Tru and Nelle

by G. Neri

  The Very First Time I Ever Laid Eyes on Truman

  A.C. used to say to me, “Nelle, Monroeville is home to us. People are born, raised, get married, and die without ever a thought of moving away.” That’s what made Truman different, I suppose, ’cause he was an outsider from the beginning. He was from a different city in a different state. He talked different, he acted different, and he was different in every way imaginable. But then again, I wasn’t like anyone else either; maybe that’s why we got along in the end.

  The first time I ever laid eyes on Truman, I thought he was some kinda precious china doll. This was a couple years before I ever talked to him, back when he visited Miss Jenny with his folks.

  Miss Jenny, being the refined person she is, was always ordering delicate things from faraway places. So here, I thought, was this pretty doll sitting on a wicker chair on her side porch, all dressed up in a little white suit, short pants, and a striped tie. It had fine blond hair that looked white under the sun. It seemed so real, I was thinking of using it to scare my sister Bear.

  Then it began to cry.

  Miss Jenny and her cousin Lillie Mae were having a big ol’ argument—so loud I could hear almost every word they were saying from my house. Just when I thought it couldn’t get no worse, that doll suddenly started bawling its little head off. I musta been three at the time, but I can still remember it on account of all the crying. My mama, who hates noise ’cause it makes her all nervous-like, pulled me inside.

  “Who was that, Mama?”

  “That is Lillie Mae’s child!” Lillie Mae lived in New Orleans. Every time she showed up here in Monroeville, she caused a stir. She dressed like a showgirl and if she wasn’t getting enough attention, she raised a ruckus until everyone noticed. The way she acted upset Mama and so did her kid’s crying. Mama sat down and played the piano as loud as she could just to drown them out. Between the piano, the yelling, and the crying, my ears couldn’t take it anymore! I hid in my daddy’s office until it quieted down again.

  After that day, I didn’t see or hear that kid for a long time.

  ’Bout a year later, a big fancy car with no top pulled up and there was that child again, all dolled up in a little sailor suit. Lillie Mae and her husband dressed real fine too, bouncing out of the car like they owned the world. Miss Jenny did not look happy to see them. Folks just didn’t act like big-city people here in Monroeville. Me, I was already wearing overalls and going barefoot all the time. Maybe my mama woulda liked a little china-doll kid instead of a tomboy like me, but I knew she couldn’t stand them either.

  The adults went inside, leaving this little kid to wander around the backyard all alone. Truth be told, last time I saw this kid, I’d thought it was a girl. Now I wasn’t so sure. The kid seemed worried about getting the white shoes dirty. But then the kid saw Miss Jenny’s bone fence and froze. I hafta admit, that fence kinda scared me too, ’cause it was made from real animal bones. Why Miss Jenny would make a fence out of animal bones I never knew, but I wouldn’t go anywhere near that thing.

  I remember sitting there watching that little sailor inch up closer and closer to that bone fence. When the kid finally touched it, a big ol’ grin appeared. Giggles followed. The kid was petting the bones and kinda wiggling on them when Lillie Mae called from the house: “Tru!”

  Tru? What kind of name is that? It did not help me solve the mystery of this child, who was real surprised and kinda slipped and fell across the fence, knocking out a few bones. Well, that was like pulling on a thread—as soon as you undid a few of ’em, a whole row came tumbling down.

  The look on that face! The kid panicked and tried to fix it but the more it was meddled with, the more it came undone. I started sniggering myself, and then the kid noticed me laughing. Well, if looks could kill—that kid just stood there glaring at me, hands on hips, lower jaw jutting out like a bulldog’s. That just made me laugh even more, ’cause that’s just what the kid looked like, a little bulldog with two middle teeth missing.

  “Tru!” his mama cried. When she came out and saw the kid’s dirty suit, Jenny’s prize fence all a mess, and her child sitting there caught in the act, she grew angry. Well, before she could say anything, the kid began shaking like a volcano about to blow—face turning beet red and eyes watering like a dam overflowing during a storm. And that’s when a wail came outta that mouth that I bet you could hear all the way from the county courthouse in the town square.

