by Marja Mills
“Since I live so close to the paper, people could just walk over after work,” I told Nelle, Judy, and Ila. “So I set a date and decided we’d make this a little bit fancy. I had some food catered, made some myself. A couple of days before the party, I ordered a big sheet cake from this gourmet market called Fox & Obel. I told the guy at the bakery—this was over the phone—that I wanted the cake to say ‘Congratulations, Julia. Pulitzer Prize 2005.’ ”
“That’s sweet,” Judy said.
“Well, I told the guy I wanted to be sure her name was spelled right. I told him, ‘Her name is Julia, J-U-L-I-A, but she gets “Julie” sometimes and hates that. So I’d appreciate it if you could be sure it says “Congratulations, Julia. Pulitzer Prize 2005.”’
“He said, ‘Oh, that is very good. An honor. Congratulations to her.’ He had a heavy accent. I couldn’t quite place it.
“‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be a pain, but could I ask you to read it back to me to be sure?’ He did, and spelled out J-U-L-I-A. ‘Perfect,’ I told him.
“The day of the party, the cake arrived shortly before the guests were due to begin filtering over after work. The cake was in a white, rectangular box. I put it on my counter and hustled to set out the other food. I didn’t open the lid to the box until right before people were due to arrive. My heart sank.”
“They got it wrong?” Ila said.
“No,” Nelle said.
“Here’s what the cake said.” I tore a scrap of paper out of my notebook, scribbled a few words, and passed it across the table to Nelle. She read it silently and then tilted her head back and gave one of those laughs that washed across the room. “Oh,” she said. “That’s marvelous.”
She passed the scrap of paper to Judy so she and Ila could read the mistaken inscription on the cake.
“Congratulations, Julia. Poet Surprise, 2005.”
I joined in the laughter. “It ended up being the hit of the party.” Every time someone came to the door, one of us would put the lid back down on the cake box, tell the person what it was supposed to say, and then lift the lid.
“She’s stuck with it,” I told them. “She’s the Poet Surprise now.”
Nelle and Alice both were quick to draw the distinction between achievement and fame, and so Nelle’s 1961 Pulitzer Prize for the novel remains a quiet source of pride. The timing of the prize was especially meaningful because the father they adored lived long enough to see Nelle’s achievement.
—
There were moments with Nelle when we’d be reminded of her novel’s extraordinary and enduring effect on the nation. One morning at Taste 2 Love, our modest breakfast place that day, Nelle sighed and confessed she had been putting off a task. Laura Bush had written Nelle a letter of appreciation, and Nelle had to figure out what to say in reply to the nation’s First Lady.
One friend set down her Styrofoam coffee cup and shot Nelle a sly, sympathetic look. “I know, I know,” she said. “I never know what to say when I’m writing back to the First Lady.”
Nelle laughed with the rest of us.
Oprah Winfrey occasionally came up in conversation. When she had wanted to select To Kill a Mockingbird for her enormously popular televised book club, Oprah later disclosed that to her audience, and described, with glee, her lunch with Nelle at the Waldorf.
The author put her at ease immediately, Oprah told her audience. “I felt like we’d been girlfriends forever.” But there was no budging on the book club question. Oprah recounted this to her talk show audience in an “after the show” segment, imitating Nelle’s Southern accent.
“You know Boo Radley?” Nelle asked her. “Well, that’s me.” She didn’t want the enormous attention an Oprah selection would bring to bear.
One day, Nelle told me she’d had another call from Oprah, who’d been to South Africa, where she had established a girls’ school. This time she was there to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s birthday.
“I asked her what she got him for his birthday,” Nelle said. “She said, ‘Oh, a library.’ I think that was it.” Nelle laughed. She shook her head from side to side in appreciation.
Over coffee at Burger King one day, Nelle asked, “What do you think of Sissy Spacek?” Was this for movie night?
“I think she’s very good.” I’d seen her most recently in the film adaptation of Andre Dubus’s In the Bedroom. We discussed the movie, and Spacek’s Texas accent. Then Nelle said Spacek would be narrating an audio edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Narrating Harper Lee’s novel was one of the best things she got to do in her life, Spacek wrote in her autobiography, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life.
When you saw her every day, you could forget that Nelle’s novel was something so many people had in common—not just having read it but having been taken by it. That kind of influence, of connection, is hard to grasp. How do you measure the reach of a book that goes beyond staggering sales figures and Top Ten Favorite Books of All Time lists to something more profound, to the connection of readers to the story, of readers to one another, of one generation to the next? I started to picture that influence as a silken thread, the rust color of Monroe County soil, of Maycomb County soil. Of red dirt. It was stitched through other books and movies, part of high school for many Americans, a common point of reference.
All from a first book by the woman who was feeding quarters into the washing machine at the Excel Laundromat with me on a regular basis.
Chapter Thirty
It was time for Nelle to head back to New York. July fourth that year, 2005, was a packing day for Nelle. The following day, a friend would drive her to Birmingham and the train departing for New York.
The evening before Nelle left, I opened their screen door and hung another Winn-Dixie plastic grocery bag on their front-door handle. It was a care package for the trip, along with a letter and a book, E. B. White’s 1949 Here Is New York.
