Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

  Mama was a country kid who had to ride the bus in, and the buses weren’t like we have now. They were trucks with benches in the back—covered, though. She would have to come to town with her lunch, or with a nickel to go across the street, ’cause there was a little store across from the elementary school to get something to eat.

  She always told me when we passed that schoolyard, “Oh, yes, one day we were out there playing, and you weren’t supposed to slide into base. I was on first base, and Nelle Harper slid in and knocked me down in that red clay, and she knew I couldn’t go home at lunch to change.” So fifty years later, Mama still remembers being embarrassed with the red clay stains on her clothes.

  People in town say that Mister A. C. Lee, Harper Lee’s father, was a lot like the character of Atticus—soft-spoken, dignified, and did the right thing. The only character Harper Lee says is real is Dill, who was Truman Capote. People in town say the same thing.

  Monroeville in the 1930s was very much like the [town in] the book. Just the other day, Ann Farish, who grew up here and was in the same room at school with Harper Lee, said to me that she and her friend would go down the alleys off the stores here on the square to look for change. She said, “You know, men had holes in their pockets. Times were hard. We wore our clothes until they had holes in ’em.” So the things that I read in this book, I’m also finding in interviews with people, and things that have been written about the time.

  They say that [Monroeville in the thirties] was only about one or two blocks out from the square. The square was the center of town. And Saturday was the shopping day, when all the country people would come to town. Even in the sixties, I remember coming through Monroeville, and there would be people that came to town to shop with their wagon and mules. So when she talks about the Hoover carts in the book, that was real. During the Depression, people didn’t have any money to buy gasoline. So they took the tires off of their old cars, and put them on their wagons, and still used their mule or horse to pull it. But it rolled better. That was a Hoover cart.

  It’s so multilayered. There are so many characters from every walk of life. You really feel like you are reading about a real town. The themes in the book teachers use every year to teach about prejudice and outsiders and love. Teachers have helped this book live on and on because they teach it every year, and that’s how whole generations of kids read it.

  It’s so real, it feels so real. And it’s so gentle. It talks about really hard issues, but from Scout’s point of view. It’s kind of a slow-moving book. You have time to think about all these things as you’re reading about this town.

  The movie, of course, made our courtroom famous. We say [it’s] the most famous courtroom in America, because when the film rights were sold, they came to try to film here but decided the town had changed too much. We were still having court here in 1962, and they decided to build that courtroom on the sound-stage at the back lot of Universal Studios. Henry Bumstead was the art designer, [and] won an Oscar for that movie. He told me that he took pictures, he measured it, and he wanted to get the proportions right. He wanted that courtroom, the one that Harper Lee grew up with. Harper Lee went to Hollywood and helped him on the set. She didn’t stay, they say, for much of the filming. But Bumstead said that she would come on the set and help him with, “That’s the right chair, that’s the wrong table,” that kind of thing. So he credits her for helping him win that Oscar.

  Since the thirties, the town’s spread out, that’s for sure. And on Saturdays, the square’s dead, which is very different. People shop elsewhere now. We have a Walmart. The downtown is some lawyers’ offices, a few stores, and the post office. But in ’35, everything was here. The Jitney Jungle [a supermarket Miss Stephanie mentions in the novel]—we really had one. V. J. Elmore’s was a department store [where Jem bought Scout her baton]. Bedsole’s was another department store. Everything was here in town. The doctors, the drugstores, dentists, even a boardinghouse.

  We know that she doesn’t want to meet all these people who come here. They started coming in 1960, when the book came out. We don’t take any credit for the fact that we have twenty thousand people visit this town. We know why they’re coming. And we understand that she decided to quit doing interviews. Everybody here knows that. So we don’t tell people where she lives or really anything about her business. We just try to answer their questions about the book and about the town. Because everybody wants to know what was real and what wasn’t. We try to just tell what we know about who really lived here during that time.

  When I came to work here in ’96, I would see Harper Lee around town. During the fall through the Christmas holidays, on into January and February, and then, sometime in the spring, I would realize I hadn’t seen her. I would hear that she had gone back to New York on the train. But she always came home for the holidays. I would look out the window, and she’d be going into the post office. She would come out with armloads of mail, go to the car, sit there and open something. She would be at the grocery store. She would go to church. She was not a recluse at all. She just wanted her privacy. So we didn’t tell people, “Go here, and go there, you may see her.” We just knew that she was around, and [we were] glad that she would come back to Monroeville.

  There are so many people who say to me, “This is my favorite book ever.” They love her. They want to tell her how much they love her. But she doesn’t want that. It would be too much. So this museum is not a place that she would want to be, because they would recognize her and try to talk to her about the book.

  I think she’s a realist. She had to write the book. She went to New York to get it published. That was her goal. And then she wasn’t prepared for the publicity, the fame. I respect the fact that she was able to step back from that. Look what happened to Truman. He loved it. He loved the attention. She decided not to do that. And so, to come to Monroeville and be able to move around the way she does here is pretty amazing.

