The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  Julia met her husband when she was on a Greyhound bus bound for a town near Memphis. He asked for her address. She figured she wouldn’t hear from him, but he surprised her with a letter three or four months later. “He was more serious than I was,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about settling down.” She was twenty-two when they married.

  They had eight children. One of their children, a daughter, was killed by a school bus on the road near their house. Julia has lived with that memory, that loss, ever since. It isn’t one she discusses much. Now her husband was gone as well.

  Julia had been taking care of people one way or another all her life. Before doing the kind of work she did for the Lees, she worked twenty years as a licensed practical nurse at the local hospital. Before that, she was a midwife, delivering babies at home when that was common practice. People still walked up to her, introduced themselves, and said, “Remember me? You delivered me. My momma’s name is . . .” She’d delivered a whole lot of babies. Sometimes the name brought it all back to her, though, a delivery forty years earlier, a moaning young mother in a bedroom, pushing and perspiring and worrying, and then the tiny human being Julia would wash and weigh and speak to softly. Softly but not so softly the mother couldn’t hear. “You’re a healthy little one, aren’t you? Yes, a fine baby boy. Mm-hmm. A strong little guy.”

  “Just makes you feel good,” she said, “bringing someone into this world safely. No telling what happens to them after that, though. Lord have mercy.”

  Julia’s work life would always include caretaking. When she started working for Alice, she was still taking care of her grandchildren during the day. These were the children of her son, Rudolph, the police chief. “I had to get up early,” she recalled. She’d get ready, drive into town to take Alice to work, and then pick up the children and take them to her house. “Later, I’d go back to pick up Miss Alice at work, drive her home, and then get the children home. It worked out fine.”

  Eventually, when she wasn’t needed for child care, she stayed with Alice at night while Nelle was in New York, taking over Nelle’s bedroom.

  She was definitely not one to dwell too much on Nelle’s celebrity. When Julia mentioned that day that she hadn’t yet seen the Mockingbird play, I asked if she had read the novel. “No,” she said. “But I mean to.”

  After she had been working for Alice for a few years, Rudolph asked her if she didn’t want to retire. She was in her seventies, after all. Julia said she preferred to stay on with Alice.

  “I think she needs Miss Alice,” Rudolph told me, “as much as Miss Alice needs her.”

  Julia had also worked for the hospital as a nurse’s aide. She remembered one man as the cruelest of the cruel to blacks in her area. Decades later, he showed up, old and sick, at the Monroe County Hospital. She recognized him, recalled his name. She remembered the brutality he inflicted.

  “He had been so bad,” Julia said. “He had lived a raggedy life. . . . He would beat people up,” people he called “those niggers.” As the man’s body and mind failed, his victims turned the tables on him and set chase. The only way Julia could pacify him was to pretend to kill them. So there in his hospital room, she would reassure him his pursuers were gone and he was safe.

  “I just had to beat so many up and kill them because it worried him when he got really bad. He would holler, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! Don’t let that nigger get me.’”

  Julia looked pained, and then amused, at the irony. “It was unfortunate,” she said, a wry smile breaking into a laugh, “I had to be the one to take care of him.” Her job was her job. She did it. Bathed the man, fed him, chased away his imagined enemies. “They ran him to death day and night,” she said.

  Like Julia, her supervisor, a white woman, usually knew instinctively when a patient was near death. “One night, when I was taking care of him, the head nurse come in there and [said], ‘Julia? He is going to die.’

  “I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I know that.’

  “She said, ‘Okay. You need me, you call me.’

  “I guess she was gone out of his room about an hour. He got straight out of that bed.

  “‘Oh, those niggers are gonna get me.’ He was staggering around, then back in bed, then up again. I’d just grab him and he’d put his head on my shoulder. That’s the last thing he did,” she said. “He died on my shoulder.”

  Julia called for the head nurse. “She said, ‘Told you he was going to die.’

