by Marja Mills
As we got closer to Monroeville, NPR faded. Now the choices were country music, conservative commentary, or fiery preaching on a couple of stations. Around every other bend was a redbrick church or a tiny white one with a steeple stabbing blue sky and a cemetery out back. Most of the churches were Baptist, but we also saw ones that were Methodist, First Assembly, and Pentecostal.
In a clearing between a redbrick school and woods dripping in kudzu, we spotted a basketball court. Young men playing. Young women watching.
Terrence slowed the car and looked at me.
“Yes, let’s,” I said.
We pulled into the area of trampled grass where other cars were parked, our rental conspicuously shiny and new among the old wide-bodied Chevrolets held together with spare parts and ingenuity. People stared openly at Terrence and me as we walked to the sidelines. Terrence carried a large camera around his neck. He is fairly tall. I stand fully five feet three and a half inches, with blue eyes, blond hair, and what’s charitably called alabaster skin, a whiter shade of pale. Mine was the only white face in the crowd.
We explained why we were there. We were just chatting, mostly. This was our first chance to get acquainted with the area, see what people had to say about life in this part of the country. Had they been assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in school? A few had. Most had not. This also was the first of many times I was glad we had our bases covered between the two of us: male and female, black and white. Of course, once we opened our mouths and spoke, our accents lumped us together in one important way. We were Yankees.
As we spoke with the young men and women, the harshness of the sun gradually faded. I glanced at my watch. It was 6:35 P.M. This was what photographers call the golden hour, the magical interlude when everything is bathed in a soft light and, in the words of the painter James Whistler, “common things are touched with mystery and transfigured with beauty.”
Terrence crouched down to photograph a couple of the pickup ballplayers from that vantage point.
A light rain began to fall. In the muggy August air, it was gentle relief. As it picked up, Terrence returned the lens cap to his camera. I closed my notebook against the falling drops. One of the young men waved at us. “Come back anytime.”
Terrence and I made our way back onto the two-lane highway to Monroeville. We’d have to find our way in the dark to the Best Western on the outskirts of town and then be up early to cram as many interviews as possible into our first day there.
Nearing the city, the feeling of a place out of time ends abruptly. Familiar chains pop up. At the Best Western, our rooms had an uninspiring view of parking lot and fence. Across a large field, the lights from David’s Catfish House glowed softly.
For dinner, I fed quarters into the outdoor vending machines. I retrieved peanut butter crackers from the well of the snack machine, and held a blessedly cold can of Diet Coke to my forehead. I smelled an odor I could not place. It wasn’t coming from the big garbage can in the alcove; it was carried on the faint breeze blowing over the field. It smelled like paper mill with a sour finish, like boiling cabbage. It was fertilizer, I later learned.
This was a poor county in a poor state. Where were the jobs now that the Vanity Fair plant had scaled way back? The apparel manufacturer set up shop here in 1937, and it became the town’s economic engine, propelling it out of the worst of the Depression. There were a lot of jobs for men and, for the first time at these wages, women. But most of the manufacturing work had gone elsewhere in recent years. The money tourists spent on meals and motels didn’t begin to make up for the jobs lost to cutbacks and closings. Monroeville suffered an unemployment rate of 18 percent.
Terrence rapped on my door. Monroe County was dry, going back to Prohibition. Conecuh County was not. Terrence suggested we get libations back across the county line. We had passed Lee’s Package Goods, no relation to the sisters, and doubled back to stop in. The place was a cross between forlorn and forbidding. It had peeling paint and bars on the windows. Other than the WELCOME TO MONROE COUNTY sign and the store, there was nothing much around here except fields.
The jangle of the bell on the door announced our arrival. A heavyset young white woman behind the counter looked our way. So did a middle-aged Asian woman who appeared from a back room. They didn’t smile at us. They just looked at us without expression. Under harsh lights they sized up their customers. We must not have looked like too much trouble.
After we returned to the motel, we shared a quick drink in this dry county.
“Half a glass is good, thanks.” I wanted to go over my notes before tomorrow.
“Half a glass.”
Terrence poured my wine into a water glass from the bathroom counter, which faced out into this standard-issue motel room.
He offered a toast.
“To Monroeville.”
“To Monroeville.”
We clinked glasses. Not rotgut. Not great.
In my room, I pulled out my paperback copy of the novel and climbed under the covers. I was tired from our trip, but before I made my acquaintance with Lee’s hometown, I wanted to get lost again in the rhythm of her language. I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep right away anyway.
This edition, published by Warner Books, had a simple illustration on the cover: the silhouette of a bird flying away from a tree. In the knothole of the tree, someone had stashed a ball of yarn and a pocket watch.
Just a few weeks earlier, it had been shiny and new, its spine unbroken, its 281 pages crisp and untouched. Now pages were turned down at the corners. Passages were highlighted in yellow and sentences underlined in black ink with scribbled notations in the margins.
On page 5, I had underlined one of the novel’s most-quoted passages.
