The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee by Marja Mills Read Free Book Online

There was something childlike in her expressions, not childish but animated, spontaneous in an appealing way. At the same time she spoke with an almost formal grammar.
    “This is not the Monroeville in which I grew up. I don’t like it one bit.”
    She was not one to equivocate, clearly.
    We spoke at some length about how the character of the town hadchanged. She also echoed Alice’s comments about the continual attention she received and the toll it took on both of them. As she put it, “Forty years of this gets to be a bit much.”
    She was a woman of formidable intellect. I would have loved to hear her expound on any number of topics. But I trod carefully that first day. I was concerned about her famously private nature. Yet here she was, putting me at ease. I came to realize later that she set the tone of any conversation.
    “Alice told me a little about your parents, and Finchburg. And Burnt Corn.” That was a nearby community, tiny but still something listed on maps. We laughed together about some of the colorful place names in Alabama. She lamented that local flavor was being lost. Later, she noted how developers often named new subdivisions for what they had destroyed to create them. As Lee put it, many paved Oak Groves stood where oak trees had fallen.
    Mayor Daley wasn’t the only prominent Chicagoan to have proclaimed his love of To Kill a Mockingbird. Oprah Winfrey spoke of the influence the novel, one of her favorites, had on her. I’d heard she’d wanted to pick the novel for her immensely popular televised book club but that the novelist declined.
    Lee confirmed this. “I met her. We had lunch together.” The two discussed Winfrey’s request over lunch in New York at the Waldorf Astoria, she said. Lee declined her request but was impressed by Winfrey’s knowledge of her characters, and her passion for the book.
    “What did you think of her?” I asked.
    “Well, for a girl, a black girl, growing up in poverty in Mississippi when she did to accomplish what she has . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It is remarkable.”
    Winfrey had been a cultural force as long as I could remember. It was easy to forget—unless you remembered the place and era in whichWinfrey grew up—how unlikely it was at the time that she would become a cultural figure of influence and wealth beyond all imagining.
    Lee mused aloud as to why Alice and I developed a quick rapport. With her index finger stabbing the air as if she were pressing an invisible doorbell—a gesture, I’d come to learn, that was as automatic to her as breathing—she delivered a true compliment, given the character of the woman to whom she compared me.
    “I know what it was,” Harper Lee said. “Quality met quality.”
    I had never heard that formulation before. It might have been particular to her.
    I was surprised, once again, that she seemed in no hurry to leave. When she did stand to say good-bye, I thanked her and she wished me safe travels.
    But she had one last surprise.
    She hugged me. I hoped I didn’t look startled. And then she was gone.

Chapter Four

    A lready I found myself fascinated by Harper Lee and Alice Lee as sisters. Even at their ages, it was clear Alice was the steady, responsible older sister, and Nelle Harper the spirited, spontaneous younger one. Born fifteen years earlier, Alice was as much mother as sister to Nelle. Alice had lived most of her life in Monroeville, and she and Nelle shared her home several months of the year. The rest of the year Nelle lived in her New York City apartment. Alice handled, in large part, Harper Lee’s financial affairs. Her sister had no interest in that, Alice said.
    They were utterly different in temperament and the paths they chose. Nelle left Monroeville in 1944 to attend Huntingdon College, as Alice had done, in Montgomery. After a year, Nelle went on to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and studied law. The summer of 1948, she studied at Oxford and fell in love with