  “And I said, ‘Yes, ma’am. I knew he was going to. But I didn’t think he’d die on my shoulder.’”

  Vicious as he had been in life, Julia felt sorry for him in death. “I wouldn’t want to leave this world in that kind of shape,” she said. Julia shook her head at the memory. “Oh, my, I tell you,” she said, and paused.

  She looked as if she were resurfacing at the kitchen table from that long-ago hospital room with the tortured end of a raggedy life. And the violent racist seeking his final comfort on the shoulder of a black woman who knew his history.

  Julia grew pensive about death as she told me that story. “It’s terrible to die remembering bad things you’ve done to people,” she said. “So when I get angry”—she laughed—“I ain’t gonna kill nothing but the snakes. And I’ve killed a lot of them. I’m still killing them.”

  I asked her how she kills a snake. “A stick, or a hoe,” she said. “Or I shoot ’em.” She paused. “Now, you certainly have to approach a rattlesnake. You don’t ever go up behind him. You have to face him direct.” Julia said this emphatically, “DIE-rect.”

  She told me about her history, how her mother was born in 1889, so her mother’s mother had to have been in “the last tickin’ of the slavery time.” Slaves often took the last name of their owners, so the area has both black and white Stallworths, her maiden name.

  It was remarkable how different her life had been from that of the Lees, with whom she spent her days. Yet at the same time, there was a tremendous amount of shared experience between them.

  “I hope she knows how much we love her,” Nelle said over coffee one day.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nelle pulled into the driveway next door and, with a wave, she and Alice disappeared inside.

  Alice explored the world from that modest house. She did it year after year, her appetite undiminished, from her perch in the living room, in those classic suits and panty hose, one slim ankle crossed over the other.

  If the gray recliner was command central, as I came to think of it, it also was a nest, the reading chair with the floor lamp on one side and the mounting stacks of books, always threatening to topple over, on the other.

  Nelle’s life in a wider world, her singular experience being Harper Lee, with all that meant, expanded Alice’s world, too. So many of her stories unfolded as Alice sat in that same living room chair, Nelle in her own reading chair across from her, telling her about the famous people she met, the trips she took to England, the things she did in New York, and, yes, the books she was reading.

  It wasn’t the same, of course, as if she had poked around those English villages in person, or walked the streets of all the other places she visited by books and imagination. But I was struck by how fully she seemed to have experienced the world.

  “This is how I’ve traveled,” Alice told me that first evening I met her, running her hand across a row of books.

  “You know,” Tom said one day, “here Nelle Harper is this famous author who has traveled all over and met so many famous people. And I used to wonder if that wasn’t a little hard for Alice, who knows more about English history than most British people and never has gone there. But I’ve never seen any envy there. She gets such a kick out of Nelle’s stories but I don’t think there’s ever been resentment about that.”

  On one Saturday afternoon I was recording Alice’s stories about the Lee family when she told me about the letter Nelle sent home the summe
r she was studying at Oxford.

  “The American students that were over there that summer—see, it was still close enough after the war that everyone was still rationed and gas was still—you went everywhere on bicycle, nearly. Occasionally, Nelle Harper would see one of those big hogs on wheels—one of the Rolls-Royces.”

  It turned out, Alice told me, that one of the Oxford boys was going to London because he had a letter of introduction to a member of Parliament. “Something had happened that his girl couldn’t go,” Alice said, “and he asked Nelle Harper if she’d like to go. And she went. I think maybe they bicycled all the way in but, you know, it’s not far. And they were having tea on the terrace and this man who was hosting them excused himself from the table for a short time and returned with somebody.”

  Alice paused and looked at me with the relish of a cook about to serve something special. “And that somebody was Winston Churchill.”

  She continued, “Nelle Harper was so shocked and so overcome she couldn’t remember what she said because it was just a brief thing: somebody doing it to give college kids a thrill. . . . Nelle Harper’s letter back home said, ‘Today I met history. I met history itself.’”

