I Am Scout (9 page)

Regardless, she proceeded with equal energy as both journalist and law student. Her quirkiness was a particularly good fit with the humor magazine's reputation. She is an “impressive figure as she strides down the corridor of New Hall at all hours attired in men's green striped pajamas,” said the
Crimson White
in a front-page article.

Quite frequently she passes out candy to unsuspecting freshmen; when she emerges from their rooms they have subscribed to the
Rammer Jammer
.… Her Utopia is a land with the culture of England and the government of Russia; her idea of heaven is a place where diligent law students and writers ascend after death and can stay up forever without Benzedrine [like caffeine].… Wild about football, she played center on the fourth grade team in Monroeville, her hometown. Her favorite person is her sister “Bear.” … Lawyer Lee will spend her future in Monroeville. As for literary aspirations she says, “I shall probably write a book some day. They all do.”
18

When the yearbook photographer visited the offices of the
Rammer Jammer,
Nelle hammed it up by posing as a harried editor glaring at her typewriter, a cigarette burning perilously low in one hand.

It was demanding, preparing for the law school classes in torts, real estate, and contract law, yet Nelle managed the
Rammer Jammer
's staff of
16
, too. “She was a lot of fun, she just made it go,” said one of the self-described “lowly persons” on the staff.
19
Nelle contributed at least one piece to every issue, including
Now Is the Time for All Good Men,
a one-act play making fun of a proposed racist amendment to the Alabama State constitution.

Her so-called Boswell Amendment would have required prospective voters to interpret the U.S. Constitution to the satisfaction of the local registrar. At the start of the play, Nelle introduces a senator, the Hon. F. B. MacGillacuddy, who argues strenuously for the passage of the amendment, which is nothing more than a trick to keep blacks from the polls. Once it passes, however, Senator MacGillacuddy fails the test, too, and is denied the right to vote! He appears before the United States Supreme Court, pleading, “My civil liberties are being threatened.… Whatta you going to do about it, boys?”
20
As a piece of satire, it was more mature in style and content than most of what usually appeared in the magazine.

Even though Nelle enjoyed her stint at the helm of the
Rammer Jammer,
at the close of the
1946
–
47
school year, she severed her ties with it. One year as editor in chief was enough. Her law school classes were demanding, and she was forced to spend most evenings studying at the library until midnight. Trying to balance writing with law—a combination she thought possible—was proving to be next to impossible. Something had to give.

Classes ended in May, and Nelle went home by train. For once, she didn't stay on campus for the summer session. She was needed in Monroeville to help with a happy occasion: the marriage of her brother, Edwin, to Sara Anne McCall, her friend and classmate since childhood.

Edwin was seven years older than Sara and, according to friends, hadn't given her a second look when they were growing up together. When he graduated from high school, she was still in elementary school. Later she enrolled at Huntingdon College the same year Nelle did, but Edwin was in the Army Air Corps by then. In June
1944
, he participated in the Normandy invasion, flew support for General Patton's Third Army in Europe, and received the Purple Heart. In
1946
, Captain Lee returned to Alabama and reenrolled in Auburn University to complete his degree in industrial engineering. There he met up with Sara, who had transferred from Huntingdon. They hit it off immediately and fell in love. The wedding was set for Saturday, June
28
,
1947
, in Monroeville.

Inside the church, garlands of Southern smilax and tall baskets of Snow Queen gladioli decorated the aisle and altar. Sara wore a dress with a high collar, full skirt, and long train that was a modern adaptation of an
1860
wedding gown on display in a museum in Richmond, Virginia. The reception was held outside at the bride's home, an innovation that not many folks in Monroeville were familiar with, but the lovely coolness of the evening persuaded them it was a grand idea.

Everything would have been ideal for A. C. Lee as father of the groom, except that Nelle had arrived home troubled about the direction of her life.

The crux of the matter was that she wasn't enjoying law school. She had enrolled, she said later, because “it was the line of least resistance,” meaning that she realized how strongly her father wanted to welcome another lawyer into the family.
21
But she was discovering that she hated studying law—and that was the term she used,
hated.
A friend on the campus newspaper never doubted that “she could have been a good lawyer. Her mind was so quick, but she just wanted to write.”
22

If she framed her dilemma in similar terms to her father—that writing was winning out over law—he might have countered that she could take over the
Monroe Journal
from him and Alice. After all, he was almost
70
. He was looking forward to having a little more time for playing golf and serving on various committees in ways that weren't too demanding. Just taking it easy. Weekly deadlines wouldn't permit that, and Alice's law practice was booming. So Nelle could do a real service by her family, the town, and the whole county if she took over the reins of the
Journal
after graduation. She didn't have to join Barnett, Bugg & Lee, either, if she didn't want to. But a law degree was always good insurance.

The rest of the summer must have been a bittersweet one in the Lee household. Edwin had made a fine marriage and let it be known that the couple would be settling down in Monroeville. Alice had decided to live at home permanently to help her parents, particularly her mother, whose health required regular visits to Vaughn Memorial Hospital in Selma,
75
miles away. Nelle, on the other hand, had thrown everybody for a loop. In August, she boarded the train at Evergreen and rode it north to Tuscaloosa, where she was determined to give law school one more try.

