I Am Scout (8 page)

During the final week of classes, in May, the girls in Massey Hall hugged each other and handed their yearbooks around, seeking farewell messages. In Catherine Cobb's book, Sara Anne McCall wrote, “Dear Cobb, It's been fun knowing you. You're one swell girl and I'll never forget you.” Another student penned, “Dear Cobb, This year was really swell, and you helped make it so.”

Florence Stikes handed her yearbook to Nelle. When she returned it, Nette had written:

Dearest Flo,

Thanks for the memories

of stinking sophomore lit

of Mrs. Figh's shoes

that you were so swell

and now I'll leave you

with love & all that hell!

“Typical Nelle,” Florence said.
36

Chapter 4

Rammer Jammer

“Ta-
dum
! Ta-
dum
! Ta-dumpity-
dum
!” sang several girls out the window of the Phi Mu house at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Their voices were loud enough so that the target of their ridicule could hear. “She had long flat shoes, long straight hair, a slight slump, probably because she carried a black, portable typewriter in one hand and a stack of books and papers in the other,” said one of the choristers. “I never saw her with anyone and wonder if she were lonely.”
1
The girl they were mocking was Nelle.

It seemed inconceivable that with World War II ended (on September
2
,
1945
) and the campus of
7
,
500
students full of veterans, any woman would not want to look her best. With a sea of men flooding the university, many co-eds hoped to get their “MRS degree” before graduation. The student newspaper, the
Crimson White,
added luster to their fantasies by featuring an undergraduate “Bama Belle” on the front page almost every week—lovely as a Hollywood starlet, sometimes with the distinction of being a gentleman's fiancée. A few were married already and pictured with their husbands in romantic settings, suggesting that a princess had at last found her prince.

But Nelle was apparently not interested in any of this, which affronted the young women in the
15
houses along Sorority Row. Her lack of makeup, her flyaway hair and dull brown outfits would have passed unnoticed had she been an “independent”—someone outside the elite panhellenic organization of sororities and fraternities. But she wasn't. Through an error of judgment on the part of the girls in the Chi Omega house, she had become one of them—a sorority sister.

Chi Omega was a house that “specialize[d] in blondes,” proclaimed the university yearbook, “long, short, thin and broad,” including Miss Alabama of
1946
.
2
“Your [sorority] sisters were watching you,” said one Chi O member. “They did not want our behavior to reflect on them.”
3
And Nelle's certainly did. In the purely feminine waters of sorority life, she floated like a drop of motor oil. “I kind of wondered at the time what she saw in a sorority to join it,” marveled another, looking back.
4

The reason Nelle signed up for Rush Week at Alabama was a wish to be happier than she'd been at Huntingdon. Her sister Alice's year at Huntingdon had been immensely happy. But, then, Alice had joined clubs and organizations. Nelle had remained largely on the sidelines.

And there may have been another reason, too. A lifestyle where the accent was on femininity and grace was in step with her mother's values. Frances Lee, whose parents had invested time and money in making sure she was “turned out” properly, in the old-fashioned sense, would have approved of her youngest daughter going over to the debutante side. Maybe Nelle decided to give being her mother's daughter another try.

So with an optimistic heart, she put her name on the Panhellenic Association's list of young women scheduled to visit all the houses on Sorority Row during Rush Week in autumn
1945
. As she and other rushees came through the door at Chi Omega, the members—all sporting fraternity pins—serenaded them lustily with fraternity songs. Nelle liked the humor. They invited her back. And a few days later, much to Nelle's surprise (and later theirs), the Chi Os—Nu Beta chapter, founded
1922
—accepted her.

The Chi Omegas lived in a two-story brick house painted white, designed in the Federal style. On the right-hand side of the main stairway was a flat-roofed sunroom, sometimes used as extra sleeping quarters. Upstairs, the young women slept in bunk beds and got ready for the day by sharing showers and dressing rooms.

Once the girls came down in the morning, maids scurried upstairs to dust, sweep, and change the sheets. During mealtimes, the black butler served at table. Nelle usually skipped breakfast; she hated it because she hated eggs. And she let it be known that she hated swing music, too, which was then the most popular kind in America: she thought numbers by Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington were frantic and obnoxious. She sang in the shower, but instead of catchy numbers such as “Let It Snow,” her pretty alto voice carried songs by Gilbert and Sullivan, composers of nineteenth-century British musicals such as
The Mikado
and
H.M.S. Pinafore
.

A British tar is a soaring soul,

As free as a mountain bird,

His energetic fist should be ready to resist

A dictatorial word.

His nose should pant and his lip should curl,

His cheeks should flame and his brow should furl,

His bosom should heave and his heart should glow,

And his fist be ever ready for a knock-down blow.

Not a lot about her had changed since Huntingdon. She was still chain-smoking, and she preferred men's pajamas to nightgowns. “She was a little mannish-looking,” recalled one sorority sister. “When girls had long hair and did things with it, her hair was short.”
5
Another chose the word
matronly
to describe Nelle: “A little bit thick in the middle. Nothing very stylish.” However, “she had beautiful large, dark brown eyes that were quite piercing.”
6

In the evenings, the girls chattered about their days and their boyfriends, but not Nelle. “She was just sort of a loner. She just sat there and looked. I don't remember any contact between her and anybody,” said a sorority sister. At mealtimes, “she never entered into any conversations with the girls at the table, but was more of an observer. I always had the feeling that she found us very shallow, silly, and young in which case she was absolutely right.”
7

On Friday and Saturday nights, when the other Chi O girls were bustling around, trying to be ready in time for dates or dances, Nelle never had any plans. No one recalled seeing her with a boyfriend. Practically every weekend, she tromped through the living room, golf club bag slung over her shoulder, heading out for a few rounds. The way she dressed for the golf course, just jeans and a sweatshirt, raised a few eyebrows. “That wasn't the way we dressed,” said a Chi O sister.
8
The pronouncement on Nelle's outerwear was that it was “very different.”

