by Casey Cep
“You wouldn’t think she had two nickels to rub together—she was dressed like a pauper,” Karr remembered. The court reporter found that Lee wore her wealth lightly in other ways, too. She was “really about the nicest person I ever met in my life,” Karr recalled, “just down to earth and humble.” Karr’s husband made them bologna sandwiches, and the three of them sat down to talk about the case and the circuit. At the time, Karr had been working as a court reporter for five years, following Judge Avary around the Fifth Circuit to cover criminal trials and anything else on his docket. That meant she was in a good position to regale Lee with stories about the judge, the jury, and pretty much everyone else involved in the Burns case.
She also agreed to provide Lee with a transcript when the trial was over, though she warned that it would take some time. Karr did her court reporting in shorthand—the particular kind invented by John Robert Gregg almost a hundred years earlier, which looks less like English than an EKG—and she typed it up only if a case was appealed. That process was slow, and the Burns trial was already proving to be a long one, but Lee agreed to pay Karr whatever it cost and wait however long it took.
* * *
—
Harper Lee wasn’t in a hurry, because she wasn’t going anywhere. After she got interested in the Reverend, she had her niece Molly arrange for her to stay for a few months in a cabin on Lake Martin. It was one of the six hundred or so cabins built by Ben Russell, the founder of Russell Mills, with lakeside land he’d gotten from a trade with Alabama Power after giving up on a dam he himself had wanted to build at Buzzard Roost Shoals, north of Cherokee Bluffs. Russell rented the cabins to employees and friends, including Sara and Joseph Robinson, who owned an iron foundry in town. Mrs. Sara, as her students knew her, taught in the Alexander City schools and loved the idea of hosting the novelist; the novelist, in turn, never met an English teacher she didn’t love.
The Robinson cabin was on the northern side of the lake with a clear view of the River Bridge between Alexander City and Dadeville. A rustic number, it was equal parts pine, tin, and screen, much like the one near Kowaliga Bridge that Hank Williams had stayed in twenty-five years earlier when he came to Lake Martin to dry out. For both artists, their isolated idylls of clear nights and calm waters held the promise of serenity and sobriety, although Lee was not always alone. Early during her stay, the novelist adopted a stray black cat that she took to calling the Reverend; later, her friend Marcia Van Meter came down from the city to see how the book was going and to meet the feline incarnation of its central character.
Eventually, Lee swapped her lakeside digs for a room at the Horseshoe Bend Motel, not only because it was the nicest place in town (it was where the sequestered jury had stayed), but because it was owned by her niece’s husband, Bobby Chapman. The fifty-room facility, which was built in 1958, sat just a few miles down the road from the battlefield for which it was named, right at the corner of Highway 22, which runs between Rockford, Alexander City, and New Site, and Highway 280, which runs from Birmingham all the way across the Georgia line. Its location made the hotel popular with travelers heading to or from Atlanta and with tourists who couldn’t afford a cabin but wanted to go swimming, boating, or fishing on Lake Martin. In 1967, Chapman’s parents bought the place from its original owners, and three years later, when Bobby finished his studies at the University of Alabama, he came back home to run it.
The Horseshoe Bend Motel was shaped like a hexagon, with an office at the base and five lengths of rooms that angled their way around a swimming pool in the center. Bobby eventually turned its restaurant into a convenience store, where day-shift Russell employees got their coffee and biscuits before work, and opened a lounge called the Stable Club, where those same workers returned at the other end of the day for entertainment—provided partly by Bobby’s liquor license, a novelty since Tallapoosa County had been dry until 1968, and partly by the local and regional acts that regularly performed shows there. “The Stable Club became something of a local ‘Cheers,’ ” Chapman said later. “If I looked back on it, I could probably say we had our Norm and Cliff and maybe a Sam and a Carla or two.” For Lee, the Stable Club was a real improvement on the café at the Warren Hotel in Kansas—not least because, unlike in Finney County, she could order more than coffee.