Good thing the book is so slim. I wanted to be able to shut the screen door so the bag would be hidden from any passersby. No need to advertise that the house might be unoccupied, though in this case, both sisters were home.
I knew she liked the book as much as I did. Even more, given her deep feeling for the city White brings to life. He originally wrote the piece for Holiday magazine. White walked the streets of New York, observing details down to the overturned orange crates that offered an outdoor seat and relief from the heat for families suffocating in sweltering slum apartment buildings. This was during a heat wave in the summer of 1948. White typed up the piece in a terribly warm hotel room.
The cover of the 1999 edition, published on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, features a sepia photograph, circa 1935, of the young E. B. White walking a Manhattan street in an overcoat and a fedora. The book is less than a half inch thick and small enough that I could touch all four sides of the front cover with my outstretched hand, palming it like a basketball.
“Don’t reply to this,” I told Nelle in the letter. “You have enough to do before your departure. In case you’re journey proud tonight and want to reread Here Is New York, here is my copy.” I described the contents of the small care package and told her I had found the passage she had recommended from Thomas Macaulay’s richly detailed history of England.
“You and Alice will make an educated woman of me yet,” I wrote in the note. “I found Macaulay’s description of the Hastings impeachment.” The passage, about the six-year trial of Warren Hastings for corruption as a British administrator in colonial India, had come up in conversation.
Her end of the conversation, naturally. That happened a lot with Nelle. References to books and their characters, fiction and non-, laced her conversation, and Alice’s, as casually as did the weather.
Nelle referred to Faulkner as much as, probably more than, any other Southern writer. One morning, over breakfast in Frisco City, she lamented the rise o
f what might politely be called redneck culture in the South. We saw evidence of it often. “They’re the Snopes,” Nelle said, referring to the family in his trilogy about a grasping, cunning clan in Mississippi, unencumbered by etiquette, scruples, or self-awareness.
She tossed out literary references as easily as some might recite their own phone numbers. In a press conference for the film To Kill a Mockingbird, as reported by Rogue, a reporter asked about her favorite writers. “Oh, mostly 19th Century, rather than 20th Century, writers. Charles Lamb, Jane Austen, Thackeray”—she laughed—“all that crowd.”
Walking the short distance from their home to mine, the only sound I heard was crickets. The air was warm and still. In the odd communications routine that had developed, I then went to my bedroom and faxed a note to Nelle that I had left a bag on their door handle.
If I could avoid calling them, I did. Alice couldn’t hear the phone, and Nelle often heard it only after several rings. She would hustle to get to the little phone alcove in the hallway just off the living room, only to discover the caller had hung up. It exasperated her to no end. Generally, she would rather not be interrupted. A fax was less intrusive.
Later that evening, the reply I told her not to send inched its way out of my fax machine. “Thanks!” Nelle wrote, for sending the care package and for spending time with her at home. She seemed especially touched by the E. B. White book, gently scolding me for being “a v. wicked young person” and writing that she had “peeped” into the slender book “and of course wept at the first sentence.”
In 1948, when White was writing that first sentence and the long essay that followed, Nelle Harper was twenty-two and studying law in Tuscaloosa. Just a couple of years later, she would leave law school, live at home for a short time, and then wave good-bye to her father at the small Evergreen train station thirty miles from Monroeville.
The small-town woman was off to begin life as an aspiring writer in the big city. Truman already was there, publishing short stories and magazine articles and reveling in the excitement of Manhattan. The children who sparked each other’s imaginations in Monroeville already had grown into adults with sharply different sensibilities. But both appreciated the escape New York offered from small-town prying eyes.“On any person who desires such queer prizes,” White wrote in that first sentence that still moved Nelle, “New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”
White describes three tribes of New Yorkers: commuters, natives, and settlers. Nelle Harper belonged to the latter group. White goes on to list the different types of settlers coming to New York, including “a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors.”
A half century had passed since she made that first trip to New York and rented an apartment in Manhattan. At seventy-nine, Nelle once again was making the trip from Monroeville back to Manhattan.
She reminded me of American expatriates I spent time with in England and Spain, in Mexico and Paraguay. They navigate two places very well: the country where they were raised and the one in which they live. They may not be fully understood in either one, and that’s fine by them. There’s some privacy in that, even a bit of mystery, an unknowable quality, that follows them back and forth.
For those New Yorkers who heard her Alabama accent and inquired how long she had been in the city, Nelle had a stock answer: “Since before you were born.” That settled that.
Chapter Thirty-one
On a July morning in 2005, Tom was reading the sky. He looked up to the heavens and knew trouble was coming. Of course, with television weathermen talking incessantly about Doppler radar and fronts moving in and all that, he already knew. But checking for himself, looking across Pineville Road and spotting the threat hanging low in the sky over the Methodist church steeple, that was what quickened his own pulse. By now, reports were clear: A hurricane was headed to the Gulf Coast and Monroe County could be in its path.
