Mockingbird Songs Read online

  Dedication

  To Alice, Louise, Nelle, and Dartie

  Authentic Alabama Steel Magnolias

  Epigraph

  The song changes by singing

  into a different song.

  It sings by falling. The water

  descending in its old groove

  wears it new. The words descending

  to the page render the possible

  into the actual, by wear,

  for better or worse, renew

  the weary mind.

  —WENDELL BERRY, “The Book of Camp Branch,”

  from Leavings: Poems

  Frontispiece

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Frontispiece

  Preface

  Introduction

  1 In the Beginning

  2 Celebrity, Kinship, and Calamity

  3 Imperfect Fathers, Imperfect Towns

  4 Contemporary Biography, Literary Disputes

  5 Legacy and Change

  6 An Author Shapes Her Own Identity

  7 The Stroke and a Forced Return Home

  8 Marble Lady/Authentic Woman

  9 Adulation and Isolation

  10 To Everything a Season

  Postscript

  Appendix: Eulogy for Nelle Harper Lee

  Acknowledgments

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  On a crisp spring day in 1993 not long after I received Nelle Harper Lee’s first letter, I was tending my rose garden when a male northern mockingbird began singing. Looking in its direction, I spied a calico cat halfway up a scrawny ten-foot-tall pine tree; up in the branches could be seen a small nest and chicks. The mockingbird, perched on the limb of an adjacent sweetgum, was singing fair warning of its intent to defend its family. The cat seemed frozen in space, torn between the nearby threat and the tasty morsels nearly within its grasp. Suddenly the bird dived for the head of the cat, which met the threat with an outstretched paw. The bird circled back to its perch and repeated the chorus of threats. When the cat resumed its climb, the bird swooped down again, this time attacking the cat’s haunches. Now completely absorbed by the standoff, I put down my tools and watched.

  After minutes of parry and thrust, advance and stalemate, the cat realized that the prize, however close, was not worth the risk to its life. But when the poor animal decided to reverse direction, it lost its footing. Frantically trying to regain traction, the cat part ran, part fell to the ground, an avalanche of bark bouncing off its head and back. The mockingbird, merciless, continued its attack as the cat tried to restore its breath and balance. When sufficiently recovered, the cat raced across my yard in search of sanctuary. The triumphant bird, apparently taking me for the cat’s accomplice, swooped down at my head as I retreated into the carport. The mini drama concluded, the mockingbird returned to its perch in the sweetgum tree and resumed its singing.

  Originally, the mockingbird’s range extended toward Canada on both coasts of North America, but from the late 1800s to the early twentieth century the beauty and diversity of the birds’ songs attracted not only mates but also trappers. So many were captured to be sold as pets that they became scarce at the upper edge of their range. After the so-called cage bird trade ended, the species recovered and pushed its boundaries north again. Although ornithologists inadequately understand mockingbird migration patterns, they have established that some birds move south in the fall, while others prefer the northern edges of their occupation zone.

  Why Harper Lee named her masterpiece after these fascinating birds may be explained in one of its key passages. After Atticus Finch tells his daughter, “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” Miss Maudie explains why: “They don’t eat up people’s gardens, they don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

  Nelle Harper Lee was in many ways like the mockingbirds Miss Maudie described that hot Maycomb day. They are complicated and independent—and so was she. They boldly defend themselves and their families from predators, including the two-legged variety, and so did she. And like Nelle, mockingbirds have the most piercingly beautiful song. For that reason, she spent much of her life eluding people who wanted to capture and cage her. I loved and respected her for her fierceness and her commitment to singing the songs she wanted to sing the way she wanted to sing them.

  Introduction

  How does one chronicle a friendship? How does one remember the twists and turns, accidental meetings, serendipitous events, shared interests, and habits of the heart? How does a relationship progress from “Dear Mr. Flynt” / “Dear Ms. Lee” to “Dear Wayne” / “Dear Nelle” to “Beloved Professor” / “Dear Madam Famous Author” to “Dear Ones” / “Dear Prime Suspect”? How does mutual respect morph into formal acquaintance, warm friendship, and finally love?

  These letters record the progress of my relationship with Nelle Harper Lee, but they can only hint at the reasons we became such special friends and correspondents, from the first letter between us, in 1992—when she was sixty-six and I was fifty-two—to the last, about a year before she died in 2016. Perhaps in another life Nelle wanted to be a historian of the South, as I have been throughout my career as a writer and professor. Or perhaps, as Nelle sometimes hinted humorously, she fell under the spell of my wife, Dartie (whose name confused Nelle for years as she tried to master my pronunciation), who brought her exotic chocolate concoctions and told her so many funny stories, and I was merely the appendage who came with the deal. Perhaps we became close because Dartie and I were there for her at three critical junctures of her life: when her sister, Louise, slipped into dementia; when she herself suffered a stroke and, obsessed with maintaining her privacy, isolated herself at a rehabilitation facility; and when she was forced to give up her second home in New York City and live out the rest of her days in Monroeville, the town from which she had fled to freedom sixty-five years earlier. Or perhaps we three met in the twilight of our lives and just needed each other.

