by Marja Mills
In truth, Dr. Harper came to the rescue not only of baby Louise but of a family of four, with Frances driven to mental collapse and A.C. struggling to work, sleep-deprived, and care for his ailing wife and two small daughters. In this way, as well as others, the Lee family was quietly ahead of its time. Frances, according to Alice, was able to regain her emotional equilibrium.
Not only was A.C. ahead of his time, Frances was as well, doing what it took to recover. She lived away from the family for a year, staying with relatives near Mobile.
A.C. was living a life that resembled Atticus’s in more ways than his law practice. For a time, he was a single father day to day, looking after Alice and baby Louise with the help of a black woman—like Calpurnia in the novel—and neighbors who knew one another’s business, for better and for worse.
A few years later, with Frances’s health long since stabilized, she and A.C. planned two more children. Louise was five when Ed was born. Five years later, the Lees had their fourth and last child, a girl.
So deep was A.C. and Frances’s gratitude to Dr. Harper that when Louise’s baby sister was delivered in an upstairs bedroom on Alabama Avenue, the parents gave her the middle name Harper.
Nelle Harper Lee arrived on April 28, 1926.
All those sons and daughters named Harper, after Harper Lee, should know their name is a link not only to the author but to an otherwise-forgotten Selma pediatrician who, in 1916, saved a desperately ill infant named Louise Lee.
The Lee sisters, after all these years of staying quiet, began taking aim at the myths about their mother and other stories as well. At Nelle’s request, I went on a reconnaissance mission one day to the Old Courthouse. According to the exhibit, A. C. Lee gave the young Truman a dictionary, the one displayed in a glass case. Whenever Truman heard a word he didn’t know, he pulled the dictionary out of his pocket and looked it up.
It’s a charming story—with one problem. “Nonsense,” Nelle said when I showed her the picture I snapped of the dictionary. Her father did no such thing, she said. “That never happened.”
Alice told me she was so disgusted with a book by Capote’s aunt Marie Rudisill that she burned it with the autumn leaf piles in the backyard. Rudisill followed that one, Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him, with another, The Southern Haunting of Truman Capote.
Learning about the Lee family, now and going back several generations, meant learning about the black women who were part of those households.
One Sunday, Tom accompanied Alice and me on a long drive through Burnt Corn, Finchburg, Scratch Ankle, and some other communities. Alice pointed as we passed a small white church on the way to Finchburg.
“That church there was a landmark to me when I was little. That was my grandmother’s cook’s church. Henepin’s church. I played with Henepin’s daughter, named Fanny Lee, named for my mother.”
Alice wanted to make sure I understood that the history of race relations in the South was not as simple as it was often portrayed. She told me, “Like with Julia. You would not have dared raise a child to be disrespectful to them. My grandmother would have chewed me out. When I grew up we always had a cook and most of the time a nurse for the little folks and my mother would have really taken us to pieces if we were rude or disrespectful to those people.”
From the backseat, Tom Butts interjected his own experience. “I got a whipping once for sassing an old black man. There was respect but also strict boundaries.”
Tom’s later experience as a preacher near Mobile who supported integration would include finding a cross burning in his yard. That was 1957, but as late as 1984 he found a KKK card tucked in his door that read, “We are watching you and we don’t like what we see.”
Alice recalled the loyalty of the men and women who had worked for their family. “The morning that my father died it was an early Sunday morning on the fifteenth of April, 1962. It was a Palm Sunday that year. I had not been home an hour before the black lady who worked for me showed up in a white uniform: ‘Miss Alice, I’ll do anything for you I can.’ You don’t forget that kind of loyalty.”
Chapter Twenty-four
While I was living next door, I made a decision I’d debated for years. I applied to adopt a baby from China. I thought I’d be married and raising a family by that time in my life. I’d always loved children, been good with them, and time was running out.
I had a feeling the Lees might be skeptical about the idea, and they were. “Heavens,” Nelle said when I told her over coffee at my kitchen table. “How old will you be when that child graduates from high school?” I’d made the calculation a thousand times myself. If all proceeded at the usual pace for that that kind of adoption, I’d be about sixty.
I had struggled with the decision. Was it fair to a child to adopt as a single parent, and an older one with lupus? Was it realistic that I could provide the upbringing I’d want to give a child in those circumstances? But my doctors encouraged me to do so, and I knew my parents and brother, my whole close-knit extended family and friends, would wrap a child in a warm embrace.
Nelle mentioned my decision to Alice before I had a chance to tell her myself.
“I understand you have some news,” Alice told me next time we were settled in her living room, a few days later.
“The adoption? Didn’t I tell you about that? I thought I had.”
“Nooo,” she said, drawing out the word. She didn’t say so but I realized she would rather have heard this directly from me. I’d learned, just intuitively, to tell them any news of interest at about the same time, if I could.
“I just don’t know why you’d want to take on a baby.”
I was reminded how rare it was for a single woman to do such a thing in their day, if an agency even allowed it. As it turned out, the pace of adoption in China dramatically slowed soon after. The trip I had thought I’d take in 2007, with the group I was assigned by my agency, never happened.
