Chapter Four
NELLE DIDN’T APPEAR to be interested in flirting with boys or dating, like a majority of teenage girls. Instead of climbing up inside the clock tower to spy on boys, she preferred viewing them on the ground in games of football. One afternoon, Nelle convinced some boys to let her play in their scrimmage. One of the local football heroes did not want her to play and said so, but she ignored him—at first. When Nelle’s friend A. B. Blass passed her the ball, she took off toward the goal line and stiff-armed the football hero, knocking him under a tree. When he protested that they were only playing touch football, Nelle replied, “I thought we were going to play ball!”
Nelle still saw Truman during his summer visits to Monroeville. One time he arrived in a chauffer-driven Buick, according to A. B. Blass, who was playing baseball with his friends in the empty lot next to the Courthouse.
“Can I play ball with you fellows?” Truman asked when he got out of the car. But nobody wanted Truman on their team since he swung a bat like he was chopping wood, and he never paid attention when playing out in right field. Balls would sail right past him, and he’d never even notice.
Finally, Bass said that Truman sighed, “Sure is hot. Would y’all like a set-up? My treat.” This was a ten-cent drink at the soda fountain, and all the boys decided to take him up on his offer.
Once at the soda fountain, Blass said, “We either ordered double Limeade or Dope. After we finished our set-ups, we picked Truman to play on our team.” But whenever he was in town after that and wanted to play ball, Bass said the boys always demanded a set-up first. Naturally Truman charged everything to Aunt Jenny’s account.
Nelle’s most influential high school teacher, Miss Gladys Watson, became her friend and mentor for life. Miss Watson lived across the street from the Lee family, and she was the one who introduced Nelle to British literature. Miss Watson (who married much later in life to become Mrs. Gladys Watson Burkett) emphasized the three Cs in her teaching: “clarity, coherence, and cadence.” She expected students to study the rules of grammar, and if they didn’t get it right the first time, they rewrote their papers until every comma splice or run-on sentence was eradicated. Nelle adored her teacher and loved nineteenth-century British authors, especially Jane Austen, who became a tremendous influence on her. Nelle later told an interviewer that she wanted to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama.
Monroe County High School had no monthly newspaper nor even a yearbook where a student’s creative writing might have been noticed, so it is not known if Miss Watson thought Nelle was going to be a writer when she was a student. However, it is clear that she instilled a love of language and reading in her pupil. Nelle said years later, “There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.”
Nelle spent many hours in the school library, reading those beautiful sentences. The town had built a brand-new high school in 1936, and Nelle was a student there from 1940 to 1944.
On January 25, 1940, a raging fire in the middle of the night burned down Truman’s family’s house next door to the Lees’. It was one of the coldest nights of the year in Monroeville, with the temperature dipping down to eleven degrees. Fire and smoke filled the neighborhood, and by the time the Volunteer Fire Department had extinguished the fire, the house had burned to the ground. Neighbors soon appeared with blankets and food to help the Faulks, as was the custom when anybody in town was in trouble. The family escaped unharmed except for Queenie, Sook’s dog, who died in the fire. The home that Nelle, Truman, and Big Boy had spent so many hours in as children was gone.
On December 7, 1941, when Nelle was a sophomore in high school, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The very next day, the United States declared war on Japan and entered into World War II. During the following four years, over sixteen million Americans served in the armed forces, including Nelle’s brother, Ed, who joined the Army Air Corps at age twenty-one. Many other boys with whom Nelle grew up fought, too: A. B. Blass, George Thomas Jones, Charles Ray Skinner, and Big Boy. Nelle was thirteen when the war began, and it ended during her freshman year at Huntingdon College, in 1945.
A close-up of Nelle’s tenth-grade class at Monroe County High School, 1941. She is standing on the far right.
