“Survive, and probably won’t.”: Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, 303.
“‘Tell us this in time?’”: Quoted in John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1994), 619.
“Several French writers.”: Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, 308.
“Citizens’ Council nor NAACP.”: Lee, GSAW, 188.
“Law or economic threat.”: William Faulkner, “A Letter to the 95,” Life, March 5, 1956, 51–52. Faulkner implied that the Supreme Court was responsible for creating the conditions that led to Emmett Till’s lynching. His regional defensiveness compelled him to balance southern violence with racial riots in the North and West, and his ultimate concern was not with the ongoing injustices suffered by black southerners but with the white southerner finding some “peace,” so that he was “not to be faced with another legal process or maneuver every year, year after year, for the rest of his life.”
Comments attributed to him: Time, April 23, 1956.
Covered southern racial matters: Lee, GSAW, 24.
“So drop the act.”: All quotations in this paragraph are from Lee, GSAW, 177–178.
“Do right,” she says: Lee, GSAW, 241.
Aspects of his views: Lee, GSAW, 242, 245–246.
“Far from it yet.”: Lee, GSAW, 245–246.
“Big overgrown Negroes.”: Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 367.
Cal shakes her head: Lee, GSAW, 160.
Good white southerner: Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
“Hostile to black demands.”: Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 86–87.
Chapter 4
Work was untitled: Lee, Author Cardfile, ALWP; Maurice Crain to Lynn Carrick, June 13, 1957, HarperCollins Collection. There is some discrepancy in the historical record about these events. Annie Laurie Williams lists the revisions that Lee handed over in July and August 1957 on a cardfile labeled “Go Set a Watchman,” which suggests that these revisions were to “Watchman.” But both the June 13, 1957, letter from Maurice Crain to Lynn Carrick and the July 9, 1957, letter from Harper Lee to Joy and Michael Brown make clear that by this time Lee had accepted Crain’s advice to put aside “Watchman” to work full-time on the childhood novel that she had titled “The Long Goodbye.”
Taken their husband’s name: Clarissa Atkinson, “Once Upon a Time,” The Oldest Vocation, August 8, 2014, https://oldestvocation.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/once-upon-a-time/.
“Sound plot structure.”: The Author and His Audience, 27–28.
Far too long: Shields, Mockingbird, 90.
Might in fact do so: The Author and His Audience, 28–29; Maurice Crain to Lynn Carrick, June 13, 1957, HarperCollins Collection.
Expected to take six months: Shields, Mockingbird, 91; Lee, Author Cardfile, ALWP; The Author and His Audience, 28.
“Tom Heflin,” he chuckles: Lee, TKM, 205, 250.
About an idealistic man: Shields, Mockingbird, 89.
“Work of his whole life.”: Tay Hohoff, A Ministry to Man: The Life of John Lovejoy Elliott (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), 226.
“Obey his inner light.”: Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1960.
That she herself had: Lee, GSAW, 118.
“Always be his answers.”: Lee, GSAW, 265. One of Lee’s nephews, Ed Conner, who owns the family’s lone doctorate in literature and who taught for years at Kentucky State University, a historically black institution, holds to this interpretation. He believes that the act of writing Watchman served as a kind of emotional catharsis for his aunt. It was written as she saw her father in dramatic physical decline, and it allowed her to forgive him and to expunge, as it were, the years of frustration she felt toward him. Ed Conner, email to author, March 6, 2017, Crespino papers.
Hypothetical black student: NYT, May 7, 1959; Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 132–138. For attempts in Tuscaloosa to start a rival newspaper, see “Notes of The People Speak Broadcast,” March 12, 1957 and “Notes from Janette,” March 13, 1957 in folder 7, box 255, Buford Boone Papers, Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama.
Patience became dirty words: Thornton, Dividing Lines, 93, 96, 168–173, 195, 405.
The Statesmen Quartet: Monroe Journal, June 10, 1954; and April 10 and May 1, 1958.
To attract new industries: Thornton, Dividing Lines, 108–109, 474–475.
“Alabama sun for demagoguery.”: Monroe Journal, September 26, 1957.
“Life,” the man said: Quoted in Carter, Politics of Rage, 95.
“Out-nigger me again.”: Thornton, Dividing Lines, 108–109. Also see Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 90–96.
“Efforts were stopped cold.”: Quoted in Thornton, Dividing Lines, 97.
“People to preserve segregation.”: Monroe Journal, December 5, 1957.
Klan in Monroe County: Monroe Journal, August 7, 1958.
Meetings at rural churches: Monroe Journal, August 28, 1958.
“Attention All White People.”: Monroe Journal, March 19, 1959.
“Monroe County Klaverns 46-202.”: Monroe Journal, July 2 and December 31, 1959.
“That way down here.”: Monroe County Heritage Museums, Monroeville: The Search for Harper Lee’s Maycomb (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1999), 19.
“Bayonets in public schools.”: Monroe Journal, August 7, 1958.
“Directly on the U.S. Supreme Court.”: Monroe Journal, May 7, 1959.
“Carving up on each other.”: Monroe Journal, January 15, 1959; for the connection between the Home News and the Klan, see Thornton, Dividing Lines, 97.
