The Mockingbird Next Door

by Marja Mills

  One thing I did still have to keep myself from asking them was, What are you thinking? When they volunteered, the answer was always interesting. But if they wanted to share the reason something sent them into a thoughtful silence, they would tell me. It wasn’t my place to ask.

  Nelle reached for the door handle.

  “Thank you, hon,” she said. “You are a good egg to do this.”

  “My pleasure,” I said. A thought occurred to me again that made me smile. I don’t think she’d heard when I said it before, as we walked to my car at Kathryn’s. I raised my voice a little and enunciated so what I said next would be clear. We’d been talking side by side in our bucket seats but I turned to face her.

  “Well,” I said, “it was an interesting experience telling you what you didn’t say.” She laughed heartily but also shook her head. “You see?” she said.

  She declined the offer to walk her to the door. I flipped on the headlights, turned the car back on—“cranked it,” as they said here— and watched for her to get safely inside.

  As she went, slowly, up the two steps to the landing, I rolled up the windows on the off chance of rain overnight.

  Nelle opened the front door and, without turning around, raised her hand to signal “all is well.” The door closed and I was quite sure she would be standing over Alice’s chair soon, one hand braced against the back of it, recounting something of the evening.

  That night ended in laughter but Nelle’s uneasiness about the second movie would not abate until it came out the following autumn. Infamous, the one with Jones as Capote and Bullock as Nelle, did inspire a bit of levity as well. She liked the movie enough to overlook those white socks Bullock wore with black pumps. In a letter to director Douglas McGrath, Nelle told me, she informed him of something along the lines of this: “You have created a creature of such sweetness and light and called her Harper Lee that I forgive the socks.”

  Between the two movie debuts, in May 2006, the biography Nelle especially dreaded arrived. Charles J. Shields, a former English teacher who had gone on to write biographies for young people, published Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. The book became a best seller and sparked a round of reviews and published reflections about Harper Lee and her novel.

  Denied access to Harper Lee and her close associates, Shields pieced together his portrait with, among other things, interviews of others who once knew Harper Lee. He also drew upon correspondence he found at the New York Public Library and information in the articles about her written over the years.

  One day, browsing at a Barnes & Noble with a friend, Nelle spotted the Shields book. She picked it up and observed with satisfaction that it still was in its first printing. She put it back on the shelf, way back, and slid a different book in front of it so Mockingbird was hidden. The defiance of that gesture stayed with me but, more so, the futility of it. The spines of thousands more copies of the book still faced outward at bookstores across the land. Nelle objected to Shields’s conjecture about the nature of her family relationships and the details of her time with Capote and his Monroeville relatives, among other things.

  If it’s true, as novelist Carolyn See has written, that “by the time we’re six or seven, we have made an agreement with the universe about the kind of people we are going to be,” then perhaps young Nelle’s was this: Independent, spirited, doing pretty much as she pleased, she would explore the world and express herself free of the traditional expectations assigned Southern young ladies. As a child, that meant she was labeled a tomboy; in college, a bit of a nonconformist in a culture that valued the opposite, especially in its women.

  From her forties on, Harper Lee was branded a literary recluse, an imposing figure but also a curiosity. If living her life apart, and leaving unchallenged speculation about her nonconformity, was what it cost, she was willing to pay.

  Not happy to pay—but willing.

  After the release of the movies and the biography she dreaded, well after the perfect storm of fresh publicity was over, I reminded Nelle of what she had said about her book years before at the Excel Main Street Diner: “I wish I’d never written the damn thing.” On this day, over coffee, I had my notebook out and was going over items I wanted to include in the book. “Do you still feel that way?” I asked her.

  She glanced away, reflecting on the question. Then she looked at me again. “Sometimes,” she said. “But then it passes.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The jangle of the phone woke me one morning in early December. I was sound asleep. I rolled over and glanced at my clock radio. It was a little before eight A.M. This was Nelle, I knew, in some sleepy recess of my mind, with coffee on her mind. She never wanted to wake me; I never wanted her not to call because she was afraid she’d do so. So my reaction to the ring, even jarred from sleep, was automatic: a determinedly bright “Hello?”

  “Morning, hon. Do you have time for a cup of coffee this morning?”

  “You bet. I’d love one.”

  “Do you want breakfast?”

  “You bet.” I was more awake now and propped up on one elbow. Was that my second “you bet” or third?

  “All right. I’ll drop off Alice and come by for you.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll keep my eye out.”

  “Bah-ah,” she said, her playful exaggeration of a Southern, two-syllable “Bye.”

  “See you soon.”

  I’d jump up, get dressed, and look for her out the kitchen window so she wouldn’t have to get out and knock. The windows were closed against the cool air now. I couldn’t always hear the Buick approach in the driveway, even from the kitchen. But if I knew someone was coming for me, I could stand by the coffee machine and spot the car out that window, the one with Wes’s Auburn sun catcher.

