Wayne Flynt is a Distinguished University Professor of History at Auburn University and author or co-author of eleven books. He has been recognised with numerous awards and honours, including the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Clarence Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing, the James F. Sulzby Book Award (twice) and the Alabama Library Association Award for non-fiction (twice).
The violent racism of the American South drove Wayne Flynt away from his home state of Alabama, but the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s classic novel about courage, community and equality, inspired him to return in the early 1960s and craft a career documenting and teaching Alabama history. His writing resonated with many Alabamians, in particular three sisters: Louise, Alice, and Nelle Harper Lee. Beginning with their first meeting in 1983, a mutual respect and affection for the state’s history and literature matured into a deep friendship between two families who can trace their roots there back more than five generations.
Flynt and Nelle Harper Lee began writing to one other while she was living in New York – heartfelt, insightful and humorous letters in which they swapped stories, information and opinions on topics both personal and professional: their families, books, Alabama history and social values, health concerns, and even their fears and accomplishments. Though their earliest missives began formally – ‘Dear Dr Flynt’ – as the years passed and their mutual admiration grew, their exchanges became more intimate and emotional, opening with ‘Dear Friend’ and closing with ‘I love you, Nelle.’ Through their enduring correspondence, the Lees and the Flynts became completely immersed in each other’s lives.
Beautifully written, intelligent and telling, this remarkable compendium of their letters – a correspondence that lasted for a quarter century, from 1992 until Harper Lee’s death in February 2016 – offers an incisive and compelling look into the mind, heart and work of one of the most beloved authors in modern literary history.
This is the story of two extended Alabama families, containing too many names to list. Down in this part of America, family counts for a lot. We often protect each other’s secrets at the expense of the stories we want to tell. And few families had more secrets than the Lee family of Monroe County, Alabama. Therefore, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to three incredible Lee sisters—Alice “Bear” Lee; Louise “Weezie” Lee Conner; and Nelle Harper Lee, who became “Dody” to close family—because they trusted me with their stories, and believed me when I promised never to write about Nelle during her lifetime.
Louise’s two gifted sons—Edwin Conner, retired professor of English at Kentucky State University; and Hershel “Hank” Conner, retired professor of communications at the University of Florida—contributed stories, family insights, and perceptive literary judgments. Sara Ann Curry—widow of Edwin Lee, the Lee sisters’ only male sibling, who died young—enlightened me about the family from the unique perspective of an in-law, though a treasured one.
Whereas I tend to be extroverted and talk more than listen, Dartie, my beloved wife of fifty-five years, is quiet, thoughtful, and, as a high school English teacher, attentive to language, accent, content, and idiom. Therefore she was an excellent source for what really happened during hundreds of conversations with the three sisters over more than three decades. And she was my most severe literary critic, always able and willing to say what she believed. I think Nelle was drawn to her more than to me at first.
As Alice and Nelle came to know our two sons, David and Sean, they liked them as well. The boys were authors in their own right and enjoyed a chance to critique my manuscript, heaping out deserved criticism and revisions. Our sons married Alabama sisters, Shannon and Kelly Rogers. Kelly earned a master’s in public history at Wake Forest University, offering as her thesis a meticulous annotated transcription of her Civil War–era great-grandfather’s letters to his wife, the perfect preparation for the tedious work of deciphering Alice’s handwriting. Shannon edited as well.
Amid swirling Monroeville controversies concerning the health of Nelle and Alice, the provenance of the newly discovered Go Set a Watchman manuscript, and the role of Alice’s personally selected law partner and successor, Tonja Carter, I tried to remain objective and independent. Although I barely knew Tonja when the controversies began in February 2015, she was from that day forward Nelle’s fiercest protector, the family’s most assiduous representative, and the international press’s preferred villain. Still, it was Tonja who gave me the permission to reproduce these letters, allowing Nelle to speak for herself from beyond the grave. For that, I am very grateful.
Finally, thanks to Andrew Nurnberg, Nelle’s agent and mine, for guiding me splendidly through the minefield of commercial publishing. He and Jonathan Burnham, senior vice president at HarperCollins, were enthusiastic about this project from the beginning. And Sara Nelson, my skillful editor there, though new to the company as I am, was clearly not new to the profession. With deadlines looming when she arrived and a hapless Luddite author who hated technology as much as Nelle did, Sara guided me to a secure landing right on time. It not only takes a village to raise a child, it also takes both personal and corporate families to produce a book. This one is the proof.
