I Am Scout (2 page)

The benefits to Monroeville of the railroad's arrival were staggering. After
1912
, brick structures began replacing old weather-beaten wooden buildings, giving the town the appearance of real permanence. Although Monroeville's economy was based on only a handful of humble but necessary industries—a sawmill, a cotton ginnery, a gristmill, a fertilizer plant, a machine shop, lumberyard, and a waterworks plant—an enormous new high school opened the same year the railroad arrived, indicating that a better future lay ahead for Monroeville's young people.

A.C.'s career prospered in the offices of Barnett, Bugg & Jones. First, he served as the financial manager; then, by “reading for the law,” as it was called—a kind of home-schooling under the guidance of attorneys—he passed the bar examination in
1915
.

Plenty of legal cases would likely come his way, as Monroeville was the county seat. The enormous white-domed courthouse, built in
1903
in the center of the town square, was “one of the handsomest and most conveniently appointed in the state,” boasted the
Monroe Journal,
“and one that would do credit to a county far exceeding Monroe in wealth and population.”
13
From the corridors of the courthouse, all the administrators and servants of county government spent every weekday issuing a paper stream of court orders, motions, certificates, writs, deeds, wills, plats, bills of sale, affidavits, and depositions. As Scout says about Maycomb, the fictional town based on Monroeville, in
To Kill a Mockingbird,
“Because its primary reason for existence was government, Maycomb was spared the grubbiness that distinguished most Alabama towns its size.”
14

As a young attorney, A. C. Lee was appointed in 1919 to defend two blacks accused of murdering a white man. He lost; they both were hanged. (
History of Alabama and Her People
, 1927; photographer unidentified)

Steadily A. C. Lee was ascending the rungs of respectability: from teacher in a country school, to bookkeeper, to financial manager, to attorney.

*   *   *

Despite outward signs that the Lees were doing well, many people thought there was something a little odd about them. Mr. and Mrs. Lee were educated people, and their children—Alice, Louise, Edwin, and Nelle—were known to be bright and friendly. What seemed peculiar about the Lees were signs that the family was coping with problems at home.

To begin with, any thoughtful person could see that A. C. Lee tended to keep himself in check. He stuck to routines and was methodical and reserved. He often gave the impression of having something heavy on his mind.

“Mr. Lee was detached,” Truman's aunt Marie recalled, “not particularly friendly, especially with children.… He was not the sort of father who came up to his children, ruffled their hair, and made jokes for their amusement.”
15
In Mr. Lee's presence, said an acquaintance, “you didn't feel comfortable with him. But that he was nice.”
16

Part of his standoffishness around children may have been that he was already in his
50
s when Nelle was in first grade. (In
To Kill a Mockingbird,
Scout says about her father, “When Jem and I asked him why he was so old, he said he got started late, which we felt reflected on his abilities and his manliness.”)
17

Of course, some of his reserve may also have been rooted in Southern manners, too. Doctors, lawyers, teachers—professional people in general—were expected to behave in a courteous but authoritative way. They were educated, and therefore acknowledged leaders in the community. Said the son of a businessman who golfed with A. C. Lee for years, “I doubt they ever called each other by first names. Those were different times.”
18

Seen up close, A. C. Lee was of average height and weight, with a flat, serious face and mild expression. Behind a pair of large, round glasses, his thoughtful gaze looked owlish. Every weekday morning, he would walk down the steps of his wood-frame white one-story bungalow on South Alabama Avenue on his way to his law offices above the bank in the town square. He did not greet passersby on the street with a hearty “good morning.” If the weather was rainy, Mr. Lee drove his black Chevrolet. He was a Chevy man his entire life, not given to flashiness even though he was one of the wealthiest men in town.

He wore a dark three-piece suit that sagged and lost its crease in the Alabama heat during the summertime. He always wore a suit, everywhere, even when golfing and the only time anyone could recall him hunting. That day he trudged around under the trees and shot a few doves—almost as a favor to the friend who had invited him—then he went straight back to the office. He wasn't much interested in that sort of thing. One of his former golf caddies remembered Mr. Lee as “much more of an intellectual than a physical man. The image of shooting the mad dog or of facing down the crowd of rough necks [as Atticus Finch does] has never quite rung true to me. The strong intellectual stand, though, seems very natural.”
19

When he was lost in thought he had a habit of absentmindedly fumbling with things, including his watch, a fountain pen, or his special favorite: a tiny pocketknife. He flipped it up with his thumb and caught it like a coin while he talked. Once, a store clerk waited while Mr. Lee practiced flipping different penknives until he found one with exactly the right weight and balance. “He could hold it between two fingers and thump it in a way that it would just spin around,” recalled Charles Skinner, a friend of Nelle's older brother, Edwin. “He'd stand there and talk to you—he wouldn't look at the knife, he'd just thump it around. And it would just be whirling around in his hand. It was an automatic thing with him, I don't think he ever knew what he was doing.”
20

In addition to playing with objects while he spoke, his manner of speaking was slow and careful. He did not make conversation as much as let fall a comment that usually began with “ah-hem!” contained “uh,” and sometimes, for emphasis, ended with “ah-rum!”
21
Generally, he preferred listening to talking, while sucking on a piece of hard candy.

Even on social occasions, he was never one to cut loose. He never accepted a drink or offered to pay for one. A. C. Lee, everyone in town knew, was a strict Methodist, and when it came to liquor, he was “dry as an old sun-bleached bone.”
22

At the Monroeville Methodist Episcopal Church, where he was a deacon, congregation members noted that he usually sat near the front by himself, preferring to be alone with his thoughts. When it was time to pray, he would rise, face the congregation, and deliver a long improvised prayer, tapping out a rhythm for his rumbling voice on the pew with his penknife.

