father in action at the courthouse. As a woman, she still accompanied him to the law office some days to work on her manuscript about the character he inspired, Atticus Finch.
Alice and her house held a wealth of Lee family stories. In this spare room with the fax, we lingered in front of a bookcase. I asked Alice about their favorite authors. High on her sister’s list, she told me, were William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, Jane Austen and Thomas Macaulay. The first three are familiar names to most people who’ve taken high school English, whether or not they remember what they read. Nowadays, Home Alone actor Macaulay Culkin has far greater name recognition than Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British writer, historian, and Whig politician. Thomas Macaulay died in 1859. More than a century later, Culkin’s parents named him in honor of the original Macaulay. Fame is a strange beast.
Alice preferred nonfiction, especially British and American histories, and Nelle devoured those, too. I spotted a shelf lined with many such histories. Judging by the jackets, some were recent, but many were published decades ago.
“Have you spent time in England?” I asked.
She ran her deeply lined hand across the spines of a row of books. It was a tender gesture. Loving, even. “This,” she said, “is how I’ve traveled.”
Alice’s room, down the hallway a bit and on the left, had a bed with a bright pink coverlet, an old dresser, and, naturally, a crammed bookcase. Other books were in piles on a chair and on the floor. Still more books and rafts of papers were scattered across half the bed.
Like her father, I would later learn, Alice had a peculiar reading habit at bedtime. She would lie flat on her back and hold the open book above her face to read it. Seems like an uncomfortable position but it worked for A. C. Lee and it worked for his daughter. If Alice couldn’t fall asleep, she had her own version of counting sheep. She silently ran through the names of Alabama’s counties. Or American vice presidents. Chronologically. But in reverse order.
At the end of the hallway, she showed me Nelle’s bedroom. This originally was their father’s quarters. It was as modest as the rest of the house. When Nelle was in New York, Julia occupied the room. The walls were blue. Built-in bookshelves lined the wall to the left of the door. A small figurine of a cat perched on a shelf at eye level. A trunk sat under one window. A small door led to the private bath.
As fascinated as I was by this unexpected house tour, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. But Alice brushed aside my concern about that and continued the conversation.
My thoughts turned to Terrence again. I told Alice that he was out in the car. Would it be okay if he came in to take her photograph?
“Well, yes. All right. Invite him in.”
I hurried out through the darkness to the rental car. It was still a warm night but not nearly as warm and close as in the house.
Terrence lowered his window. He grinned.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” I said it so fast it came out as one word. “I had no idea I’d be in there so long. That is Miss Alice. She’s wonderful, Terrence. Come on in. She said it’s okay to bring your camera.”
“Oh, fantastic.” Terrence followed me up the wooden steps to the front door.
Already I was looking forward to telling him about my conversations on our drive back to the Best Western.
“I hope you have enjoyed your visit to Monroeville,” Alice told Terrence.
“Very much.”
We chatted some more in the living room, and then Terrence, tentatively, got down to business. “Is this good here?” he asked. Alice had resumed her spot in the recliner.
“Yes.” Alice smiled at Terrence but also looked a touch wistful. “I never did like photographs of myself. The problem is they look like me.”
Terrence spoke to her gently, put her at ease as much as he could.
“I just hope I don’t crack your camera,” Alice told him. She said this with the wry delivery I came to know well. The real life “Atticus in a Skirt,” as Nelle called her, had that in common with the novel’s quiet attorney. Just as a neighbor in the novel observes of Atticus, Alice could be “right dry.”
Alice had one request for me. Could I stay on long enough to interview the Methodist minister who was a good friend to both Lees? I said I’d like to and I’d ask my editors if I could extend my visit.
I inquired if I might ask her some more questions the following day, either here or at her law office. I expected she might decline, reasonably enough. Already she had been generous with her time. To my delight, she invited me to stop by her office.
Terrence and I bid her good night and slid into the rental car. We drove back to the motel, excited by this unexpected development.
The next morning, I called my editors. We agreed it made sense to stay on. Alice speaking on the record, particularly about their parents and her sister’s experience with fame, was unusual.
We had another long interview that day, in the suite of offices above the Monroe County Bank. Barnett, Bugg & Lee was a two-lawyer firm consisting of Alice and a young male attorney she had taken under her wing. Another attorney was of counsel. A receptionist sat at a desk near the front door and relayed callers’ messages to Alice. She could no longer hear well enough to use the telephone. As with Atticus Finch and many other small-town lawyers, real estate transactions, tax returns, and wills were at the heart of Alice’s practice.
At one point I asked her about her sister’s long public silence. “I don’t think any first-time author could be prepared for what happened. It all fell in on her,” Alice said, “and her way of handling it was not to let it get too close to her.”
And what about the first question everyone had about her sister: Why didn’t she write another book?
Alice leaned forward in her office chair. “I’ll put it this way . . . When you have hit the pinnacle, how would you feel about writing more? Would you feel like you’re competing with yourself?”
