The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  After I began work on this book, he gave me permission to read and quote from his journals. That night, he sat at his kitchen table and wrote the day’s entry in his slim, hardcover journal. Two rows of the journals, with “Record” embossed in red on the covers, resided in one of his many bookcases.

  “Took a package to Harper Lee that had been delivered to me,” he wrote of that day. “We talked for a while about the Chicago Tribune reporter and what she would like me to say and not say. To my astonishment, NHL spent two hours with the lady—not in an interview but in a visit. I’ve never known her to give a reporter the time of day.”

  Of that evening he wrote, “I hope she does a good job with this series of articles, because NHL has put lots of trust in her integrity. I would hate to see NHL wounded by any of this.”

  Nelle asked that Tom not reveal when she was in New York versus Monroeville and that he not disclose the restaurants and other spots where journalists or tourists might find her.

  This was becoming a different story than my editors and I first envisioned. It was unprecedented for Alice and Tom to say this much on the record about Harper Lee. With the author’s trusted circle usually unwilling to talk, Tom pointed out, “Those who know don’t speak and those who speak don’t know.”

  As far as I could tell, two better sources of insight into the author’s life didn’t exist. Alice was as much mother as sister. She had vivid memories of Nelle Harper when she was the age of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, about six. The attorney knew their father, the model for Atticus, better than anyone and shared her home with Nelle Harper part of each year. For forty years, she had been deeply involved in handling her affairs.

  Tom Butts, meanwhile, knew Nelle Harper in the way almost no one else did: He spent time with her in both Monroeville and Manhattan. Few, if any, of Nelle’s Manhattan friends spent time with her Monroeville circle and vice versa. Tom knew her in both contexts.

  My editors agreed it was worth delaying the story to take up the Lees on their invitation to return. I could fly South again in a week or so, and research a longer profile of Harper Lee. One Book, One Chicago would continue into October. We had a little time.

  I told the Lees and Reverend Butts I would be in touch about a possible date to return, and Terrence and I made our way back to Chicago.

  Chapter Six

  Back in Chicago, Terrence and I were surprised when photos of Nelle being inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor went out on the wire. He had suggested staying on to photograph her at that Montgomery ceremony, since she did not want him to photograph her in Monroeville, as he had done with Alice and the other interviewees. It was no surprise she would not want to be photographed for my story; our meeting was off the record for newspaper purposes, after all. But now Terrence had missed his chance.

  I mustered what gumption I could and faxed the author. The letter, addressed “Dear Ms. Lee,” said,

  I’m writing with a request: Would you consider letting Terrence pay you a very brief visit in the next few days? He stayed away from Monday’s Montgomery ceremony at your request, but then was chagrined to see the Montgomery newspaper publish that photo of you that went out on the news wires. That happens; and we, of course, are most grateful for the help you and the others have been in our research . . .

  I went on to tell her about the next steps in the One Book, One Chicago program, including a story I was writing about the staff of a children’s hospital reading the novel to their patients.

  Lee’s sense of fairness, and her distinctive style, were abundantly clear in her reply. It arrived the same day. The one-page, handwritten letter began with high praise for Terence, whom she called “a latter-day Alfred Stieglitz” and whose portraits she and Alice thought were “unfailingly wonderful.” She was certain that they were taken through cheesecloth.

  She consented to be photographed and noted that she and Alice didn’t wish to be photographed together. I learned later that they didn’t want their ailing other sister, Louise, to feel excluded.

  She signed the letter with her full name and in parentheses added, “And call me Nelle—for goodness’ sake.”

  Terrence flew down soon after, and spent a day with her. “She was actually a lot of fun,” Terrence said. “She knew I had a job to do and we drove a number of places.” She teasingly gave him the nickname “Terrible T.”

  For my part, it looked like the second week in September might work out for a return trip. Before then, Alice and Nelle Harper would be with their sister Louise. She lived in Eufaula, two hundred miles away. We agreed that a return flight on September 12 would work.

