The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  There was an edge there, too, though, of suspicion or impatience, and I didn’t want to set it off. Tom had warned me she had a temper. When something set her off she could get creative with her cursing, her salty “Conecuh County English,” in Tom’s words.

  “Have you been back to the courthouse?”

  “Yes, I was there and I stopped in the history room in the library. I spent some time with Dale Welch.”

  Nelle’s expression softened.

  “Dale’s a good egg. She was a librarian, you know. And she taught. She’s a reader, unlike most of the people around here.”

  As I was recounting my conversation with Dale, our food arrived, and I had my first look at sawmill gravy, poured over my biscuit. It was thick and white with bits of sausage. I had never learned to like gravy of any kind. At holiday time, my family knew not to pass the gravy boat my way. But if this was part of local culture, and possibly a test of my willingness to partake, I was going to eat it all and look like I was enjoying it, no matter what.

  It was viscous stuff. I swallowed hard.

  Nelle dug into her own biscuit and eggs with gusto. That surprised me a bit, because I’d read so much about her reserve. But that was at public events, I suppose. In person, her heartiness was appealing: her relish of the food and coffee; that big laugh; her obvious affection for Alice and Julia and Dale and Tom. I had assumed I would have to keep my distance from the famously private Harper Lee but I couldn’t help but enjoy her company. She might have been prickly but she was a delightful companion.

  I did some more reporting around town for a couple of days. As I was walking from the car to my motel room one afternoon, I felt a lupus flare taking hold, worse than usual. I didn’t know if I’d be able to make the long drive to the airport the next day. It meant a trip to the local emergency room.

  I knew this sensation. It was mounting. I’d been pushing through the fatigue. I recognized the characteristic shooting pains in my fingers and toes

  I’d been more tired the last few days but now it was what the doctors call wipe-out fatigue. Walking to and from the rental car felt like trudging through molasses. Even lying in bed I felt slammed.

  I faxed the Lees that I would have to cut my stay short and thanked them for the time they’d spent with me. Because of their failing hearing, faxing was our most reliable mode of communication. I apologized for rushing off—this was a standard-issue lupus flare, for me, and once I got treatment at the ER I’d be fine and on my way. I’d fax them once I was in Chicago, and keep them posted as I put together the stories.

  I drove the short distance to the hospital and filled out the paperwork to be evaluated in the emergency room. A nurse took me to one of the private areas and drew blood. I conferred with the white-smocked doctor making his way from one curtained area to the next. We agreed this was probably a flare that could be treated. I’d get home and then deal with my doctors there if needed.

  The nurse started an IV and I started figuring whether it would be realistic to try to drive to the airport later that day. I was resting on a gurney when I heard a voice.

  “Child, what have you done to yourself? Heavens.”

  I knew that husky voice. Nelle had materialized by the gurney.

  I was stunned, and embarrassed. I didn’t want her to go to this trouble or to see me like this. I stood up to greet her and blushed on the spot.

  She gave me a quick hug and then stood back, taking the measure of how I looked.

  I was hoping the hospital’s tile floor would open up and swallow me. Knowing how the Lees felt about journalists, I had taken extra care not to impose on their time and goodwill. For their sake, and mine, it was best I be professional, together, and outa here. This had no place in that picture.

  Instead, here I was, a pale-faced girl in a hospital gown, shaky and embarrassed that Nelle had gone to the time and trouble of driving to the emergency room.

  “You’re so kind to come out here. But really, this is just standard stuff. I’ve dealt with it before.”

  She looked at me skeptically.

  “They’ll do some labs, see where things are. They’ll probably give me a little bit of IV steroids and I’ll be fine.”

  She glanced over at the nurses. She lowered her voice and leaned in closer. “If anyone asks, I’m your mother-in-law. Otherwise they won’t let me stay back here with you. Only relatives. Rules.” She spit out the last word. I smiled.

  Before long, Nelle was on her way, and I was on the mend.

