I Am Scout (11 page)

When Michael and Joy heard that Nelle would be alone on Christmas Eve, they invited her to stay the night and through breakfast, too. It was only right, they said.

Early Christmas morning, Nelle opened one eye to see a little boy in footie pajamas eagerly commanding her to rise and shine. Downstairs everyone had already gathered at the foot of the Christmas tree and was preparing to distribute presents. Michael had built a crackling fire in the fireplace. The Browns were in an especially happy mood because Michael had received a financial windfall from his musical comedy special,
He's for Me,
slated to be aired on NBC in July. Things couldn't have been better.

The adults never exchanged expensive gifts because Michael and Joy, knowing that Nelle couldn't afford them, had introduced a game about gift giving: the person who gave the least expensive, cleverest gift won. This Christmas, Nelle was pleased with herself because she'd found two gems: a postcard portrait of someone Michael admired and a used book of witty sayings for Joy. With pride, she handed out her gifts.

And then she waited … and she waited. Nothing came her way. The Browns, smiling to themselves, let her wait a little longer.

Finally, Joy said, “We haven't forgotten you. Look on the tree.”

Poking out from the branches was a white envelope addressed “Nelle.” Inside was a note: “Dear Nelle, You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”

“What does this mean?” she asked.

“What it says.” They told her to total up what it would cost for a year to stay home and write full-time. That sum was their gift.

Several seconds passed before she found her voice. “It's a fantastic gamble. It's such a great risk.”

Michael smiled. “No, honey. It's not a risk. It's a sure thing.”

She went to the window, “stunned by the day's miracle,” she remembered later. “Christmas trees blurred softly across the street, and firelight made the children's shadows dance on the wall beside me. A full, fair chance for a new life. Not given me by an act of generosity, but by an act of love.
Our faith in you
was really all I had heard them say.”
13

A few weeks later, Nelle wrote rapturously to a friend,

Have you had time enough to think that over? The one stern string attached is that I will be subjected to a sort of
19
th Century regimen of discipline: they don't care whether anything I write makes a nickel. They want to lick me into some kind of seriousness toward my talents, which of course will destroy anything amiable in my character, but will set me on the road to a career of sorts.… Aside from the et ceteras of gratefulness and astonishment I feel about this proposition, I have a horrible feeling that this
will
be the making of me.…
14

She would have to carefully budget the Browns' gift of money, but it was enough to pay rent, utilities, and groceries. She quit her job at the airline and soon her schedule fell into place: out of bed in the late morning, a dose of coffee, and then to work—all day long until midnight sometimes. All she needed was “paper, pen, and privacy.”
15

Under this “regimen of discipline,” her output soared.

*   *   *

Six months later, she arrived at the offices of publisher J. B. Lippincott & Co. for an appointment to discuss her novel. With the help of a husband-and-wife pair of agents, Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain, Nelle had submitted a manuscript for a novel she had titled
Atticus
, which later became
To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Lippincott editors who assembled to meet her were all men except one: a late-middle-aged woman dressed in a business suit with her steel gray hair pulled tightly behind her. Her name was Theresa von Hohoff, but she preferred the less stern-sounding Tay Hohoff. She was short and rail-thin, with an aristocratic profile and a voice raspy from smoking cigarettes.
16

Among Tay's principal delights were working with eager young authors. But she also spent lots of time with her bookish husband, Arthur, and—this was a near obsession—adopted cats in need of homes. As she studied the “dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman [who] walked shyly into our office on Fifth Avenue,” her instincts told her she would like her.
17

To Nelle, the meeting was excruciating. The editors talked to her for a long time about
Atticus,
explaining that, on the one hand, her “characters stood on their own two feet, they were three-dimensional.” On the other, the manuscript had structural problems: it was “more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel.” They made a number of suggestions about how to address their concerns. Turning her head back and forth to acknowledge the remarks from this roundtable dissection, Nelle obediently kept nodding and replying in her gentle Southern accent, “Yes sir, yes ma'am.”
18
She assured them that she would try. Finally, they wished her luck on a revision and hoped to see her again.

Tay hadn't wanted to discourage her. Even though Nelle had never published anything, not even an essay or short story, her draft of a novel “was clearly not the work of an amateur,” Tay decided.
19
In fact, it was hard to believe that Nelle was in her early
30
s and had waited until now to approach a publisher. “[B]ut as I grew to know her better,” Tay said later, “I came to believe the cause lay in an innate humility and a deep respect for the art of writing. To put it another way, what she wanted with all her being was to
write
—not merely to ‘be a writer.'”
20

At the end of the summer, Nelle resubmitted her manuscript to Tay, who wanted to work with her. “It was better. It wasn't
right,
” Tay realized. “Obviously, a keen and witty and even wise mind had been at work; but was the mind that of a professional novelist? There were dangling threads of plot, there was a lack of unity—a beginning, a middle, an end that was inherent in the beginning.”
21
Nevertheless, Tay was convinced that Nelle's willingness to accept criticism meant the book could be molded into shape. In October, Lippincott offered her a contract with an advance of a few thousand dollars so she could continue writing full-time. She was elated and offered to begin paying back the Browns their Christmas “loan,” as she insisted on calling it. But Michael, more experienced about the ways of publishing, recommended that she wait.

