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 acceptance would result in the teacher’s immediate immobilization?
“I threw up my hands like somebody had a gun on me,” she said.
“He wanted to show me that he was not guilty of killing his wife. And I said, ‘You don’t need to explain anything to me. It’s between you and God.’”
“He said, ‘I’m still interested in what I told you,’” meaning the time in every man’s life when he sees what he wants.
“I said, ‘I can’t understand how you can be a reverend and say those things about somebody who isn’t your wife.’”
And the Reverend replied, “I consult God about everything I do.”
The story would have surely entranced Harper Lee, convincing her even more that she had found her subject, along with an invaluable source. But all Levelma Simmons recalls her saying is “I need to tape this. Can I come back tomorrow?”
Of course she could. Lee would speak with Simmons many times after that, until she’d been in Alexander City for six months. Her sessions with the schoolteacher moved from the classroom to the Simmons home and dinner table, where Lee would join Levelma and Otis for chicken, cornbread, turnip greens, and conversation.
Only later did evidence of her months in Alexander City emerge, usually in the unlikeliest of places. Sheralyn Belyeu received an “entire set” of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the Alexander City Salvation Army thrift shop as a gift from her husband, she says. The volume containing the H’s held a surprise: a thank-you letter from Harper Lee to a mother and daughter who had held a cocktail party for her in their home. The letter was dated July 11, 1978.
“You simply can’t beat the people in Alex City for their warmth, kindness and hospitality,” she wrote in the letter, later unearthed by the writer Casey Cep, who has written about Harper Lee for The New Yorker, including in a March 17, 2015, story titled “Harper Lee’s Abandoned True-Crime Novel.” “If I fall flat on my face with this book, I won’t be terribly disappointed because of knowing that the time I spent with you was not time lost, but friends gained,” Lee wrote. “This is not remotely goodbye, because I’ll be coming back until doomsday, so until next Fall, love to you both, Harper Lee.”
• • •
“I probably know more about the Reverend Maxwell’s activities than does any other individual,” she would write to the Alabama novelist Madison Jones in another letter discovered by Casey Cep.
To see the fruits of her labor, you have to go to a nice house on a suburban street in Alexander City, where the last known work of Harper Lee has come to rest.
There are only four pages.
Written across the top of the first page, in what appears to be Lee’s handwriting, is the title: THE REVEREND.
Ellen Radney Price, daughter of the late attorney Tom Radney, dead since 2011, shows the pages in her dining room: a long table surrounded by chairs for “company,” as dinner guests are called in the South. In a room nearby, shelves hold a dozen or more binders containing documents from the life of Tom Radney.
And there, in the center of the dining room table, are the pages.
Four typed pages by the immortal Harper Lee.
It is August 2017, the end of another hot Alabama summer. Ellen Price carefully turns the pages, which are encased in plastic and bound in a three-ring binder kept in a big leather scrapbook, one of many that hold her father’s papers.
Price is both proud and protective of Tom Radney’s papers. He gave Lee his files, correspondence, and other documentation related to cases involving the Reverend. He never got them back.
“Big Tom gave it to her with the understanding that she was going to write the book,” says Price. And then the illustrious novelist left with the files—part of his legacy! Lee not only didn’t return the files, but she kept stringing him along with hope that the book would soon be finished. “Saying, ‘Oh, I’ve done that much, I’ve done this much,’” says Price. “Big Tom certainly held on to hope that it would eventually be written.”
“Gave everything to her,” she continues. “Big Tom went to New York once to get it back, maybe twice.”
He was left with just these four pages.
If you want to see the pages, you have to come here, to Ellen Price’s home. You have to earn your way through the door. You must promise not to quote a word from the pages—you may describe them, summarize them, but direct quotes are strictly forbidden.
These four pages are proof that Harper Lee wrote something during her months spent researching the Reverend. They are also proof that she was close enough with Tom Radney, whom everyone here still calls Big Tom, to give him some of her priceless prose.
The pages are impressive. Just four of them, and yet her intelligence, sophistication, and sheer towering love for Alabama and its history radiate from every page. The hero, it seems, at least from this sample, was the attorney.
“This did not happen over a six-month time frame,” says Ellen Price about the relationship between Harper Lee and her father. “This happened over decades. Their friendship, her interest