  But on Tuesday, September 11, as the horrifying footage of the World Trade Center played nonstop on television, I faxed the Lees. It would be all hands on deck at the paper for a while. With planes grounded I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to reschedule the visit.

  Nelle called Tom the following day, September 12, when she and Alice returned from Eufaula. Nelle wanted to seek her solace at the catfish ponds on the rural property of their mutual friends Ernie and Angie Hanks. The following day, the preacher and the writer cast their lines in those tranquil waters. Their bobbers left only small ripples in the surface. Neither could think about much except the horror in New York, but they did not discuss it at any length.

  “She didn’t really want to talk about it,” Tom said. “She just wanted some peace. That’s how she deals with those things.”

  The first week of October, I made the return trip to Alabama. I would interview Alice again and do more reporting in Monroeville. Tom suggested another form of research: fishing with Nelle. If she was up for it.

  As research goes, I decided that fishing with Harper Lee would beat an afternoon in the library.

  Tom invited me to join him at their usual spot. If Nelle wanted to join Tom and me, the three of us would go. If she preferred to do her fishing without the likes of me, understandably enough, I’d still see their favorite spot and she and Tom would go another time.

  “Nelle is in her element there,” Tom had told me. “I’d like you to see that if it works out. And if not, you’ll still have a good afternoon.”

  I waited in the glass-front entryway to the Best Western. A gray Buick made a left turn off Alabama Avenue, or Highway 21, as it was considered here on the outskirts of town. The Buick crossed the large parking lot and pulled under the portico. Nelle was in the passenger seat. She had on faded blue jeans and a T-shirt. Behind the wheel, Tom was in overalls and a white T-shirt.

  I raised my hand in greeting and slid into the backseat. “Hey, girl,” Tom said. From Nelle: “Hello, child.” I was excited she was joining us but wanted to be low-key. She might be skittish, liable to dart away if she felt crowded. “Hi, there,” I said.

  “You ready to catch some fish?” Tom asked.

  He turned and looked at me over his shoulder for a moment. I could see he was pleased, proud he had been able to make this happen. “You bet,” I said, as casually as I could, but with a look that telegraphed “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  Nelle asked what I had been up to the last couple of days.

  I began to tell her about my interviews, leaning forward in my seat a bit and raising my voice to be heard.

  She was chatting, in good humor, but she also was gathering intelligence. What had I heard lately from the people at the Old Courthouse?

  She also didn’t want our fishing trip to be in the story in a way that revealed I was there with her. We worked it out later that I could describe the outing by attributing the description to the friends and not spelling out that I was there, too. She also asked me not to identify the friends hosting us that day. “I don’t want people showing up there, looking for me or bothering Ernie and Angie.” Long after the newspaper story ran, she gave me permission to include outings such as this one in the book.

  Not that many out-of-towners would be able
to find Nelle’s fishing hole anyway. It was well off the main road to the nearby town of Lenox. A wooden sign nailed between two trees formed a rustic entrance to the property. Emblazed on the wood was SWAMPY ACRES. It wasn’t swampy, though. A couple of large ponds were surrounded by large oak trees. Beyond were Ernie and Angie’s carefully tended rows of corn, watermelon, and tomatoes.

  Before we arrived, Tom told me that Ernie’s left leg had been amputated below the knee, a complication of his diabetes. With the help of his prosthesis, and a beat-up golf cart, he still spent long hours puttering around the gentle slopes of the property. He grew up near here, played in these woods as a boy, searching out enemy soldiers lurking behind the tree trunks. He met Angie, the woman who would be his Yankee bride, when he was in the service. She was a fun-loving, petite, dark-haired girl from a big Italian family. They both liked to laugh.

  “Do they still have figs?” Nelle wondered aloud as we drove the final stretch of dirt road to the Hanks’ home. They did, Tom said, and some days they could be eaten warm off the tree.

