learned anything, I’ve forgotten it.” On her achievements: “Success has had a very bad effect on me. I’ve gotten fat—but extremely uncomplacent. I’m running just as scared as before.”
“What’s going to happen when it’s shown in the South?” a reporter asked after the release of the movie based on her book.
“I don’t know. But I wondered the same thing when the book was published,” she responded. “But the publisher said not to worry, because no one can read down there.”
In response to the endless questions about her next book, she had this to say: “I guess I will have to quote Scarlett O’Hara on that. ‘I’ll think about that tomorrow.’”
Her first published story after Mockingbird was an essay in the April 1961 issue of Vogue. Entitled “Love—In Other Words,” it was a reflection on the meaning of love.
“Here, for Vogue, is the first article written by Harper Lee, a shy young woman who has an engaging drawl, immense happy eyes and, this year, the pleasure of having written an uncommon novel: To Kill a Mockingbird,” read the editor’s note introducing the essay. “Not unlike someone who might crop up in her 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