Chapter Three
The following day, my phone rang at the Best Western.
“Hello?”
“Miss Mills?”
“Yes, this is Marja.”
“This is Harper Lee. You’ve made quite an impression on Miss Alice. I wonder if we might meet.”
It was as if I had answered the phone and heard “Hello. This is the Wizard of Oz.” I felt my adrenaline spike. With effort, I kept my speaking voice from going up a couple of octaves.
“That would be wonderful.”
The voice on the other end was slightly husky and almost musical, her Alabama accent undiminished by the years in New York City. She didn’t sound the least bit shy.
This was not to be an interview for my newspaper story, she said, but a chance to visit. “Would eleven A.M. be all right? At the Best Western?”
“That would be great. Whatever works best for you.”
“All right, then. I’ll see you at eleven.”
I hung up the phone and collected myself.
I called Terrence’s room, then Tim in Chicago. Who would have guessed? It was exciting and a little nerve-wracking.
Tim reacted as Terrence had. “What? Really?”
That night, in bed, I opened the novel again. I slipped under the covers and into the cadence of her prose and the pace of life in 1930s Maycomb.
No matter what the parameters were, I was intrigued by the opportunity to meet with this mysterious literary legend, this woman whose book had meant the world to so many millions of people for so many years. And I never expected to actually be able to speak with her, anyway; so many reporters, year after year, had come to Monroeville before me and left with nothing to write except more stories about hunting for Harper Lee.
The next morning, I went over my notes. I imagined she might want to know who had spok
en with me.
The knock came at the appointed time.
I opened the door to my motel room. The light was harsh compared with the dark room. I blinked. Everything about the woman before me looked solid and practical: the short white hair, the large glasses, the black sneakers fastened with wide Velcro straps. Her bangs were cut high and straight across her forehead. She was solidly built and on the tall side. She wore a simple white cotton blouse over casual tan pants. She had on a bit of lipstick but otherwise no makeup or jewelry.
“Hello,” I said. “Please come in.”
“Miss Mills.” She smiled and stepped into the coolness of the room. I closed the door.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” I said. “Would you like to have a seat here?” I motioned to the small table. Not that there was much alternative. Other than a chair pulled up to the desk against the wall opposite the beds, the table offered the only place to sit. It was a bit cramped, shoved up against the window immediately to the left of the front door as you entered the room. I took the chair by the window and she sat to my left, facing the window. “I can open this if you’d like more light,” I said with a shrug. I wondered if she would prefer the privacy of closed curtains.
“No, this is just fine. Thank you.”
Based on what I’d read, I expected either someone of great reserve or perhaps someone angry about my being in town and unafraid to express her displeasure.
She was neither. Her voice had a pleasant lilt, and although she was reserved while we exchanged greetings, as soon as we began talking she came across as down-to-earth and self-assured. She repeated nearly word for word what she had said on the phone. “Well, you’ve made quite an impression on Miss Alice.”
“She was wonderful.”
“I understand you had quite a conversation.”
“We did. I just wrote her a note.” I nodded toward the desk. “I’ve been making the rounds and told her I’d keep her up to date on that. She told me I should talk to Dale Welch and Reverend Butts.”
She scowled and leaned in a bit closer.
Was that the wrong thing to say?
“Pardon me. I didn’t hear you.”
I raised my voice. “Your sister told me I should talk to Dale Welch and Reverend Butts.”
The scowl deepened. She cupped her hand to her right ear. “What?”
The air-conditioning unit just to my right and under the window seemed to have two settings: noisy and off. I switched it to off. The loud rumble and blowing abruptly ceased. It was a reckless move in summertime southern Alabama but it worked.
“Is this better?” I asked. “I can turn it back on if it gets too warm.”
Her face relaxed and she smiled. “No, that’s better.”
Alice had filled her in on our conversations.
Before we began talking in earnest, she was very clear: This would not be an interview. “Just a visit.”
I agreed, and filled her in on the One Book, One Chicago happenings.
I mentioned the movie showings. I’d enjoyed Gregory Peck’s remarks in a documentary about meeting Lee and filming To Kill a Mockingbird.
At the mention of Peck, she leaned forward. Her eyes danced.
“Isn’t he delicious?”
She had as many questions for me as I had for her. She wanted to know more about the One Book, One Chicago program, and she also asked about the director of the program, Mary Dempsey, with whom she had spoken. She also asked about the specifics of my stay, including where I had gone, who had spoken with me, and what they had said. I didn’t feel I was being grilled; her tone was conversational.
I did want to know what she thought of Monroeville today.
“I read that when they were going to film the movie, they decided Monroeville had changed too much from the thirties for them to film here.”
She made a face, as if she had tasted something sour. There was something childlike in her expressions, not childish but animated, spontaneous in an appealing way. At the same time she spoke with an almost formal grammar.
“This is not the Monroeville in which I grew up. I don’t like it one bit.”
She was not one to equivocate, clearly.
