Читать книгу The Devil and Harper Lee - Mark Seal - Страница 4
ОглавлениеSOMETHING IS WRONG with this funeral.
Poor black girl, sixteen years old, dead in a tragic accident. Discovered past midnight on a deserted country road, her neck crushed beneath the left front wheel of a 1974 Ford Torino. A car tire and jack were on the ground beside her, as if she had suffered a freak accident while changing a flat. Only months later would the coroner’s report show that she had been strangled, dragged across the road, and positioned beneath the car, which crashed down on her when the jack was knocked free.
It is June 18, 1977. Alexander City, Alabama. A packed wooden chapel at a small-town funeral home, an overflow crowd outside. Scorching hot. Everyone waving fans to ward off the heat—hundreds of people, swaying to the dirge of the organist. The preacher’s sorrowful benedictions, carried aloft by shouts of Amen!
Another small country town. Another sweet, smart teenager just learning how to drive. Another girl working a summer job at a fast food restaurant. Another kid about to be buried and forgotten. Another impoverished African American community in grief. Everything sadly normal, except for this: The girl didn’t die by accident. She was most likely murdered.
And the man most everybody believes to be her murderer is sitting in the third row.
His name is Reverend Willie J. Maxwell, and he is seated among the bereaved in a red velvet pew beneath stained glass windows. He is a tall, handsome black man, fifty-two years old, charming and calculating. He sits ramrod straight, a fan in one hand, a white handkerchief in the other, his arm around his sobbing wife, Ophelia. He can bring a congregation to its knees when he preaches and make grown men cry when he sings the gospel. At this moment, he is widely believed to be Alabama’s first and most prolific black serial killer, having allegedly killed five relatives for profit.
Everybody in the chapel knows it. They’ve been through this before. This is the fifth funeral the Reverend is said to have attended as both mourner and chief suspect. To be sure that this mysterious death will be the last, police are stationed outside the chapel, with plans “to arrest Reverend Maxwell immediately after the funeral,” as Maxwell’s attorney will later write.
The Reverend is dressed in his trademark outfit: black suit, white shirt, black tie. And black patent leather shoes—perhaps the ones that kicked the jack from the car that fell on Shirley Ellington’s neck. The neck of the girl he calls his stepdaughter.
Everything about the Reverend is impressive. His height—a towering six feet four inches. His clothes—fancy and perfectly tailored, from good stores in Alex City, his shoes shined up like glass. His precise mustache. His buttery brown skin, like a movie star’s. His deep, booming voice, slow, molasses-thick, and ever consoling. “A mortician’s voice,” as someone once described it. His renditions of “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross” and “Amazing Grace” draw a flock from miles around. That voice fills the room now, accepting nervous condolences over the loss of his stepdaughter. But the Reverend remains cool and collected, shaking hands, thanking Sister So-and-So and Brother Ain’t-You-Kind.
But the most notable thing about the Reverend is the legend that precedes him.
They say he is the seventh son of a seventh son, a biblical birth order that conveys mystical powers. He lives near the crossroads of Alabama State Route 9 and Interstate 22, which gained mythical connotation, along with other crossroads in the South, after bluesman Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the junction of two Mississippi highways. Folks say that the Reverend’s home is a house of horrors with dead chickens dangling upside down in his pecan trees. Smears of blood on his driveway and doorstep ward off evil spirits and unwanted intruders. They say he has seventy pairs of shoes, each with a shine that never dims, and long rows of black suits in his many closets. They say he keeps a stack of insurance policies, filled out with the names of future victims, on file in his attic. They say he uses a spare bedroom as his voodoo room, and that it’s filled with bloody body parts and powerful potions in brightly colored jars labeled LOVE, HATE, FRIENDSHIP, and DEATH. They say he wears two bulletproof vests for protection everywhere he goes, and they say he wears seven pairs of underwear at once, for reasons nobody understands.
His most powerful armor is the magic he supposedly learned from the Seven Sisters, legendary voodoo queens from New Orleans. Or maybe Mississippi. No one seems to know for sure where they came from originally. But few doubt that, under the Sisters’ tutelage, the Reverend has mastered the use of herbs and potions and acquired what was called “a hand,” meaning he had voodoo powers, including the power to kill without detection.
Guarded by both God and Satan, his talents have been amply demonstrated, people say, by this string of odd and violent deaths, some of which not even Alabama’s best forensics experts could prove as murders. Only the death of the Reverend’s first wife resulted in a murder charge, for which a judge found him not guilty.