  Alice flat out knew more about the Lee family, past and present, than anyone else. No one else even came close, Nelle included, as Nelle herself acknowledged. More than once, Nelle laughed about that. She was telling me about their aunt Kitty over a hamburger at Radley’s. “I’ll ask Alice,” she said. She laughed. “That’s always the answer, isn’t it? We’ll ask Alice.”

  And she did. So did their nephew, dentist Ed Lee, when he wanted to know about his great-grandparents. So did Tom Butts when someone needed to know about the last-minute rescue of the stained-glass windows at the turn of the century as the Methodist church burned.

  Alice knew a lot more about her mother’s parents than her father’s. Nelle and Alice’s maternal grandparents were younger and lived closer. A.C.’s family was hundreds of miles away in Florida.

  On one of our Sunday drives, Alice pointed out where a cotton gin used to be, the one that her grandfather Finch operated. He was targeted, Alice told me, by a man named Sam Henderson, who delivered the mail to the Finches and other families in the area. It was a sociable job, and the Finches considered him a friend. It made no sense that he would try to harm them.

  “It was ginnin’ season. My grandfather was in the gin with two black men who were working that day. They said, ‘Mr. Finch, Mr. Sam Henderson is out there, looking for you to kill you.’ And my grandfather said, ‘No way, he’s my friend. He wouldn’t kill me.’ They said, ‘Mr. Finch, he’s got a gun and something is wrong. He’s going to kill you.’ Well, Mr. Henderson was at the only exit, the entrance to the gin.

  “And the men finally convinced my grandfather that his life was in danger. And they worked away and loosened some of the side and got him out. And they stayed in the front and kept Mr. Henderson involved. My grandfather slipped out and went up to the house and got my grandmother and they went down through the pasture behind the house for a couple of miles.

  “When the men got ahold of somebody who went to the phone and called the sheriff, and when it was safe for my grandparents to go back to the house, the glass in the front door had been shot out. A bullet—the house had a room that extended out, you know, in a porch on this side”—Alice gestured—“and he had shot through that room right where the head of my grandparents’ bed was. The man spent the rest of his life in Bryce Hospital, insane.”

  The incident was horrifying for those involved but a captivating story to hear growing up, as Alice, Louise, Ed, and Nelle Harper all did.

  “Nobody ever knew what his grievance was. My grandfather never knew. He was so shocked. Something gave way and the man went stark raving mad. And as long as my grandmother lived, every Christmas she sent a check to Bryce Hospital that Mr. Sam Henderson might be supplied with some candies and Christmas presents. That’s the way my grandmother was.”

  Alice said this—“That’s the way my grandmother was”—with such affection in her eyes, it gave me a pang.

  “He had been their friend and what he did was something that was beyond his right mind. No grudges. I was very conscious every Christmas of what my grandmother Finch was doing. But I never asked anything beyond what I’ve told you.”

  In that, the grandparents, like Alice and Nelle’s own parents, took a progressive view of mental illness for the times. They saw not a character defect but a condition the man suffered.

  Those grandparents had two daughters: Frances, born in 1888, and, two years later, Alice. Aunt Alice was the young Alice and Nelle’s only aunt on their mother’s side. No matter. She was enough fun for five aunts.

  Frances and Alice were close, but not alike. Alice was the more outgoing of the two. The two Finch sisters went off by riverboat to a private boarding school in Mobile, much as the ultraproper Aunt Alexandra had done in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  There was no driving to Mobile because there was no bridge over the river and delta along the way. And there was no public school for them to attend. The high school in Monroeville wasn’t established until 1911, the year Frances and A. C. Lee had their first child. They named her Alice, after Frances’s sister.

  “I’m the first person in my family to have been educated in public school.” Alice noted this with pride. Her feelings for public education never wavered. Nor did her disappointment in seeing a private school spring up the year desegregation came to Monroeville.