—
Melvin’s barbecue is tucked away on Cherry Street, the side road that runs between Claiborne Street and Pineville Road. It’s a town favorite for good reason: It is smoky, flavorful, and moist but not gloppy. Enjoying it on a regular basis, however, as we did, meant finding a way to work it off. Twice a week, Nelle and I headed for Peggy Van’s exercise class. It was held in a one-story white brick building called the Community House, a seven-minute drive from downtown Monroeville, just up the hill from the duck pond. Often, we met up in the parking lot with Julia, another regular.
My first time there, I surveyed the large main room. It had hardwood floors. I saw about twenty women who looked to be in their seventies and eighties—along with one brave gentleman. Wide windows overlooked a wooded ravine. In the spring, pink and red azaleas crowded just outside the windows, as if they were trying to eavesdrop on the class.
At ten A.M. on Mondays and Wednesdays, we would start our routine under the big mirror ball. I was half the age of my classmates, but I felt right at home; the stretching was good for my aching joints, which might be elbows one week, hips the next. Fatigue was the bigger problem. There seemed to be no way around napping a lot. On my most tired days it felt as if gravity were turned up. I wanted to build stamina, though, and hoped the exercise class would help shore up my flagging energy.
Dance bands once played here in the 1950s. Ladies in structured silk dresses the color of emeralds and sapphires twirled beneath the sparkly light of the mirror ball, under the appreciative eyes of husbands and beaus with slicked-back hair and neatly pressed suits. “They’d get has-been bands, but it didn’t matter,” said Dale Welch, the retired librarian. Dale went to a different senior exercise class, Silver Sneakers at the YMCA, one Nelle later attended with her. For Dale, driving by the Community House still conjured up those old dance bands.
“It was a chance to dress up and go out. People actually danced then.
It was a lot of fun. It was quite elegant.”
Dale missed the fun, but pointed out that those good old days weren’t good for everyone. Only Monroeville’s white couples got the chance to swirl around the dance floor. The black men and women present weren’t dancing and enjoying themselves. They were serving refreshments.
I thought about that the day I accompanied both Nelle and Julia to class. About half of us were white, half black, and the main feeling was of camaraderie as we pushed ourselves to walk briskly in a giant circle. Peggy turned up the volume on the boom box perched on the stage where the dance bands once performed. “Remember,” she told us, “heel-toe, heel-toe.” A different Monroeville was moving across those same wooden floors under that same mirrored ball. I was the only one circling the room who wasn’t around when half of us would not have been welcome to the dance. Or allowed, for that matter, to attend the same schools, use the same bathrooms, drink from the same water fountains.
Now the jewel tones in the room weren’t the formal dresses; they were the velour sweat suits favored by many of the women. Peggy instructed us to commandeer gray metal folding chairs from one end of the room and place them in a large circle.
“Remember—sit majestically.”
Peggy was in her sixties, slim and flexible. She was all energy and encouragement, and we summoned what majesty we could.
We attempted to lower ourselves—slowly, gracefully, and with straight backs—into the chairs. Sit majestically. Well, we could try; some of us were creakier than others. We sat down with varying degrees of majesty. We stretched our arms above our heads, flexed our ankles and our knees. I had one of those moments—an “Oh, my God, I’m in an exercise class with Harper Lee” moment—but the truth is, those moments came less frequently. I’d settled into a routine with Nelle and Alice. The days had a rhythm. It wasn’t the rhythm of a reporter’s life in Chicago, but it had its own pulse and lilt. I was getting used to it.
I asked her one day, as we headed home from Miss Peggy’s valiant attempt to keep us limber, how our instructor could get by with the short Bible-based homily she appended to the end of each session.
“I don’t necessarily need to take my inspiration with my exercise,” Nelle said, “but Peggy’s a good egg.” She steered her car up Alabama Avenue.
How did she feel about the way religion is interwoven into public life? I told her I still was surprised when a public event began with a Christian prayer. “I guess I’m just so used to thinking in terms of separation of church and state,” I said.
This sparked a hearty laugh. “Most people around here,” Nelle said, “don’t think in those terms.”
That connection to the Bible, Nelle pointed out, colors the work of great Southern writers. She maintained that the King James Version of the Bible is unsurpassed in its use of language.
“How many of us,” wrote Eudora Welty, “the South’s writers-to-be of my generation, were blessed in one way or another, if not blessed alike, in not having been deprived of the King James Version of the Bible? Its cadence entered into our ears and our memories for good. The evidence, or the ghost of it, lingers in all our books: ‘In the Beginning was the Word.’”
—
One day, walking out of the post office, built in 1933, complete with a WPA mural inside, I paused at the top of the steps and looked around. What would the people who populated this square in the 1930s—in Mockingbird days—make of it now?
Everything is oversized. Parked across the street in front of the Old Courthouse are pickup trucks and SUVs so big you don’t step into them so much as climb on up; inside cup holders outnumber passenger seats and stand ready for plastic bottles of Coke that hold three times what the little glass ones did. People themselves are larger, too, wider and a bit taller. A family with an average income lives with a level of comfort and electronic convenience their ’30s counterparts couldn’t fathom.