*   *   *

Why Mr. Lee seemed so distant only some of the neighbors on South Alabama Avenue and a handful of close friends understood. He was serious by nature, it was true, but he was also preoccupied with worries—mainly about his wife and her mental health. To outsiders, that would have been a surprise, because on the surface at least, Mrs. Lee appeared to be a contented housewife married to a successful attorney.

Most days at about
10
:
00
a.m., she appeared on the porch of the white bungalow to water her flower boxes. She was a large woman but carried herself gracefully and preferred simple cotton prints. She made the most of her best feature—thick, platinum blond hair—by wearing it braided and coiled on the crown of her head. After pinching off dead flower blossoms or cutting back stems that had become too leggy, she went back inside, letting the screen door bang shut. In a few moments, piano music could be heard drifting from the front room. Her gift as a classical pianist had been one of the centerpieces of the orchestra at the Alabama Girls' Industrial School. In Monroeville, she was in demand as a performer at weddings, and she played at the wedding of Truman's parents. If the house remained quiet after she had gone inside, it meant she was probably working a crossword puzzle or reading. She was a “brilliant woman,” Truman said; “she could do a
New York Times
crossword puzzle as fast as she could move a pencil, that kind of person.”
23

To minimize housework, she kept her home simple: there were no rugs to vacuum or shake out, the chairs were cane-backed, and the iron bedsteads had been painted white. The pine floors gleamed from regular polishing.
24
She had housekeepers—there was always one black woman, sometimes two, who cooked, cleaned, and looked after the children. They walked from a black neighborhood where they lived to the Lee home about a quarter mile away. Hattie Clausell lived in with the Lees for many years, and when Nelle came in after a day of play, sunburned and grass-stained, it was usually Hattie who ordered “Miss Frippy Britches” out of her hand-me-down overalls, to be scrubbed in the tub, combed, and given supper in the kitchen.
25
In fact, Hattie may have been the person Harper Lee was thinking about when she created Calpurnia.

In those days it was commonplace for middle- and upper-middle-class Southern white families to employ black housekeepers, cooks, or handymen. Carson McCullers, author of
The Member of the Wedding
and other novels, grew up in Georgia in the
1930
s. Her home life was similar to Harper Lee's. “We knew ‘colored people' as servants,” said McCullers's cousin Roberta Steiner. “In both our houses we had a ‘cook' who was really a general housekeeper. About half her time was spent with the baby if there was one. She did whatever was necessary at the time. We had a ‘yard man' who came about once a week. Our clothes were picked up by a black woman with a wagon. She took them home, boiled them on an outside fire, starched them, ironed them and returned them. Sheets, etc., went to the commercial laundry. Extra help came in for fall cleaning. It was the way of life.”
26

Consequently, in
To Kill a Mockingbird,
the round-the-clock presence of Calpurnia is true-to-life. Although now we wonder how Calpurnia cared for her own family when she was looking after the Finch children.

*   *   *

Yet despite the extra help with running her home, and the comfort of four children who loved her, Mrs. Lee was an unhappy person. Part of the reason had to do with her circumstances. Life in a small town couldn't offer much to a woman of her talents and interests. She and Mr. Lee enjoyed books and music, but cultural activities were almost nonexistent. The standard of living in the South at the end of the
1920
s was already the lowest in the nation. It was at the bottom of the list in almost everything: ownership of automobiles, radios, residential telephones; income per capita; bank deposits; homes with electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. Southerners subscribed to the fewest magazines and newspapers and read the fewest books; they also provided the least support for education, public libraries, and art museums.
27
Then the stock market crash of
1929
and the decade of the Great Depression that followed wiped out pastimes like book clubs, theater and musical performances, and other self-improvement activities. Church programs and ladies' charity work were practically the only opportunities available to someone with a lively mind like Mrs. Lee. The image of Mrs. Lee, a “brilliant woman,” killing time by playing the piano for hours or reading is a sad portrait of a creative person with no outlet.

More serious, however, was Mrs. Lee's mental state. From the time Nelle was small, she knew her mother mainly as a middle-aged, overweight woman with a host of demons. Today her condition would probably be diagnosed as manic-depression, an emotional disorder involving severe mood swings and irrational thoughts. Her unpredictable behavior, over which she had little control, affected everyone in her family.

The “gentle soul” of the household, as her children later called her, could become inexplicably upset and tearful, or unaccountably talkative. Some days, Mrs. Lee “seemed withdrawn”: she might remain blank-faced in response to a greeting, as if she had never seen the person before, or only nod in reply. On days when Mrs. Lee was too depressed to fix meals and Hattie or the cook couldn't come, the family settled for eating hunks of watermelon all day.
28

Other times, her mood would veer to the opposite pole—her mind racing, words tumbling out. She would seize on a small piece of gossip, or something she'd heard on the radio, and exaggerate it beyond belief. From the porch, she would shout instructions to passersby on the street.
29
Bafflement in the Lee family over Mother's behavior reached its highest pitch when she would rise in the dead of night and begin playing the piano. It was then that Mr. Lee had to coax her back to bed with the promise that she should rest and then play as much as she liked the following day. Eventually, Mr. Lee arranged for her to spend a few restful weeks at a beach resort on the Gulf of Mexico during the summer months, under the watchful eye of his secretary, Maggie Dees.