  Truman Capote’s mother brought him back to Monroeville to live with the cousins who raised her. She and her brothers and sisters were orphans. He came when he was a baby and was taken care of by these old cousins. He went to the first grade, part of the second grade, and then went to New York to live with his mother, who had married Joe Capote by then. But he came back every summer to play with Nelle.

  On South Alabama Street is Mel’s Dairy Dream, and that was where Harper Lee grew up. Her house was torn down in 1951 or ’52 when Mister Lee sold it and Mel’s Dairy Dream was built. So generations of people in Monroeville have gone there for milk-shakes and hamburgers, and still do.

  The book seems so familiar, and then we assume things. I hear townspeople interchange the name of the real person and the character that they think was the model. In conversation, when they’re talking about the real person, they’ll use the fictional name.

  Harper Lee’s mother was Frances Cunningham Finch, and Frances Finch’s father was the postmaster up at Finchburg, which was up near Williams Landing. He married Ellen Williams, and they lived in that area. All the stuff in the book about Finch’s Landing, I relate to Williams Landing, which was a steamboat landing right there, where her family lived. Frances Cunningham Finch married A. C. Lee and moved to Monroeville. They had Alice, Louise, Ed, and Nelle. Mrs. Lee died in 1951. I’m not sure what of. Ed died in 1951 of an aneurism, they think. He was at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. So that was two deaths in their family that year, 1951.

  A. B. Blass [who owned the local hardware store] says he delivered papers to Mrs. Lee, and she would be sitting out on the porch swing in the afternoon dressed in a gingham dress, like a lot of the ladies did. They finished their work in the morning. They cooked dinner, which is the noon meal, and then, in the afternoons, they would sit on the porch and visit with people.

  He would take her the paper. And she’d say, “You’re such a nice young man.” I really haven’t heard other people talk about her. Jennings Carter stayed at the Faulk house a lot and played with Truman and w
ith Harper Lee. He remembers Mrs. Lee playing the piano.

  When the book came out in 1960, I wasn’t here. So I began asking people, “What did you think [when the book first came out]?” Most people said that they didn’t pay it any mind. I asked my mama, and she said, “Well, it just seemed so familiar, we didn’t see anything special about it.”

  When the movie rights were sold and Gregory Peck came to Monroeville, that’s when they sat up and took notice. Everybody has a story of Gregory Peck just being here in this town, staying at the hotel, eating in the restaurants, and visiting Mister Lee. That’s when people noticed the book. If Hollywood’s gonna make a movie out of this book, then there’s something about it that’s special. One girl said that Gregory Peck came into the bank and wrote a check. She was so nervous she had a hard time giving him his money.

  Some young girls rode around town trying to find him to get his autograph. He and Harper Lee were meeting at a little motel, and the girls found out where they were. They dared one another to go and knock on the door. So Martha Moorer had to go and knock on the door. And Harper Lee answered and said, “Martha Louise, what are you doing here? Leave us alone,” or something like that, and started to shut the door. But Gregory Peck said, “No, it’s OK. I’ll give her my autograph.” She cannot find that autograph, though, ’cause I asked her for a copy of it.

  When the book came out in 1960, Ernestine’s Book and Gift Store bought copies, and there was a signing. Everybody in town came to have their book signed. Ernestine bought five hundred copies, and they sold. One lady said, “We just were appalled that she bought that many. We didn’t think that many would sell. We were afraid for her to lose money.”

  Now those people are bringing their books in to show me because they are valuable and rare.

  I don’t know a lot about her relationship with Truman. I just know how close they were when they were children. I just feel like…they were friends the rest of his life. Because friendships that you form when you’re a kid with someone who is of like mind really do endure.

  I know she wants to stay a mystery and let the book stand for itself. Half the people now who come here say, “I don’t need to go and see her. I love the book. And I have the book.” I see the word recluse in articles all the time, and that’s not true. She’s not a recluse. Each year we put on To Kill a Mockingbird, the play, and that’s our big fund-raiser to keep this building intact. It’s a county building, but we don’t get funding from them. It was this building that Harper Lee had in mind when she wrote her book.

  Allan Gurganus

  Allan Gurganus was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1947. He is the author of three novels, including, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) and White People (1990), and a collection of short stories, Plays Well with Others (1997).

  I remember the title was extremely beautiful. I thought the title was everything a title should be—an invitation, a mystery. I loved mockingbirds, and there was part of the cult of living in the South: There’s always one on every corner just singing its little gullet out.

  One of the things that struck me initially as someone who lived in a town of twenty-four hundred was, I felt the permission to write about small-town life and the permission to feel that huge international drama, all the circumstances of truth, justice, and the American way, could be played out in a town of two thousand souls. And could be played out by a single just man who stands up to be counted. Atticus resembled a lot of the Harvard-educated lawyers who had gone away to school and come home. Faulkner is full of those people too, who seemed in those days to be the real aristocrats, the people who could have done anything but chose not to leave, the people who had a kind of comprehensive vision of the sociology of the town and were amused by it and forgave it and defended the wrongly accused.