  Well, the anger just drained from Lillie Mae’s face and she started pampering the kid like royalty, just to stop the crying. I listened to the kid make up some big story—“This little barefoot boy in overalls pushed me into the fence!” the kid said in a peculiar, high-pitched voice.

  Then I realized that child was talking about me!

  That little shrimp. I ducked down behind a bush and watched through the leaves as Lillie Mae carried her kid back inside. Right before they disappeared into the house, that shrimp stuck out a tongue at me, grinning like I’d been had!

  That’s when I knew that kid was smarter than most of the children around here.

  The Road to Monroeville

  For the first years of my life, my father, Archulus Persons Jr., never had a job. We’d been living off Grandmother’s money, which was a lot, but he’d spent it all on fancy cars trying to impress my mother. He finally got a real job after living off family money and two-bit schemes all this time. He had to go away for a few weeks, but Mommy didn’t want me around without him. She kept on saying, “Truman, you make me feel old. I’m still young and too pretty to be dragged down by the likes of you.” The final straw came when she said she was sorry she’d ever met him and even sorrier that she’d had his boy.

  My daddy didn’t say a thing after that. The next day, he took me with him on his trip.

  We showed up at the foot of the Big Muddy—the Mississippi River—and there it stood: a real Mississippi steamship, with a paddle wheel and two high smokestacks right out of Huck Finn. Painted on the side, I saw my middle name: Streckfus. As in the Streckfus Steamship Company.

  “You were named after these boats, son,” Daddy said. “When I told Mr. Streckfus, he hired me on the spot and made me the assistant purser. ‘Any Streckfus is family to me,’ he said.”

  The boat ran up and down the Mississippi between New Orleans and St. Louis. Daddy didn’t want me sitting around getting into trouble, so being the showman he was, he made up a job for me—I was to wander the deck and tap-dance for people. He’d dress me up in my little sailor outfit and had his trumpet player, a grinning black fellow he called Satchmo, play for me as I tapped my little heart out. The passengers loved me and would even throw money at us!

  Even after Daddy took his share, I was pretty rich by the time I got back. We stopped at a gift store to get something for Mommy, but I froze when I saw one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen: there, hanging in the front window of the store, was a green Ford Tri-Motor kid’s airplane with a red propeller! It was big enough for me to sit in—kind of an oversize tricycle with wings.

  “You can have one present,” he said. I was stuck on that plane. It looked as grand as Lucky Lindy’s Spirit of St. Louis.

  “That,” I said, pointing.

  Well, he said it was too expensive and even after I threw a fit, he still said it was too much.

  So I asked for a dog. We went looking for a pet store but it was hot and humid and we couldn’t find one for the life of us. So we settled on a hat.

  Daddy always wore a big Panama hat and so we found one at a hat store just like Cousin Jenny’s store. It had a floppy brim that I could pull down over my eyes like a cool detective. We arrived back in New Orleans, and the second Mommy saw that thing on my head, she let Daddy know she didn’t like it one bit. It went against all her fashion rules and she threatened to burn it. But I was crazy for it.

  As soon as we got home, we were on the road again, heading straight back to Monroeville, where all Mommy’s kin lived, particularly my four distant c
ousins, who all lived under one roof. The hat came with us.

  The whole trip, Mommy and Daddy fought over money. She wanted to live like a queen and he was usually broke because of it. But he always had an idea for the next big thing that would make them rich. This time he was running moonshine from an Indian named Joe who lived just outside of town. I overheard him on the phone saying not to worry, the sheriff would never pull over a family with a little kid.

  I asked Mama, “How can Daddy catch the moon’s shine and tuck it away in the trunk of our car?” She was livid. My oldest cousin, Sook, sat me on her lap and covered my ears as the biggest argument ever cast a pall over the whole house.

