by Casey Cep
Nelle didn’t fit in with her peers socially—even in class pictures, she is out of line with them, literally—and she was years ahead of them academically, chiefly because of how early she had learned to read. She had started with Rapunzel, the Rover Boys, and Uncle Wiggily Longears, then moved on to the Bobbsey Twins and the adventures of Tom Swift, and before long she was going to Avonlea with Anne of Green Gables and attending meetings of the Fair and Square Club with Seckatary Hawkins. By the first grade, she could be counted on to have read both The Monroe Journal and The Mobile Press, a feat not many adults in Monroeville managed.
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If Nelle was an unusual child, she was nothing compared with her best friend, the little boy who had appeared one day like a changeling at the house next door. His mother, Lillie Mae Faulk, had grown up in Monroeville with four cousins but left at seventeen after marrying one Archulus Persons, a blond-haired, bottle-glassed lawyer by training who made his living as a pint-size P. T. Barnum—managing a boxer, booking tour groups on steamships, and staging a variety show with a performer the posters described as the “World’s Foremost Man of Mystery.” (When Persons brought the show to Monroeville, he buried the man of mystery in a grave at the elementary school Nelle attended and left him there for two days breathing through a pipe; interested parties paid one dollar to look down the hole at him.) To no one’s surprise except Lillie Mae’s, they ran out of money before their honeymoon ended. She got pregnant and wanted an abortion; he wanted a son, and won. When the boy arrived, his father named him Truman, after an old school friend, and Streckfus, after a steamship line on the Mississippi.
Truman Streckfus Persons came into the world in 1924 and lived mostly in Monroeville from 1928 until 1932. The cousins of Lillie Mae’s who had taken care of her before the wedding took care of her son after, and they lived in the house next door to the Lees. There was just a low stone wall between them, and by the time that Nelle was out of toddlerhood, she and Truman had become partners in crime and just about everything else. They flew kites, staged baptisms in his family’s fishpond, and whiled away hours together in the tree house her father had built in a chinaberry tree in the backyard. Before they could read, Nelle’s brother read to them, then all three of them would act out the plot, vying for the best roles based on age, size, or stubbornness. Eventually, Nelle and Truman started reading for themselves, and once they ran out of stories to read, they started writing them, finding their heroes and villains in familiar figures on South Alabama Avenue. When Nelle’s father gave her a beat-up typewriter, she spent hours every day typing out poems and scenes, occasionally consenting to share the contraption with Truman.
School might have sometimes been miserable for Nelle, but it was worse for Truman Streckfus Persons, a boy half the size of his name and twice as strange. Nelle was younger, but taller, fiercer, and more inclined to fight back, so what protection he got, he got from her. Mostly, though, they kept close to each other and away from others; they were both “apart” people, as he would explain much later, when the world knew him as Truman Capote. His parents had divorced after his mother ran away with another man, Joseph Garcia Capote, a Cuban office manager who worked for a firm on Wall Street, and after a nasty court fight Lillie Mae, now going by Nina, got full custody of her son. She moved him to New York and changed his surname, but still sent him home to her cousins for long stretches in the summers. “Master Truman Capote of New York City arrived Sunday,” The Monroe Journal reported of one such visit in June 1935, “to spend several weeks in Monroeville with the Misses Faulk.”
The loss of Master Truman as a full-time neighbor was a blow to Nelle, but summers were better than nothing, and now whenever Truman crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, he brought the whole world with him: subway tokens, skyscrapers, prep schools, tuxedos, foreign languages. But when he went away again, the world was just Monroeville, and Monroeville, for Nelle, was mostly just her family: the attentive love of her father and the distracted affections of her mother; the watchful, encouraging eye of her oldest sister, Alice, whom she called “Bear” because of an early visit to the Montgomery Zoo; the protective presence of Ed, who was on his way to becoming a military pilot; and the adoration of her sister Louise, known as Weezie, who moved across the state to Eufaula to start a family when Nelle, who was known to the family as Dody, was barely in her double digits.