  In Chicago, I faxed the Lees on my first day back at work to let them know I was feeling better. As it turned out, ongoing health problems and other assignments conspired to delay the publication of the stories even longer. Finally, in September 2002, I began final fact-checking on the articles we were preparing to publish.

  I wanted to spell out in the story that Nelle consented to be photographed. Otherwise, I thought, readers would wonder why a story in which she had no comment, as usual, was accompanied by Tribune photos clearly taken with her permission. Not at all usual.

  Nelle questioned if that explanation was necessary but gave her consent in a one-page, typewritten letter spit out of a Tribune fax machine.

  In the letter, she did two seemingly contradictory things. She made clear her low regard for newspaper reporters. She also indicated she might be open to talking with me some more.

  I sat at my desk and read the fax. As would happen many times in the years to come, I was unsure, and anxious, about what Nelle would have to say this time around. I needed to honor my agreement with her and Alice. At the same time, I had to write a journalistically sound article, not a puff piece.

  She began with kind words. I had returned to work after a short stay in the hospital. She and Alice were endlessly patient as my health problems slowed the process of getting the story ready to be published.

  She wrote that she was “appalled by the viciousness of lupus” and was encouraging about the way I’d dealt with setbacks. “You are a most remarkable young lady. Bless you” I was to make it “Quaker plain” that she declined to comment for the story.

  For my edification, she outlined the decline, as she saw it, of journalistic standards. “The files on one Harper Lee,” in fact, were a useful case study of the fall. She had no patience for New Journalism. She lamented the passing of an era she said I was too young to remember, one in which a reporter’s first and only job was to get the facts right, not to inject personal opinion. After reflecting on her treatment in the press, she began the next paragraph, “Therein you should see the possibilities of another story.”

  I remembered the case in general in which the U.S. Supreme Court widened freedom of the press, making it more difficult for public officials to win libel or defamation cases against news organizations. I looked up the specifics. The Sullivan case focused on civil rights coverage in the segregated South, but its ruling applied more broadly to what some perceived as a lowering of standards regarding both accuracy and malicious reporting. Plaintiffs had to prove “actual malice” by reporters and editors, the hard-to-prove action of setting out, deliberately and knowingly, to publish inaccurate reports in an effort to defame public officials.

  I didn’t agree entirely with her view of my “once reputable profession” but I knew what she meant. And as a practical matter, I was hugely encouraged that she was bothering to teach me what she saw as the relevant history of my career. I read the letter a second time. I appreciated the comments about dealing with lupus. More important, in the story soon to go to press, I could state that she had consented to be photographed and thereby resolve that issue.

  And those magic words, unlikely as they were coming from Harper Lee: “You should see the possibilities of another story.”

  —

  The main article, with a few sidebars, was to run Friday, September 13, 2002. I flew to Montgomery Thursday afternoon, a
s planned, with the preprinted feature section in hand. After so much time, theirs and mine, spent reporting the story, I wanted to face them after they read it, whatever their reaction. And I didn’t need to be asked twice when they encouraged me to come back when I could.

  Friday, at Barnett, Bugg & Lee, I found Nelle slouched in a chair in Alice’s office after a morning running errands. Alice sat, as always, facing the doorway, her deeply veined hands folded on her desk’s little return table. We exchanged greetings and the usual catch-up on weather, travels, health. Nelle nodded at the copies of the Tribune I held in my hands.

  “You are a brave woman,” Nelle said. “You have come to face your accusers.”

  The way she phrased that, I thought, sounded like something out of the British histories they read. I pictured the two sisters in the white wigs worn by British jurists.

  I wasn’t feeling all that brave. Would they think the story was fair? I thought so, but I couldn’t be sure. Accurate? Better be. But so much conflicting information had been published about Nelle Harper over the years. I was wary that an incorrect date or a long-exaggerated anecdote could survive the fact-checking I had done, somewhat awkwardly, by fax.

