Charles J. Shields - I Am Scout. The Biography of Harper Lee

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Contents

To my wife, Guadalupe

Chapter 1

Ellen Spelled Backward

Get offa him! Nelle Roared. Get off now!

Though she was only seven years old in 1933 , Nelle Harper Lee peeled the older boys away from her friend and next-door neighbor Truman Streckfus Persons. He was lying on his back, red-faced and tearful, in the sandpit of the Monroe County Elementary School playground in Monroeville, Alabama. The bigger boys had been playing a game called Hot Grease in the Kitchen, Go Around! With their arms crossed, they dared anyone to try to get past them and into the sandpit.

But Truman, who adored attention, couldnt resist. He had marched directly toward the older boys and forced his way through. What he didnt expect was how furiously they would attack him. Shouts and flailing fists assaulted him, until Nelle barged into the circle and pulled him to his feet. Then she shoved past the angry boys and escorted her injured friend away, glancing over her shoulder to make sure she and Truman werent being followed.

But most boys knew better than to try that. Nelle had a reputation as a fearsome stomach-puncher, foot-stomper, and hair-puller, who could talk mean like a boy. Three boys had tried challenging her once. They came at her, one at a time, bravely galloping toward a dragon. Within moments, each had landed facedown, spitting gravel and crying Uncle!

She was a sawed-off but solid tomboy with an all-hell-let-loose wrestling technique, wrote Truman of a short story character he later based on Nelle.

Bully was a word often used to describe Nelle, but it can also be seen as an envious compliment. She was a fighter on the playground and frightened those who wouldnt stand up for themselves. She relied on herself and was independent, giving the impression at times that she was snobbish. And because she didnt try to conceal how smart and curious she was, she defied rules of good behavior for children. A fourth-grade classmate watched in awe when Nelle would talk back to the teachers. She was strong-willed and outspoken.

* * *

It was true she was tough and independent. She preferred wearing a scruffy pair of overalls to a dress and hanging upside down from the chinaberry tree in her yard to sitting quietly in a church. But actually, her folks were upper-middle class. Her home life was the product of several generations of southern Alabama farmers raising themselves up from hardship.

The Lees had long been Deep South Southerners. Nelles father was the son of a Civil War veteran, Cader Alexander Lee, a private who fought in battles with the th Alabama Regiment. (Her family is not related to Confederate general Robert E. Lee, as encyclopedias claim.) After the South surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia in April 1865 , Cader Lee, , did his best to steer his life back on course. On September , 1866 , he married -year-old Theodocia Eufrassa Windham, a sister of a distant cousin killed during the war. Less than two years later, the first of their nine children was born. In the middle of the brood, Amasa Coleman Lee, Harper Lees father, was born July , 1880 , in Georgiana, a village in Butler County, Alabama, miles south of Montgomery. His family nicknamed him Coley. Within a few years, they moved to northern Florida.

Coley Lees upbringing took place in a staunch Methodist home, he recalled, meaning his parents frowned on drinking, card playing, and other time-wasting behavior. On Sundays, his father hitched up the horses for a three-and-a-half-mile trip from their farm in Chipley, Florida, to services at the local Methodist church. The message of those sermons became the central philosophy of his life: salvation through believing in the gospel of Jesus was only the first step in fulfilling a responsibility to help reform humanity. Years later, as a civic leader in Monroeville and an Alabama state legislator, Nelles father was a strong believer in the need to uplift people. Progress, he argued, might be defined as any activity which brings the greatest possible number of benefits to the greatest possible number of people.

Even after Coley reached the age for regular schooling, chores on the farm took precedence over schoolwork. Some winter evenings he ran out of daylight before he could finish his lessons. But he was a steady reader, and at he passed the examination to teach. For three years he taught school near Marianna, Florida.

Then, eager for better wages, he shook the dust of Florida from his heels. In southern Alabama, big sawmills were eating deep into the piney woodsone appearing every five miles or so along railroad tracks, filling the air with the scream of buzz saws and the vinegary smell of fresh lumber. Mills employed to men, about one third of them black, and there was plenty of work for laborers. But Coleyintroducing himself as A. C. Lee nowwas a whiz at numbers and landed a job as a bookkeeper. Over the next several years, a series of better-paying positions followed. Finally, he found work at the Flat Creek Mill in Finchburg, Alabama, a tiny town named after the postmaster, James Finch. Then one day at church, A.C. met Finchs -year-old daughter, Frances Cunningham Finch.

* * *

Francess father was a farmer and part-time postmaster. Her mother, Ellen C. Finch (her maiden name was Williams), came from money: her family owned a plantation in southwest Alabama. The land was excellent, bordered as it was by the Alabama River, then rising into high fields above the floodplains. Steamboats arrived to off-load goods and take on the Williamses cotton, raised and picked by slaves. It was one of many real-life places and people that Nelle later drew on when she came to write To Kill a Mockinghird. Finchs Landing, as she renamed the Williamses plantation in the novel, produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile. Although James Finch and his wife were not as well-off as their in-laws, they gave their children the best education they could afford.

When their daughters Frances and Alice each reached , the Finches enrolled them in the new Alabama Girls Industrial School in Montevallo, a progressive institution for white girls. In todays terms, it resembled a private college prep school. The students studied English, Latin, history, and mathematics. In addition, they could choose from vocational electives, including stenography; photography; typewriting; printing; bookkeeping; indoor carpentry; electrical construction; clay modeling; architectural and mechanical drawing; sewing; dressmaking; cooking; laundering; sign and fresco painting; home nursing; and other practical industries. The curriculum guaranteed that graduates could make their own way in the world.

To keep the focus on academics, the girls wore uniforms: a navy blue dress and cap trimmed with white cord and a tassel. Trips off campus required a chaperone because, as the school catalog warned, pupils are not here to enter society, but to be educated; furthermore, they are not allowed to correspond with gentlemen, and visits from them is positively prohibited under penalty of expulsion.

The Finches were wholeheartedly in favor of this no-nonsense curriculum for cultivating young women. And so when A. C. Lee entered the picturea self-made, self-educated young man who was preparing himself for bigger thingsthey recognized a good match for their daughter. And Francesan artistic, some might say pampered young womanhad every reason to expect the kind of genteel life she had been educated for.