During those wartime years, Nelle’s family, like most families in the United States, had to ration butter, sugar, meat, gasoline, and many other products in order to support the war effort. Scrap metal, from bottle tops to car bumpers, was donated to help, too. Mr. Lee and his law office sold war bonds, which were similar to today’s savings bonds. Alice volunteered for the Red Cross. Louise was married and living with her new baby in Eufaula, Alabama, while her husband was stationed overseas. Mobile, Alabama, just a hundred miles south of Monroeville, became a boomtown, with ammunition factories springing up everywhere. Women also entered the workforce like never before, since the men were away at war.
Nelle graduated from high school in 1944 and followed Alice’s lead by attending Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. Alice was a sister to look up to and learn from, which Nelle made a gallant effort to do especially as an undergraduate, when she thought she would become a lawyer like her father and sister.
In 1937 Alice had moved to Birmingham, Alabama, to take a job with the Internal Revenue Service in its Social Security division. She resumed her education at that time, which had been interrupted by the Great Depression, by attending night school at the Birmingham School of Law. She passed the Bar exam in 1943 and left her IRS job because a new position had opened for her back in Monroeville—in her father’s law firm.
Today, at age ninety-seven, Alice still practices law in that same firm, Barnett, Bugg, & Lee.
Nelle’s freshman year was her first time away from home, and while she hadn’t acted like the majority of girls in Monroeville, she fit in even less with the young ladies at Huntingdon. Smoking cigarettes was quite common among the coeds at Huntingdon, but not the pipe that Nelle was seen smoking in her dorm room. She preferred brushing her hair to curling it, she didn’t wear makeup, and she wore Bermuda shorts instead of skirts whenever possible. Girls were expected to dress in evening gowns at least once a month for dinners, and Nelle avoided these events. One of her classmates, Catherine Helms, described her this way: “She wasn’t worried about how her hair looked or whether she had a date on Friday night like the rest of us were. I don’t remember her sitting around and giggling and being silly and talking about what our weddings were going to be like—that’s what teenage girls talked about. She was not part of our ‘girl group.’ She never had what we call in the South ‘finishing touches.’ ”
Nelle, however, excelled in her classes and academic work, making the dean’s list her first semester. But what is most remembered about her is her great athleticism. She could spike a volleyball and was one of the top soccer players at the school. Nelle was simply ahead of her time in that she chose to be comfortable with who she was rather than try to fit in. She refused to march to the same drumbeat of marriage and children that the majority of women were expected to heed in that era. Her early stories reveal a writer ready to tackle subjects that had nothing to do with love or romance or the latest styles.
Her closest friend at Huntingdon was a young woman named Jeanne Foote, and in Jeanne she found a friend with whom to discuss literature and politics, subjects that didn’t seem to appeal much to other students at Huntingdon. In an interview with Charles Shields, Foote said, “Those conversations were very important to me. I don’t think that there were others at Huntingdon—whom I knew and had ready access to—who had these same interests.”
Nelle wrote some of her first articles for the campus newspaper, The Huntress, and published some of her first pieces of fiction in the college literary magazine, The Prelude. Two of her fictional stories, “A Wink at Justice” and “Nightmare,” feature courtroom settings and lynchings.
“A Wink at Justice” opens in a courtroom thick with “tobacco smoke, cheap hair oil, and perspiration.” The jury is a group of “august boys” with cuspidors at strategic spitting distance. Eight black men are on trial for gambling behind a warehouse. After a quick study of eight pairs of hands, Judge Hanks dismisses three of the men and charges the other five with sixty days in jail. The judge notes that the three men had corns on their hands, which meant they were hardworking, family men. He explains, “It was the ones with soft, smooth hands that I was after. They’re the ones who gamble professionally, and we don’t need that sort of thing around here. . . .”
In “Nightmare,” a child recalls witnessing a lynching, and feeling icy cold in the burning August heat. After the hanging, passersby discuss it like a sporting event. “ . . . Best hanging I’ve seen in twenty years. . . .”
It is clear from these two short pieces that Nelle was already beginning to experiment with the setting and action that would become the very heart of To Kill a Mockingbird.