In other ways, though, Lee’s early days in Alex City were a lot like the ones she’d spent with Capote in Garden City. Many locals were at first leery of saying anything at all about their infamous neighbor, and like many of the white reporters who came to chase the story of the voodoo preacher, Lee met with lots of resistance. “If the Reverend was alive,” one of the second Mrs. Maxwell’s friends said, “nobody would talk to you.” Even three months dead, he still managed to spook plenty of people; stories about his posthumous powers proliferated, as did the fear that he would take revenge from beyond the grave. “Around town the talk is he’s already back,” Curtis Jones, a relative of Shirley Ann Ellington’s, had said, “folks say he’s been seen in town driving a car.” People also said that the Reverend Willie Maxwell voted in an election after he was too dead to pull the lever, and that at night a mysterious light shined above his grave.
Lee also had another problem, one that she hadn’t faced in Kansas but that became unavoidable in Alex City the minute anyone realized who she was. The author of To Kill a Mockingbird was not just famous in Alabama: she was famously rich and famously connected to Hollywood. How much would she be willing to pay for their story, almost everyone she tried to talk to asked her, and who would play them in the movie version of whatever she wrote? Lee, who had thought the chief challenge to her journalistic ethics would involve maintaining absolute fidelity to the facts, instead found herself warding off people who wanted to sell her their grandmother or sell themselves to the highest bidder. She complained that even the Reverend’s neighbors thought they could sell their stories to television producers. The same went for some of the most important characters in the saga. Someone had tried to negotiate a fee for Robert Burns’s cooperation, and Fred Hutchinson, the funeral director, told Lee that he could get her an interview with the Reverend’s widow, for the right price. Eventually, though, after Lee had made it known that she was not in the business of buying her interviews, or paying for anything except official copies of documents like transcripts and death certificates, people relented and began to talk.
Not that their talk was always reliable. Although the Reverend was famous for a very different reason, the way people told stories about him must have reminded Lee of the way they had embroidered their stories about her since To Kill a Mockingbird was first published: inserting themselves where they had never been, intimating deep truths from glancing interactions, and inventing information entirely when the need arose or the mood struck. Soon enough, the issue wasn’t that she did not have enough material; the busboy who delivered her dinners at the Horseshoe Bend Motel in exchange for fifty-cent tips watched as stacks of papers piled ever higher on her desk. The issue was that she had, as she would later say, “enough rumor, fantasy, dreams, conjecture, and outright lies for a volume the length of the Old Testament”—exactly what Harper Lee was hoping to keep out of her book.
| 21 |
Coming Back Until Doomsday
Notwithstanding the rumors to the contrary, by the time Harper Lee came along, the Reverend Willie Maxwell was not available to give an interview to even the most resourceful of reporters. One of her other subjects, however, was all too happy to talk to her. No one found Lee more charming than that charmer Tom Radney, and in the months she spent around Lake Martin, he often came by the Horseshoe Bend to have a drink with her, talk about the case, suggest people for her to interview, and check on her progress.
It was easy to get along with Big Tom, and to Lee he was a familiar type. Even though he was slightly younger than she was, he had a lot in common with her father: both were country lawyers who served in the state legisla
ture; both were lay leaders in the Methodist Church; both were members of the Masonic Lodge and the Chamber of Commerce; both were the sorts of men known to everyone in town, and liked by most. Their politics, however, were oil and water: many of Tom’s letters to the editor of The Alexander City Outlook defended the very federal government that A.C. had attacked in his editorials on states’ rights for The Monroe Journal. And while Mr. Lee was never seen without a jacket and hat, except on the golf course, Big Tom was a man who liked to loosen his collar.
For his part, Big Tom initially found Harper Lee to be a “shy, reserved, matronly lady” but, after watching her interact with sources, found that she was “quick to smile and make friends.” The two had a shared love of travel: just as she had gone abroad to Oxford, Big Tom had hopped a ship to Europe after his army service and made his way around France and England before going to Russia to see what he called “the communist threat.” They also loved politics. Lee’s views fell somewhere between civil libertarian and uncivil curmudgeon, but she saw Radney’s JFK cocktail party story and raised him one about JFK’s presidential motorcade, which she had once waited hours to see at the United Nations. What Radney did not know about the Corn Laws, she could supply for them both, and they shared a hagiographic affection for Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee.
