The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee
Read The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee Online
Authors: Marja Mills
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Nonfiction, #Retail
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First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Marja Mills
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Photograph Credits
1
,
6
: Carla Mills (Collection of Marja Mills)
2
,
3
,
4
: Chicago Tribune, September 13th, 2002. © 2002 Chicago Tribune. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited
5
,
10
: Collection of Thomas Lane Butts
11
,
13
: Donald Uhrbrock / The Life Images Collection / Getty Images
12
: Courtesy of Preston B. Barnett
14
: © Bettmann/Corbis
15
: Courtesy of Alice Finch Lee on behalf of the Estate of A. C. Lee
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Mills, Marja.
The Mockingbird Next Door : Life with Harper Lee / Marja Mills.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-698-16383-6
1. Lee, Harper. 2. Mills, Marja. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Alabama—Biography. I. Title.
PS3562.E353Z75 2014
813'.54--dc23
[B]
2013039938
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Version_1
For my parents, Dave and Carla Mills
Contents
Author’s Note
This is a work of nonfiction. It is based upon notes, tapes, transcripts, interviews, and conversations from my time in Monroeville. Events and conversations are rendered as I remember them and verified to the best of my ability.
Prologue
I
n the summer of 2005, I was having coffee at Burger King with Harper Lee.
By that time, we were friends and next-door neighbors in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. We’d first met in 2001, when I was on assignment for the
Chicago Tribune
. I had developed a rapport with Nelle, as her friends call her, and her sister Alice. Over time, the idea of my writing a book about the Lee sisters, with their guidance, had taken root in our conversations. With their blessing, I had rented the house next door.
At the time of our Burger King visit, Nelle was growing increasingly resentful and anxious about a coming unauthorized biography and two Truman Capote movies in the works. I think the combination of those events encouraged her to open up to me even more. I wasn’t an unknown quantity but someone she knew and trusted, sitting across the table from her.
I wouldn’t have been sitting there if I had included anything she had said was off the record in my newspaper article, or if I had pushed her to divulge things she felt were no one’s business. Even the fact that I’d never asked her to autograph a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
for me
factored in. I didn’t feel I was entitled to more from her than she wanted to share. I wanted to hear as much as she was willing to share, of course. But I didn’t push it. That patience seemed to ease Nelle’s mind.
“I know what you can call your book,” she told me, leaning in and stabbing her finger in the air, as she liked to do when making a point.
“
Having Their Say.
I know they used it with the Delaney sisters but titles aren’t copyrightable.” Nelle beamed.
Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years
was a bestselling book about two African American sisters, one sweet and one salty, looking back on their lives.
In this scenario, Alice, her elder sister by fifteen years—sharp and still practicing law in her nineties—was the sweet one. Nelle was the saltier one. I smiled. I didn’t take it as a mandate for the title but rather as a measure of Nelle’s enthusiasm.
I was delighted they were ready to have their say, in any measure, and to look back on their lives. It has been a privilege to get to know the sisters, their family, their friends, their hometown, and their passions. With the Lees as my teachers, I learned more about literature, family, history, faith, friendship, and fun than I did in any classroom.
This book is my attempt to tell the story of my time with the Lees and to honor all that they shared with me. I could not have done it without the trust, support, and encouragement of Nelle and Alice Lee and their closest friends.
To the best of my ability, I have let them have their say. All humor and erudition should be credited to the Lees. Any errors are my own.
Chapter One
D
o you want to take a trip? You can say no.”
Tim Bannon, my editor at the
Chicago Tribune,
stood at my cubicle. He ran the daily features section on the fifth floor of the Gothic Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago and was pleasantly low-key by newspaper standards. Tim knew I liked to travel for stories, and that if the story took me to an unusual part of the country, so much the better. I had loved spending time at a monastery in rural Missouri for one story and at The Citadel, the military college in South Carolina, for another. Tim also knew I had been out sick a lot that year, 2001. In 1995, I had been diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune condition that frequently left me fatigued. I wanted him to know I was still able to do my job. I purposely accepted before finding out more.
“Sure. Where to?”
“Monroeville, Alabama.”
Tim saw my quizzical look and smiled.
“It’s Harper Lee’s hometown. We know she doesn’t give interviews. But I think it’s worth going there anyway.”
Enough said.
A couple of weeks earlier, the Chicago Public Library had chosen
the elusive author’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
as the first selection in its One Book, One Chicago program. The idea was to get Chicagoans in every corner of the city reading and discussing the same book. It didn’t hurt that
To Kill a Mockingbird
happened to be the favorite of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, as he told me a couple of months earlier for a story I wrote about his reading habits. That he was a reader at all surprised some folks. His press conferences were hard to follow. He didn’t necessarily exit the same sentences he entered. But he loved books, and he especially loved
To Kill a Mockingbird.
In that, he was part of a phenomenon that began in 1960 and continues to this day.
When the novel was published in July of that year, Harper Lee was a few months past her thirty-fourth birthday. From the beginning, Lee was a collection of contradictions. She was an Alabama native whose love of the state’s back roads was matched only by her love of New York City streets. Her public shyness masked a wicked wit. During the publicity engagements for the novel’s publication, when she wasn’t averting her gaze, her dark eyes could alternate between a penetrating stare and a mischievous gleam. She was a distinctive blend of engaging and elusive.
Lee labored for several years to produce the novel. She coaxed the story out of a Royal manual typewriter in her small Manhattan cold-water flat and on visits home. Atticus Finch is a principled attorney and the widowed father of two children. As the novel begins, his tomboy daughter, Scout, is about to turn six. Her older brother, Jem, is almost ten. With their father, they endure the suspicion and outright hatred directed at Atticus when he defends Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell, in their segregated town. In the novel’s climactic scene, Bob Ewell, father of Mayella, comes after the children. Boo Radley, the neighborhood
recluse who has frightened and fascinated the children in equal measure, saves them.