Not everything has changed.
Even now, you’re likely to strike up a conversation at the post office. A shopowner might call you by name at Darby’s Red and White grocery.
Still, like most of the country, the town swells with stuff and selections are endless.
I told Nelle that I thought a Depression-era resident who stood where I did that day, taking in the contemporary scene, would be dazzled and appalled. Dazzled at the convenience and choice and prosperity, even in a struggling town. But also appalled by the excess, the move away from a strict moral code, the way people don’t look one another in the eye as much.
“You’re exactly right!” she said.
We discussed that—the way change comes at a cost. Convenience is appealing, but drive-through windows hardly foster the interaction of a general store. It was a topic we returned to often—the price we pay for convenience, appealing as it is.
—
The afternoon light was beginning to soften, a prelude to dusk. Alice and I had been speaking for a couple of hours, the small rocking chair pulled up to her recliner.
As if on cue, Nelle appeared from the back bedroom.
“You two about ready to go feed the ducks?”
I glanced over at Alice.
“I b’lieve so.”
There always was a little something new to observe and talk over. A duck might have gone missing. Usually, the duck in question would reappear, his whereabouts the previous day a mystery. At one point, a duck was struck by a car, his feathered carcass discovered in the road. A friend told Judy, who told Nelle, who told Alice, who told me. Radio Monroeville, I called it.
“Radio Bemba” is what Cubans call word of mouth, bemba being slang for “lips.” I mentioned the expression to Nelle one afternoon at McDonald’s. We were gossiping about who gossiped the most around town, and why. It was a competitive field, that’s for sure. The name of Nelle’s top pick was not to go beyond our orange plastic booth. She was clear about that. “This is off the record.”
She outlined the person’s ample credentials for the post. One story made me laugh. She joined in, then looked stern for a moment.
“Don’t put that in there,” she said.
“Off the record, got it.”
Later, Nelle asked, “What’s that called? The radio thing?”
“Radio Bemba. It’s pronounced Rah-dee-oh Baym-bah,” so I quickly spelled out B-E-M-B-A.
Nelle nodded. “I want to remember that.”
Every now and then, I’d invoke the local version when telling Nelle something that someone told someone who told me. “Rah-dee-oh Monroeville.” It wasn’t as much fun to say. Bemba bounces off the lips, playful onomatopoeia. With onomatopoeia having its own bouncy way about it.
Nelle was parsing language all the time.
In one brief drive along Alabama Avenue, she had the four of us in the car thinking about the origins of grits and midwife. We were headed for an early dinner at David’s Catfish House. Kathryn Dawkins drove, with me beside her and Nelle and Alice in the backseat. Kathryn was a longtime good friend of the Lees, a fellow Methodist close in age to Nelle. A former Vanity Fair employee, she now was a pharmacy clerk at Food World.
“I hope this is okay, sugar,” Kathryn said. She glanced over at me. “Are you getting tired of David’s?” I’d been there a couple of dozen times. I imagine she and the Lees lost count of their own visits somewhere around the one hundred mark.
“No, I like David’s and I like their hush puppies, too. Not so great for the diet, though.”
Nelle had been watching her calories as well.
“I shouldn’t have the cheese grits,” she said. “But I’m going to.”
“Did you know grits is is correct?” She recalled the British roots of the word.
On we went, past the old Vanity Fair administrative building and Central Supply, past Burger King and McDonald’s, past the Winn-Dixie and the hospital. We drove by a new auto parts chain store.
Alice regarded the scene.
“Just what we need,” she said drily. “Another auto parts store.”
“Did you see Julia today?” Nelle asked me.
“I did,” I said. “I went out to her place.”
“It’s really tucked back in there,” Nelle said. It was easy to overshoot Julia’s home.
“Yeah, we spent some time looking at her garden and her pear tree. I wanted to ask her more about her days as a midwife.”
“That’s an old Middle English term, isn’t it?”
“Sounds like it could be. I don’t know. I’ll look it up.”
Nelle recalled that the word isn’t at simple as it sounds. Mid could mean “with,” not necessarily “middle” or “intermediary” back then. And wife simply meant “woman” at one time. A midwife worked with women, delivering babies. Or something like that.
After we finished our catfish, Alice reached into her handbag and retrieved four foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses. With a twinkle in her eye, she gave one to each of us, “because a meal without dessert is like a sentence without a period.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Dinner out meant Radley’s or David’s, usually, but Nelle had a suggestion for Dale and me.
“How about the Mexican place for a change of pace?”
Mexican it was. I’d passed the place a hundred times, on the way to the Excel Laundromat with Nelle or to the South Forty with Tom, but I’d never gone in. The Laredo Grill was a bit of Mexico plopped onto Highway 84, a boxy adobe structure between the log cabin ambience of David’s Catfish House and the bright lights and big windows of the Waffle House, with its trademark black-on-yellow sign.
The Laredo, with its colorful sign, was meant to be festive but seemed forlorn instead. The long-established restaurants on either side were filled with regular customers enjoying familiar Southern fare.