  Next thing I knew, Mommy stormed out, followed by Daddy, and they left me all alone. Sook held me all night till I soaked her nightgown so completely she had to change and sleep in a gingham dress.

  My cousin Jenny, who was old enough to be my grandmother, was just beside herself. When she saw me in the morning, she told me not to worry. “Your mama doesn’t deserve your love.”

  The next week, Sook was by my side almost every waking hour. I helped her cook; we went for long walks in the woods collecting herbs and wild mushrooms, hid out in the attic cutting out the most beautiful pictures in the magazines so we could decorate our kites with them, and after a particularly good day, she would sit me on her lap and let me sip chicory coffee and eat butter beans as we read the funnies out loud. She always started with Little Orphan Annie.

  She was my best friend those first horrible months. She always had missions for us to fill up the time—especially in those brutally hot summer months. Cousin Jenny was so sick of the flies coming in off the porch, Sook got her to offer a one-penny bounty for every twenty-five flies we killed. The carnage that followed will long be remembered in fly lore—we made almost thirteen dollars in two weeks, enough to get us into the picture show fifty times with money left over for sweets.

  Besides Sook, I didn’t have any real friends my age outside of these walls until I met the boy next door, who turned out to be a girl. Her name was Ellen spelled backwards.

  Author’s Note

  Truman Capote and (Nelle) Harper Lee went on to become two of the most heralded American writers of the twentieth century. Truman’s acclaimed works include Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Grass Harp, A Christmas Memory, and In Cold Blood—a crime story that reunited him with Nelle in 1959. Until recently, Nelle had published only one book in her lifetime, but To Kill a Mockingbird has become an enduring classic that won a Pulitzer Prize and sold more than forty million copies worldwide.

  To Kill a Mockingbird and many of Truman’s short stories were inspired by their years growing up in the tiny town of Monroeville, Alabama. As Truman’s aunt, Mary Ida, once said about him, “He took nuggets of truth, gave them a new twist, and made them bigger than life.” Likewise, many of the events told in this book actually happened, but I’ve rearranged them into a single story and added more than a few fibs for spice, hopefully making for a flavorful bowl of southern homestyle yarns. One rule of thumb holds true: the more outrageous and unbelievable a scene, the closer it is to real life.

  After Truman’s big farewell Halloween extravaganza in 1933, he moved to New York to live with his mother, Lillie Mae, and her second husband, Joseph Capote, a Cuban business man, who adopted Truman as his own. Unfortunately, Truman never got along with either of them and ended up being sent to a series of boarding schools (including a disastrous stint at a military academy). In 1939, they moved briefly to Connecticut, where an English teacher saw talent in Truman’s writing and encouraged him to contribute short stories and poetry to the school’s literary journal and campus paper.

  Throughout his years away, Truman sought refuge in the past, returning every summer to Monroeville, where he resumed having adventures with Nelle and Big Boy. Later, however, as money problems arose from his stepfather’s embezzling schemes (to pay for Lillie Mae’s extravagant spending), these visits became fewer and far between.

  Nelle stayed in Monroeville, becoming an independent and strong-willed young woman. In high school, mentored by an English teacher, she discovered her love of British literature and decided she wanted to become the Jane Austen of southern Alabama. Meanwhile, Truman wrote and wrote, his stories about life in Monroeville providing his only escape from exile. He decided not to go to college, and after a short stint working for The New Yorker magazine, Truman started publishing short stories in literary journals, where he began to be recognized for his unusually refined style of writing.

  After high school, Nelle went on to study law, but dropped out to pursue writing after Truman published his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948. Truman based the novel’s tomboy character, Idabel, on Nelle.

  The following year, Nelle moved to New York to pursue her dream and supported herself as an airline reservations agent. Truman was her only friend in the big city. However, he introduced her to a couple, the Browns, who in 1956 offered to support Nelle for an entire year so she could finally write her first book. That novel became To Kill a Mockingbird. Nelle based the character of Dill on Truman.