Big Tom was thrilled to have the state’s most famous author interested in one of his cases, and he did everything he could to see to it that the book in which he would appear got written. He tossed all of his files on the Reverend Maxwell into an enormous leather briefcase—really, more of a valise—and told Lee to keep it for as long as it took to write the book. All told, it amounted to hundreds of pages of material, including enough insurance paperwork for her to open her own agency: dozens of applications, forms, policy sheets, fee schedules, and legal briefs, not to mention a lengthy court of appeals case.
It was a gold mine, worth more to Lee than anything that had come out of Devil’s Backbone or Hog Mountain the century before, when Tallapoosa County experienced its own blink-and-you-missed-it gold rush. To Lee’s delight, Radney had squirreled away copies of just about every piece of Reverend-related paperwork that had crossed his desk or required his signature, including letters, indictments, witness lists, jury lists, and other documents related to the criminal cases going all the way back to when District Attorney Aaron had tried and failed to get a conviction for first-degree murder in State of Alabama v. Willie J. Maxwell. Radney had even saved a copy of the handwritten slip of paper that the foreman had handed the judge in the first murder trial—“We the Jury find the defendant Willie M. Maxwell not guilty”—and its perverse twin, the one six years later, that acquitted Robert Burns.
Although Big Tom specialized in acquittals, he insisted to Lee, as he had to every other journalist who asked, that he would not have tried to get another one for the Reverend in the murder of Shirley Ann Ellington. A few days before the preacher’s death, he claimed, Maxwell had come by the Zoo wanting to know if Radney would represent him, and Big Tom had refused. The Reverend was so angry when he left that he threatened a reporter in the parking lot, telling her that he would run her over with his car if she didn’t move out of his way. Lee, well aware of all the lawyering Radney had done for the Reverend over almost a ten-year period, starting with a land transfer in 1967, had reason to doubt these claims. She had already seen the Maxwell House, and she was learning just how lucrative a client the Reverend Maxwell had been; moreover, Big Tom’s story undermined his long-standing and admirable insistence that every client, regardless of guilt, deserves a lawyer.
Lee was not entirely convinced by Tom’s story, and she was dubious about his motives for making himself look so noble. “He seemed,” she later said, “to see himself as a cross between Atticus Finch and Robert Redford.” To be fair, Big Tom might have started seeing himself that way the day that Lee picked up the telephone in front of him and called Gregory Peck, joking with the actor about what role he would play in the film version of the book she was working on; maybe, she teased, he would be cast as a Baptist preacher. It would not have been unreasonable for Radney to think that Peck might prefer to play the defense attorney who had gotten an acquittal for a murder that had been witnessed by three hundred people, reprising the sort of role that had won him an Oscar. Even the small chance of that was enough to make Radney eager to cooperate, and whether or not Lee’s book was ever made into a blockbuster, it was sure to be a best seller.
But Big Tom was not only motivated by self-interest. Even without encouragement or incentive, he could be generous and gregarious with anyone, and when Lee showed an interest in his life, he gladly invited her into it. He took the author to see his family’s farm—a parcel of land, originally part of the Quarters, that he had bought back not long after he started representing the Reverend. There in Daviston, Radney had built a cabin, put in a swimming pool, and filled a red barn and pasture with horses, chickens, goats, sheep, and, briefly, an emu. Like the Lee family, the Radneys had a beach property down in Destin, on the Florida panhandle, but Big Tom preferred to spend the days he wasn’t at the office at the farm. The Quarters was the closest thing to ancestral land he had, and it wasn’t far from his childhood home in Wadley or his family’s church. Everyone who came out there with him, Lee included, was liable to be subjected to the line he’d used in speech after speech when he was campaigning: “Never forget from whence you came.”
