The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (17 page)

Maybe after she got her degree, he said, she could consider it. But it wasn’t to be. She went a more traditional route, earning a college degree and then teaching from 1928 until she retired. The closest she got to working in a business office was teaching typing to her students.

She remembered the four Lee children as students, especially the three girls. Ida first met Alice when Ida was teaching and Alice was in senior high. “She was one of these quiet studious people.”

Louise was more outgoing. “I’ll never forget Louise. Louise was a pretty child, and we’d have football games and they’d have Coca-Cola—it came in bottles then. She was serving the Cokes at a football game and reached down to get a Coke out of the tub of ice water and the thing blew up and cut her face on her cheek. She always had a scar from it. It was the first that I’d ever seen Coke blow up.

“Ed Lee was all about football,” she recalled.

And Nelle, well, Nelle stood out in her own way. “Nelle was always the tomboy. She was always—getting into something. If somebody picked on her she’d jump on ’em and fight ’em. So a bunch of the boys decided one day they were going to get the best of Nelle. So one was going to start it, and then the others were going to jump in and help him. But she jumped on that first one, and then the others came in and she jumped on them.” Ida laughed. “And they didn’t jump on her anymore! She was quite different from Alice. Growin’ up, she was a tomboy.”

As she spoke, all I could think of was Scout. Scout, who got into school yard dustups with boys from her class. Scout, who wanted to do what her brother did and not be confined by dresses and ladylike manners.

Chapter Fifteen

A
s I began to spend more time with the Lee sisters, I was mesmerized by the stories they told and by the way they told them, in beautiful, fluid language rich with the flavors of the South. They spoke with a playfulness, too, a sprightly humor that turned even mundane events into wry tales. Our days fell into a rhythm, punctuated by the daily drive to Whitey Lee Lake to feed the ducks and geese.

I often found myself standing at the edge of the small lake, just a few minutes from Alice’s law office, watching Nelle summon ducks with her distinctive call:

“Woo-hoo-HOO! Woo-hoo-HOO!”

While calling the ducks, Nelle shook a Cool Whip Free container filled with seed corn. The ducks responded to the rattle. Alice stayed in the car, peering out her open window. The small, grassy slope down to the water’s edge couldn’t be navigated with her walker. Nelle stood on the small bank. She would focus on one duck, then another. She was studying, as she always did, how they interacted.

Nelle was counting the ducks, too. The difference in her approach to life as compared with her sister’s was in evidence even here, counting ducks. Alice did so silently and methodically, and then repeated the
process. Nelle, standing a few feet from me and a tad closer to the lake, counted rapid-fire. I could hear, without a breath between the numbers, “Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.” It was tricky counting moving ducks. She started again, and then once more.

She turned to me, exasperated. “You have young eyes. How many do you get? I only count sixteen.”

“Let me see.” I performed my own count at a pace between the two sisters’. A couple of the smaller ducks strayed closer to the water’s edge after I counted them, and then hustled back to the larger group.

“I counted seventeen but I think I counted one twice.”

“What?” she said, straining to hear. It was irritating not catching things the first time.

She moved closer and I raised my voice to repeat what I had said.

She nodded. I began the count again.

“You’re right. I only get sixteen.”

“Eaten by a fox, maybe.”

I wasn’t sure if Nelle was kidding. Were there foxes around here? These residential areas were wooded. Maybe so. I didn’t ask. I’d revised my usual thinking about posing such questions on the spot. Better to find out another way. I had the feeling one or two ignorant questions would get me a demotion.

Something startled the geese into a cacophony of honking. Whatever prompted the ruckus, it was quickly dismissed as neither threat nor possible source of food. They returned to pecking at the ground.

Nelle gave an audible sigh and walked over to Alice. “Well, are you about ready to go, Bear?”

“Yes, I believe so.” She said “I b’lieve so,” minus one syllable in
believe,
like my grandfather. “How many did you count?”

“Only sixteen. Marja the same.”

“I fear one has gone missing.”

I slid into the backseat as Nelle walked around to the back of the car and put the Cool Whip container in the trunk. She got behind the wheel with a loud “oomph.”

“Home,” she said, and we were off. I looked back at the ducks. From a distance, they all looked alike.

No detail in these interactions was too small to escape their attention or pique their interest. Once, when one of the ducks had an injured wing, Nelle watched to see how “the little fella would get his food.” She noticed him the first time because he was trailing behind the feathered flock in the rush for the corn kernels.

The next time we spotted him, he brought up the rear but hung with the other ducks and geese closely enough to stake out his share of corn and peck away. The others didn’t give him leeway, nor did they take advantage. It was simply competition as usual.

Another day, Alice gazed out the open window from her usual vantage point, the passenger seat. She chuckled softly. “Look at them follow momma duck.”

After the rush for corn, the mother duck made her way back down to the lake, ducklings waddling after her in ragtag fashion. The little ones knew to keep up with her. She didn’t look back. In the water, they fell effortlessly into orderly formation behind their mother. To human eyes, anyway, they were the picture of a contented family, a page out of
Make Way for Ducklings,
Robert McCloskey’s 1941 classic set in Boston.