  I figured a few things in the story might bother Nelle. But they came from Alice and their preacher friend, Tom Butts, speaking on the record. Already, I was feeling the uneasy tug between inquisitive journalist and protective friend.

  The story, “A Life Apart: Harper Lee, the Complex Woman Behind ‘a Delicious Mystery,’” took up the front page of the section and another two full pages inside. The section front included a large, close-up photo of Nelle, gazing with those penetrating eyes, arthritic hands folded in front of her on an unseen restaurant table at Radley’s.

  The story traced Harper Lee’s path to being such a famously private author and gave details of her day-to-day life in Monroeville with Alice, from feeding the ducks to collecting mail at the post office. It described the toll the press of attention had taken on both sisters. One sidebar story described the fishing outing, another Nelle’s long friendship with Gregory Peck. Per our agreement, I did not include my meeting with Nelle.

  While they read it, I left to photocopy an essay about local history that Alice wanted me to read. Not everything in the story was flattering, though much of it was. I didn’t know how Nelle would feel about all Alice had said on the record. I dallied by the photocopier so they could read the piece without my standing there.

  When I returned to Alice’s office, Nelle looked up from the newspaper. She read quietly for a few more minutes. “B plus,” she said when she finished. From Alice, “Good job.” They seemed generally pleased, perhaps relieved.

  Nelle did have one complaint, about the way I described Alice’s accent in this sentence: “‘Nelle Harper is very independent. She always was,’ says Alice Lee, who, with her Alabama inflections, pronounces the name ‘Nail Hah-puh.’”

  Wrong. “Nail Hah-puh” was closer to the way some people I interviewed pronounced her name, but not Alice. There was something soft, something Southern, in her pronunciation, but it was more subtle than I had been able to capture phonetically. I’d seen her name spelled phonetically like this in other stories and remembered the moment I sat at my desk quietly repeating aloud the name as I remembered Alice saying it. Not quite it, I thought to myself at the time. But as close as I’m going to get. Now I regretted it.

  “You dropped her two social classes with one syllable,” Nelle said.

  I was chagrined. Even so, I had to admire her admonishment. It was succinct and delivered its sting with a dash of wit. Classic Nelle.

  I tried to imagine the correction the Tribune could run. “An article in the September 13 Chicago Tribune mischaracterized the way Alice Lee pronounces the name of her sister Nelle Harper Lee. Alice Lee says ‘Nelle Harper,’ not ‘Nail Hah-puh.’ The Tribune regrets the error.”

  Absurd? Maybe I could come up with a better way to word it. Maybe not.

  Don’t bother, Nelle said. She’d rather leave it be. I let it go. But I made note, ever after, of the myriad accents freighted with meaning within the 1,035 square miles of Monroe County, Alabama.

  Chapter Seven

  The Lees invited me on a drive the following day to see one of their favorite historical spots: the grave of Creek Indian Chief William “Red Eagle” Weatherford. Dale and Tom would join us as well. Nelle drove Alice, Dale, and me. Tom trailed us in his Buick. About an hour out of Monroeville, we came across the small town of Stockton and the Stagecoach Cafe.

  The decor of the Stagecoach Cafe was pegged to its history as a stopping place for the covered wagons making their way across this part of the state. Even the salad bar was shaped to resemble a giant (and very long) covered wagon. The five of us sat at a long pine table with a red-and-white-checked cloth. We ordered sweet tea and baskets of fried oysters.

  Nelle ate the last of her oysters with relish. She pushed her chair back with a small groan. They were good, and they were filling. Alice took small bites from her plate. It took her longer to eat less. Before we left, Alice rose to use the ladies’ room. I went with her.

  It isn’t easy navigating a restroom with a walker. By the time Alice made her way to one of the sinks, I had washed and dried my hands. The surface around the sinks had the usual splashes of water, and stray strands of hair. You wouldn’t want to set down a pocketbook there. The paper towel dispenser was on the wall, several steps from where Alice stood. To reach it, she would have had to grip her walker with wet hands. I handed her a paper towel.