  Although Nelle and I communicated for more than twenty years, we never worked together, lived in the same town, or talked for hours on the telephone. Our friendship hinged on certain encounters, most of them face-to-face, and in between was lots of time and space—and letters. Her first to me was typewritten and formal. I didn’t keep a copy of my response, but I remember that I replied in kind. She didn’t write me again for a decade, not until a family crisis prompted her to reach out. From that point on, we both dropped our awkward formality in favor of ink-on-paper intimacy. Nelle preferred fine stationery. E-mail was never an option. Her letters were like those of two other southern literary icons of the time, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. Sally Fitzgerald, editor of O’Connor’s correspondence, notes that the Georgia master of the short story had a reputation for reclusiveness “by inclination.” But O’Connor, like Nelle, was also a witty and gregarious storyteller and conversationalist who often penned wonderful letters.

  Though she lived into the age of personal computers, Facebook, and Twitter, Nelle rejected them, vociferously and profanely, believing them merely alternative ways of invading people’s privacy.

  Conversely, she once sent us a Charles Rennie Mackintosh card from her precious and dwindling stock purchased at the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow just because she wanted us to have one. Her letters are self-consciously of another age, less flirtatious, gossipy, and trivial than Jane Austen’s, her literary idol, and more like O’Connor’s and Welty’s: colloquial, chatty, funn
y, satirical, brutally honest, unflinching, emotionally warm, intensely personal. Because her circle of close friends was small, her correspondence was doubly treasured. In time, others will no doubt share their hoard of letters to, from, and about Harper Lee, and an editor will compile them, as R. W. Chapman did for Jane Austen and Sally Fitzgerald did for Flannery O’Connor. This collection is, by comparison, small and far from comprehensive, but I hope it offers some interesting moments and important feelings in the life of my friend, and whets the reader’s appetite for more.

  As for the hinges to our relationship, these are easier to identify. We first met Louise—Nelle called her “Weezie”—Conner, and her little sister, “Doty” (a nickname of endearment for Nelle within the family), in March 1983 in Eufaula, Alabama. Louise—whose name Nelle would incorporate in her central character in Mockingbird, Jean Louise Finch (though the sisters would argue all their lives about who Scout really represented)—was the often overlooked second daughter of Frances and A. C. Lee. She had gone off to college at Auburn, fallen in love, married, moved to Eufaula on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, given birth to two sons, and become a mainstay of the First Baptist Church. Our paths crossed because she was serving on a committee to organize an Alabama history and heritage festival, and I, then a professor of history at Auburn University, about an hour away, was invited to be one of the speakers.

  Decades earlier, during the civil rights movement, the mayor of Eufaula had asked Louise to serve on a much more important committee, one called Community on the Move. This five-person group had been started by a black woman Louise knew who was concerned about education, racial divisions, and drug trafficking in their town. Louise, asking the committee founder what she could contribute to the effort, was told simply, “You have a white face.” Some local folks would have been offended by such tokenism. Louise agreed to serve. She and the other committee members met twice weekly, ate together, discussed community problems, and tried to make the town better. Her black friend began stopping by for coffee, a small act of personal friendship in most places but a racial blurring of the color line in civil rights–era Eufaula.

  Citing her father as inspiration, Louise explained to us that he had been an “inside Christian,” by which she meant a man of honor and personal decency, attuned to his duty as a community leader, one who treated all people fairly and with respect, though he was not liberal, self-righteous, or ostentatiously religious. His Methodist upbringing had persuaded him that the Kingdom of God was as much concerned with justice in Alabama as with heaven in the hereafter. Although he did not endorse the civil rights movement as early as Alice and Nelle, he moved more rapidly than most white Alabamians.

  It was the history-and-heritage event that first brought me together with Nelle. Committee members wanted the keynote speaker to be Louise’s famous sister, Harper Lee, but all were aware that she had made no formal public appearances in decades, except to accept honorary degrees. So they proposed instead to invite Nelle’s childhood friend Truman Capote, by then world-famous for his book In Cold Blood. Hearing of this, Nelle stepped in. Knowing Capote’s foibles and idiosyncrasies all too well, she feared that he would embarrass her sister, so she stunned the committee by volunteering to speak at the conference herself. It was an act of pure affection for her sister, but delivering on it was pure agony for Nelle, who had difficulty eating or sleeping for days before such an event.

  Speaking just before Nelle that day was Nancy Anderson, a professor of English who was a colleague of mine at Auburn. Faced with both a large audience and a speaking slot that preceded a literary icon’s, Nancy later told me she was feeling nervous and intimidated. But just before she walked onstage, she was introduced to Nelle, who put her at ease by whispering, “Are you as terrified as I am? I feel like an owl that came out at midday. I let my sisters talk me into this, but I will never let them do it again.”

  Later on, Nelle talked for over an hour to a group of children who’d been in the audience, and offered to sign copies of Mockingbird for them. Among the fortunate recipients that evening was our son, Sean, who had turned fourteen that day. When I asked Miss Lee to sign our book as well, she replied icily, “I only sign for children.” That was our first, not very promising, exchange.