“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turn to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. . . . Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”
The grown Scout is looking back at the world of her childhood. She is in no hurry to tell the story. Right away, we hear her warmth, her wit, and a subtle wistful quality. She invites us to the events that changed everything one summer when she was a young girl, events set in motion, her brother reckons, long before either of them was born.
Horton Foote selected the passage to begin the film adaptation of the book. He grew up in a small town in Texas, not Alabama, but he said Lee had captured a place that he knew intimately from his own childhood. Lee called Foote’s film one of the best adaptations ever made. Gregory Peck won an Academy Award for what he called the role of a lifetime. Horton Foote also won an Oscar, for his screenplay. Lee had not wanted to write the screenplay. She trusted Foote. As he put it, “It was just like we were cousins. I just felt I knew this town. It could have been a replica of my own.” So began a decades-long friendship, not only with Foote but with Peck, who met her father in Monroeville to prepare for his role.
Robert Duvall made his debut as a young film actor playing the reclusive Boo Radley, seen only at the end of the film. Elmer Bernstein’s haunting score is recognizable from the first notes. They evoke a child’s simple tinkering on a piano. As the title sequence begins, we see a young girl’s hands opening an old cigar box. She sings to herself as she pokes around the box of treasures. There are a few Buffalo nickels, a set of jacks, some marbles, a harmonica, a whistle, and a pocket watch. It’s a childhood of roaming free, of unbridled imaginations using those simple props to conjure up stories of high drama and death-defying feats.
When the film came out in 1962, Monroeville had a downtown movie theater. A young Harper Lee, her dark hair cropped short, smiled broadly for a photo below the marquee advertising To Kill a Mockingbird. Not long after, the theater burned. It was not
rebuilt.
—
The next morning, I stepped out of my motel room and into the furnace of Monroeville in August. The Best Western is on Highway 21, which becomes Alabama Avenue. To reach the courthouse, according to the clerk at the motel, all we had to do was follow the road about five miles. It ended right at the town square. We passed an unremarkable stretch of auto parts places and assorted businesses. Next we came upon the Monroe County Hospital, up a short, steep hill to our left, then a strip mall with a Winn-Dixie supermarket, a Rite Aid, and a dollar store. We passed Radley’s Deli, a weathered gray building, named for Boo Radley. We drove the generic stretch you find anyplace in America—McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC—before we spotted the low-slung Vanity Fair building. Pete’s Texaco, a classic, cluttered old gas station, looked like it hadn’t changed much over the decades. On the corner where Alabama Avenue crosses Claiborne Street was Lee Motor Company, also no relation to the author. I had read she didn’t like the mural of a giant mockingbird painted on the side of the brick building. Across the street, on another mural, Scout and Jem stand by the neighborhood tree. The snug 1930s post office anchors the southeast side of the town square. We parked in one of the diagonal parking spaces across the street, in front of the Old Courthouse. Adjacent to it is what everyone calls the new courthouse. It was built in 1963.
Seen from the north, Lee wrote, the Maycomb County courthouse was early Victorian and looked all right. “From the other side, however, Greek revival columns clashed with a big nineteenth-century clock tower housing a rusty unreliable instrument, a view indicating a people determined to preserve every physical scrap of the past.” Monroeville once had such an unreliable instrument, a problem addressed with a modern solution. Now when the bell tolls the hours, it is a recording that rings out from the clock tower.
We made our way up a short flight of steps and through the pair of tall, heavy doors that welcome Mockingbird tourists. The courthouse is a magnet for people from around the country looking for a connection to the novel and the movie, those seeking a glimpse of the real world that inspired that fictional one. A small gift shop sold To Kill a Mockingbird T-shirts and key chains, and posters of the town’s annual production of the play.
Terrence and I ducked our heads into the large courtroom that served as the basis for the one in the movie. It was large, with a curving balcony, painted white, along the second floor, and tall windows overlooking the square. Terrence began taking pictures and I climbed slightly uneven wooden steps to the stuffy second floor.
I heard Kathy McCoy, the director of the museum and its annual To Kill a Mockingbird production, before I saw her. Behind a closed door, she was having a loud, animated phone conversation. Her accent was Southern but not the same kind you heard around here. She was from Kentucky.
I wanted to know what McCoy could tell me about the community, the play she directed each year here at the courthouse, the Lees’ role around town, and who might remember the old Monroeville and be willing to speak with me. I asked her about the tourism here, and what she could tell me about Harper Lee, knowing that tension has simmered for years between the Lee sisters and those looking to capitalize on the book’s fame.
“Harper Lee doesn’t want us to commercialize the book,” McCoy told me, “but we feel what we’re doing is a service to the community and to the rest of the world.” She and her staff put together a guidebook titled Monroeville: The Search for Harper Lee’s Maycomb and published a guide for tours of the town. On the town square, fans of the novel can peer at the redbrick building where Lee’s father maintained his law office and where Harper Lee wrote part of the novel. On Alabama Avenue, they can see the spot where Lee’s childhood home once stood, the spot that now is home to Mel’s Dairy Dream, a white shack with a walk-up window for ordering ice cream cones and burgers. Gone, too, is the home next door, where a young Truman Capote lived for a time with his aunts. A plaque and a little bit of an old stone fence mark the spot.
