by Marja Mills
Short of moving into an assisted living center, I was learning about that world, too. Not just about what it means to live in the Lees’ small hometown in Alabama but what it means to be among the old in a nation geared to the young.
Chapter Eleven
By this point, the Lees were excited for me to discover their Monroeville. True to their personalities, Alice was more steadfast and constant in her enthusiasm, while Nelle was often inspiring and helpful but could also be distant about it. Sometimes I sensed that her old trepidation about the press got the better of her. But the many days she was keen about the project were magical. As she came to know me better, we had more of those days.
Even in her later years, Nelle retained a childlike enthusiasm for things: for exploring, for good meals, and, as time went along, for my book. In my early days in Monroeville, she began to want in on the fun that Alice and Tom and I were having on Sunday drives.
“Do you mind if I join you?” she’d ask. I didn’t mind.
She was an enthusiastic guide, on drives and when she was giving me assignments of where to go and whom to see if I had any hope of really understanding this area, her family, and her own experience.
One afternoon, Nelle arranged for us to meet with Margaret Garrett, an old friend who lived in Stockton and was related to Chief Red Eagle Weatherford. In her nineties now, Garrett was a good storyteller and she remembered what it was like here when she was young.
We spent a few hours with her, the stories flowing back and forth between Margaret and Nelle, and Nelle was elated on the drive back to Monroeville.
I took my eyes off the road to glance over at her. “I think we got great stuff, don’t you?” she said, tapping her index finger on the dashboard for emphasis.
“The part about the hair?” she said. “Oh, that was great.”
Margaret’s parents brought her home from a Montgomery boarding school when, feeling modern and bold, she had cut her hair into a bob. In that era, they figured it was the first scandalous step on a young woman’s road to ruin. She continued her schooling back home, where her parents could keep an eye on her. The story said a lot about the social mores of the time for a young woman growing up in Alabama.
I glanced over at Nelle when Margaret was telling us about that. Nelle shot me a “good stuff” look and made a quick scribbling motion, meaning “Make sure that’s in your notes.”
She loved that part of the reporting process, it was clear. It gave me just a glimpse, in my own humble circumstance, of what it must have been like to work with her in Kansas all those years ago when she and Capote spent long hours around the kitchen tables of the people they were interviewing.
In later years, Nelle made no bones about all the aspects of publishing a book that she was glad to leave behind: the spotlight on her personal life, the demands on her time, the way people just showed up at her door, wanting something.
But on that day, I saw the downside of her decision—her series of decisions over the years—not to publish again, or to collaborate the way she did with Capote for In Cold Blood. Anxieties and frustrations aside, she loved the work.
I was accustomed by now to Nelle’s wry way of introducing me to people as “a contradiction in terms: a class-act journalist.” I remembered her letter to me, back in 2002, when she wrote about “the decline of a once honorable profession.”
She’d observed that decline, as she believed it to be, from a unique perch. For forty-two years at that point—more than half of her life—she had avoided interactions with the press and yet been written about regularly. Being written about and, in the absence of firsthand information, speculated about, bothered her deeply.
“Some of that is our generation,” Tom told me one day over burgers and onion rings at the South Forty. “The idea that some stranger would speculate in print about whether she is gay just appalled her, embarrassed her.” He paused.
“Not that younger people want their sexuality speculated about, either, but for someone who grew up in the time and the place that we did, it was really jarring to her. She didn’t grow up with things like they are now, where people discuss the most personal stuff on TV and all that.”
People sometimes asked Tom whether Nelle had dated and, if so, what her orientation was. “I tell people I don’t know.”
It’s the kind of question, he said, that would bother someone of Nelle’s sensibilities regardless of orientation.
Only a couple of other tables at the restaurant were occupied, but there at our back table, we lowered our voices. It was a sensitive topic, but this was part of Nelle’s difficult experience with fame.
I took a sip of my Diet Coke.
“Why all the speculation, do you think?”
“Well, she never married and no one seemed to know about her dating life, if she had one. Scout was a tomboy, and so was she, and she kind of kept that almost masculine way about her as an adult. She’s not a dainty person. Especially back when she first got famous, she didn’t fit the stereotype of a ladylike Southern woman. Remember, that was 1960. I don’t think I’ve seen her wear a piece of jewelry as long as I’ve known her except something simple for an appearance. She doesn’t wear makeup, hardly. You know how she dresses. Always pants and kind of baggy clothes sometimes. Even the way she moves, you know, there’s just something almost masculine about it. And that stood out more back then than it does now. People forget how times change.”
Nelle endured other speculation in the press, of course. Whether Capote had a hand in writing To Kill a Mockingbird—though everyone in the know agreed he did not—and whether she simply gave fictional names in her novel to people taken directly off the streets of Monroeville.
Even in those articles that didn’t indulge in speculation, Nelle found she was misquoted at times, or that incorrect names and dates and other inaccuracies appeared in print. The Internet only made the problem worse, as a mistake or rumor in one article would then be picked up and copied in a dozen others, and personal blogs meant unedited copy circulating without any form of fact-checking or editorial control.