  I hung up the phone and flexed stiff legs under the warmth of the covers. I hugged my spare pillow for a few luxurious moments. This wasn’t the time for lollygagging. Lollygagging? When did I start saying things like that, even in my own head? In the company of these older women, I’d begun channeling some of my grandparents’ sayings. I’d go to breakfast looking like a ragamuffin if I didn’t hurry.

  I scrambled up and half shuffled, half hobbled in bare feet across the wood floor into the bathroom off my bedroom. That new chill was in the air and underfoot as well. I could feel it in the cool bathroom tiles. Maybe that would wake me up. I was never quite ready for the pink of this bathroom first thing in the morning. Oh, well. I was glad for the cool weather, glad to be starting the day with Nelle and breakfast out.

  Sometimes I missed the routine of getting ready for school or the office like everybody else. For years, I’d had energy enough to last the day and a regular place to go to, with colleagues and coffee and a workday that had a beginning and an end.

  This was a more amorphous kind of work. I spent a lot more time resting, usually in bed, than I did interviewing people or even just being out and about in Monroeville. I could pass a couple of days in solitude, if I didn’t see the Lees or the Crofts, the Buttses or Dale. I tried to at least get to the post office, lupus-y day or not, but my intentions outpaced my energy.

  Still, it was a lifesaver to work on a project this interesting. Even at a glacial pace. The nature of the book meant that even those brief forays to the post office served a purpose beyond getting my mail. They were part of getting to know this community, the particulars of the world that the Lees and their friends inhabited in this south-central corner of Alabama. It was the kind of perspective the pace of daily journalism doesn’t permit.

  At breakfast at the hole-in-the-wall City Café that morning, a woman from the Finchburg area approached Nelle with her grandchildren. They spoke pleasantly for just a few moments. After they were gone, Nelle remarked, “I hope I didn’t disappoint them.”

  What? I thought. The woman clearly had been thrilled, and Nelle had been nothing but gracious and down-t
o-earth, interested in finding out more about the woman and her family.

  Our eggs had grown cold but the waitress came by and warmed up our coffee.

  I understood, though. It was a thought she often had after encounters like these. How does anyone live up to the mystique that had grown up around her?

  People introduced themselves to her in all kinds of settings as she went about her business, out to eat or running errands or at events. They were routine encounters for Nelle. But they were anecdotes that the other person would tell for years, for a lifetime, each comment dissected, each detail repeated. Even there in a down-home restaurant in small-town Alabama, that kind of fame exerts its own kind of pressure.

  —

  It was movie night. Nelle, Judy, and I were finishing dinner around my dining room table before retiring to the living room to watch the DVD Nelle had requested, Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers. Nelle finished her last bite of Melvin’s barbecue, pushed back her chair, and made this observation about the work ahead of me.

  “To understand Southerners, you need to understand their ties to their church and their property.” To understand this part of Alabama, I would need to understand the ties of people here to these particular churches, this particular land.

  Actually, she corrected me in a subsequent conversation, “Not land. Property. It’s different.”

  Land is something you cultivate. Property is your home place. Often, it’s your identity. It’s an anchor and a refuge, a link to the past and a hope for the future. When times are hard, if nothing else it is a place to grow vegetables and keep some chickens. When times are good, it is where a person gathers friends and family to celebrate the bounty.

  Really go to church, Nelle told me. Alice said the same. Go to white churches and black. Go hear Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians. And Holy Rollers.

  “You need to go to Miss Mary’s church,” Nelle said. Miss Mary Watford Stabler was a couple of years older than Nelle. They didn’t see each other often, but they were friends of long standing. Nelle phoned Miss Mary and asked if she might take me, Judy, and Ila to Sunday services.

  Miss Mary’s Pentecostal church is near the tiny community of Scratch Ankle.

  Miss Mary was only seventeen when she had a vision that spreading the gospel and ministering to the faithful was what she was called to do. She has been a Pentecostal preacher ever since. Her Bible is the most worn, thumbed through, underlined one you can find in Monroe County, and that is saying something.

  Back when she was a girl, you didn’t see many female Pentecostal preachers. You still don’t. But her path began at home. Her father was a preacher. She was helping him cajole, inspire, and whip up the faithful in Monroe County revival tents before she was old enough to vote. Which, at that point, women had been allowed to do for all of nineteen years.

  I wondered how her congregation compared to other Pentecostal churches in the area. There were quite a few, including a larger, breakaway congregation just down the road. The joke was, “How do you get two Baptist churches in a new community? Build one. A breakaway will form in no time.” Safe to say it applied to more denominations than the Baptists.

  “Don’t worry,” Nelle told me. “There won’t be any snakes. At least I don’t think so. They’re the least roll-y of the Holy Rollers,” Nelle said. “At least, I think that’s so.”

  We joined a dozen others that morning for Miss Mary’s rousing sermon. Several people made their way to the front to bear witness.

  Afterward, one woman also made her way to our pew as we rose to leave. She had heard Harper Lee would be there. She wondered if Nelle would mind signing her name in her Bible.

  Nelle signed and we were off for a picnic on the banks of the Alabama River.

  We stopped at a country store for fried chicken and potato logs, the large, fried potato wedges Nelle liked.