  A decade later, the Alabama and West Florida Methodist Women’s Conference invited me to speak. At the reception afterward, two distinguished-looking women chatted with Dartie and me. Learning that one of them lived in Eufaula, I asked if she knew Louise Conner, whom I remembered from the heritage conference. “I am Louise Conner,” she replied, grinning to assuage my obvious embarrassment. She then introduced us to the other woman, who was her older sister, Alice, well known to Dartie and me as one of the state’s first female lawyers and a legendary leader of Alabama Methodism. Louise invited us to Eufaula for a visit, and we accepted, never thinking of Nelle or dreaming that she would misinterpret our interest in her sister.

  Louise was smart, warm, funny—and extremely fond of golf in general, and the British Open in particular. During one visit, she delayed our departure for her favorite soul food restaurant so she could finish watching that tournament’s final round. “Do you play golf, Wayne?” she asked, never taking her eyes from the television screen. “No,” I answered. “Never liked it.” “Well,” she informed me, “you would like the opening event of the tournament. A Scottish bagpiper plays ‘Amazing Grace.’ When I die, I want a bagpiper to play that. I won’t know whether I’m in heaven or at the British Open, and it won’t make any difference.”

  Soon we were visiting every few months, and our topics expanded to include our respective families. Louise revealed that Nelle had warned her we might be less interested in Louise than in stealthily finding out about the Lees. In reply, I told Louise that we found her hospitality, wit, and wonderful storytelling much preferable to Nelle’s abrupt dismissal of us years earlier at the autographing. Louise paused, then replied, “Well, Nelle has to understand that Mother and Father were my parents too; and if I want to tell you about them, I will.” And for years after that, she did.

  During one of those years, a friend who taught literature at the University of Montevallo asked me to lecture an adult education class about poverty, class, and race in 1930s-era Alabama, which is the specific field of my expertise. Of course, that period is also the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird. I soon found that many of my students were lawyers and judges who were interested in studying the novel and its author. To my surprise, Alice Lee was among them, attracted, she told me later, by reading my accounts of life in twentieth-century Alabama. That seminar produced a long correspondence with Alice, fifteen years Nelle’s senior, whom we saw infrequently but came to love.

  Sadly, age gradually took a toll on Louise’s health. First she fell and broke a hip. She recovered, but more falls forced her into an assisted living facility. Although we visited as regularly as before, she became increasingly distant, responding with silence to our attempts at conversation. One day her son Hank contacted us with the news he had moved his mother to a facility near his home in Gainesville, Florida.

  Shortly thereafter, in fall 2002, the Alabama Humanities Foundation (AHF) honored Nelle with its highest award. She not only accepted but even agreed to attend the fund-raising reception. Although we had met her only once, years earlier at the autograph signing, we decided to attend in hopes of hearing news about Louise.

  Our friend Nancy Anderson, serving then as an AHF board member, later told us a story characteristic of Nelle. She observed a mother, “not elegantly dressed like others,” with daughter in tow, who had obviously spent more money than she could afford on tickets to the fund-raiser. The young girl carried a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, despite a large sign warning “No Photos, No Autographs.” Nelle noticed the girl, walked over to her, and asked if she wanted her book signed. When the excited child handed her the novel, Nelle saw that the mother had a camera. “You can take a photograph if you wish,” she whispered.

  Be
fore the arrangements committee could whisk Nelle away to utter some variation of her standard acceptance speech (as I would come to learn, she’d usually just say, “I’m too overcome with emotion to say more”), I managed to whisper an inquiry. When the event ended, Nelle found me and pressed into my hand a program on which she had written her sister’s Gainesville address and phone number. Delighted to have this information, we called Louise and wrote her, but received no answer; our friend had drifted away.

  It was four years later that I next encountered Nelle. She had agreed to accept the Birmingham Pledge Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award for advancing racial understanding, and the foundation’s director asked me to speak briefly about her achievements. She was so well known that, although I am an experienced speaker, I struggled to write something that was not banal or trite. But in the end, something unfolded that night that was much more interesting than any speech I could have made.

  I had spent the preceding months assisting two Birmingham teachers with a challenging project. Patsy Howze, a renowned choral teacher, had assembled a gifted choir at all-black Fairfield Preparatory High School, but the school had no theater where the singers could perform. Nearly all-white Mountain Brook High School, located in one of America’s wealthiest suburbs on the other side of the city, had a state-of-the-art theater and Pat Yates, a gifted drama teacher, but only a handful of black students. And Yates needed more than that, because she wanted to do a production of To Kill a Mockingbird. She decided to propose a joint production with Fairfield, and asked me to join her and both groups of students to discuss it.

  Our initial meeting took place at Fairfield, which none of the white students had ever visited. All the white students filed into the room and sat to my left. The black students gathered to my right. “What is the theme of the novel?” I asked the thirty or so teenagers. Silence. Prolonged, intimidating silence. I made a conscious decision to wait them out, but after several minutes I began to doubt my strategy. Finally, and to my enormous relief, a tall African American student with a deep bass voice broke the silence: “Tolerance! Don’t judge somebody until you walk around in his shoes.”