When Nelle Harper Lee finally found another friend in high school, it wasn’t a classmate but a teacher, Gladys Watson Burkett, who wore her eyeglasses around her neck and her passion for literature on her sleeve. “She is one of the few teachers I’ve known who has an absolute love of her subject,” Nelle said. “She taught me all I know about English.” Burkett lived across the street from the Lees and took such an interest in Nelle that the two stayed close until Burkett died. “She is my closest friend in Monroeville and has been all my life,” Lee once said, revealing not only the appetite she had for intellectual friendships but also the deep estrangement of a bright young woman from her hometown.
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When the time came to go to college, Capote did not. He knew that he wanted to be a writer, and he didn’t see the point in studying how to do it when he could just hurl himself at the task instead. Nelle was two years his junior, and by the time she faced the same decision, he was already living on Park Avenue, working as an office boy at The New Yorker. He walked the halls of 28 West Forty-Fourth Street like a ballerina, carrying pencils and wearing a cape; the first time the editor in chief, Harold Ross, ever saw Capote, he asked, “What’s that?”
The answer, soon enough, was a staff writer. Nelle wanted to be a writer, too, but her parents were as present as his were absent, and they expected all of their children, especially the girls, to get an education. As a result, in 1944, Lee left Monroeville to attend Huntingdon College.
Situated on a beautiful campus not far from where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived during their Montgomery years, Huntingdon was a small women’s school run by the Methodist Church. Alice had attended and loved it, but Nelle found it small and stuffy: there were five hundred girls on a fifty-eight-acre campus, and they were required to gather early every morning for chapel. She joined the Chi Delta Phi literary honor society and the glee club but never quite settled into student life. It was grade school all over again: whatever her peers were doing, Nelle didn’t want to do, and whatever she did want to do, they did not. She wouldn’t wear hats or makeup, and she didn’t dance or date; she smoked constantly, stayed awake all night reading the Victorians, and cursed like the boys her classmates’ mothers warned them about.
The only place Nelle Lee was at home was on the pages of campus publications. During her year at Huntingdon, she reviewed Bertita Harding’s Lost Waltz (the novelist, she griped, was too gentle with the house of Hapsburg) and Norman Cousins’s Good Inheritance (whose academic prose “is something of a relief from the so-called ‘realistic’ writings of the day”). She also published her first two works of fiction in The Prelude, the student literary magazine. “Nightmare” was about a young girl who watches a lynching through a crack in a fence post; “A Wink at Justice” was a courtroom scene where a judge lines up eight African American defendants accused of gambling and examines their hands to see whose were rough enough to prove they had been working instead. Although clearly juvenilia, both stories were foretastes of the feast to come: the lynch-mob mentality that would overtake so many residents of Maycomb, and the courtroom as a theater of morality.
Never quite happy at Huntingdon, Nelle left after a year for the University of Alabama. During her time there, its campus in Tuscaloosa had more than eight thousand students, and she liked it better from the start because of the hours she could keep: with no mandatory chapel, she could stay awake as late as she wanted, getting by on three or four hours of sleep, sustaining herself with cigarettes, candy, and hot showers. Her idea of heaven, she told t
he student newspaper, was “a place where diligent law students and writers ascend after death and can stay up forever without Benzedrine.”
Lee pledged the Chi Omega sorority, but its members were just as puzzled by her as the women at Huntingdon had been; no pledge before her had been so bold as to correct the pronunciation of her soon-to-be sisters during an initiation, and most of them teased their hair more than their professors. Soon enough, Lee ditched the sorority house for one of the regular dormitories. It didn’t much matter where she kept her toothbrush, though, because she practically lived at the Union, the building that housed all of the student publications.