She understood that, of course, because it was something they had in common. Both were southerners unwilling to leave a region that would have preferred to do without them: an unmarried, unconventional literary woman; an in-your-face progressive. She could have stayed in Manhattan; he could have started a fresh political career almost anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But Harper Lee returned over and over again to the town where she was born, and Big Tom never really left; both of them were deeply loyal to the South, even when it disappointed them or disapproved of them.
The South would gladly have done without the Reverend Maxwell, too, but unlike them he had very little chance of getting out of it, even if he had wanted to. Six million African Americans went north and west during the Great Migration, but many millions more stayed behind. Among them was Maxwell, who lived in one of the many small towns the civil rights movement seemed to have passed by. What Harper Lee knew about Tom Radney’s South instinctively, she could have learned about Willie Maxwell’s South only through patient research and ongoing conversations of the kind that very few white Americans, then as now, ever have.
She sought out some of those conversations, but the ones with Big Tom came easier, and she got to know his whole family. Madolyn couldn’t spend endless hours at the Stable Club with her the way her husband could, but she was delighted that Alabama’s most famous author wanted to meet her children: Ellen, who was already fourteen; Fran, who was twelve; Hollis, who was ten; and six-year-old Thomas. In the years since Big Tom had given up politics, Little Tom had outgrown being a homemade home plate when the family played kickball in the driveway, and was now big enough to pedal around in the fire truck that Radney had bought for his children when none of them won the one being raffled by the Alexander City Fire Department. The girls, meanwhile, were old enough to know who Lee was, and when one of them said to her, “I never read anything by you except To Kill a Mockingbird,” the author’s retort tickled them all: “Nobody else has either.”
Like Big Tom, Madolyn liked Lee a lot. She remembers “just sitting back and listening to the conversation” whenever Lee and Radney got to talking about case law or the Creek Wars or whatever else one of them dredged up from the depths of their erudition. Madolyn also noticed what just about everyone who ever met Harper Lee did—namely, that she “didn’t care a whit about the way she looked.” While most women at that time had to mind what went into their mouths and what came out of them, Lee smoked and drank as much as any man and, as Madolyn said, “had several
four-letter words she’d contribute to any conversation.”
Unlike the three Mrs. Maxwells, who had all been pastor’s wives, and Mrs. Radney, who was a politician’s wife, Lee was no man’s wife. Instead, like those men, she was defined by her work, and free to spend all of her time reading and writing. No one could tell her what kind of reporting she should be doing, as they most certainly would have; true crime had plenty of female victims and the odd female murderess, but almost no female authors. She could devote an entire day to thinking if she wanted, or spend six hours with Sergeant William Gray and his wife, going over crime scene photographs that he had stashed at home, then stay up all night transcribing her notes on his memories of the death of the second Mrs. Maxwell. She was nowhere near as anonymous as she was in Manhattan, where hundreds of thousands of people came and went every day and no one noticed if your apartment light was on all night or you didn’t leave the building until late afternoon, but in Alex City, unlike in Monroeville, Lee could still find relative peace. She came and went as she pleased, since her cabin was remote and the rooms at the Horseshoe Bend had their own private entrances. She wore down her tires driving from one tiny village to another, learning the byways and back roads of the three counties around Lake Martin, and talking with anyone who knew anything about the Reverend Willie Maxwell.
* * *
—
Along the way, Lee tracked down the byline that had interested her most when she reviewed the earlier coverage of the Maxwell case in The Alexander City Outlook and The Montgomery Advertiser. Of all the reporters who had covered the story, only one was present on the day the Reverend was shot. Lee called the newsroom of the Outlook, got the editor, Alvin Benn, on the phone, explained who she was, and asked if she could speak with one of his reporters, Jim Earnhardt. Unfortunately, right at that moment, she could not, he informed her, because Earnhardt was out obeying Benn’s motto: there’s no news in a newsroom.