“NAACP, which God forbid.”: Nelle Harper Lee to Hal Caufield, June 16, 1956, Kennerson Collection.
Becomes a heroic choice: Cultural assumptions about single fathers are backed up by psychological research. See Amanda R. Haire and Christi R. McGeorge, “Negative Perceptions of Never-Married Custodial Single Mothers and Fathers: Applications of a Gender Analysis for Family Therapists,” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy 24, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 24–51; and Sarah L. DeJean, Christi R. McGeorge, and Thomas S. Carlson, “Attitudes Toward Never-Married Single Mothers and Fathers: Does Gender Matter?” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy 24, no. 2 (April 1, 2012): 121–138.
“Boy! It’s great.”: Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1962. For more on the politics and culture of the baby boom, see Steve M. Gillon, Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America (New York: Free Press, 2004).
“Bitterness toward white people.”: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The essential study of how theories of the black damaged psyche shaped American racial liberalism is Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Also see Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 220–227. For more on children and civil rights politics, see Rebecca de Schweinitz, If We Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). For a study of how the preservation of childhood innocence shaped debates over race in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America, see Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
“Embarrassed” the South: Crimson-White, October 1, 1946.
“After the household sleeps.”: Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York
: W. W. Norton, 1949, 1961, 1994), 25.
“Thing in all my life.”: Smith, Killers of the Dream, 53.
“He is a gentleman,” Lee, GSAW, 113.
“Unless we run away.”: Smith, Killers of the Dream, 51, 54. For more on the socialization of white children, see Kristina DuRocher, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). For a comparative study of white and black socialization, see Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
“At home anywhere else.”: Lee, GSAW, 248.
Fate of Tom Robinson: Lee, TKM, 200–201; 213.
“They had to do it.”: Lee, GSAW, 241.
Began with the rising generation: Eric Sundquist observes that Brown and Mockingbird both “started from the simple premise that today’s children are tomorrow’s adults.” Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 221.
“That was enough.”: Lee, TKM, 157. Eric Sundquist has written, “The novel’s beguiling proposition that juries, police forces, and whole communities of sympathetic children would make for a more just world, and, most famously, Scout’s naïve routing of the lynch mob that has come to drag Tom Robinson from jail—all are calculated to substantiate the ethical authority driving Brown v. Board of Education.” Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 228–229.
Corpse with sharpened sticks: Kester, “Lynching of Claude Neal.”
As “a child’s book.”: Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 411.
Audience that it enjoyed: Mills, Mockingbird Next Door, 225.
From riotous white protestors: NYT, August 28 and 31, 1956; September 2 and 3, 1956; December 8, 1956.
“That had turned violent.”: Lee, GSAW, 238.
Yelling God-knows-what: David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
“Negro comes up.”: Lee, TKM, 88.
Train for Kansas: Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 318–319.
“Somebody your size.”: Monroe Journal, December 17, 1959.
“All are one in Christ.”: Monroe Journal, December 24, 1959; Galatians 3:27–28.
“Did right, son.”: Mills, Mockingbird Next Door, 21. The canceled Christmas parade would become a proud moment for Monroeville’s civic leaders. See Steve Stewart, “‘Watchman,’ ‘Mockingbird,’ and the Real Monroeville,” Montgomery Advertiser, July 26, 2015.
“try and stop it?”: Lee, GSAW, 267–268.
“Giants in the KKK.”: Monroe Journal, January 14, 1960.
Suspected of being a Klansman: Monroe Journal, December 31, 1959, and February 18, 1960.
Decked in Confederate flags: Monroe Journal, December 17, 24, and 31, 1959; January 14 and 21, February 18, and March 31, 1960.
Books were leftover: New York Herald Tribune, April 15, 1962.
Chapter 5
Campaigns could surely ensue: R. Barton Palmer, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: The Relationship Between Text and Film (London: Methuen Drama, 2008), 113–115.
Star to play Atticus: James P. Yarbrough to Miss Sullivan, October 17, 1960, and Annie Laurie Williams to James P. Yarbrough, November 4, 1960, Box 149, folder Lee, Nelle Harper—Motion Picture, Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Would have to wait: Annie Laurie Williams to George Wood, August 8, 1960, and George Wood to Annie Laurie Williams, October 6, 1960, box 149, folder Lee, Nelle Harper—Motion Picture, Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Cooper and John Huston: Robert P. Richards to Annie Laurie Williams, November 8, 1960, Box 149, folder Lee, Nelle Harper—Motion Picture, Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Psychologically abusive father: Chicago Tribune, Janurary 30, 1961; NYT, May 6, 1962; also see Jared Brown, Alan J. Pakula: His Life and His Films (New York: Back Stage, 2005).
“Burble a single note.”: Maurice Crain to Alice Lee, March 22, 1961, box 149, folder Lee, Nelle Harper—Motion Picture, Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Hill behind the town: NYT, April 19, 1961; NYT, May 6, 1962; and John Griggs, The Films of Gregory Peck (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1984), 179–184.
Lee, initially imagined: Palmer, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, 200.
Straight over to tell him: Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1961.
Ask for identification: Boston Globe, February 11, 1963.