The sisters noticed the aggressive ducks and the more passive ones. Nelle commented on the way one new goose briskly circled the lake, small head held high above a slim, regal neck. He was showing who was top goose, she speculated, and Alice agreed. Or maybe he was just checking out the new territory. The interpretations were the Lees’.

They did the same around town, keenly observing the
interactions—in government, at church, and in personal circles—among the leaders and the followers, the newcomers and the established, the injured parties, socially speaking, and the top dogs. That eye for the way hierarchies and influence form and slowly shift in a community infuses
To Kill a Mockingbird.

In the community of Monroeville, information about Nelle was currency. It could be spent, traded, or saved for the right moment. Demand exceeded supply, especially because her good friends kept their interactions with her largely private. People were curious about where she went, whom she saw, what she said.

“I’ve just learned not to even mention it to anyone, usually, if I have coffee with Nelle,” Dale Welch told me. “People talk if you do that, and she doesn’t want that.”

Perhaps that’s why her friends were interested in long conversations about Nelle and Alice. Early on, Nelle and Alice told them it was okay to speak freely with me, and so it was a chance for them to compare impressions with someone else, to share favorite stories that they didn’t with others.

“I’d like you to meet some people,” Nelle had told me on that visit when I delivered the published story.

I didn’t know where she was taking me, or exactly why, but I didn’t ask. I just followed her to her Buick. She drove me to three homes and introduced me to close friends Judy Croft and Ila Jeter, and took me to Dale Welch’s house to get to know her better.

It was lost on none of us that this was an unusual decision on her part. That day marked the beginning of a new phase in my getting to know the Lees’ world in Monroeville. These were good friends she was introducing, telling them I was looking to do more research in Monroeville. Alice had begun sharing more stories of her life, of Nelle’s, of their family, and of the area. Nelle, too. They both
encouraged me to talk to their friends there, especially the older folks who remembered Monroe County in the 1930s. These weren’t stories that could be told quickly. Our conversations usually were two or three hours long. Now in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, those friends might otherwise take some of their firsthand knowledge of the Lees and old Monroeville to the grave.

Chapter Sixteen

J
ulia Munnerlyn, the mystery woman in the kitchen making fried green tomatoes that first day I met Alice, welcomed me into her life. She would take me to her church and her home. She proudly showed me the flowers she tended at both places, as well as at the Lees’.

Julia grew up in the area, the youngest daughter of six Stallworth children. “Four boys, two girls,” she told me. “I’m the baby girl and I had a brother under me.”

Their father farmed and logged at a sawmill camp. “But our livelihood was farming. Oh, we made everything. We grew everything. We didn’t have to go to the store to buy too much, just sugar or something like that. We’d raise hogs and butcher the hogs and make up our own cracklins’”—she chuckled at the memory—“and make our own lard.”

“It sounds like a lot of work,” I told her over coffee at my kitchen table one August afternoon when Julia walked across my parched yard from the Lees’ house and rapped on the kitchen door. I had asked her over, and we settled in at the kitchen table, tape recorder rolling.

“No, it was fun. Because, you know, it was your main source [of fun] that you invented. Today’s children, they don’t do anything but
put their hands on things they’re not supposed to. We didn’t have a problem back then. Everybody worked together and everybody—well, if this family over there sees these other children doing something wrong, you got a whipping from them. . . . The children obeyed. I don’t know how the news got home so fast—we didn’t have no telephone—but when you got home it would go like this:

“‘Uh-huh. What’d you do at Sadie’s house?’ ‘Oh, we didn’t do noth . . .’

“‘Uh-huh. Come on, young lady or man, you’re gonna get it.’ And you would [get it] again.”

Julia met her husband when she was on a Greyhound bus bound for a town near Memphis. He asked for her address. She figured she wouldn’t hear from him, but he surprised her with a letter three or four months later. “He was more serious than I was,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about settling down.” She was twenty-two when they married.

They had eight children. One of their children, a daughter, was killed by a school bus on the road near their house. Julia has lived with that memory, that loss, ever since. It isn’t one she discusses much. Now her husband was gone as well.

Julia had been taking care of people one way or another all her life. Before doing the kind of work she did for the Lees, she worked twenty years as a licensed practical nurse at the local hospital. Before that, she was a midwife, delivering babies at home when that was common practice. People still walked up to her, introduced themselves, and said, “Remember me? You delivered me. My momma’s name is . . .” She’d delivered a whole lot of babies. Sometimes the name brought it all back to her, though, a delivery forty years earlier, a moaning young mother in a bedroom, pushing and perspiring and worrying, and then
the tiny human being Julia would wash and weigh and speak to softly. Softly but not so softly the mother couldn’t hear. “You’re a healthy little one, aren’t you? Yes, a fine baby boy. Mm-hmm. A strong little guy.”

“Just makes you feel good,” she said, “bringing someone into this world safely. No telling what happens to them after that, though. Lord have mercy.”