The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (29 page)

Mexia is named for a Texas town to which a local man had a connection. With no real downtown or center of gravity, and a collection of newer houses on cul-de-sacs, Mexia looks like a tiny suburban subdivision stranded in the Monroe County countryside. Surrounding it are stands of skinny pines and ravines draped in kudzu. Red dirt roads end in scruffy compounds where relatives have cobbled together a mishmash of trailer homes, clotheslines, and tire planters.

It was worth the trek to Mexia. After James retired from shift work at the pulp mill, and Ila closed the beauty parlor at the back of their house on the nearby highway, they found what they wanted here in
their retirement: the close-knit Southern Baptist congregation out on Old Salem Road; a spacious, one-story house at the end of their cul-de-sac; and plenty of space. Ila grew tomatoes and cucumbers in the large garden out back. James spent long hours at the buzz saw in the big woodworking shop he built in the side yard. There he fashioned the wall of oak cabinetry that housed the Crofts’ big-screen television, and the large bookcase in the Lees’ entryway.

Alice and Nelle had little room or desire for new furnishings at the house, noticeably smaller than the homes of most of their friends. But a big bookshelf was a lifeline amid the rising tide of books the sisters couldn’t bear to part with. James had also fashioned another gift they cherished. He made an oak dictionary stand, waist-high and strong enough to support the enormous Oxford English Dictionary opened to the latest page Alice or Nelle had consulted. They placed it to the left of their plaid living room sofa, the one with skinny wooden arms, near the small stretch of built-in white bookcases that housed copies of
To Kill a Mockingbird
in Spanish and Italian, French and German, Polish and Russian.

In Mexia, the Jeters’ home looked over a ravine. Nelle suggested that perhaps she could toss all her belongings in there and burn them, preferably shortly before she died, so she wouldn’t have to worry about her personal things falling into the wrong hands. She was only half kidding. I looked over at the ravine as Judy pulled into Ila’s driveway.

Inside, Nelle nodded across the table at me. “You haven’t said much about Chicago, child.”

“It was a good trip. I got done what I needed to. And I ended up giving a party.” I took a quick sip of coffee. “A friend of mine at the paper—her name is Julia—got good news. She won a Pulitzer Prize, for feature writing.”

Nelle looked genuinely pleased. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said. She paused and gave me a pointed look, one that surprised me. “See?” she said. “It can happen.”

The
Chicago Tribune
friend, Julia Keller, wrote a three-part series that vividly re-created the destruction of a tornado that swept through Utica, Illinois. Residents were left not only to grieve their dead and rebuild the town but also to try to come to terms with the randomness of fate. When the tornado hit, what should have been decisions of no consequence instead meant the difference between life and death. Very quickly, the tornado took down buildings on one side of a street but left them intact on the other.

“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.

—

T
here 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

I
t 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 of 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.