The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (22 page)

Articles about the Beck crime spree didn’t mention her childhood escapade with Truman, perhaps because Truman’s mother, Lillie Mae, pleaded with the neighbors in Monroeville not to mention it.

“She was determined that no one would connect Truman with Martha. She went around saying, ‘Don’t say anything about it. Don’t say anything about it.’ And they didn’t.”

Years later, Truman asked Nelle to accompany him to Kansas to research the 1959 farmhouse murders vividly recounted in
In Cold Blood
. She had turned in her manuscript for
To Kill a Mockingbird,
but it had not yet been published. He wanted to write a nonfiction narrative about the murders of the Clutter family that was so detailed and compelling it would read like a novel.

Her old friend once had seemed unstoppable as he took the New York literary world by storm. But by the late 1950s, he was floundering. Nelle took heart that the Kansas book he envisioned could be a turning point.

“I thought this could be a serious effort at a serious book and I wanted to encourage him,” Nelle said.

His subject matter intrigued her as well.

Capote called Nelle his “assistant researchist,” a title that did not reflect the depth of her contribution to the book. Those times in Kansas were among the last when the two old friends would enjoy a real camaraderie. In the years spent writing the book, and those that followed its 1966 publication, Capote was sinking into heavier abuse of drugs and alcohol.

“Truman was a world-class gossip and given to embellishment,” Nelle told me. “If not outright lies,” she added. It was one more reason the distance between them grew. He gossiped about her, same as he did with most famous people he knew, and she resented it.

What Nelle and Alice resented more than anything was Capote’s claim that Frances had tried to drown Nelle. “Talk about Southern grotesque!” he had said.

The story infuriated Nelle and Alice. Even decades later, their indignation rose in their voices.

“Imagine someone saying that about your mother,” Nelle said.

Alice’s affable tone during one of our Sunday afternoon interviews turned to disgust when I brought up the topic. “I was upset because Mother had a very gentle nature. Nothing could have caused her to try to dispose of one of her children. Truman would say anything when he was drunk,” Alice said.

After
In Cold Blood,
Capote’s subsequent celebrity centered more on his society connections than on his writing. He threw the famed, masked Black and White Ball at New York’s Plaza Hotel, and was a regular on the talk-show circuit. His long-awaited book became
Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel.
It was published in 1986, two years after his 1984 death from drugs and alcohol.

While his decline continued the Lees didn’t want to have any more to do with him. Nelle attended Truman’s funeral in Los Angeles, where he had been living in the guesthouse of Joanna Carson, ex-wife of Johnny Carson.

With time, Nelle’s anger toward Truman was accompanied by sadness that his life turned out the way it did, that he seemed unable to put aside drugs and alcohol and whatever demons haunted him long enough to produce more of the quality writing he had in him.

She came to view his invention of his own myth, starting with his supposedly wretched childhood in Monroeville, as an inevitability, a character flaw over which he perhaps had little control.

In one of my early driving tours with Nelle and Alice, as the sisters
were squabbling over Nelle’s accelerating at a yellow light, the topic of Truman came up.

Nelle clarified her feelings then. As far as she was concerned, Truman lied about people and belittled them as a way of life and he didn’t care whom he hurt.

“Truman was a psychopath, honey.”

That stopped me short. Nelle used language precisely. She wasn’t just tossing out the word like kids on a playground do, calling one another “psycho.”

“You mean in the clinical sense?” I asked.

“If I understand the meaning of the term,” she answered. “He thought the rules that apply to everybody else didn’t apply to him.”

Chapter Twenty-one

T
he Lees loved to explore their corner of Southern Alabama. Two of the first places Alice and Nelle took me were the nearby communities of Burnt Corn and Scratch Ankle. In 1814, local settlers fought Creek Indians in the Battle of Burnt Corn. Three years later, the town was established officially. Now all that’s left is a gas station, a collection of small houses, and a shuttered general store. Not far from there is the smattering of homes, churches, and, yes, a gas station that people still call Scratch Ankle. Officially the maps designate it as “Franklin and surrounding area.” The origin of the name Scratch Ankle? It’s up for debate. The leading theory attributes the name to the dog-borne fleas that, back in the day, worked their way under men’s socks and trousers and just below the hemline of women’s long skirts, bringing on an intolerable itch.

On a shopping trip to Mobile, Nelle, Judy, Ila, and I stopped by a Barnes & Noble in a large strip mall. Nelle was muttering about the decline of civilization after the young man in the music department hadn’t heard of the classical CD she was looking for: Mozart’s
Magic Flute
. In the local history section, I found a slim paperback with a maroon cover titled
Place Names in Alabama
.

On the drive back to Monroeville, I found Burnt Corn in the book and read the entry aloud. Nelle had a question: “Is Smut Eye in there?”

Sure enough, on page 129 was an entry for the Bullock County community, its humorous name generally attributed to “smut from fires blackening the faces or getting in the eyes of persons working over them or passing near them . . .”