Nor did Nelle think much of the way a narrative approach to nonfiction had become popular both in newspapers and in journalism as practiced in magazines and books.
“Having been around for 30-odd years, the New Journalism is your heritage,” Nelle had written in that 2002 letter.
One thing that intrigued me about this was that the New Journalism, as it often is called, had its origins not only with journalists such as Tom Wolfe but with Truman Capote and, specifically, the book Nelle helped research and report, In Cold Blood.
She and Capote delved into the kind of reporting that allowed his narrative approach to the book. With a level of detail and effort to understand people’s motives and mentalities, Capote was able to write the story as what he famously called a “nonfiction novel.”
And this was reporting about a husband and wife, and two of their four children, who were murdered in their home. Even more than a private author such as Nelle, these were people who had no chance to protect their private lives from what others might write. I saw the irony there, or at least a contradiction. Didn’t Nelle?
I approached the subject gingerly in one of our long, later conversations.
“You were practicing journalism doing that research, wouldn’t you say?”
Nelle looked at me evenly. “There was a difference.”
“A difference?”
“I knew when to stop.”
I wasn’t sure Herb and Bonnie Clutter would agree with that assessment but I wasn’t going to press the point. Nelle did say she felt Truman exaggerated the emotional instability he described plaguing Bonnie Clutter in the years before she was killed.
Nelle believed, she said, that Bonnie Clutter had endured the hormonal changes that come with menopause, and perhaps some moodiness, but that her emotional health was not as fra
gile as Truman depicted it.
She might have questioned his work on that point, but on the whole, she was proud of their work together in Kansas.
Chapter Twelve
Those first several weeks of settling in were full of errands, chores, and possibility. One afternoon, Judy stopped by with small Tupperware containers of homemade vegetable soup. “You take care of yourself, girl,” she said. “What do you need? What can I get you?” Kenny accompanied her. He was anxious to secure my promise that I would leave Wes’s Auburn sun catcher in the kitchen window. The sun catcher was a large, decorative rectangle of stained glass, with “AU” in Auburn orange and blue. The first time Kenny walked into the house, he spotted it right away. It was the only thing he needed to see to know this was the right place for me.
I knew the Auburn decoration would get me grief, though, from the University of Alabama fans in my slowly widening circle of friends. Football was second only to God in inspiring devotion around here, and even He had to be relieved the annual showdown between Alabama and Auburn didn’t conflict with Sunday services. People wouldn’t dream of dropping by during those games, any more than they would bother the sisters once the Masters was under way. Later that year, Alice got a huge kick out of Alabama native Warren St. John’s Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, about the subculture of die-hard ’Bama fans that follow the team in RVs.
Methodist or Baptist, Alabama fan or Auburn. These things mattered. They determined who your people were. In a way, I had a clean slate.
“I haven’t decided about that,” I told Kenny. “What about the Alabama fans?”
I was teasing but he looked genuinely alarmed.
“I give you my word, Kenny.”
He brightened. “You my sister.”
He gave me a hug good-bye. Kenny’s hugs weren’t perfunctory. He wrapped his arms around me and gave me what my three-year-old nephew Andrew would call a squeeze hug.
When Kenny and Judy headed home, I was alone again in this unfamiliar house. I wanted voices in the room with me. Storms had claimed the antenna. I could get one channel, CBS. It was full of static. I decided not to bother with television. I’d already watched enough Law & Order episodes for one lifetime. I asked around: How might I get my transistor radio to tune in to NPR? No one knew. This was puzzling; Hilda Butts had her kitchen radio permanently tuned to NPR, so there must be a way. I asked Tom the next time I was at his house. Turns out they had a special rooftop antennae that allowed them to tune in the NPR affiliate in Tuscaloosa, 150 miles away. Hilda made it the one condition of their transfer to Monroeville.
“There is one trick you can try, though,” Tom said. “Hold it against your body like this.” He held an imaginary radio against his rib cage. “And point the antenna toward your backyard.”
That evening, alone at home with my thoughts and the whooshes and clanks of the furnace, I gave it a try. I climbed onto my bed and stretched out, looking up at the ceiling. There was a cobweb there I hadn’t noticed. I pushed myself back so that only my lower legs dangled off the end. My clog slipped off my right foot and dropped to the wooden floor with a thunk. I kicked off the left shoe and scooched back more so I could try this with my knees bent and my feet flat on the mattress. I tuned in the radio, rested it on my ribs with my left hand, and, with my other hand, pointed the long silver antenna over my right shoulder toward where my backyard met the Lees’.
