MONROEVILLE

Which?	To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
What?	Deep South US town that inspired a simple tale of racial heroism

NO ONE’S in a hurry in this tired old town. Maybe it’s the heat – the Alabama summer is stultifying, sticky as molasses. It would be swell to swing on a porch all afternoon with an icy Coca-Cola. But this bench under the main square’s live oaks and magnolias will do just fine. Folk pass by, strolling between the Christian bookshop, the thrift store and the fine old County Courthouse, its white dome dazzling under the sun. No case has been tried here for decades; indeed, its most famous case wasn’t tried here at all. But it remains a potent symbol of justice all the same …

Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, delivered the right message in the right tone at the right moment. A simple tale of prejudice, unjustness and morality, it was published in 1960, just as the American South faced its biggest social shift since the Civil War. The equality movement was gaining momentum; deeply entrenched attitudes to race and class were being challenged. Alabama saw some of the highest-profile acts. It was in Montgomery in 1955 that Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. In 1956, anti-integration riots erupted when Autherine Lucy and Polly Myers became the first African-American students to be admitted to the state’s university.

Though set in 1930s Alabama, during the Great Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird matched the mood of the sixties, and gave voice to the fears and frustrations of this transitional period. It showed the country it needed a conscience and offered an unimpeachable hero: Atticus Finch – single parent, lawyer, ‘the bravest man who ever lived’. Atticus, the father of child narrator Scout, defends Tom Robinson, an innocent black man, against charges of raping a white woman. Atticus knows he is destined to fail, but he proceeds with the case nonetheless.

The Finch family live in Maycomb, technically a fictional place but so modelled on the author’s home of Monroeville that the two inevitably merge – the footsteps of Harper Lee and Atticus Finch lead the same way. Maycomb is an isolated, insular, hard-scrabble town, steeped in Southern values. Monroeville is similarly out on a limb, similarly Southern-hospitable, similarly facing testing times. Its former clay streets – ‘red slop’ in the rain – have been paved but the population is low and falling (currently 6,000 or so) and there’s a slight air of decrepitude around the old square, where many businesses have closed. However, its cultural impact has not faded.

Monroeville’s literal and literary heart is the County Courthouse. Completed in 1904, this Romanesque clock-towered seat of justice was used until 1963. Attorney A.C. Lee fought many cases here, with daughter Nelle Harper Lee watching from the balcony. In the 1970s the building was almost demolished. But it was surreptitiously placed on the National Register of Historic Places and saved. Restored to its 1930s glory, the Courthouse is now a museum where you can sit in the judge’s chair, climb to the ‘coloreds’ balcony’ and, each spring, watch the Mockingbird play, which recreates the novel’s action in situ.

A circuit of the square passes the two-storey Monroe County Bank Building (inside which A.C. Lee once practised law) and the tiny jailhouse – ‘a miniature Gothic joke’ – where the likes of Tom Robinson were once interred; it’s now an annex to the Sheriff’s Department. Alabama Avenue leads from the square’s southeast corner. A little way down, past the car parks and uninspiring office buildings, is Mel’s Dairy Dream, a small retro drive-thru selling burgers and shakes. This was the site of Lee’s childhood home, torn down in 1953. Next door, a low brick wall is all that’s left of the Faulk house, where a young Truman Capote would stay while visiting his Monroeville cousins, and where Truman and Nelle Harper became lifelong friends.

According to Atticus, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.’ Visiting Monroeville lets you walk a little with Harper Lee.