  She didn’t like waiting, though.

  “Finally!” she said when it was ready.

  “I suppose we should wait to eat until we get there,” she said in the car.

  I had a feeling it was more request than statement. But we waited.

  “Ila, you are a marvel,” Nelle said as we sat at a picnic table, with the fried chicken and potatoes added to the bounty of foods Ila had prepared.

  The morning’s service energized Nelle.

  “I feel like I’ve really been to church for the first time in a long time.” Miss Mary delivered an impassioned sermon that quoted heavily from the Bible, and Nelle liked that. The “New Age stuff,” as she called it, wasn’t for her.

  While I lived in Monroeville, many Sundays I would attend whatever church the Lees felt would contribute to my education. I went to white churches and black, tiny country gatherings and congregations large enough to need two services. I went to Baptist and Methodist churches, Pentecostal and First Assembly of God, breakaways and independents. I inquired about any Jewish or Muslim services, however small, I might visit but there was nothing in the area.

  It was on that same Wallace and Gromit movie night at my house that Nelle told Judy and me about a phone call she’d made a few months before. We had lingered after watching the DVD, Nelle in my green corduroy rocker pulled up to the coffee table, Judy to her right in a floral armchair, me to her left in a wood rocker.

  She told us about calling Brock Peters’s home just before he died. Peters had played the falsely accused Tom Robinson in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird forty-three years earlier. He had died of cancer at age seventy-eight in August 2005.

  When Nelle called, the woman whom she identified as Brock Peters’s lady, Marilyn, told her Brock was in his final hours and she was reading aloud to him—from the Bible and a passage from her novel that had always touched him.

  Nelle had then written to Marilyn, quoting from The Pilgrim’s Progress, the classic spiritual allegory about the search for eternal life: “So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

  Nelle had that day received a sweet letter in reply.

  She was chagrined, however, that neither Judy nor I could name the source of the quote about trumpets sounding. It could be embarrassing to those called upon to identify such things, and it happened to all of us.

  —

  In January 2006, Nelle came back from the annual Tuscaloosa luncheon exhausted and relieved.

  She hadn’t known a New York Times reporter would be there, she told me. She was quoted in a front-page story the next day.

  In “Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day,” the Times’s Gina Bellafante reported that Nelle agreed to speak to her about the event. She wrote that Nelle was patient in posing for photographs with students, quick-witted in her comments, and appreciative of the event. Nelle got a call the following day from Howell Raines, the Alabama-born former executive editor of the New York Times, reporting that the story was the most e-mailed of the day. While Nelle didn’t know exactly how that worked, she appreciated what it meant.

  In her article, Bellafante repeated Nelle’s comment that Horton Foote, the To Kill a Mockingbird screenwriter, remained a good friend and that as he had aged, he had come to look “like God, only clean-shaven.”

  Not long after the article ran, the phone rang on West Avenue. Nelle picked up the receiver to discover it was Horton Foote, Horton with the tender heart, the kind eyes, the sweet, civilized way he had about him. The Texas of his youth was still in his soothing, almost husky voice.

  “God here,” he said. They laughed and got caught up. He ended the call by telling Nelle, “Remember, God loves you.”

  She laughed again, repeating the conversation over coffee at McDonald’s. She looked wistful. “He’s one of the last real gentlemen,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Ihad moved into the house not knowing how long it would be available. Now I’d been here going on fifteen months, wh
ich was longer than I had meant to stay, though I would end up staying another two. It was time to return to Chicago. I could gather more information indefinitely but, already, writing up what I had would be a formidable task. I had crates of files, boxes of notes, stacks of taped interviews with Alice and others to transcribe. I thought the lupus might have eased up by now but it hadn’t. Nor had it gotten worse. Resting so much of the time meant work progressed at a snail’s pace.

  I had begun discussing with the Lees when I might move back to Chicago. I was pleased they were in no hurry to see me go but also understood.

  I’d talk to Nelle about it over coffee. These daily routines, theirs and mine, these rhythms of daily life, had become second nature. Now that would be coming to an end. That Tuesday, the last day in January, I faxed Alice. As I often did, I sent it at lunchtime so she would see it before she returned to the office for the afternoon.

  Alice, I spoke with Wes last night. I gave notice for March 1st. I can extend week-to-week if I want and if he hasn’t found anyone by then. Just to keep you posted. I must have been prematurely Journey Proud because I didn’t sleep much.

  Hope you’re making progress with your mounds of documents.

  To a Chicago/Wisconsin girl, this feels like a sunny, crisp October day.

  Marja

  I was in bed when Nelle called one afternoon.

  “Do you feel like a cup at McDonald’s?”

  I hesitated, just for a moment.

  I always felt like a cup at McDonald’s with Nelle, even when I wasn’t feeling well. But I was back in bed, feeling worse than usual.

  Nelle interjected quickly, “Not if you don’t want to. That’s no problem.”

  “No, I’d love a cup of coffee.”

  Maybe fresh air, as much coffee as I could manage to swallow, and the best conversationalist this side of the Mississippi would be what the doctor ordered.