that close-knit family in Alabama, where her aunt created greatness, seemingly from thin air.
As she waits for the train to pull in to Birmingham Station, Molly recalls another time she was here: May 1976, the year of her wedding.
She remembers her famous aunt disembarking from the train with a magazine rolled up beneath her arm: the May 1976 issue of Esquire. Inside it, nitroglycerine: the third installment of Truman Capote’s serialized novel in progress, Answered Prayers, in which he continued his skewering of the women he called his Swans, his supposed best friends, the leaders of the international jet set.
“Truman has lost his mind,” Lee told her niece upon disembarking from the train that day. “All his friends! All his friends! He has just thrown them under the bus! I can’t believe this!”
Now, once again, the train comes screaming down the tracks. In white clouds of engine steam and a symphony of screeching train whistles, there she is, Harper Lee, appearing through the haze, invisible to all in her disguise of absolute austerity.
Home again and, most important, ready to write again.
The two women embrace in a chorus of Deep South exultations. Molly helps her aunt with her baggage: suitcases packed with simple, casual clothes, along with files, notebooks, cassette tape recorder, and manual typewriter. They climb into Molly’s burnt orange Volkswagen Beetle for the hour-and-a-half drive to Alexander City.
Lee would have surely made the place where the Reverend and his alleged victims died a character in her novel, just as she had immortalized Monroeville, thinly disguised as Maycomb in Mockingbird. “Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired town when I first knew it,” she wrote.
Alexander City, only 150 miles north of Monroeville, is anything but tired upon her arrival in the late 1970s. It is booming, its pretty little downtown square crowded with banks and restaurants and offices to serve the local population of nearly thirteen thousand. Most everyone works for the textile factory, Russell Mills, manufacturer of uniforms for professional and amateur sports teams worldwide, so successful that the mill runs night and day and still can’t keep pace with demand. Russell runs not only the town but also Lake Martin, at this time the largest man-made lake in the world, a vast body of water where the Russell family owns hundreds of Russell Cabins, leased out to vacationing local families through a company called Russell Lands. Molly’s in-laws lease one of these cabins, which they’ve graciously loaned to Harper Lee for her stay.
As Molly’s Volkswagen bumps along, it kicks up a storm of dust. The clay of Alabama is “so overwhelming,” as local author E. Paul Jones will later describe it, “that the leaves on the trees on the side of the road were covered in the mostly red dust as were the houses or other buildings near the road or downwind from the road.”
The cabin has no address. Just drive down this and that dirt road and eventually you are there. They pull up to the wooden structure, primitive at best, which surely makes Lee feel at home. She has just left a tiny apartment, from which she takes buses to restaurants, Mets games, museums, and anywhere else. Fiercely private, she doesn’t allow even her closest friends or family inside. Most neighbors know her only by the completed crossword puzzles she leaves on the building’s lobby entrance table each morning, according to the New York Post.
The cabin is on par with her spartan quarters in New York: one bath, two bedrooms, living area, and a dining table for a desk. In this strange new world, in a state she thought she knew so well, Lee will go forth in her rental car, a pint-size Toyota, which she keeps clean and polished to a sheen. And which, despite her stubborn loving care, is quickly covered in red dust and mud.
She doesn’t yet know that she has stumbled into a horror story. A story whose supposed ghosts haunted one local writer’s rented house near the Reverend’s former home. The writer fled after hearing scurrying sounds and bumps in the night, and experienced what she believed to be visits by various spirits. This despite the house having been painted floor to ceiling in “haint blue,” the color of protection against evil forces.
And now it is Harper Lee’s turn.
At this point, she has nothing but confidence and enthusiasm and, thanks to Molly, a crucial source: a local schoolteacher named Levelma Simmons, who knows the black community that Lee needs to penetrate, knows everyone Lee needs to interview, and is ready and eager to help. She and Molly used to teach underprivileged kids—black and white—at the same junior high school, and the teacher had regaled Molly with tales about the supposedly murderous deeds of Reverend Willie J. Maxwell. It was a story that seemed to unfurl like a radio serial, one death after another, each one more shocking than the last.
Molly reported these cases to her aunt as Lee shuttled between her apartment in New York City and her home in Monroeville—until the writer in her overcame her pursuit of privacy and she boarded a train headed south.
She would tell Maxwell’s story in a novel. While it would most likely be fiction, it would be based on what she called “straight journalism of the old-fashioned kind: facts.”
But Harper Lee is white, and the story is black.
• • •
In late-seventies Alabama, for a white woman like Lee, the black community was another world entirely. Going there alone would be like Capote’s arrival in Kansas: doors closing, along with mouths. Levelma Simmons, though, was not merely a teacher; she was a legend. The first African American to teach in the then all-white Coosa County schools before integration; the first black person elected president of the prestigious Alabama American Legion Auxiliary. And she had frequently been named Teacher of the Year. She had of course read To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a novel that transcended color and creed and distilled the racial problems in Alabama into a solution rooted in tolerance.
“My aunt is coming to write the Maxwell story,” Simmons recalls Molly telling her one day. “Could she come and talk to you?”
Of course she could, she replied.
And so, after school one afternoon, Simmons awaited the world-famous author in the trailer that served as the underprivileged school’s classroom. The author of Mockingbird—in her classroom! Needing her help! Scenes from the beloved book raced through her head. And then, without fanfare, she was there: Harper Lee, arriving at the appointed hour, all hi and how-ur-yew, her usual warm and gracious self, down to earth, Alabama to her core.
Simmons sat at her desk in the empty trailer, and Lee folded her tomboy frame into a small student desk. She herself was now a student, starting where all writers do on a project, no matter their past achievements, no matter how great their fame: ground zero.
The teacher’s words poured out in a torrent.
“I know all of the people who died,” she began. “I cannot tell you that he did them.” She added that nobody could say he had murdered anyone for sure. “But he probably did.”
She would take Lee through all of the “accidents” and tell her about all of the people involved. She would try to open doors to families and friends she knew. For today, though, she began as she usually did when she told the story: with an encounter she’d had with Reverend Maxwell.
“The evil part of him was circulating,” she recalls having told Lee. “He approached and said, ‘Sister, there comes a time in every man’s life when he sees what he wants.’”
Oh, Lord have mercy, she thought. “I believe in prayer and I said, ‘God, you gotta give me some strength here.’”
Simmons was happily married, to longtime teacher and school principal Otis Simmons, but she had heard that the Reverend had powers. “He could have for himself any woman he desired,” E. Paul Jones would later write in his book on the case, To Kill a Preacher.
“Those eyes he had!” Simmons continued. “I went down to the drugstore and composed myself. And when I came out of the drugstore, there he stands, trying to hand me something!”
Was it an herb? A voodoo powder? A potion whose mere