  Tom pulled up to the gravel area by the house, a one-story ranch with brown and beige bricks. Ernie was waiting for us, ready to fish. He was tall and wearing denim overalls like Tom’s. A large straw hat shielded his reddened face from the sun. We made our way down a small slope to one of the two large catfish ponds. The oak trees around the ponds were reflected in their placid, dark surfaces. “Do you know what we use for bait?” Tom asked me. Nelle waited for my answer, looking mischievous. Tom pulled out several small plastic Baggies.

  “Hot dogs!” he said. He doled out the small chunks of wieners from the Baggies and we slipped them on the fishing hooks.

  I stated the obvious. “It’s beautiful here.”

  “I never get tired of this,” Nelle murmured.

  They both caught a few fish. My casts were falling short. I tried again, casting more energetically, and caught my line in the branches of an oak.

  As dusk fell, we trudged back up the gentle slope for dinner around the kitchen table. Ernie took the fish we’d placed in a white bucket and put some on ice. The rest he gave to Angie. She coated the fish in bread crumbs and lightly fried it, along with a pile of sweet potato rounds. We feasted that night.

  “Delicious,” Nelle pronounced.

  Tom took his glass to the sink and dumped out the ice cubes. He hesitated, then retrieved them and rinsed them off.

  “Angie, do you want me to . . . ?”

  Angie laughed. “Sure.”

  Tom put the cubes back in the freezer. “Old habits die hard.” He looked sheepish, then amused.

  Ernie was chuckling. “I catch myself doing the same thing.”

  Nelle tipped her head back and laughed. “Oh, Tom.”

  He explained. When they were children in the 1930s, getting ice, and keeping it, was a lot of work. And it cost money. The rolling store came through town twice a week, selling its wares, and so did the ice truck. It was out of Evergreen, the Conecuh County seat and home to the railroad station from which Nelle later set out for New York. The iceman hauled big blocks of ice in the back of the truck. He stretched a canvas tarp over the top to keep them cool, or as cool as they could stay under the Alabama sun. Air-conditioning didn’t come in until the 1960s, and even then it was enough of a novelty that businesses that had it advertised the fact.

  So used ice was something to rinse off and keep, not toss in a sink to melt. Tom’s mother washed off any ice that remained in a glass and put it in a sawdust-lined hole in the ground. Then she covered it with cloth. She would no more let ice melt down a drain than she would throw away the scraps of cloth she stitched into quilts.

  On hot days, which were most days, nothing was as refreshing as a chip of ice dissolving on your tongue and running cool down your throat. Just the sound of it clinking in a glass of sweet tea made you feel cooler. It was civilized.

  This was the first of many times I would find myself around a kitchen table with Nelle, enjoying the sound of laughter and old friends trading stories of the way things used to be.

  It was pitch-black outside now, and time to go home.

  “Angie, you are a marvel,” Nelle said, pushing back from the table. “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a meal more.”

  “You come back quick, Nelle,” Angie said.

  Ernie walked us to the car and opened the passenger door for Nelle. “Don’t be getting into any trouble now,” he said.

  “Heavens, no,” she said, laughing.

  “I can’t make any promises,” Tom said.

  It was their usual give-and-take. Nelle fumbled to fasten her seat belt by the car’s interior light. She feigned indignation. “Tom, what in the world?”

  He reached over and guided the seat belt into the buckle.

  Nelle rolled her window the rest of the way down and reached over to put her hand on Ernie’s sleeve. “You take care of yourself, Ernie. Thank you for a wonderful time.”

  Ernie nodded and glanced at the backseat. “You find your way back here now, you hear?”

  Nelle and Tom chatted the whole way home about people they had in common with Ernie: who had been feuding with a neighbor, who had remarried, who had come into a small inheritance, and whatever happened to his cousin?

  The names didn’t mean anything to me. But I listened to the easy banter between the two, even as I got sleepy in the backseat. Tom was right. Nelle was in her element here.

  We followed our headlights through the dark back to Monroeville.