It was a sanctum for someone like Nelle, the first place she’d found, outside her own home, where no one felt the need to comment if she stayed hunched over a typewriter all day or looked askance if she invoked Childe Roland or recited long stretches of Swinburne. The Union was also the place where she made one of her closest friends—once again not a fellow student but a professor named James McMillan. Jim was the director of the newly formed University of Alabama Press, which had its office in the Union as well, and most mornings when he got to work and started a pot of coffee, all-nighter Nelle would come stumbling down the hall for a cup. They’d talk about history, botany, literature, and linguistics, about what she was writing or what he was editing, and then eventually she would head back to her dorm for a few hours of sleep.
When she first got to campus, Nelle had tried getting on the newspaper but found it was harder to do so when your father wasn’t the editor. She was, however, able to get something in the humor magazine, the Rammer-Jammer, right away, and she got herself on its masthead by the end of her first semester; a year later, in the fall of 1946, she became the editor in chief, a position that attested to her talents but also to the times, since in college journalism, as in every profession, four years of sending men abroad for World War II had created opportunities for women. In addition to running the show, Nelle still wrote pieces for most issues. These included a campus version of Romeo and Juliet, a mock-country newspaper called The Jackassonian Democrat that wasn’t so unlike her father’s Monroe Journal, and an Esquire send-up that she called “Some Writers of Our Times,” which cataloged all the things a writer supposedly needed to be successful: a sadistic father, an alcoholic mother, “some kind of soul,” and, most essentially, to have been born in a southern town. That piece included a cameo by her friend Truman Capote, who lisps his way through a diatribe about his masterwork in progress: “Honey, I’m thuck. My novel ith about a thenthitive boy from the time he’th twelve until he ith a gwown man.” The best of her contributions, though, was “Now Is the Time for All Good Men…,” a one-act play about the Boswell Amendment, an actual attempt in 1946 to prevent black Alabamians from registering to vote; in her parody, the Honorable Jacob F. B. MacGillacuddy, chairman of the Citizens’ Committee to Eradicate the Black Plague, has designed a literacy test so onerous that not even he can pass it, leaving him to plead for an exemption from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The pieces Nelle wrote for the Rammer-Jammer were mostly silly and all sophomoric (appropriately so, under the circumstances), but they weren’t bad, and there were a lot of them, which was enough to snag her a column on the student newspaper, The Crimson-White. Anyone who hadn’t encountered Nelle Lee’s acerbity in a classroom got to know it through her “Caustic Comment,” which excoriated everyone from campus security to the registrar. One of her columns absolutely flayed the philistines on the library staff who first refused to give a friend of hers a copy of Ulysses and then made him settle for one without the “Penelope” chapter.
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While Nelle was piling up cigarette stubs and typewriter ribbons, her sister Alice, back home with their parents, had earned her own desk in the offices of Barnett, Bugg & Lee. She had followed A.C. into a legal career and developed a knack for tax law, buoyed partly by the Victory Tax that came after the war and left everyone, even those without much income, needing help with the Internal Revenue Service. Between her father and her sister, Nelle had spent years listening to cases in the Monroe County Courthouse. Movies might have cost a dime, but trials were free. The rolled-tin ceiling gleamed from above and the gum-tree floors gleamed from below as she eavesdropped on cases that ran the gamut from mischief to murder.
Even before Nelle was old enough to read a law book, her father had started talking about renaming his firm “A. C. Lee and Daughters, Lawyers.” Whether or not that dream ever had any appeal for her, Nelle had always been eager to please her father, and after one year at Alabama she applied for early admission to the law school. By 1947, she was officially a law student, losing even more sleep to contracts and torts. She would later say that she had enrolled only to get access to the law library, but at the time she told her family that a legal education would provide the discipline she would need as a writer and that studying the law would teach her how to think.