My last letter to Nelle was written a month after I, along with the rest of the world, heard the stunning news that a copy of her first manuscript had been found and would be published. The publisher’s February 3 announcement of the book, which bore the cryptic title Go Set a Watchman (borrowed from Isaiah 21:6, King James Version, of course), spun her life into unfamiliar disorder. Evidence of what was to follow arrived two days later on February 5, when I spent nine hours talking with reporters calling from around the world.
Almost immediately questions arose about whether Nelle was too ill, physically and possibly mentally, to give informed consent to the publication of a book she had ignored for decades. In that frenzied climate, fueled by journalists as well as by Monroeville gossip, long-ago chatter about whether Truman Capote had really written Mockingbird was resurrected. Riding the crest of small-town resentment against Tonja Carter, the law partner Alice chose to carry on Nelle’s legal business during the final years of her life, the rumors reached a worldwide audience. As the tsunami of rumors surged, my son, Sean, wrote me his fears about the possible effects of the controversy on Nelle: “They’ll drag her out into the spotlight even if it kills her just so they can satisfy their curiosity. Reminds me of a 4th grade demonstration of a tortoise’s beating heart. We saw it beat. The tortoise died.”
Nelle’s friends and family had noticed her growing problems with short-term memory but did not doubt her mental competence to give informed consent. Neither did officials from the elder abuse division of the Alabama Department of Human Resources, who investigated anonymous charges that Nelle was being mistreated. Not only did she pass whatever cognitive test they administered, she reportedly dismissed their intrusion into her private life by telling them to go to hell and leave her alone.
More particularly, Nelle’s nephew Hank Conner, unofficial Lee family historian, confirmed her enthusiasm for publication of the manuscript, which he said he had read a half-century earlier and thought inferior to Mockingbird. During a two-day visit several weeks before the publisher’s announcement, he said, he asked her multiple times if she was certain she wanted the novel to be published. Each time she replied that she did, finally satisfying the single person who understood the situation best and initially had been most skeptical.
During our first visit with Nelle on February 9, I was eager to administer my own memory test. As we tried to drive into the parking lot beside the assisted living facility, a vehicle from the state’s Department of Human Resources blocked our way, and a guard checked our identification before granting us admission. Inside the building, the twelve residents, Nelle among them, cowered in the commons area, none of them joking or talking as they usually did. After we wheeled Nelle to her room, I jokingly called her the “great one” and mentioned her new novel. She shocked us by asking, “What new novel?”
“Don’t talk like that, Nelle,” I said. “I mean your new novel that has just been announced by HarperCollins.”
“I don’t have any new novel,” she insisted. Now fully alarmed and wondering if the rumors of mental impairment could be true, I muttered, “Go Set a Watchman, Nelle. Your new novel.”
“Oh,” she replied with a grin. “That’s not my new novel; that’s my old novel.”
I was filled with relief. “Well, whatever you call it, it just reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list.”
“You lie!” she shouted, one of her favorite retorts when we bantered.
“I am an ordained Baptist minister. I don’t lie,” I responded.
She laughed. “Well, that makes it even worse.”
“You should be so proud, Nelle,” I said. “This is the most important story about American literature in half a century.”
There was a long pause. With sagging shoulders and eyes focused on her feet, she muttered softly, almost inaudibly, “I’m not so sure anymore.”
Publication on July 14 raised her spirits, as did our report during the day that the town was filled with reporters from around the world and, thanks to security at the Meadows, none of them could get near her. Early on the fifteenth we went by the Meadows to tell her that first-day sales had exceeded 700,000 copies, setting records for adult fiction at Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. Gleefully she replied, “I am a very rich woman!”
Dartie corrected her: “You have been a very rich woman for a very long time, Nelle!”
By the end of the first week, sales totaled more than 1.1 million, a record for an American novel.
Some critics declared Nelle’s new/old novel a searing and accurate account of racism in the 1950s. Some saw it as a flawed work that nonetheless previewed the talent that later came to fruition in Mockingbird. Others dismissed the novel as unfinished, preachy, too long on dialogue and too short on wordsmithing and characterization. Many liberal northern readers were appalled at Jean Louise Finch’s reconciliation with her racist father and uncle. Many conservative southern readers were appalled that Nelle had opened old wounds better left alone.
