I Am Scout (4 page)

The secret of their closeness was mysterious to others, but they understood it. Besides liking each other, Nelle later referred to their bond as sharing a “common anguish.”
11

*   *   *

A look at each of their family lives suggests why. It's likely that Nelle, as a daughter, and Truman, as a son, were not their mothers' ideals in those roles. After all, deliberately or not, Nelle rebelled at what her mother valued. She would not go willingly into the “pink cotton penitentiary,” as Scout calls it, of girlhood. The charms of Miss Tutwiler's Alabama Girls' Industrial School—dressmaking, cooking, and the like—would not have held her attention long. Nelle couldn't even accept her teachers' instructions without asking a slew of questions. Hence, Mrs. Lee and her stubborn daughter lived in two different worlds.

For his part, Truman fell short of his mother's hopes in a similar way. Lillie Mae thought a boy should be rough-and-tumble. He acted effeminate. And as he grew older, his mother openly resented this. “Lillie Mae continually attacked him for behavior she thought effeminate and improper,” said Truman's aunt Marie. “She rode him constantly.”
12
Truman's aunt claimed to have overheard his mother railing at him about his masculinity: “‘Truman, I swear, we give you every advantage, and you can't behave. If it were just failing out of school, I could take it. But, my God, why can't you be more like a normal boy your age? I mean—well, the whole thing about you is so obvious. I mean—you know what I mean. Don't take me for a fool.'” Actually, he was quick, agile, and determined. One of his best stunts was leaping up on the rock wall between his house and Nelle's and turning cartwheels. And he lived up to the nickname of Bulldog more than once by head-butting adversaries and knocking them down. A friend saw him do it in the lobby of the Lyric movie theater in Mobile, only that time Bulldog sailed in a bit low and hit the kid between the legs.
13

In any case, both Nelle and Truman were not their mothers' ideals. But there was little they could do about it. They were who they were. A “common anguish” based on failing to win approval from their mothers would have united them, but it would have been painful, too.

*   *   *

Truman had his own explanation for the bond between them. He said it was because they were “apart people.”
14

What he meant is captured by a glimpse of the two friends at the Strand movie theater in the town square one Saturday afternoon. According to a Monroe County Elementary School classmate who saw them, they were immersed in a game they had invented. One would spell a word, but leave out a few letters; the other would have to guess the complete word. While they were playing, kids were shouting, teasing, and noisily finding seats. Yet Nelle and Truman were concentrating so hard on their game that they were lost to anything else. “They were a little above the rest of the kids in town.”
15

In their defense, as bright children they turned to each other because there wasn't much else to do. There were no books to take home from school because it had none to loan. Pictures at the Strand movie theater tended to be Westerns, adventures, or romances, because people wanted to forget their problems for a few hours. In most households, the world funneled into the living room via radio or newspaper only.

Not even school offered an oasis for imaginative children. On the first day of first grade, Truman proudly recited the alphabet all the way through and got whacked on the palm by the teacher with a ruler.
16
Children weren't supposed to come to school knowing how to read. It was this incident, or a similar one involving Nelle, that inspired the scene in
To Kill a Mockingbird
when Scout complains to Jem about her first-grade teacher: “that damn lady says Atticus's been teaching me to read and for him to stop it.”
17

Looking back, Nelle summarized what her early years were like in a town that could offer little to stimulate the mind. “This was my childhood,” Nelle said. “If I went to a film once a month it was pretty good for me, and for all children like me. We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn't have much money. Nobody had any money. We didn't have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imaginations most of the time.”
18

*   *   *

One way “apart people” with time on their hands could feed their imaginations was to read. Truman's cousin Jennings recalled how Nelle and Truman's mutual love of reading created a bond that put them in splendid isolation.

“The year I began school Truman and Nelle were knee-deep reading Sherlock Holmes detective books. Even though I hadn't learned to read with their speed and comprehension, we three would climb up in Nelle's big tree house and curl up with books. Truman or Nelle would stop from time to time to read some interesting event aloud. We'd discuss what might happen next in the story and try to guess which character would be the culprit. Sometimes Truman called me ‘Inspector.' Nelle was ‘Dr. Watson.'”
19

The
Rover Boys
was another favorite series, despite the stories' stiff dialogue—“‘Hello, you fellows!' shouted a voice from behind the Rover boys. ‘Plotting mischief?'” At least they featured a girlfriend-sidekick named Nellie.

Then, said Nelle, “As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth:
Anne of Green Gables
was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two
Rover Boys
were an even swap for two Tom Swifts.… The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed—he swapped his sister's doll buggy.”
20

*   *   *

Mr. Lee, seeing that Nelle and Truman had fallen in love with words, encouraged them with a special gift. When they were old enough to write stories of their own, he gave them a typewriter. It was the
1930
s equivalent of a word processor: a rugged, steel-encased black Underwood No.
5
.