By the next summer, Nelle Lee had thought herself right out of Alabama. She had been accepted to the International Education Exchange at the University of Oxford, and on June 16, 1948, right around the time the Reverend Willie Maxwell headed home after his army service, she set sail for Southampton on the Queen Elizabeth. She spent that summer at Lady Margaret Hall, reading widely in British literature and traveling around what seemed, to someone born and raised in the vast open spaces of the Deep South, a tiny curio of a country. Like so many southerners, Nelle regarded the United Kingdom as the cradle of civilization, and she obsessed over its history all the way down to the level of obscure Whig politicians and minor Anglican bishops. She loved the English countryside so much that when her courses finished, she rented a bicycle and pedaled around solo, staying in hostels. When word of her adventures reached Monroeville, her neighbors were alarmed, but the Lees, who had long since made peace with Nelle being Nelle, simply looked forward to the next installments of A Tomboy Abroad, which included an account of cycling into London and running into Winston Churchill while having tea.
It was a memorable encounter, by any measure, but when it came to meeting people, her friend Truman Capote, then and ever, put her to shame. Capote was in Europe that summer, too, but instead of studying literary giants, he was palling around with them: dining with Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, and Evelyn Waugh in England, then dashing over to Paris to meet Gertrude Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, and, allegedly, to sleep with Albert Camus. It was an enviable itinerary, or anyway a glamorous one. Lee was still a coed, but Capote was already well on his way to becoming an international celebrity. He came home on the Queen Mary the first week of August with Tennessee Williams, rubbing elbows on board with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. She caught the same steamer two weeks later, encountering no one except a few other students who had been enrolled in exchange programs like hers.
Nelle arrived in New York on the last day of August. She took the Crescent Limited back to Alabama, where constitutional law and civil procedure awaited her. While she paid to sit through lectures and fret over exams, people were paying Capote for every word that he wrote. He was a peacock strutting about the globe; she was a pigeon pacing the roost. Whatever she had told herself before about law school—about acquiring discipline or fulfilling her father’s dreams—it wasn’t enough anymore. Six weeks shy of graduation, Nelle Lee dropped out. It had become obvious to her that a writer is someone who writes, and also that sooner or later everyone disappoints their parents: better, she figured, to get started on both.
| 17 |
The Gift
Nelle Lee was twenty-three years old when she moved to Manhattan. By the time she arrived, Truman Capote had already grown sufficiently bored of New York that he had taken off on another one of his fabulous grand tours. In Morocco that summer and unable to welcome her, he went to the British Post Office in Tangiers and wrote to another friend to ask him to look after her. Michael Brown had moved to New York two years ea
rlier from Mexia, Texas, to try to make a career as a lyricist, and he felt that the code of displaced southerners obliged him to go meet the young woman who had once lived next door to Capote in their tiny Alabama town.
“Nelle and I were instant friends,” Brown said. Along with both being southerners, they had a lot else in common: he, too, had mostly been raised by a much older sister, after his mother died; he, too, idolized his father, a physician who had supported the family and helped put him through college and graduate school. And he wanted so badly to shed his small-town identity that he began, as Nelle later would, by changing his name. Born Marion Martin Brown, he came to New York after World War II—having served in the U.S. Army Air Forces, like Nelle’s brother—and introduced himself to everyone as Michael.
Brown was writing songs on book jackets and paper towels while earning a living as a typist, and soon enough Nelle found a day job, too. In the spring of 1949, she went to work as an assistant editor for a trade magazine called The School Executive, a monthly publication of the American School Publishing Corporation. For three dollars a year, readers of The School Executive could keep up with trends in pedagogy, new textbooks and teaching aids, commentary on education policy, and profiles of school systems around the country. But working at the magazine required the regions of Nelle’s brain that she most needed for her own writing, and she left after only six months. She then took a job as a ticket agent, first for Sabena Belgian Airlines and then with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Air travel was expensive and exciting in those days (to her delight, she had once taken a call from Sir Laurence Olivier, who needed a flight home to London), and Nelle thought that in addition to paying the bills, the position might help her, like Olivier, get a ticket back to England. It turned out, though, that she would use the employee passes only to return to Alabama, the very place she had tried to leave behind. Like the School Executive job, the ticket agency work was adjacent to yet removed from the life to which she aspired.