The controversy Watchman provoked set me to thinking about our quarter-century friendship with the three Lee sisters. I reread Nelle’s classic novel as well as her new one, and found in them what I had first discovered in the Bible: the most elemental meaning of innocence, judgment, justice, mercy, love, tolerance, forgiveness, and reconciliation, between races as well as generations. I also reread one of Nelle’s favorite novellas, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, based on the biblical parable of the prodigal son. The upright brother tells his minister father the sparse details of the murder of his younger, dissolute brother Paul. His father replies, “Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?”
“Everything,” Norman replies.
“It’s not much, is it?” his distraught father asks.
“No,” replies Norman, “but you can love completely without complete understanding.”
That sentence could have served as Nelle’s requiem, her last gift to her readers. They would have to love her without fully understanding her, for she would not be pulled into the spotlight for the sake of our curiosity.
In the early morning hours of February 19, 2016, seven months after the publication of Watchman and barely two months before her ninetieth birthday, Nelle Harper Lee died peacefully in her sleep at the Meadows. The following day I delivered as Nelle’s eulogy “Atticus’s Vision of Ourselves,” the tribute I had written years earlier for the Birmingham Pledge Foundation’s gala awards ceremony. So satisfied had she been with my interpretation of Atticus and her own literary legacy of racial tolerance and understanding that she insisted I change not a single line. I complied though with one addition: a sentence to demystify her hero as required by her own depiction of his flaws in Go Set A Watchman. As for a discussion of the private life of the author or her father, that would have to wait for another time. Nelle was buried in the small cemetery adjacent to the Monroeville United Methodist Church next to her father, mother, brother, and sister. At last she found rest and peace.
We gather tonight to honor a person, a writer, her father, her family, and her novel. That is a bit more than I can manage in fifteen minutes, so I will stick with the novel. But it might help us all to remember that we are honoring both a person and a writer, and they are different. Persons have a right to be persons separate from being writers.
Every book, be it fiction or nonfiction, is the projection of the writer’s vision and values, so in some sense we cannot separate them. A work of fiction might seem an exception to this generalization, but I don’t think so. As writer/storyteller Garrison Keillor once said, “Fifteen minutes after an accident, no two people can agree on the details of what happened. If it were not for the truth of fiction, there wouldn’t be any truth at all.”
So what truth have people around the world teased out of the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird?
Racial justice. Tom Robinson is a symbol of three centuries of apartheid and injustice toward Africans and African Americans. Don’t expect me to accomplish in a few minutes what ethicists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, theologians, and historians have not been able to do in the past three centuries: untie the complex knot of racism in the world. Harper Lee could not figure it out. Nor could Atticus Finch, who asks in the novel: “Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand.” But there is a difference between Atticus and many of us. The inability to explain is not an excuse for spiritual amnesia. Just after his troubled query about racism, Atticus adds: “I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town.” Beyond our embedded love for our communities, Lee seems to be saying, is our obligation to follow our own internal ethical compass. “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule,” Atticus explains, “is a person’s conscience.” And that is precisely why Atticus Finch emerges as such a profoundly important figure in American literature. If the jurors represent us at our cautious, timid, fearful worst, Atticus is humanity at its best. And that is one reason the novel endures. In an age of antiheroes—political and corporate corruption, excesses of all kinds by celebrities and athletes; a world populated by Madonna, Paris Hilton, Abramoff, Scanlon—Americans have lost their pool of real-life heroes. So they seek them now in literature. And in Atticus Finch, they have found their favorite hero, the person more than any other they aspire to be like and they want to represent them at their best. Miss Maudie tries to explain all this to Jem: “I simply want to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”
Class. Although the year that the book was published, 1960, ushered in a new and violent age of civil rights upheaval in America and primed the reading public to understand the work as a race novel, I believe it is just as much about class. Lee describes two poor white families, the poor but proud Cunninghams and the poor but not proud Ewells. The Cunninghams are the deserving poor whom we can and should help. Scout explains the difference by telling her first-grade teacher about her friend, young Walter Cunningham: “The Cunninghams never took anything off anybody, they get along on what they have. They don’t have much, but they get along on it.” Not everyone in her family has Scout’s insight or her compassion. Her aunt Alexandra thinks differently, in conjunction with the traditional social and class distinctions so deeply rooted in America: “The thing is [Scout] you can scrub Walter Cunningham until he shines, you can put him in shoes and a new suit, but he’ll never be like Jem. Besides, there’s a drinking streak in that family a mile wide. Finch women aren’t interested in that sort of people.”
Then there are the “white trailer trash” Ewells. They are the historic undeserving poor, regarded with disdain and contempt even by Maycomb’s blacks. They are