  Before their mother and Aunt Alice went to study in Mobile, schooling took place at home with a few other white children. There was no thought then of white and black children going to school together. That wouldn’t happen for fifty years.

  “There were just a few white young people their age over there, and they’d get together and employ a teacher. When it came time for high school, Mother and Auntie went to Mobile and boarded with friends who had at one time lived in Finchburg.”

  The Finch sisters went on to study at a women’s college, what eventually became the coed University of Montevallo, and marry before graduating. In 1910, Frances wed A. C. Lee at the family home in Finchburg. Alice married Dr. Charles McKinley and they made their home in Atmore. As women, just as when they were girls, the Finch sisters were close to each other yet had distinct personalities. Alice remained the more gregarious of the two.

  “Auntie had a marvelous sense of humor. Well, Mother had it, too, but she did not create as much as Auntie did.”

  “Create as much mischief, you mean?”

  “Did not create as much humor as Auntie did. Auntie would make up these funny words and things like that. Mother was more proper.” Alice laughed.

  Nelle and Alice, even in their eighties and nineties, reached into their aunt’s improvised vocabulary. They knew what the other one meant, even if no one else did. Their favorite word of hers was cyphaloon, which referred to weather so bad it might as well be a cyclone crossed with a typhoon.

  One afternoon, Nelle, Alice, and I were making the short trek from their front door to the driveway. We stepped outside and saw dark clouds hanging low. A faint breeze carried that feeling of a storm brewing. Nelle looked skyward but said nothing. The Lees had installed a few wide, unvarnished wooden steps up to the front door. They took the place of the original cement ones. When Alice was concentrating on taking those steps carefully, anyone with her waited until she was in the car to address her.

  Nelle walked with her to the passenger seat and handed me the walker. I folded it and placed it in the trunk. Once we were in the car, Nelle turned to Alice and said in a raised voice, “Cyphaloon coming.” From the backseat, I heard Alice’s low chuckle.

  “I b’lieve so,” she said.

  Frances Lee had four children. Alice McKinley had five, all of them boys. Hers was a rambunctious household.

  Until the last four years of her life, Frances
took every chance she got to spend time at the Gulf shore. Sometimes the whole family went. Other times, A.C. or a friend would accompany her so she would not be alone. It was the only place she got relief from terrible allergies. Where rows of condos now stand near Destin, Florida, seaside cottages back then offered a peaceful retreat.

  “Life was one big sneeze for her and when she would get within ten miles of salt water, she’d be free. So she would spend not only the summers but some of the cooler weather down there across from Pensacola. That was the only time she had any pleasure, when she would not sneeze. She was allergic to everything. Everything they could test for she was allergic to. Salt water stopped it.”

  Aunt Alice survived Frances by thirty years, decades in which she shared any number of misadventures with her adoring nieces. Alice McKinley was older and arthritic when she and Nelle would set out on one of their country drives to ride past places like an old Scottish church they both liked.

  The bonds of the family were strong, in part because of the terrible events of the summer of 1951. Every family has its defining events, and for the Lees, that summer held two of them. Frances Lee’s death in June was an unexpected blow. Her youngest, Nelle, was only twenty-five; her oldest, Alice, almost forty; Louise was thirty-five, and married with two young sons. Ed, thirty, the only son, also was married, and had a young daughter and baby son. Six weeks after Frances’s death, the still grieving family got that shocking news from Montgomery. Just the evening before, all had been fine when Ed chatted by phone with his wife in Monroeville.

  That summer had begun as usual, with A. C. Lee a delegate to the Methodists’ regional annual conference, this time in southwestern Alabama. It was business as usual for Nelle, too, in New York, where she’d moved in 1949 to pursue her writing while working as an airline reservations clerk. She lived in a small apartment on the Upper East Side and had resumed her friendship with her old neighbor and now rising literary star, Truman Capote.