About
100
students were enrolled in law school for the
1947
–
48
school year, taught by
13
faculty members, all of whom were “on the younger side,” remembered Nelle's classmate Daniel J. Meador, who would one day become an assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice. The number of women, however, he said, totaled less than a dozen. The whole group was small enough to fit “in the women's rest room at the same time.”
23

And they could usually be found in there, too, freshening up between classes. Nelle milled around in front of the mirrors with the others, but Mary Lee Stapp couldn't recall ever having a conversation with her, “and she wouldn't have initiated it. She never made a great effort to get to know anybody; she had her mind on what she had her mind on.”
24
Jane Williams recalled Nelle from criminal law class, but “she would not have been noticed except for the fact that she was in a large class of males. She was habitually dressed in a baggy pullover, with a skirt and loafers—her hair pulled behind her ears and no makeup. To say that she was reclusive is an understatement. She was very quiet, spoke to no one—except when the instructor called on her to respond. Even then, she did so with as few words as possible.”
25

The women, although they were few in number, demonstrated a tenacity equal to their male counterparts. None who attended during the years Nelle was enrolled flunked out. Moreover, they would not be intimidated. A certain criminal law professor, for example, tried to fluster female students by pressing them on the indelicate facts of sex crimes. One day, while he was questioning a student about the details of a rape case, attempting to maneuver her into a graphic description, she cut him off in midsentence: “Look,” she said, “you know about the male anatomy—why don't you just tell us?” The class laughed and applauded.
26

Meanwhile, Nelle continued to linger on the margins, disengaged. “Most of the women who were there knew each other, but most of us don't remember her,” said a classmate.
27
To drop out, though, would disappoint her father. Still, the dread she felt at facing exams she might not pass for sheer lack of interest threw a gloomy light on her future.

Unknown to her (though she would have been insulted if she knew), some of her classmates thought that Nelle and the law would not be a good match, either. One couldn't picture Nelle abiding by the formalities of courtroom protocol. “I think lawyers sort of have to conform, and she'd just as soon tell you to go to hell as to say something nice and turn around and walk away.… I just couldn't see her being interested in that sort of thing.”
28

By spring
1948
, it was obvious to Mr. Lee that his youngest daughter wasn't showing anywhere near the same enthusiasm about practicing law that Alice had. So he agreed to provide an incentive—one that would acknowledge Nelle's love of literature. Perhaps, he reasoned, she should have an experience that showed what a well-paying career like practicing law could provide, including the means to travel and write on the side. On April
29
,
1948
, the
Monroe Journal
announced, “Miss Nelle Lee, University of Alabama law student and daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A. C. Lee of Monroeville, has been accepted as an exchange student at Oxford University in England during the coming summer. She will sail from New York on June
16
.”
29

It would be a pilgrimage to the land of Nelle's favorite British authors: Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Lamb, Henry Fielding, Samuel Butler, and all the others, who until now had lived for her only between the covers of books. And perhaps it would break the spell of her unhappiness.

*   *   *

On the morning Nelle arrived at the New York docks preparing to board the
Marine Jumper,
a converted troopship from the war, there was a festive feeling in the air. Nearly
600
young people were hugging their parents, posing for snapshots, and waving as they climbed the steep gangway. Nelle found a spot in the passengers' quarters on one of the double bunks; in each room, there was one shower for
35
people—“just like you'd expect in the army,” commented one of the students.
30

Then the ship got under way, assisted by a tugboat or two to point the ship's bow toward the Atlantic. When New York had at last dipped below the horizon, coordinators from the exchange program assembled the students for a series of orientation programs. They provided lengthy sessions about the destination countries, their religions, social life, and economic problems after the war.

There was no curfew, so the main deck on starry nights was usually dotted with travelers lying on their backs, feeling the thrum of the
10
,
000
-horsepower turbine underneath them as the ship rolled through the swells at
15
knots.

On Friday, June
25
, passengers prepared for landing at Plymouth, England. After hastily eating breakfast, they boarded a ferry to the customs warehouse. Officials and porters loudly explained how to locate luggage.

Then a four-hour train ride brought the spires of Oxford within sight, by which time the students were so hungry they were bartering rolls and fruit saved from breakfast. As the train crossed the Isis River on the west side of the university, Nelle could see Christ Church's octagonal Tom Tower, whose seven-ton bell has rung
101
times every night since the late
1600
s at
9
:
05
to mark curfew. The welcoming dinner that evening was held in a centuries-old hall amid stained glass, carved beam ceilings
50
feet overhead, and wood-paneled walls.

Although she was enrolled in the seminar on
20
th-century literature, she was permitted, as all the students were, to attend any lecture she wanted to on philosophy, politics, and economics, or general topics. It's doubtful that the array of scholars then could be assembled for a six-week summer session today. The faculty of almost
70
lecturers included novelists, historians, music critics, and scientists. In addition to lectures that Nelle was required to attend on Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Russian poetry, and Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, there also were at least three other lectures to choose from every day on such topics as free will, truth, political theories and moral beliefs, communism, modern painting, and the history of Oxford University.
31
For a young woman like Nelle, raised in a rural and economically depressed part of the United States, it was a feast for the mind.

After that experience, she lasted only one more semester in law school. She knew she couldn't go on. “She fell in love with England,” Alice said later.
32
She had walked streets known to writers she admired and imagined herself in their company. What she needed to do now was to write earnestly. Truman had done it. His first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
published that year, had established him. She couldn't hope to duplicate his success the first time out, but she had to make a start. Staying in law school was pointless, particularly when there was a strong possibility she might fail the exams because she just couldn't muster the will to study for them.