Nelle Harper, under a peaceful New York sky, was suffering the anxiety of being far away and worried about Alice. Everyone raised in this poor, rural county knows how quickly a hurricane or ferocious tropical storm can blow inland and wreak its random havoc. They’ve seen it before. In one county, homes are destroyed, lives are lost. In the neighboring county, branches blow down and that’s about it. You don’t know which fate is yours until it is upon you.
Alice, always the one thinking ahead, had a plan for when the danger drew closer. Tom and Hilda planned to ride it out at their home on Pineville Road. Alice thought it would be unwise to be in our neighborhood with all the tall trees that could fall on her roof or mine. “You haven’t been through this here,” she told me before I left her house for mine. “You don’t know what this weather can do. I don’t want you to be frightened but I want you to be careful.”
As she spoke, she gave me one of her looks, the appraising look. She studied faces the way Tom, and his father before him, surveyed the skies: to get a read on things. I was tempted sometimes to shield the oldest among us from the worries of the day, even as able and steady as she was. But there wasn’t much point in that. She seemed to just know. She paid attention to everyone with whom she interacted.
That eye for detail made her the kind of lawyer she was, the kind of lawyer her father was, the kind of lawyer Nelle brought to life in Atticus Finch. Alice Finch Lee was as observant a person as I’ve ever met. She was low-key, understated, most of the time. It’s worth remembering that Atticus’s stirring speech to the jury in To Kill a Mockingbird was an exception to his usual practice of law. He drafted wills, resolved disputes, handled land transactions. A careful attention to detail, far more than any courtroom drama, was at the heart of his practice.
This time I easily could pass Alice’s subtle scrutiny. The Yankee wasn’t freaking out. Yes, I was a midwesterner facing my first hurricane. But, as Alice knew, I’d been through tornado seasons in Wisconsin and the 1993 Los Angeles earthquake. I didn’t suffer anything more than a few bruises in the earthquake, but my building was damaged, then condemned and torn down. At least with a hurricane, there was more warning. But Alice wanted to be sure Julia and I had a safe place to go. Final plans couldn’t be made until we had a better idea of when the hurricane would hit.
By that Friday, Hurricane Dennis was predicted to make landfall Sunday near Pensacola. Alice was home from the office, and she faxed me the strategy. We would ride out the storm in the bank. She then had to go because her machine was lit up with faxes, especially from Nelle Harper.
The bank building, with her law office on the second floor, should be able to withstand even a hurricane. It didn’t have a basement; most houses and buildings here don’t. But it had a vault. Where else in town are you going to find thick walls of steel designed to be impenetrable?
And so, on Sunday, as the winds picked up and the rains began, our ragtag little group gathered at the bank, which was closed for business. Alice and Nelle Harper’s nephew Ed Lee, the dentist, and his wife, Marianne, were there. So were Haniel, Judy, and Kenny, as well as several others. People brought snacks and flashlights and magazines.
We’d take refuge inside the vault only if it looked like the bank building itself could go to pieces. I wondered if the FDIC has rules about letting noncustomers like me in a bank vault. Surely this was a case where it would be better to ask forgiveness than permission. Or was Alice only kidding about taking refuge in the vault if need be?
We sprawled out in a conference room. The reports on the radio were growing more ominous. Monroeville still looked like it could be in the path of the hurricane. I peeked out a window; otherwise, we were standing and sitting clear of them. It was unsettling to see the familiar street scene transformed. No one was out. The air was taking on a sickening yellow hue. The branches and leaves on the trees were blowing straight back, like long hair in the wind.
Nelle Harper’s calls to Ed’s cell p
hone were picking up speed, just like the storm. Yes, he told her, Alice is fine. No, really. Everyone is fine. We’ll keep you posted when it’s over, if the power and cell phone service stay on.
Alice, as usual, was the calmest among us. I don’t think it’s just that she couldn’t hear the howling wind or the urgent tone of the radio broadcasts. She had made her plan. It was a good one. And now her part was over.
She serenely worked her crossword puzzle while the rest of us buzzed around, trying to predict what couldn’t be predicted. No doubt she had learned long ago the futility of trying to know the unknowable. Every now and then Ed passed along Nelle’s admonitions to stay safe. Alice responded with an amused look, another in her now-familiar repertoire of meaningful looks and glances. This was the expression of a calm big sister dealing with her more excitable baby sister.
After a few hours, the winds let up. The power was out and we could see branches were down but the worst of the storm had skirted Monroeville. Ed and his wife had a small generator and invited Alice, Julia, and me to spend the night at their home on the other side of town. The drive there was eerie. After all the commotion leading up to this, the town was still. By the time we settled in and said our good-nights, it was late.
Alice said she would sleep better in the recliner, positioned way back. She drifted off with a throw tucked around her slight frame. I stretched out under a blanket on a sofa near Alice’s chair. I was tired but not sleepy. I tiptoed over to the pullout sofa where Julia lay. I could hear the steady rise and fall of her breathing. She was asleep, too. I snuggled back under the throw on my sofa. After the thunder and lightning, the lashing rain and the howling winds, this was a quiet that filled the ears. I was reminded of the silence that enveloped my bedroom that first night next door to Alice and Nelle. I could hear Alice’s soft breathing and listened for Julia’s. I thought about the three very different lives that had intersected, for the time being, in this shelter from the storm.
