own fiction, Nelle Harper Lee lives with her father and sister in a small Alabama town; they practice law, she writes. (A nonpracticing lawyer, she studied a year after law school as a Fulbright scholar at Oxford, then worked a stretch as a reservations clerk for BOAC [British Overseas Airways Corporation].)”
Later that same year, 1961, Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire, commissioned her to write a story about a subject she knew well, the Deep South. And while her draft of the story no longer seems to exist, the rejection letter does. “I feel lousy about returning this to you,” Hayes wrote, thanking her for her “willingness to be pursued relentlessly by us for a piece that was our idea for you to do.”
Next, in the December 1961 issue of McCall’s magazine, she wrote a short essay entitled “Christmas to Me.” It was a tender, heartwarming story of how a gift from her adopted family in New York City led to her writing To Kill a Mockingbird. Four years later, in the August 1965 issue of McCall’s, she wrote another short essay titled “When Children Discover America.”
Now, almost twenty years after all of that, she is once again ready to produce greatness, distill the world, catch lightning between the covers of a book. She is prodded, too, by her ardent older sister Alice, who, still vigorous at eighty-eight, will work in her law office every day into her hundreds.
Does she think about this next book on the train? Maybe over a $1.50 Scotch in the club car, as the Amtrak of those days advertised, or a $3.75 plate of “Fried Chicken in the Southern Tradition with Grits and Country Gravy (May we suggest a Chablis or Rosé wine to complete this entrée—$2.00 extra)”?
Does she drift off to sleep through the bumpy night? Or, if she sprang for the sleeper berth, does she lie awake and stare at the ceiling?
The Reverend, the Reverend, the Reverend … The words must have rumbled through her brain like the monotonous rhythm of the train barreling down the tracks. Behind her was what she once called the lonely life of writing; ahead were things she loved—crime, reporting on real things and real people, and, most of all, Alabama.
When the train dips down into the Southland, she is almost home. Soon she will be crossing the state line. As she wrote in Go Set a Watchman, the first draft of Mockingbird, the train “honked like a giant goose at its Northbound mate and rumbled across the Chattahoochee into Alabama.”
The impetus for her trip is the attorney John Tomas “Big Tom” Radney, a man of titanic will who represented both Reverend Maxwell and (only in Alabama) the man who killed him. “Oh!” the local folks exclaim upon hearing his name, one awestruck term to convey the famed attorney’s intense powers of persuasion. “Tom Terrific,” as the local newspaper editor called him, lorded over Alexander City, mythic in his victories in both politics and the courts. Once Tom Radney set his mind to something, it would be done.
Some say he summoned the famous author over the telephone, commanding her to get there pronto. Radney himself would say in a letter to a filmmaker, “Harper Lee called me and made arrangements to come to Alexander City.” Either way, persuasion was Tom Radney’s business, and he no doubt delivered a pitch that few writers could refuse: Five strange deaths. Small Alabama town. Voodoo preacher. Shot down in front of hundreds of mourners during the funeral for his last alleged victim, At the story’s center: none other than the famed attorney himself, who, Harper Lee would later write, “seemed to see himself as a cross between Robert Redford and Atticus Finch.”
And of course there was his name: Radney, only one letter away from the name of Mockingbird’s antihero: the recluse who finds redemption, Boo Radley.
On the train, she must be thinking about the last time she rode across America in search of stories. It was 1965, and she was traveling with Truman Capote to investigate what would become his true-crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood, about the brutal mass murder of a Kansas farm family, the Clutters. She had loved Capote since they were both five, living next door to each other in Monroeville. He was the thinly fictionalized Dill Harris in Mockingbird, that “pocket Merlin whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.” Capote became her co-conspirator and fellow writer when her lawyer father, Amasa Coleman Lee, the model for the forthright Atticus Finch, gave them a typewriter to share when they were kids.
In Kansas, doors would have slammed shut on Capote if he had been traveling alone. “Flamboyantly homosexual at a time when most people thought homosexuals should stay in the closet,” a Kansas professor of literature later reminisced in a story in the Wichita Eagle, recalling Capote speeding through town in a rented Jaguar. In his Charles de Gaulle hat and full-length pink Dior coat, Capote never would have gotten very far with the locals if not for Harper Lee.
In Kansas, she was likely greeted as just the “girl,” as Capote’s publisher, Bennett Cerf, once called her. “Nobody ever heard of her,” he’d said. She proved to be much more. With her sweet smile and good southern manners, she got those closed doors to open wide. She spent months “knocking on doors, buttonholing people in stores,” the Eagle reported. “She did much of the talking at first.”
Without Harper Lee, Truman Capote might have been lost. She accompanied him to interviews, covered the trials of the two murderers, and produced pages of neatly typed and immaculately organized research notes that showed both her fine eye for the telling detail and her insatiable quest for facts.
On and on her notes went, the facts from which Capote would mold his masterpiece. On her cover page she typed, “These Notes Are Dedicated to the Author of the Fire and the Flame. And the Small Person Who So Manfully Endured Him.”
All during her time in Kansas, she extolled Capote’s “genius” while making no mention of her own. But her grit and determination so impressed the two murderers in Capote’s book—the ruthless Perry Smith and Dick Hickock—that they invited her to attend their execution, according to Charles J. Shields in his 2006 biography, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. She declined, so as not to overshadow Capote, who not only attended but supposedly had fallen in love with one of the killers.
“The crime intrigued [Truman] and I’m intrigued by crime—and, boy, I wanted to go,” she once said. “It was deep calling to deep.”
Now deep is calling her again.
This time, though, she is riding solo. Without Capote, who has become a clown, a drunk, and, as she will later write, a “compulsive” liar. Without the support system that guided her through To Kill a Mockingbird: her trusted agent, Maurice Crain, who once wrote that he “handled it [Mockingbird] from the time it was a short story and a gleam in the author’s eye,” dead in 1970; and without her iron-willed editor, Tay Hohoff, her “invisible hand,” as The New York Times would call her, who helped turn her “series of anecdotes” into the Great American Novel, dead in 1974.
Now Harper Lee is alone on the tightrope, with only Alabama to catch her if she falls.
• • •
At the Birmingham train station, her niece is waiting.
Her name is Molly Chapman. Sweet Molly is the daughter of Harper Lee’s late older brother, Edwin Coleman Lee, who died at thirty-one and served as the model for Jem in Mockingbird. Recently married to Alexander City native Bobby Chapman, Molly taught junior high school in one of the poorer counties. She and her husband will serve as ambassadors to the author as she delves into the bloody story that has rocked their town to its core.
To Molly, the woman on the train is not Harper Lee. She’s her Aunt Dody.
The aunt whose bedroom window she climbed through as a little girl, seven years old, to watch Mockingbird being born and sneak peeks at the fresh new pages before Lee could shoo her away. “Do not go into my bedroom,” her aunt had commanded. “Do not touch my papers.” Which, of course, meant she climbed through the window and examined the papers the instant her aunt left the house. Molly often thought of those magical summers in Monroeville and the stacks of yellow paper growing beside her aunt’s typewriter, and the names she read upon them: Dill and Jem and Scout and Atticus, names that would soon