  I was close enough to Scout’s age to be attracted both to the childlikeness of the voice and the sagacity of the adult perspective. I think…one of the things that’s not quite understood about the book is that Lee manages to be a child and an adult. The analysis of the town is very shrewd and with the wisdom of an eighty-year-old dowager who’s seen it all. And yet, the voice can be very fresh and very innocent and beguiling and Huck Finn–like. I think Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird have a lot in common, and I think Harper Lee learned a lot from Twain in terms of a child’s critical vision of the hierarchy, of the system.

  There was a kind of freshness. I remember reading it in one sitting as one of those books that pulls you through it. I thought it was an extraordinary book, but I was just young enough to know that there were many extraordinary books. I thought all books were extraordinary. What’s marvelous is that you see that sometimes the first things that happen to you are as big as they seemed. And it’s very moving to see what an evergreen and enduring achievement it’s truly turned out to be.

  The narrative is very tough, because she has to both be a kid on the street and aware of the mad dogs and the spooky houses, and have this beautiful vision of how justice works and all the creaking mechanisms of the courthouse. Part of the beauty is that she, Harper Lee, trusts the visual to lead her, and the sensory. You really know that courthouse extremely well, who sits where, where the black people sit, where the fans are. I think that one of the many reasons that Horton Foote wrote such an amazing screenplay is that he had the good sense to know a great thing when he found it, and he trusted it. So even the relation of Atticus to the lady down the street—who’s what, his part-time lover of an evening, who knows?—is very beautiful, deftly honored. It’s not spelled out, it’s not oversimplified or made lurid.

  I think one of the many anomalies of the book is that it is a very great book that was made into a very great film. Usually, great films are made from second-rank books, and usually great books make terrible movies. But there is something in the opening sequences of the film with the childhood toys and images of the precious things saved that lets you know you’re in a child’s vision, and it holds there.

  I’m interested in the fact that “a Boo Radley” is now a phrase in the language. It’s sort of like, “the block’s Boo Radley.” Many people who haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird have that phrase in their lingo. That’s what every writer wants, to identify some previously noted but not named phenomenon and provide the English-speaking world with a brand-new word, a brand-new concept. And I think she has done that.

  Calpurnia is like the black women in Carson McCullers, but she’s very particular and very proud and a kind of role model. Goodness is, I think, underestimated as a dramatic virtue in fiction. Except for the white-trash villains, everybody in the town is sort of good or trying to be. I think that’s one of the enduring attractions of the book. Maybe in our times, which are so full of corruption and just disgustingly forthright greed, our nostalgia for this vision of decency and the system working makes it a more important book, not a less important one.

  I loved the story of Harper Lee visiting the set with Gregory Peck, and he’s in his white ice-cream suit, and it’s all properly creased and a little three days old, and she starts crying at the sight of him. She said, “You look just like my daddy, and especially the way your little tummy pouches out.” He said, “That’s not a pouch, that’s great acting!”

  I think it’s maybe a testament to the book that Gregory Peck as a star was always a little stiff, a little angular. This movie, I think, humanized him, and he relaxed into the part because all the virtue was there and he could underplay.

  I read To Kill a Mockingbird again two years ago, partially because a godson was reading it in high school and I wanted to seem cool in his eyes and pretend that I knew all about it in advance, so I burned the midnight oil and read it in a single sitting. I was amazed—there’s dew all over it. The description early on of the ladies with their powder sort of melted like frosting on teacakes by nightfall seemed to be so knowing and so loving, and kind of rueful but very true. It’s a book of a real writer.

  I think [this time] I saw it mor
e in the social context of the period. I look back at the civil rights struggle and think that if Dwight Eisenhower or Jack Kennedy had flown from Washington, during the battles for integration, and had taken the hand of a little black girl who was being pelted by tomatoes and jeered at by white crackers, and walked to school with that child, risked all their political capital to do the right thing, as Atticus would have done, the civil rights struggle would have been put forward by thirty years. But they were too cowardly, they were too mixed in their own feelings about race, they were too canny as politicians to take that chance.

  When I read this book, somehow I had this vision of the biggest guy on the block taking the littlest hand on the block and leading this child to school. And it never happened. But it happened in the book, and I think that’s one of the eternal attractions of the work.

  Writers are known as sort of self-regarding and isolated and competitive and jealous of each other. But in my experience, writers are also each other’s first readers; they are the ones to note first what you’ve done extremely well. If they’re honest with each other, they can both grow at an extraordinarily advanced rate. I think the childhood friendship between Harper Lee and Truman Capote was clearly immensely important to each of them. They became each other’s first readers, each other’s best readers, each other’s shrewdest judges.