*   *   *

As editor and author got down to the business of working together, Tay discovered that Nelle's speaking and writing voices were very similar—funny, subtle, and engaging, perfectly suited for the novel with a Southern setting she wanted to write. Tay encouraged Nelle to keep writing in that vein about Monroeville and its people. But as the Lippincott editors had tried to explain, a short story—even a series of short stories with the same setting and main character—is different from a novel. A short story usually hangs by one incident or revelation. A novel, however, needs an overarching story, deep and big enough to encompass everything else, especially the ongoing development over time of related characters and themes. The engine of this unifying story has to include continuing tension arising from a major conflict too, enough to keep the reader turning the novel's pages. What story could Nelle write about, Tay wanted to know, that could pull everything else together?

For many years now, ever since the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird
in
1960
, many readers, teachers, and scholars have assumed that Nelle chose to tell in her novel a version of the infamous Scottsboro Boys trials in
1931
–
37
. But that's wrong.

The Scottsboro “boys”—teenagers, none older than
19
—were nine young black men accused of raping two white girls in boxcars on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis, as the train crossed the Alabama border on March
25
,
1931
. The public was fascinated by the story because of its sheer ugliness. During the first trial, in Scottsboro, Alabama, their legal representation came from an alcoholic real estate attorney and his incompetent assistant. Newspapers boosted their circulations by blaring the sexual and racist angles of testimony with headlines such as “All Negroes Positively Identified by Girls and One White Boy Who Was Held Prisoner with Pistol and Knives While Nine Black Fiends Committed Revolting Crime.” The jury found all of the accused guilty; the judge sentenced eight of the nine defendants to death, with the exception of a
12
-year-old who was considered too young to die.

During a second trial, ordered by the United States Supreme Court, four of the accused were released after all charges against them were dropped. Eventually, all of the Scottsboro Boys were paroled, freed, or pardoned, except for one, who was tried and convicted of rape and given the death penalty four times. He escaped from prison in Alabama and fled to Detroit. After his arrest by the FBI in the
1950
s, the governor of Michigan refused to extradite him to Alabama.

These events, most of which occurred when Nelle was about the age of her child-narrator Scout, would seem to be the historical foundation of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
The racial injustice during the Scottsboro trials is on display; the white juries' fear of black-white sexual relations is obvious; and the courage of the two highly skilled attorneys who finally won the case for the Scottsboro Boys can be grafted onto Atticus Finch.

The trouble is, the scope of those trials was too big, too excessive for Nelle's purposes. In her novel she wanted “to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world,” she later told an interviewer.
22
The courtroom scene of Atticus defending Tom Robinson from a false charge of rape, for example, compresses a history of racial injustice into one hot afternoon. By comparison, the Scottsboro Boys case—a dragged-out national scandal involving nine young men and two women—was huge and too far removed from Nelle's experience.

Nelle later stated as much years after writing
To Kill a Mockingbird.
In a
1999
letter to Hazel Rowley, author of
Richard Wright: The Life and Times,
Nelle said that she did not have so sensational a case as the Scottsboro Boys in mind.
23
Most likely, she used a crime that shocked the readers of the
Monroe Journal
when she was a child and her father was editor/publisher of the newspaper. A black man living near Monroeville was accused of raping a white woman.

*   *   *

On Thursday, November
9
,
1933
, the
Monroe Journal
reported that Naomi Lowery told authorities that a black laborer, Walter Lett, had raped her the previous Thursday near a brick factory south of Monroeville.
24

Both Walter and Naomi were luckless types, floating on the surface of the economic hard times. In his early
30
s, Walter had done less than ten years in the state prison farm in Tunnel Springs, Alabama, draining swamps and cutting roads through wooded areas. The length of his sentence suggests that he was convicted of drunkenness or fighting. Naomi,
25
, had drifted into Monroe County with her husband, Ira, and son. They were too poor to afford even a radio.
25

Regardless, Naomi was white, and her word mattered more than a black laborer's. Walter desperately protested that he didn't know his accuser and that he was working elsewhere during the time of the assault. It may have been that he and Naomi were lovers, or that she was involved with another black man. If a white woman became pregnant under those circumstances, it was not uncommon for her to claim rape or to accuse someone other than her lover.

For six months Lett awaited trial until the circuit court's spring term commenced in the Monroe County Courthouse.

He was arraigned on March
16
,
1934
, on a grand jury indictment on a capital crime of rape, which carried the death penalty. He pled “not guilty.” Ten days later, circuit court judge F. W. Hare—who would later jump-start Alice Lee's career—and a jury of
12
white men heard Walter's testimony. The case took an unusually long time to be heard and decided. It was not until
9
:
00
P
.
M
. that the jury returned to the courtroom with its guilty verdict and fixed “the punishment at death by electrocution.”
26

However, the verdict didn't sit well with some of the leading citizens of Monroeville and the county at large. Objections reached the statehouse in Montgomery, and on May
8
, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Governor B. M. Miller granted a stay of execution. Governor Miller reset the date of execution for June
20
. A second reprieve moved the date again, to July
20
. The reason for the stays, Governor Miller told the
Montgomery Advertiser,
was that “many leading citizens of Monroe County” had written to him stating, as he expressed it: “I am of the opinion and conviction that there is much doubt as to the man being guilty.”
27

One of the petitioners may well have been Mr. Lee. He was the publisher and editor of the
Monroe Journal,
a director of the Monroe County Bank, an attorney, and an elected representative from Monroeville. If his name wasn't among the “many leading citizens of Monroe County” calling for clemency, Walter's cause might have suffered. In response, Governor Miller commuted Walter's sentence from death in the electric chair to life imprisonment.