Nelle asked me to look up the town of Reform—so named, the story goes, because of a traveling preacher who refused to return to the small settlement until its wayward citizens reformed. The name game was on. Judy, Ila, and Nelle tossed out other quirky names, some official, some not. I read the entries for places closer to Monroeville: I found Pine Apple, Opp, Mexia, and the town of Brewton’s Murder Creek, where in 1788, three men camping along the riverbank were robbed and killed. Once again, our drive turned to memories of old Alabama. Laughter and stories flowed as we skimmed past miles of cotton fields.

Clearly, some of the locales cited in the book were named to describe rather than to entice: Bug Tussle, Gravel Hill, Needmore, and Hell’s Half Acre. Not to mention Rattlesnake Mountain, Penitentiary Mountain, Sinking Creek, Polecat Creek (
polecat
being slang for “skunk”), and the former Massacre Island—no relation to Murder Creek.

The nicknames that proliferated back then were as fun as the place names.

In Tom Butts’s tiny community alone, he grew up with Shorty Higdon and Fatty Burt, Specs Watson and Legs Ryland. Shorty’s name and Fatty’s are self-explanatory. Fatty’s cousins, Pig and Bear Burt—farm kids like all the rest—got their nicknames from older brothers who decided one was a stinker and the other lumbered from room to room. Or at least that’s the speculation, thin on evidence.

Legs Ryland, a classmate of Tom’s, was tall. As for their pal Hickory Nut Salter, Tom never knew his real name or how the young Mr. Salter came to be Hickory Nut. “He grew up to be a Holiness preacher. I don’t know if he still goes by Hickory Nut or not. We could try to find out.” We never did.

On a crisp, sunny October day Nelle and her friend Bill Miller, a former Vanity Fair executive, were “going to ride,” taking a country drive. They invited me along. First we’d stop for breakfast at Nancy’s Ranch House Café, successor to the ill-fated Wanda’s Kountry Kitchen. Breakfast was eggs and grits, bacon and toast, and coffee. Lots of coffee.

Our waitress, a young woman in a black cowboy hat, stopped by our table.

“Would you like more coffee?”

“Yes,” Nelle said. “Mounds of it.”

At one point, Nelle held out her arm to show us a large, gold-toned wristwatch.

“Isn’t this marvelous?”

She chuckled. It was from a catalog for people with low vision.

On the pearly face, the little hand and the big hand were huge. Ken Johnson, the jeweler over on the square, had replaced the already large hands with even bigger ones. She was the proud owner of a tricked-out wristwatch.

“This will see me through.”

Through to the end of her life. I was growing accustomed to Nelle and Alice, Dale and Tom referring to this matter-of-factly.

We headed for nowhere in particular, passing lumber mills and cotton fields.

At the end of our expedition, we crested the small hill where Clausell Avenue meets the busier Claiborne Street and headed to West Avenue. As we passed the Hopewell CME church, Nelle had a question.

“What does Mr. Marzett have on his sign today?”

Bill slowed and I read it aloud. “
EXPOSURE TO THE SON MAY PREVENT BURNING
.” Clever, but Nelle and Alice’s favorite remained the one they spotted earlier.
HOW DO YOU PLAN TO SPEND ETERNITY? SMOKING OR NON?

Language, as always, was play.

Chapter Twenty-two

I
n many instances, the riverhead of their language was their early training in faith. Only Alice remained as deeply involved in the affairs of the Methodist Church as their father had been, but Nelle continued to support the church, generously, and attended services, in Monroeville and Manhattan, as long as her hearing allowed.

But Nelle said if she ever wrote her memoirs, she’d want the book to be called
Where My Possessions Lie
. The phrase is from the poem and hymn by Samuel Stennett that became popular at Methodists camps.

In her novel, the African American Reverend Sykes sings and lines this with his congregation the morning that Scout and Jem accompany Calpurnia to church. There are not enough hymnbooks to go around. This is the first time they’ve seen a minster line, or feed lines to the congregation, who repeats them back.

In the hymn, earthly existence is one of turmoil. Not so the afterlife, the Promised Land. It begins:

On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,

And cast a wishful eye,

To Canaan’s fair and happy land,

Where my possessions lie.

O’er all those wide extended plains

Shines one eternal day;

There God the Son forever reigns,

And scatters night away.

CHORUS:

I am bound for the promised land,

I am bound for the promised land;

Oh who will come and go with me?

I am bound for the promised land.

Alice offered little encouragement that any such memoir would be published, even posthumously. “There have been a number of people who have suggested she write her autobiography,” Alice said. “But she has not shown any interest.”

If Nelle never sat down to write her own story—and no one, not even Alice, can know for sure—she remained fascinated by the characters who populate rural Alabama. Past and present.

In fact, Nelle was so intrigued by a sequence of murders in the late 1970s in Alexander City, Alabama, that she started researching an
In Cold Blood
–style true-crime chronicle. Her research focused on a black minister who continued to collect insurance money as wives and relatives showed up dead, in succession.