Harper Lee

NELLE HARPER LEE was a kid who stomped through flower beds, shot rubber-band guns, and once broke a boy’s front tooth. She even mopped the pavement with “Big Boy,” whose real name was Jennings Carter. It made his mama so mad she could have beat Nelle’s bottom off, and she said so.

Even playing games, Nelle could be rough. As “queen of the tomboys,” Nelle raced around on the playground in a fierce battle of dodgeball one day at school. During the game, a boy kept sneaking up behind her to yank her hair. The first two times, he was successful, but by the third time, she was ready for him and punched him in the stomach. Humiliated, the boy sought the help of two boys to get even, but when Nelle quickly beat up his friends, one right after the other, all three took off running.

Once when Nelle was up to bat during the girls’ physical recreation period, Jane Hybart was playing first base. The shortstop intercepted Nelle’s grounder and threw it toward first base. Instead of letting herself be thrown out, Nelle plowed right over the first base-man, knocking her flat.

Nelle was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children. She lived on South Alabama Avenue about a block from the town square, in a white house with a front porch swing, which was perfect for rocking on warm summer nights. She grew up with the nickname “Dody.” It may have felt to Nelle like she had been born into a family of grown-ups. Her oldest sister, Alice, or “Bear” as she was called, was fifteen years her senior and close to going off to college in Montgomery by the time Nelle was born. Louise (“Weezie”) was ten years older than Nelle and considered the prettiest girl in the Lee family. But Weezie was too busy with her studies and friends to have much time to play with her youngest sibling. Nelle’s brother, Edwin, whom they called “Brother,” was six years older, and was one of Nelle’s first storytellers.

Perhaps the most influential person in Nelle’s life was her father, Amasa Coleman Lee. He was the kind of father who encouraged all of his children to become educated and to work hard in any career they chose. This made him something of an anomaly in the South, where traditionally daughters were expected to be ladylike in all manner of dress and activities. If girls attended the University of Alabama at all, it was often primarily to find a husband. But Mr. Lee never seemed to burden any of his daughters with the expectation of marriage and motherhood. By his own example, he instilled in them the value of contributing to society in positive ways.

A. C. Lee was born in Alabama in 1880 and moved with his family to Florida when he was two. He started off as a teacher in Florida at the age of sixteen but wanted a better job, so he moved to Monroe County to work as a bookkeeper for the Bear Creek Mill Company in Manistee, Alabama. When the company went under in 1905, he worked at another sawmill in North Monroe County. Nelle’s mother, Frances Finch Cunningham Lee, was born in North Monroe County, Alabama, in 1888 and lived on a plantation with 9,000 acres. Mr. Lee eventually met his future wife in Finch-burg, Alabama.

After Nelle’s parents married on June 22, 1910, they lived in Florida, where Alice was born in 1911. Louise arrived in 1916, followed by Edwin in 1920. Six years later, Nelle was born. Her name was Ellen spelled backward, after her maternal grandmother.

In 1913, the law firm Barnett and Bugg hired Mr. Lee to move to Monroeville to manage a railroad the firm owned. He was also a self-taught lawyer and became a member of the Alabama State Legislature. In those days, ambitious young men could become lawyers by studying and reading law books on their own. They did not have to attend law school. Mr. Lee passed the Alabama State bar exam in 1915.

After he became a lawyer, the law firm changed its name to Barnett, Bugg & Lee. While still practicing law, Mr. Lee became the editor of the local town newspaper, the Monroe Journal, and was editor from 1928 to 1947. In his editorials, Mr. Lee took the time to explain situations in clear and simple language. People in town admired and respected him as a voice of reason.

Mrs. Lee was overweight and had what her daughter Alice described as a “nervous disorder,” which some people say may have been due to depression or possibly bipolar disorder, when a person’s moods swing from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. Sometimes Mrs. Lee talked a blue streak to passersby, while at other times she’d retreat into silence. Nelle’s friend Truman claimed that in one of her more verbose states, Mrs. Lee inspired the first short story he wrote as a child, called “Mrs. Busybody.” Another lady said Mrs. Lee used to call out to her from the front porch, “Get out of the hot sun!” whenever she’d pass by the house on her way to work.

