NEW YORK, Feb 20 — The sisters would typically come in for chicken salad and potato soup, arriving just before the Courthouse Cafe in Monroeville, Alabama, closed for lunch at 2pm, when there were few customers left.
“They just wanted privacy,” Janet Sawyer, the restaurant’s owner, recalled yesterday of Alice Lee and her sister, Harper, who became, by virtue of a single book, one of America’s most cherished authors and certainly the most celebrated resident of Monroeville, the small town of about 6,300 where she lived and where she set her masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lee’s death yesterday at 89 struck a chord around the world, but nowhere did it resonate as deeply as in the town where she grew up, writing and playing golf, and where she died in her sleep at the Meadows, an assisted living facility, not far from the modest house where she had lived with her sister Alice, until she died in 2014 at age 103.
Lee drew attention to the town, with a little help from friend and fellow writer Truman Capote, who also called it home, earning Monroeville the designation “Literary Capital of Alabama.”
Sawyer’s restaurant sits across a square from the courthouse that inspired the setting for the scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird where Atticus Finch, who was modelled on Lee’s father, became a fictional avatar for tolerance and justice.
A theatrical adaptation of Mockingbird, performed each spring at the old courthouse, which is now a museum, has long been the single biggest event in Monroeville, drawing enthusiasts from around the United States and the world.
And across the town, with its murals of mockingbirds and restaurants with names derived from the book, and its statues of children reading, there were constant reminders yesterday of the mark that Lee, known as Nelle, had left.
“She was our most famous citizen,” said Greg Norris, Monroe County probate judge.
But also among its most private persons. Norris remembered the special arrangements that were made years ago when Lee sought to renew her driver’s licence. “We waited until the court house closed, and she slipped in,” he said.
Except for the middle years of her life, when she lived in New York City, where she wrote Mockingbird, southern Alabama was home for Harper Lee, and she wrote in it of the area’s culture of tea cakes, genial manners and racial segregation in the post-Depression era.
It was in Manhattan, though, where Lee met Joy Brown, who, with her husband, Michael, gave Lee financial help in the mid-1950s so she could write her famous novel.
“I remember her wit and laughter; she laughed a lot,” Brown said. “She was also one of the most observant people you ever met, and she did not suffer fools, by any means.”
Lee never married and had no children, so her closest relatives, who include several nephews, were preparing funeral arrangements along with Tonja B. Carter, who is Lee’s lawyer and the executor of her estate.
The value of Lee’s estate remains a matter of conjecture, but certainly would appear to be in the tens of millions of dollars. More than 30 million copies of Mockingbird have been sold since its publication in 1960, and the novel continues to sell more than a million copies a year.
According to court documents, Lee earned as much as US$1.6 million (RM6.7 million) in royalties from the sale of To Kill a Mockingbird over a single six month period, and her second book, Go Set a Watchman, was the best-selling book of 2015 in the United States.
Also likely to be decided by the terms of her will is the question of where she decided to place her literary papers, at the University of Alabama, her alma mater, or another institution.
Hank Conner, Lee’s nephew, said he could not discuss the funeral arrangements, except to say that they were private. Lee’s sister and father are buried in a cemetery in Monroeville.
Conner said he was fondly remembering the times he spent with his aunt. A trip to Yankee Stadium. A visit to see Peter Pan on Broadway. “I had the good luck to spend lots of time with Nelle Harper Lee, some of it in New York City, where I saw a world I had not seen before,” he said.
Lee returned to Monroeville after suffering a stroke in 2007. During her years at The Meadows, the circle of friends allowed to visit her shrank, a point of contention among some who felt that Carter, her lawyer, was being too strict a gatekeeper and isolating Lee.
But Lee had an ornery side, as well. For instance, in 2013, she filed a trademark lawsuit against the museum in the old courthouse, challenging its ability to sell, among other things, Mockingbird-themed items. The suit was eventually settled.
Similarly divisive was the announcement last year that the second book by Lee, Go Set a Watchman, had been found in a bank safe deposit box and would be published. While some in town supported the move, there was considerable consternation over whether Lee, who was nearly blind and almost deaf, had the mental capacity to sign off on publication and to understand the consequences that it might have for her legacy.
“Maybe Nelle’s death will bring the town together, and the memorial will start a healing process,” said George Landegger, an industrialist and philanthropist who was friends with Lee.
“To me, Nelle always had Scout-like qualities,” Landegger said, evoking the name of the child narrator of Mockingbird. “She had a childlike twinkle in her eye,” he said, “and was not subject to conventional mores. She was iconoclastic and had a very determined attitude.” — The New York Times