Most children probably would have begun by creating original fairy tales. But an invasion of fairies in down-and-out Monroeville seemed far-fetched. Anyway, their favorite books featured real-life places. Why couldn't Monroeville—their neighborhood, in fact—do just as well as a setting? This would also fit with another of their favorite activities: people watching. They knew more about “Doc” Watson, the dentist, and his family who lived across the street, for instance, than they would ever know about trolls and so on.

As a result of this line of thinking, the residents of South Alabama Avenue unknowingly became characters in the first stories of Truman Streckfus Persons and Nelle Harper Lee, authors, one of whose earliest efforts (since lost) bore the interesting title “The Fire and the Flame.”
21
One writer would dictate the story slowly while the other typed, and then they would switch places. Looking back, Nelle was of the opinion that small-town life “naturally produces more writers than, say, an environment like
82
nd Street in New York. In small town life and in rural life you know your neighbors. Not only do you know everything about your neighbors, but you know everything about them from the time they came to the country.”
22

And there was certainly no lack of interesting people to cast as characters on South Alabama Avenue. At the top of the list were Truman's elderly cousins, the Faulks. Jennie Faulk had built the rambling, two-story house next door to the Lees as a shared dwelling for her three siblings: sister Callie, two years younger than she; brother Bud; and sister Sook, who, despite being white-haired, had the mind and personality of a
14
-year-old girl. (Sook is the fruitcake-baking “aunt” portrayed in Truman's novelette
A Christmas Memory
.) She was rarely comfortable with anyone except children, and she drew Nelle, Truman, and Jennings to her. They spent many happy hours sitting at her feet being fed, like open-mouthed birds, cookies dipped in coffee, or they perched in her lap and made up long, fantastic tales.

To the south of the Faulks lived ex–Confederate Captain and Mrs. Powell Jones, whose house was best avoided. The Joneses were very old; Mrs. Jones, an invalid in a wheelchair, was addicted to a powerful pain-relieving drug called morphine. Neighbors heard her screeching at her husband about her medicine. Children passing by received a good dose of her unpleasantness, too. (Many Monroeville residents would later recognize Mrs. Jones as the model for Mrs. Dubose in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, who tormented Scout and Jem with her vicious taunts.)

But for sheer mystery and speculation, no source was richer than the tumbledown Boleware place just two doors south of the Lees', past Captain and Mrs. Powell Jones's place, its backyard flush against the playground of the elementary school. It was a dark, ramshackle structure with most of the paint fallen off. What went on inside was a matter of guesswork, because the shutters were always closed, as if the house were asleep. Children held their noses while walking by, or crossed to the other side of the street, to avoid inhaling evil vapors that might be steaming from cracks in the house's boards.

This cabin outside Monroeville in the 1930s is similar to the one Tom Robinson in
To Kill a Mockingbird
would have lived in. (Library of Congress)

Nelle's next-door neighbor Truman Capote, in the 1920s, with his elderly cousin Sook. “Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head,” Nelle would later write of Truman as Dill in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
(Photographer unknown)

The owner was Alfred R. Boleware,
60
, a merchant and a big man in town, but a know-it-all and cheapskate. He and his wife, Annie, had three children—Mary and Sally, both in their late
20
s, and Alfred, Jr., a few years younger than his sisters, who was nicknamed “Son.”
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Mr. Boleware wouldn't spend a dime on his house, or its raggedy yard of tangled pecan trees, broken scuppernong arbor, and weedy garden. But his sagging estate belonged to him, and no one was permitted to put a foot on it without his permission. A well-hit ball from the schoolyard that landed in the Bolewares' weeds might as well have rolled into a minefield. Everyone knew better than to retrieve it. When the pecans ripened and fell, old man Boleware stood in the backyard, arms crossed, as if daring any pipsqueak on the playground to risk life and limb by stealing one.

Adding to the mystery of the Boleware house was the legend of Son, who was said to be languishing inside, a captive in his own home, tied to a bed frame by his father. His fate sounded like a campfire tale, but it was essentially true. He and two schoolmates—Robert Baggett and Elliott Sawyer, the sheriff's son—had been taken before Judge Murdoch McCorvey Fountain in
1928
for breaking school windows with a slingshot and burglarizing a drugstore. Judge Fountain decided that such enterprising young men could benefit from a year at the state industrial school. Baggett and Sawyer's parents agreed, but Boleware proposed something else for his boy. He asked the judge to turn Son over to him, because he could guarantee that his lad would never trouble the community again. Something about the look in Boleware's eye persuaded Judge Fountain, and so Son went home with his father.
24

After that, Son Boleware was rarely seen by anyone ever again. At first, friends from the high school would crawl on elbows and knees to his bedroom window to talk to him. Word got around that he would gladly do homework for the football players. In return for his help, they took him for rides in the darkness after midnight.

But years passed and all the young people Son had known in high school moved on, and he was forgotten. His shadowy figure appeared on the porch after dusk now and then. Some neighbors reported hearing a parched voice from the Boleware place cry “caw, caw!” and incidents of Peeping Toms were blamed on him. Once, Nelle saw him resting in the shade and didn't find him so strange. But, essentially, Son Boleware was erased from Monroeville forever.