It worked. Victory! I listened to the smooth, low-key voice of a news commentator out of Tuscaloosa. Hardly any static, and a familiar lilt to the radio host’s voice. Did NPR send people away to boot camp somewhere to acquire that public-radio way of speaking? The accent was different here but the slightly professorial, low-key intonation, the NPR-ness, was familiar. The tone of it was ripe for parody, especially around here, and I didn’t broadcast my preference for it any more than I did my Unitarian Universalist upbringing. I lay on the bed, luxuriating in the static-free reception as the radio rose and fell softly on my ribs. I’d be able to get Fresh Air this way at last. Problem was, I had to stay like that or I lost the reception. The position got old in a hurry. I stood back up. Defeat.
I mentioned this to Nelle one day. A couple of days later, she called. We had tentatively planned on coffee that morning at my place. I knew when I lifted the receiver who it was and what she’d say.
“Hey. You pourin’?”
“You bet. The coffee’s brewing.”
I put out the duck teacups and saucers and fished a couple of teaspoons out of the top drawer to the left of the sink. I left the kitchen door ajar so Nelle could walk right in. She poked her head across the threshold, keeping her white sneakers planted on the little screened porch. I was in the dining room for a minute, hunting for a place mat for the middle of the table.
“Woo-hoo,” I heard.
“Come on in,” I said, and closed the door to the large, dark buffet where I’d found the place mat. Nelle closed the door behind her. “Here,” she said, handing me two cassette tapes in plastic cases. “These are for you.”
Nelle had come bearing the remedy for my NPR withdrawal, for the desire to have voices in the room other than those to be found on the evangelical and country music radio stations. Even with the white hair and aging hands, when she was up to mischief, or giving a gift, you could see the girl in her.
I turned over one of the cassettes to read the cover.
“Kathryn Tucker Windham,” Nelle said. She beamed. “She’s wonderful.”
“Wow. Thank you.” I read aloud from the cassette covers. “At Home with My Daddy’s Stories.” And the other: “Women to Remember.” I knew of Windham, just in passing, the Alabama newspaperwoman and storyteller, now in her eighties. I’d hear snatches of her on NPR now and then. Her voice was as comforting as an embrace, and the stories of small-town shenanigans and growing up near Selma poured out of her. The tales were popular with NPR listeners and had become a staple of national storytelling festivals. She was nostalgic without being sentimental. Human nature amused her.
She had that in common with Nelle, who had taken her usual seat at the table. She pushed her teacup toward me, a supplicant for coffee. Once she smelled it brewing, she didn’t like to wait.
I set down the cassettes and picked up the glass carafe.
“Strong coffee, coming up.”
“Please.”
Nelle didn’t stay. She was there just long enough to gulp one cup and go over the logistics of our upcoming movie night with Judy and Ila. We’d watch Christopher Guest’s satirical Best in Show. I ordered it from Netflix and a few days later the rectangular red envelope showed up in my box at the post office. Nelle thought this was a more involved process than it was. She always gave me props for procuring her movie requests, as if it required more than hitting “rent” on the Netflix site. I started to explain how easy it was but she waved that away. It was the Lees’ need-to-know approach to technology. If they didn’t need to know the specifics, all the better. As long as the movies showed up, the how didn’t matter. I was curious to see what else she would request. The next ones she suggested were A Mighty Wind and installments of the British television comedy Yes, Prime Minister.
Her appreciation of satire was reflected in her choices of British and American films. During my time in Monroeville, those included Wallace & Gromit, Kind Hearts and Coronets (an Ealing British black comedy with Alec Guinness playing eight different members of the same family), Fargo, Heavens Above! (a British film in which a minister is accidentally appointed to a snobbish parish, starring Peter Sellers), Heaven Help Us, and Guest’s Waiting for Guffman.
I stood at the sun catcher window and watched Nelle start back across my front yard. I picked up the cassettes and carried them down the wide, wood-floored hallway to my bedroom. I kicked off my clogs and climbed onto the bed. It was still morning but I was feeling the short night of sleep. I slipped At Home with My Daddy’s Stories out of the ca
se and into the tape player and pushed it to the other side of the bed. Windham’s voice, warm, almost golden, was in the room.
I reached over for the green fleece throw and curled up on my side, gently hugging a pillow. I closed my eyes and listened.
“I’m Kathryn Windham in my home in Selma, Alabama [long pause], remembering tales about my father, other members of my family [pause], sitting in his rocking chair, talking about stories he told me and stories I heard about him and learned from him [pause] a long time ago in Thomasville, Alabama.”
The stories poured like honey: smooth, then faster, then slower.
“Every now and then somebody will say to me, ‘I notice when you tell stories you always pause and there are periods when you don’t say anything.’ And it occurs to me that may be because my father would pause in his storytelling while he lighted his pipe to get it going again. And though I don’t smoke a pipe”—Windham laughed—“that may have influenced my storytelling.”
Nelle later requested Windham be inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor, and attended the event.
Chapter Thirteen
Nelle told me to come by at three that afternoon. We’d stop off at McDonald’s for a cup of coffee and then collect Alice at the office and head over to the lake to feed the ducks and geese.
Nelle came to the door practically clucking. I don’t know if it struck me that way because we were off to feed the ducks later but it was as if her feathers were ruffled and she was deciding whether to talk about it or not.