She’s no Nelle

Andrew Smith was 13 when he first read ‘To kill a Mockingbird’ and says it was the first book he really loved. It was written fifty years ago, won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold over 30 million copies. Nelle Harper Lee born in 1926 wrote it as Harper Lee, as her sister explained ‘She didn’t want be called Nelle and believe me - she’s no Nelle.’

A private person, she was a ghostly presence when Andrew visited her home town - Monroeville in Alabama hoping to interview her for his documentary commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the book. We meet friends and relatives but the closest we get to Lee herself is a large slice of cake which is about to be delivered to her by a friend at the party Andrew has given to return some of the famous southern hospitality he enjoyed. But the ghostly presence knew exactly what was happening on a daily basis and it was clear that permission had been given for friends to talk to him.

Although Lee denies the story is autobiographical it is told by ‘Scout’ a young tomboy having adventures with her brother Jem and best friend Dill who is said to be based on her friend and neighbour Truman Capote. Scout’s father is a lawyer and Lee’s father was a newspaper editor and a lawyer. I remember being entranced when I saw the film in the sixties and having seen it again this week I long to read the book which even now is winging its way to me, courtesy of Amazon.

After all the publicity and the success of the book people wondered why she never wrote another. But why would you? How do you follow that?

An important part of the story is the white lawyer – Scout’s father, defending a black man, falsely accused of rape and failing to convince the white jury of his innocence. Although Atticus feels they have a strong chance of winning an appeal it ends in tragedy. The other main thread is when the children are in mortal danger from the evil father of the girl who lied about the alleged rape. Boo the strange recluse shunned by most of the townsfolk appears in the forest and saves their lives.

In the film Gregory Peck is just right as Atticus – the father of Scout and all the cast - especially the children are totally believable. The strange eerie character of Boo is played by a young Robert Duvall.

Andrew remembered that his parents had been shocked in the fifties when they took a Greyhound bus to the south from New York and witnessed the segregation and racial discrimination that existed then. Many years later, on his own visit he stayed with a white family and a black family and found that although they were no longer segregated much of Alabama was still separated.

It seems to me the book is about the best and the worst of human beings and although much has changed since then ignorance, intolerance and prejudice still exist everywhere.

I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house. And that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard, but he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted, if I could hit 'em, but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird...Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncribs, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.~

Atticus Finch

When a school tried to ban her book Lee had this to say:

Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.

Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that “To Kill a Mockingbird” spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice

^{You have to admire her.}