We spoke at some length about how the character of the town had changed. She also echoed Alice’s comments about the continual attention she received and the toll it took on both of them. As she put it, “Forty years of this gets to be a bit much.”
She was a woman of formidable intellect. I would have loved to hear her expound on any number of topics. But I trod carefully that first day. I was concerned about her famously private nature. Yet here she was, putting me at ease. I came to realize later that she set the tone of any conversation.
“Alice told me a little about your parents, and Finchburg. And Burnt Corn.” That was a nearby community, tiny but still something listed on maps. We laughed together about some of the colorful place names in Alabama. She lamented that local flavor was being lost. Later, she noted how developers often named new subdivisions for what they had destroyed to create them. As Lee put it, many paved Oak Groves stood where oak trees had fallen.
Mayor Daley wasn’t the only prominent Chicagoan to have proclaimed his love of To Kill a Mockingbird. Oprah Winfrey spoke of the influence the novel, one of her favorites, had on her. I’d heard she’d wanted to pick the novel for her immensely popular televised book club but that the novelist declined.
Lee confirmed this. “I met her. We had lunch together.” The two discussed Winfrey’s request over lunch in New York at the Waldorf Astoria, she said. Lee declined her request but was impressed by Winfrey’s knowledge of her characters, and her passion for the book.
“What did you think of her?” I asked.
“Well, for a girl, a black girl, growing up in poverty in Mississippi when she did to accomplish what she has . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It is remarkable.”
Winfrey had been a cultural force as long as I could remember. It was easy to forget—unless you remembered the place and era in which Winfrey grew up—how unlikely it was at the time that she would become a cultural figure of influence and wealth beyond all imagining.
Lee mused aloud as to why Alice and I developed a quick rapport. With her index finger stabbing the air as if she were pressing an invisible doorbell—a gesture, I’d come to learn, that was as automatic to her as breathing—she delivered a true compliment, given the character of the woman to whom she compared me.
“I know what it was,” Harper Lee said. “Quality met quality.”
I had never heard that formulation before. It might have been particular to her.
I was surprised, once again, that she seemed in no hurry to leave. When she did stand to say good-bye, I thanked her and she wished me safe travels.
But she had one last surprise.
She hugged me. I hoped I didn’t look startled. And then she was gone.
Chapter Four
Already I found myself fascinated by Harper Lee and Alice Lee as sisters. Even at their ages, it was clear Alice was the steady, responsible older sister, and Nelle Harper the spirited, spontaneous younger one. Born fifteen years earlier, Alice was as much mother as sister to Nelle. Alice had lived most of her life in Monroeville, and she and Nelle shared her home several months of the year. The rest of the year Nelle lived in her New York City apartment. Alice handled, in large part, Harper Lee’s financial affairs. Her sister had no interest in that, Alice said.
They were utterly different in temperament and the paths they chose. Nelle left Monroeville in 1944 to attend Huntingdon College, as Alice had done, in Montgomery. After a year, Nelle went on to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and studied law. The summer of 1948, she studied at Oxford and fell in love with England.
Both she and Alice were fascinated with English history and English literature. Their own English roots went deep, back to th
e barons of Runnymede, the feudal landowners who made history by forcing King John to accept the Magna Carta, limiting his powers, in 1215. The more Nelle and Alice learned about British history, the more they wanted to know. It was true when they studied it in high school and college, and it was true in the decades of personal reading that followed. Alice’s research into the family’s origins led her to believe they also had an ancestor who, four hundred years later, was one of the scholars to help translate the King James Version of the Christian Bible for the Church of England. Nelle believed this translation to be simply the best, hands down, no argument.
After Oxford, Nelle returned to her legal studies in Tuscaloosa but left a semester before she would have gotten her degree. The philosophy and human drama of law interested her. The dry technicalities did not. Alice recalled, “She got an itch to write.”
Or, rather, to devote herself to writing. She had dabbled in it before, starting with the stories she and Truman made up as children. At the University of Alabama, she wrote for and edited the Rammer Jammer, a student humor magazine. Like Alice, she was also a lifelong correspondent. “Her letters,” her friend Tom later told me, “are like short stories. Her powers of description are extraordinary.”
And so the dark-haired young woman was off to New York, at age twenty-three, to a walk-up, cold-water flat and a job as an airline reservations clerk. It was several years before she was able to quit that job and start writing full time, in a turn of events worthy of an O. Henry short story. On Christmas Day in 1956, Harper Lee was spending the holiday at the home of her friends Joy and Michael Brown. She found an envelope addressed to her on the tree in their living room. Inside was a simple message: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”
Lee wrote about that turning point, calling it “a full, fair chance for a new life,” in the December 1961 edition of McCall’s magazine. “I went to the window, stunned by the day’s miracle,” she wrote. “Our faith in you was really all I had heard them say. I would do my best not to fail them.” They meant it to be a gift, but she insisted on repaying them. The Browns remained lifelong friends and a surrogate family in New York. When Nelle went to the White House in 2007 to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Browns were in attendance.