That day, several people from out of town were looking around the centerpiece of the courthouse, the wood-floored courtroom, where a young Harper Lee had seen her attorney father in action, the one replicated in the movie. Visitors sit in the “colored” balcony, just as Scout did during Tom Robinson’s trial. The bolder ones approach the judge’s bench and lift the gavel, letting it drop with an authoritative rap. Simple props, such as a period calendar, hang on the wall to re-create the Maycomb of the novel for playgoers.
Once you step outside, though, finding the contours and flavor of the Monroeville of that era is harder. Even when the book came out in 1960, Monroeville had changed drastically from its Depression-era days. The size of it, the look of it, the feel of it, all were dramatically different.
When producer Alan Pakula and director Robert Mulligan set about bringing the novel to the movie screen, they considered filming on location in Monroeville. But they decided against it. It didn’t look enough like the town of the 1930s they were trying to re-create. The town still had some of its charm, but it was too modern to stand in for 1930s Maycomb.
Instead, they replicated the courtroom in which a young Nelle had watched her father argue cases, and went to work creating Maycomb on set in Hollywood. For exterior shots, they incorporated some old California bungalows that could be made to look like homes in Nelle’s Maycomb.
The film’s art director, Henry Bumstead, wrote producer Alan Pakula from Monroeville. He abbreviated Monroeville as “Mv” and To Kill a Mockingbird as “TM.” The letter is dated November 1961.
Dear Alan,
I arrived here in Mv this afternoon after a very interesting and beautiful drive from Montgomery. . . . During my drive, I was very much impressed by the lack of traffic, the beautiful countryside and the character of the Negro shacks that dot the terrain.
Harper Lee was here to meet me and she is a most charming person. She insisted I call her Nelle—feel like I’ve known her for years. Little wonder she was able to write such a warm and successful novel.
Mv is a beautiful little town of about 2,500 inhabitants. It’s small in size but large in Southern character. I’m so happy you made possible for me to research the area before designing TM.
Most of the houses are of wood, one story and set up on brick piles. Almost every house had a porch and a swing hanging from the porch rafters. Believe me, it’s a much more relaxed life than we live in Hollywood.
I also visited the old courthouse square and the interior of the courtroom Nelle wrote about. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am by the architecture and the little touches which will add to our sets. Old pot-bellied stoves still heat the courtroom. Beside each one stands a tub filled with coal. Nelle says we should have a block of ice on the exterior of the courthouse steps when we shoot this sequence. It seems that people chip off a piece of ice to take into the courthouse with them to munch on to try to keep cool. It reminded me of my “youth,” when I used to follow the ice wagon to get the ice chips. Nelle is really amused at my picture taking and also my taking measurements so that I can duplicate the things I see. She said she didn’t know we worked so hard. This morning she greeted me with “I lost five pounds yesterday following you around taking pictures of doorknobs, houses, wagons, collards, etc—can we take time for lunch today?” Nelle says the exterior of Mrs. DuBose’s house should have paint that is peeling. Also the interior should have dark woodwork, Victorian furniture and be grim. Her house would be wired for electricity, but she would still be using oil lamps—to save money, so Nelle says. Boo Radley’s should look like it had never been painted—almost haunted.
Warmest regards,
Henry Bumstead
When readers of To Kill a Mockingbird first come to Monroeville, they want it to be just like the town they know from the novel and the movie. They want to see the place where the characters they love—Scout and Atticus, Jem and Dill and Boo—live and play, work and dream.
“People moved
slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.”
So visitors in search of Maycomb just assume they’re not looking hard enough or in the right places. Maycomb must be here somewhere. It must exist.
“The form of a town changes, alas, more quickly than the human heart,” Charles Baudelaire once wrote. Monroeville, like any town, has been altered in manifold and important ways since the 1930s. Those who love the novel, however, haven’t budged. Their expectations are steadfast. Two decades ago, McCoy told me, Monroe County drew about two thousand visitors a year. Now the annual tally was closer to twenty thousand and climbing, and a good four-fifths of those folks say that the novel is what brought them.
The museum’s annual spring production of the play To Kill a Mockingbird draws visitors to a stage only Monroeville can offer. The first act unfolds on the lawn of the Old Courthouse Museum, where the breeze carries the scent of pink azaleas and mockingbirds sometimes alight on tree branches. The second act, the infamous trial, takes place inside, in the old-fashioned courtroom familiar to anyone who has watched the movie. Every year, the performances sell out.
McCoy directed me to walk out the door of the Old Courthouse and across a bit of lawn to the new one to interview Otha Lee Biggs, the county probate judge. Biggs was a powerful figure here who was involved with the annual play and Mockingbird matters generally.