  Alice dried her hands and then matter-of-factly wiped clean the area around the sink. This hadn’t occurred to me to do. I was in a hurry or someone else left the mess or I was paying no attention. Pick your reason. But this was routine for Alice, an extension of being a good citizen, really. It was a small thing. And yet it wasn’t.

  She ruined me for leaving public sinks the way I find them. Years later, I’ll be in the ladies’ room at a restaurant or the movies and notice the counter around the sink is wet. “Oh, forget it this once,” I’ll think and begin to walk away. Then, ashamed, I’ll turn around and dry the sink.

  Fortified by our big lunch, we climbed back into the two vehicles and pointed toward the main destination that day: the grave of Creek Indian Chief Red Eagle. A green Baldwin County park sign pointed the way to the grave.

  We had talked, on country drives, of the heritage of the area, of Creek Indians and white settlers, many of them Scottish, Irish, and English. Of the people who arrived not by choice but by slave ship and melded African traditions with those forged in the hardships of their new existence.

  “There’s a reason for the Southern tradition of storytelling,” Nelle explained. “We are Celtic,” she said, “and African.”

  And contrary, she added, especially when it comes to edicts from above. “When Southerners know they have to obey the law, they do it, without much enthusiasm. Though segregation has ended, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a terrific social stratum still in place.”

  Nelle idled the car by the grave sites. A simple gray slab was engraved with “Red Eagle” in large letters. “William Weatherford” was carved above it, and his birth and death, “1765–1824,” were below. The slab was embedded in a thick pillar of stones. Next to Red Eagle’s grave was that of his mother, Sehoy Weatherford, with no dates given. A small distance away, a large green plaque contained several paragraphs about Red Eagle’s colorful life. It also gave a short history of the chief’s mother.

  I walked the short distance from the car to the plaque and began reading.

  “The son of a Scotch trader, Charles Weatherford, and a Creek Indian Princess, Sehoy Tate Weatherford, William was destined to become one of the most powerful leaders of the Wind Clan of the Creek’s Indian Nation.”

  I glanced back at the car. Nelle made a motion that indicated “Keep reading. We’re fine.” So I did, tryin
g to concentrate on the words and not the sledgehammer heat or the surprise of being invited on this outing.

  “During the early 1800’s conflicts, usually over land, between the Creek Indians and the white settlers erupted into open warfare. After having led his warriors in the attack on Fort Mims, in August of 1813, he was known to have grieved at the viciousness of the attack. Over 500 white settlers, men, women and children, and several hundred Creek Indian Warriors were killed in this historic battle.”

  Nelle was captivated by local history. She admitted to feeling the hair on the back of her neck raise sometimes when she drove past the site of the Fort Mims massacre. Her reading of Albert J. Pickett’s two-volume History of Alabama brought to life the horrors of the bloodshed between the white settlers and the Creek Indians.

  “I feel presences there,” Nelle said.

  I was still concentrating on Red Eagle’s story and withering in the September afternoon sun when Nelle yelled from the car window. “Child, come here immediately,” she commanded. Something in the way she said it made me dash to the car without saying a word.

  Another order: “Get in the car.”

  Only then did she point out the four-foot rattlesnake that had been curled at my feet.

  Smart move, I realized from the safety of the Buick’s backseat. If she had called out, “Rattlesnake—watch out,” I would have been looking around, alarmed, instead of simply darting to safety.

  “You scared me to death,” Nelle said. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or relieved. Some of both, I decided.

  With me safely in the backseat, Nelle began scolding Tom. The preacher had gotten out of his car. Armed with rocks, the seventy-two-year-old Tom inched a little closer to the snake.

  A rattlesnake nearly killed his sharecropper father years ago when he reached his hand into a woodpile and was bitten by the snake. Tom still remembered his father’s arm swelling grotesquely as his sons rushed him to the home of Dr. Carter, the only physician for miles.