  In 1959, before her novel was published, Nelle accompanied Truman to Kansas, where he began working on a new kind of book, a “nonfiction novel” called In Cold Blood. With Nelle at his side, it was just like the old days, the two of them teaming up to solve a small-town crime­—in this case, murder. “The crime intrigued him, and I’m intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep,” Nelle remembered.

  When Nelle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, Truman, frustrated by the lengthy and traumatic nature of his project, grew jealous of her success. Despite her newfound acclaim and riches, Nelle returned to Kansas with Truman three years later for the culmination of his research—the murder trials that would close the case—and his story. She was shocked, though, when his book finally came out in 1966, to see that Truman had downplayed her contribution, acknowledging her substantial assistance as “secretarial help.” Their friendship suffered, despite both books becoming defining novels of the 1960s, huge international bestsellers, and acclaimed movies. Truman’s book did not win the Pulitzer, as predicted by many.

  According to Truman, he never quite recovered from the experience of writing that haunting book, and Nelle, overwhelmed by the media hype and attention over her novel, never wrote another novel. Truman died in 1984 of liver cancer, complicated by years of drinking. Nelle hid from the public eye for most of her post-Mockingbird life, and now resides in an assisted living facility in Monroeville. A previously lost manuscript, Go Set a Watchman, became her second (and last) novel to revisit her childhood with Truman, a fitting end to one of the greatest backstories in American literature.

  “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 imagination most of the time. We devised things; we were readers, and we would transfer everything we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama. Did you never play Tarzan when you were a child? Did you never tramp through the jungle or refight the battle of Gettysburg in some form or fashion? We did. Did you never live in a tree house and find the whole world in the branches of a chinaberry tree? We did.”—(Nelle) Harper Lee

  Acknowledgments

  “The year I began school, Truman and Nelle were knee-deep reading Sherlock Holmes detective books. We three would climb up in Nelle’s big treehouse 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.’”—Jennings Faulk Carter, a.k.a. Big Boy

  Many writers choose the nonfiction biographical format to tell the story of someone famous. In some cases, that can easily turn into the Wikipedia version of a life lived: facts stat
ed in chronological order. Here, I have chosen a different path: to use fiction to capture the poetic truths of a moment in time between two famous writers, Harper Lee and Truman Capote.

  What fascinated me was the idea that these two literary giants had been next-door neighbors growing up in a small town in the middle of the Jim Crow–era Deep South, and that they were both misfits who connected over a shared love of detective stories. When I learned that they sometimes played Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to figure out some of the mysteries of their small town and that some of the incidents in their lives formed the basis for To Kill a Mockingbird, the storyteller in me couldn’t help himself. The characters, the town, and the era were too rich, too colorful, and too outrageous to be contained by nonfiction. A story was born from real life.

  None of this would have been possible without the oral histories of Jennings Faulk Carter (a.k.a. Big Boy), as written by Marianne M. Moates in Truman Capote’s Southern Years (University of Alabama Press, 1989), and the wildly eccentric and far-fetched recollections of Marie Rudisill, Truman’s favorite aunt, co-written with James C. Simmons and published as The Southern Haunting of Truman Capote (Cumberland House, 2000). Biographies of Truman by Gerald Clarke, George Plimpton, and Jack Dunphy, and of Nelle by Charles J. Shields and Kerry Madden, plus numerous articles and interviews, filled out the rest. I am indebted to these works.

  An odd thanks goes to the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose tragic death in 2014 set the strange journey of this book in motion. Like many fans, I started rewatching his films after his passing, beginning with his Oscar-winning portrayal of Truman in the film Capote. That movie reminded me that Truman and Harper Lee had grown up together as children. Curious, I began Googling their childhoods, and further research revealed a series of wonderfully evocative tales about their life in the Deep South. I was surprised that no one had ever written about their friendship in depth, especially for kids. Their real-life stories were outrageous and funny, sad, and all too human. I was hooked.