The neighborhood paperboy, A. B. Blass, described Mrs. Lee as a quiet lady who sat on the porch swing each day almost as if in a private dreamworld. When he arrived on his bicycle, Mrs. Lee would always repeat the same thing in a gentle voice: “You’re certainly a nice young man.”

Mr. Lee took his wife out for drives, and a resident who remembered seeing them on a regular basis described Mrs. Lee as seated in the front seat, staring straight ahead, never waving or making eye contact. In the South, it is a common practice to wave to friends and strangers as a form of polite greeting, but often Mrs. Lee did not. People who recalled Nelle’s mother remember her as a distant woman. But in a letter published in O magazine, Nelle said her mother read her a story every day when she was a child, typically a classic children’s story like an Uncle Wiggily book.

Truman told his biographer Gerald Clarke that Nelle’s mother tried to drown her in the bathtub twice as a baby, but her older sisters, Alice and Louise, rescued her. Alice flatly denied that this incident ever happened, as did Nelle. Though she and Truman were best friends in childhood and helped each other as writers after they grew up, they drifted apart in later years. Nelle was very upset by Truman’s story, and in a letter to Caldwell Delaney, a friend and former director of the Museum of Mobile, she wrote:

Truman’s vicious lie—that my mother was mentally unbalanced and tried twice to kill me (that gentle soul’s reward for having loved him)—was the first example of his legacy to his friends. Truman left, in the book, something hateful and untrue about every one of them, which more than anything should tell you what was plain to us for more than the last fifteen years of his life—he was paranoid to a terrifying degree. Drugs and alcohol did not cause his insanity, they were the result of it.

Whatever attention Nelle may or may not have gotten from her mother, she received a tremendous amount of love and respect from her father. In his spare time, A. C. loved to play golf, and he wore the same clothes golfing that he wore to the office—fine suit, fedora, dress shoes, and always a pocket watch. Many articles about Harper Lee have stated that Mr. Lee was a direct descendent of General Robert E. Lee, although this is not true. However, he was very much like the character Atticus Finch.

Nelle was two years old when President Herbert Hoover declared, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. We have not yet reached the goal—but . . . we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”

Ironically, President Hoover spoke these words one year before the stock market crash of October 1929, which caused more monetary loss than the total cost of World War I and ignited the Great Depression. Banks closed, businesses failed, and the average family income fell from $2,300 in 1929 to $1,600 by 1935. The Great Depression lasted from 1929 into World War II, spanning most of Nelle’s childhood. It was the most severe economic depression “experienced by the industrial Western world.” Twenty-three thousand businesses failed in 1929, and that number rose to thirty-two thousand by 1932. In 1931, 2,294 banks with deposits totaling $1.7 billion failed and consequently shut down. By 1933, it was estimated that thirteen million people were unemployed. Shanty-towns called “Hoovervilles” sprang up around the country, along with breadlines and soup kitchens. The phrase “Brother can you spare a dime?” became the national refrain.

Gas was only eighteen cents a gallon, but most folks didn’t have extra money for gasoline. One of the main modes of transportation during the Great Depression was called a Hoover cart, named after President Hoover. The cart consisted of a horse pulling two old automobile wheels under a wagon. Nelle’s family owned a car, which her father drove in a jerky fashion, pressing the gas, coasting, and then hitting the gas again hard. He thought this method saved on gasoline.

Alice had to leave college in 1929 to come home to work at the newspaper, because there was no more money to pay her tuition. She wound up working at the Monroe Journal for seven years. Alice wasn’t alone in cutting short her education during the Depression. Many young children were removed from school to find jobs to help their parents earn a living. The next president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, proclaimed during his March 1933 inauguration address, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He introduced a program he called “The New Deal,” which focused on “the three R’s—relief, recovery, and reform” in order to get the country back on track. Roosevelt and Congress concentrated on everything from unemployment insurance to the National Recovery Act, which helped people get jobs and fair wages. He also created the Works Progress Administration, which generated jobs for people to build highways, public buildings, and parkways, and even to create paintings. Nelle grew up looking at one of the WPA paintings at the Monroeville Post Office—a painting of a farmer and his mules cutting wheat on a hot summer day.