Outlawed the previous year: Washington Post, May 5, 1961.
“Make it through Alabama.”: Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 132–133.
Escaped with their lives: Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 140–145.
(“Goddamned niggers except me”).: Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 204–205.
Up the National Guard: McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 233–235.
Disapproved of the Freedom Rides: Branch, Parting the Waters, 478.
“But they respect it.”: Quoted in Mary McDonagh Murphy, Scout, Atticus, & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: Harper, 2010), 36.
Birmingham’s militant segregationists: McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 218, 222–223.
Other white leaders: Thornton, Dividing Lines, 123.
“Undivided white community.”: Thornton, Dividing Lines, 140.
A half million copies: Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1961.
Week they were offered: NYT, May 6, 1962.
Secretary of the NAACP: Chicago Tribune, September 18, 1960.
Remembered, was To Kill a Mockingbird: Sheldon Stern, Interview with James Farmer, April 25, 1979, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. The other book that Wilkins brought Farmer was A. J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana. Chicago Defender, June 15, 1961.
His presence as well: Ari N. Schulman, “The Man Who Helped Make Harper Lee,” Atlantic, July 14, 2015.
“Who rarely speak out.”: Maurice Crain to Harper Lee, January 27, 1961, Box 149, folder Lee, Nelle Harper—Motion Picture, Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
“Patterns of a small Southern town.”: NYT, May 19, 1961.
Lee opted out: Lucy Kroll to Horton Foote, February 6, 1961, Box 23, folder 12, Horton Foote Papers, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.
Publication royalties with Foote: NYT, March 4, 2009.
“View of the children.”: Brown, Alan J. Pakula, 43–44.
“Inheritance from him.”: “Discussion with Bob Mulligan on ‘Mockingbird’ at Luncheon Meeting,” c. 1962, Box 142, folder 16, Horton Foote Papers, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.
Quickly as he could: Palmer, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, 199.
Image of Gregory Peck: “Characters in a novel… are verbal constructs,” observes film scholar Barton Palmer, “[b]ut characters in a film are embodied by particular human beings, whose presence in the story world… is a complex source of pleasure and psychological connection, potentially exceeding… their function as characters within the story.” Palmer, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, 194.
“I could be him.”: Quoted in Griggs, The Films of Gregory Peck, 180.
Those two topics alone: Gary Fishgall, Gregory Peck: A Biography (New York: Scribner, 2002), 116.
“People of good will.”: Palmer, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, 197.
“Hidden in a backwater.”: “To Kill A Mockingbird—Script,” n.d., Box 67, folder 662, Gregory Peck Papers, Margaret Herrick Library.
Assigned the case to Atticus: Palmer, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, 183.
Take on Tom Robinson’s defense: Horton Foote, The Screenplay of To Kill a Mockingb
ird (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 22–23.
“Atticus is aroused.”: “To Kill A Mockingbird—Script,” n.d., Box 67, folder 662, Gregory Peck Papers, Margaret Herrick Library.
“That much,” Atticus observes: Lee, TKM, 235.
Misses his aim: Palmer, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, 229–230.
“What real courage is.”: Notes of Robert Mulligan on To Kill A Mockingbird—Script, c. 1962, Box 3, folder 29, Robert Mulligan Papers, Margaret Herrick Library. The script that Mulligan and Peck made notes on included the scenes with Mrs. Dubose. Because the scenes were not included in the final version of the film, they do not appear in Horton Foote’s published screenplay.
Slow developing movie: “Fearful Symmetry: The Making of To Kill a Mockingbird,” a documentary included with bonus material in the fiftieth anniversary edition DVD of To Kill a Mockingbird. Pakula said that while he and Mulligan loved the performances, the scenes stopped the film’s momentum.
His every mannerism: Ed Conner, email to author, May 21, 2017, Crespino papers.
With his watch fob: “Fearful Symmetry” film; Shields, Mockingbird, 172–173.
“From that small Southern town.”: Quoted in Fishgall, Gregory Peck, 233.
DC; New Orleans; and Atlanta: Monroe Journal, April 27, 1944; April 15, 1920; June 12, 1924; February 10, 1921; and July 5, 1923.
If a Man Answers: Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1962.
Way for the new Dodger Stadium: NYT, January 19, 1962.
Pond on the back lot: NYT, May 6, 1962.
“Stomped the floor.”: Quoted in Carter, Politics of Rage, 109.
“Evil Civil Rights Commission.”: Carter, Politics of Rage, 96–104.
Segregation in Alabama schools: Carter, Politics of Rage, 105–109.
Political ally recalled: Marshall Frady, Wallace (New York: Meridian Books, 1968), 107.
Won the general election: Carl Grafton and Anne Permaloff, Big Mules & Branchheads: James E. Folsom and Political Power in Alabama (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 230–236.
Preferences of Peck: Gregory Peck, “Interoffice Correspondence with George Chasin,” June 18, 1962, and Gregory Peck, “Confidential Memo to Mel Tucker,” July 6, 1962, Box 70, folder 689, Gregory Peck Papers, Margaret Herrick Library.
Atticus Finch Page 25