  —

  On that trip, I was able to spend more time with Alice and Nelle. Once they passed, Tom pointed out, the tangle of myths and half-truths that have flourished amid Nelle’s decades-long silence would only grow. He worried about that.

  “When she and Alice go, people are going to start ‘remembering’ things as they didn’t happen, or outright making things up, and they won’t be here to set the record straight. So keep taking notes, girl.”

  One afternoon, I had a message from Nelle. Since I would be in town awhile longer, would I like to go for breakfast? If so, she would swing by the motel the next morning and get me. Once again, I found myself waiting in the glass vestibule of the Best Western, not sure what to expect.

  She was right on time. She pulled up in a dark blue Buick sedan and motioned for me to get in.

  “Good morning.”

  “Morning,” she said. “Have you been to Wanda’s?”

  I hadn’t. We made a left onto Highway 21 and, a short distance later, just past the intersection with 84, turned into a large gas station parking lot. Behind it was Wanda’s Kountry Kitchen, a low-slung diner painted yellow. Nelle glided into a parking spot and glanced over at me.

  “It’s not fancy. But it’s good food. More or less.” She gave a wry smile. “You’ve discovered Monroeville’s dining options are limited?” This was a statement more than a question.

  A sign posted near the front door had the silhouette of a video camera and a warning: THESE PREMISES PROTECTED AGAINST BURGLARY, HOLDUP AND VANDALISM.

  Nelle opened the door for me. “Proceed.”

  I proceeded. Cigarette smoke greeted us, and the din of regular customers at their usual tables. A gentleman with an enormously round belly and scraggly beard was holding court, loudly, at a table of several men. In one corner, a group of older women was deep in conversation, flicking cigarettes in a couple of ashtrays in the middle of the table. Half of the other tables were occupied. To our left, the woman behind the counter looked up.

  “Anywhere,” she told us.

  Nelle and I slid into two empty places along the far wall. Our waitress was a slim woman in her fifties or sixties with a tanned, lined face. She set two large plastic menus in the middle of the table.

  “Hi, hon,” Nelle said.

  “How y’all doing this morning?”

  “Tolerabl
e.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Please,” Nelle said.

  I studied the menu. It was standard fare: eggs and hash browns and hotcakes, along with that Southern staple, grits. Nelle barely glanced at the menu and set it aside. The waitress returned with the coffee carafe and filled our cups, the thick white mugs of diners everywhere. Small curls of steam rose from the mugs.

  “Bless you, hon,” Nelle said. She wrapped her hands around the mug.

  Now Nelle was spooning a couple of ice cubes from her water glass into her coffee. She looked over at me. “Do you need a minute?”

  “No. That’s all right. You go ahead and I’ll be ready.”

  The waitress pulled out her pad.

  “I’ll have two eggs, over easy,” Nelle said. “And a side of sausage. And a biscuit.”

  “Gravy?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  I was pretty sure ordering my trying-to-be-healthy usual—scrambled egg whites, a piece of wheat toast, and a side of fruit—violated the spirit of this place. It could mark me as a city girl or a granola head, neither a popular demographic around here. I set down my menu.

  “I’ll have the same, please. But with bacon instead of sausage, please.”

  I wondered if Nelle had invited me to breakfast to ask me something specific or just to continue our conversation. Those eyes of hers, brown and penetrating, could be unnerving but at the moment they were sparkling. She smiled broadly.

  “Have you had sawmill gravy?”

  “No, I haven’t.” Sawmill gravy . . . sawmill gravy. I should know what this was. Was it mentioned in To Kill a Mockingbird? This was lumber country, after all, sawmill country.

  “You’re in for a treat.”

  Nelle was draining her cup as we spoke. When the waitress stopped by, Nelle tapped lightly on the side of her mug. “Keep it coming, would you, hon?”

  I’d studied Nelle, subtly, I hoped, at the Best Western, at the catfish pond, and now here at Wanda’s. Each time her humor and her down-to-earth demeanor struck me.