From big cities to small towns, just about everyone suffered during the Great Depression. In Monroeville, Nelle would have seen hobos hopping trains in search of food and work. Nelle once said about the Great Depression that “life was grim for many people who were not only poor but hungry, and their wants were absolutely basic.” There wasn’t much in the Lee household, but nobody else had much to speak of either.

The Great Depression made a deep and lasting impact on Nelle. Even with all the profits from her book, she made a conscious decision early on to live frugally all her life. Close friends have described her this way: “She was raised in the Depression in a little Alabama town, and she still has the sensibility.” Growing up in Monroeville, there was no public library, no toys, and no extra money for treats.

Truman’s absent parents spoiled him with fancy gifts they couldn’t afford to win his love, but they left the raising of him to his Alabama relatives. Truman often visited his country cousin, Jennings Carter, known as “Big Boy,” who lived outside of Monroeville. When Truman visited Big Boy’s family, he saw that they had no running water or electricity, which meant “their lives were ruled by the sun: up at daylight, to bed at dark.” Town kids had a little bit more than country kids, since their parents or guardians (as in Truman’s case) were employed in law offices and shops, while country people depended on the land for every penny.

Just like the character Walter Cunningham Senior in To Kill a Mockingbird,for whom Atticus Finch works out a payment system, farmers or sharecroppers often paid their bills by trading sacks of sweet potatoes or a bushel of tomatoes or a bag of walnuts for services rendered.

More than anybody else in her family, it was Nelle’s big brother, Ed, who used to entertain Nelle and Truman. Nelle said:

When we were a bit too young to read, Brother, who was a voracious reader, would read many, many stories to us. Then we’d dramatize the stories in our own ways, and Truman would always provide the necessary comic relief to break up the melodrama. Actually, we were the only children on the street of an adult neighborhood. For a while there was the girl across the street, but she didn’t live there long. Of course, being the outsiders made it interesting for us. We were able to watch people better. That was our main interest: people watching.

One of Ed’s close friends, Charles Ray Skinner, remembered, “Ed was real smart. And he chose his friends, and luckily I was disposed to be one of his friends. He didn’t cut up like the rest of us did, but he was a nice guy.” He speculated that the reason Ed was more serious in public was because of responsibilities placed on him at home, like watching his little sister. But Ed was a good sport about it. “I’d see them doing sword fights in the front yard, playing, having a good time.”

Whether Nelle was sword fighting with Ed or swinging from a tree as Tarzan or making a backyard carnival with Truman and Big Boy, she knew how to create stories and bring them to life. In the last official, unrestricted interview she ever gave about her writing and childhood, Nelle said:

If I went to a film once a month it was pretty good for me, and for all children like me. We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn’t have much money. Nobody had any money. We didn’t have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was we lived in our imagination most of the time. We devised things; we were readers, and we would transfer everything we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama. Did you never play Tarzan when you were a child? Did you never tramp through the jungle or fight the battle of Gettysburg in some form or fashion? We did. Did you never live in a tree house and find the whole world in the branches of a chinaberry tree? We did.

One of the greatest presents Nelle’s father ever gave to her and Truman was a black Underwood No. 5 typewriter. Nelle preferred to make up stories and tell them, but Truman convinced her that typing was the way to go, since that was what real writers did. Truman said, “When we were children I had a typewriter and worked every day in a little room I used as an office. I convinced her she ought to write, too, so we would work there each day for two or three hours. She didn’t really want to, but I held her to it. We kept up that routine for quite a long time.”

We did not have the pleasure of the theatre, the dance, of motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertained each other by talking. It’s quite a thing, if you’ve never been in or known a small southern town. The people are not particularly sophisticated, naturally. They’re not worldly wise in any way. But they tell you a story whenever they see you. We’re oral types—we talk.

Truman was Nelle’s best friend, no matter how many scraps and scrapes they got into as children. They were even engaged to be married for a short time, but then Truman eloped with another girl. “He must have been about eight,” Nelle said. “We were having a fuss. He ran away with another little girl. They hitch-hiked to Evergreen [about twenty miles to the east, past Burnt Corn] but they were back by supper.”