“I'm ashamed to admit that we made fun of her,” said Barbara Moore, a member of Phi Mu sorority. “Never around her, but behind her back. Today she would be called a campus nerd.”
9

*   *   *

After a year in the Chi Omega house, Nelle moved out. She would sometimes take her meals at the house and attended chapter meetings, but her sorority sisters thought she had her mind on other things. The reason was she had discovered a more suitable group of friends—commentators on campus life and its traditions and, most important, serious writers. She called them “the most casual colony” at the university, and they greeted her as one of their own. They were “the various editors, feature writers, proofreaders and kibitzers who sling together,” as she put it, the University of Alabama campus publications.
10

Nelle had found her way to the enormous Alabama Union almost as soon as she arrived on campus the fall of her sophomore year. On the third floor was the office of the student publications, a large room divided by a row of file cabinets acting as a line separating journalism from creative writing. On one side sat the staff of the
Crimson White
campus newspaper; on the other, the writers and editors for the
Rammer Jammer,
the campus humor magazine, named for the thunderous cheer shouted by Crimson Tide football fans: “Rammer jammer, rammer jammer, rammer jammer!”

Nelle introduced herself to one of the
Crimson White
editors, Bill Mayes, “a lanky, Klan-hating six-footer from somewhere in Mississippi.”
11
She offered her services as a stringer—someone to cover the odd meeting or event now and then. But most of the news beats had already gone to journalism majors.

Not discouraged, she went around the wall of file cabinets to the
Rammer Jammer
side of the room. That staff consisted of novice satirists and humor writers, under pressure to produce a funny quarterly publication. Good submissions were sought after and prized. Nelle got her hand in right away by submitting a few pieces for the homecoming parody—a takeoff on
Esquire,
a fashion magazine for men. In the December issue, the masthead listed her name as a staff member. A
Crimson White
staffer recalled hearing Nelle's voice on the
Rammer Jammer
side of the file cabinets, and years later, when she read
To Kill a Mockingbird,
said, “I could just hear her talking in the book.”
12

During the following summer, Nelle stayed on campus, catching up on a few credits but also because she knew the
Crimson White
would need writers. She suggested an idea to Bill Mayes, who was taking over as summer newspaper editor: What if she wrote an at-large column, she asked, that commented on the passing scene—something to lighten up the editorial page? He agreed. For a non–journalism major, it was a coup.

She dubbed her column “Caustic Comment,” an irregular feature that delivered doses of self-parody, exaggerated descriptions, and long-winded gags. John T. Hamner, a newspaperman in Alabama, was struck by the tone of “bright, brittle, sophomoric but sharp humor.… Her specialty was debunking, taking quick sharp jabs at the idols and mores of the time and place.”
13
The column was at its strongest when Nelle took aim at silly advertisements on the radio, or the amount of red tape students had to endure. She didn't bother to conceal her fondness for cursing, either:

There is a striking difference between University students now and those of five years ago in regard to their interests. Formerly, the minds of the Capstone [University of Alabama] undergrads were almost solely occupied with who belonged to what fraternity and the respective merits of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey as bandleaders.

The high moment in an undergrad's life was the interfraternity dances at the end of each year. He planned for months ahead just who he would escort to each dance, and how many invitations to pre-dance cocktail parties it would be socially acceptable to decline. He frantically rushed around trying to find the correct tie to wear with tails, and he considered himself a bright and shining social light if he wore clothes exactly like someone else's.

Contrast the undergrad of
1946
. He doesn't give a damn what kind of pants he wears to a formal, his major interests are not who's pinned to whom or how many quarts per capita his fraternity brothers consume each day. There is an awakening of interest in the lives of students in the things that really count.
14

At times she used shock value to get readers' attention. Writing a book review, for instance, she interjected some tough talk about race relations, a subject usually avoided in polite company. In her opinion, too many Southern writers treated racism romantically. For avoiding this pitfall, she praised the book under review,
Night Fire,
written by a popular instructor on campus, Edward Kimbrough. She relished Kimbrough's portrayal of a character named “Turkey Littlepage, who is reminiscent of all the county sheriffs in South Alabama and Mississippi. Mean, utterly stupid, and with violent prejudices, Turkey tramps through the pages of
Night Fire
as a living memorial to all the miserable incompetents the South elects as enforcers of the law.”
15

Such language was not often seen in print on campus. The University of Alabama in the
1940
s, the “Country Club of the South,” as it was nicknamed, was a “profoundly conservative community,” remembered a history and political science major. “There were a few faculty members who expressed reservations about some of the prevailing political and social orthodoxies, but they received little student support and were generally regarded as harmless eccentrics. The one subject never discussed, in my experience, was race relations. The prevailing view was that there was no reason to upset the status quo, and most were willing to continue existing conditions indefinitely.”
16

But the
Crimson White
wasn't the best forum for Nelle's outspoken opinions, anyway. She “dressed differently, ate differently, talked differently than most. She thought differently, too,” said John T. Hamner, “and those differences made her stand out.”
17
So at the end of the summer of
1946
, when Nelle was appointed editor in chief of the
Rammer Jammer,
it seemed at last that she could give her pen full throttle.

The humor magazine was wide open for creative writers with an offbeat slant on things. Taking over the top spot was going to be a heavy responsibility for her. That first semester as editor in chief, Nelle also started law school as a junior, which the University of Alabama allowed undergraduates to do.