No wonder so few dare look the Reverend in the eye. People rush off front porches and hide in their homes at the sight of his passing car. When they drive past his house, they claim their headlights flicker. No court has been able to convict him. Lawmen can’t catch him. Some people in town are starting to ask: Are they even trying? If any of the murders had happened in a white community, would they be trying harder?
“Everyone was talking about it and worried about him, but people weren’t bothering him, because he wasn’t killing nobody from the white community,” one of Reverend Maxwell’s relatives will say years later. “He was always killing in the black community.”
In the matter of Shirley Ellington’s suspicious death, the Alexander City police have neither charged nor questioned the Reverend. Folks say he will terrorize this little Alabama town until the end of times.
Preaching on Sunday, they like to say, killing on Monday.
Young Shirley Ellington had the misfortune of colliding with Reverend Maxwell after he married her foster mother, Ophelia, his third wife. Three years into the marriage, the nightmare supposedly began. At least one relative says Shirley felt sure her stepfather was trying to kill her, which is why Ellington fled the home they shared at 10:00 p.m. that Saturday night and sped, either on foot or by car, to a relative’s house in a nearby black community. The Reverend—or somebody—not only found her, but killed her and left her body in the road. A passing motorist discovered Ellington, practically decapitated beneath the wheel of Maxwell’s 1974 Torino. Now there is only one question on the minds of the hundreds of frightened souls in the chapel: Who’s next?
Five times, they have come to bury a relative of the good Reverend, each life cut short by a freak tragedy. His first wife, Mary Lou, dead in a supposed car accident, though she had also been beaten and throttled. Then his brother John Columbus Maxwell, found dead beside the highway with so much alcohol in his bloodstream that the authorities said someone had to have forcibly poured it down his throat. Then his second wife, Dorcas, dead in another mysterious car accident. Then his nephew James Edward Hicks, found on the side of a road, dead at age twenty-two from causes the coroner was “unable to determine.” And now Shirley.
All five of the relatives had a large insurance policy taken out on their lives, most with double indemnity clauses that paid out in the case of accidental death and listed the Reverend as beneficiary.
Blood for money, people whisper. Few feel safe from the Reverend taking out his next insurance policy in one of their names—you can find the ads in newspapers or magazines—and then turning up dead like the others.
As the funeral winds down, Shirley Ellington’s family members file past her open casket to say their final, tearful farewells. Then comes a teacher. Then her friends. One by one, they gaze into that hideous casket where the young girl lies. Though Ellington’s big, dark eyes are now closed, some must imagine the shock and fear they showed when she looked up at her killer.
Finally, the Reverend rises. Six feet four inches of majesty and dread. Grief, hate, anger, and fear follow him on his long, slow walk to the casket. He lowers his head like a penitent and stares down at poor Shirley Ellington. And then he silently bids her goodbye and returns to his seat.
Suddenly, the wrath of the entire congregation comes pouring out of a young woman returning from the coffin to her seat in the front row.
“You killed my sister, and now you’re going to pay for it!”
The cry comes from Louvinia Lee, eighteen, one of Ellington’s sisters. She is pointing straight at the Reverend, her finger jabbing the air, as the mouths of three hundred mourners drop open.
And then, like a prophecy coming true the moment it is uttered, a man in a green three-piece suit appears before the congregation. His name is Robert Lewis Burns, and everyone here knows him. A member of the extended local Burns clan, Ellington’s uncle. A long-haul truck driver, he was on the road when he received news about his beloved niece’s sudden death. He knew immediately what had really happened. Though a polite and kind man, he was overcome with anger.
Burns turned his eighteen-wheeler around and headed home from Ohio, his fury building with every mile of the 735-mile drive. Now, as he takes his turn at the open casket, the anger boils over. He spots the Reverend in the pew directly behind his own, smiling calmly, almost tauntingly.
Robert Burns climbs atop the pew and stands directly over the Reverend. The two men lock eyes.
Burns pulls a .25-caliber pistol from a holster beneath his green jacket.
He’s heard about the Reverend’s two bulletproof vests, so he takes no chances and aims the pistol directly at the Reverend’s head.
Three shots ring out.
Holes blow open in the Reverend’s nose and temple and the side of his head. His now screaming wife, observers will remember, rushes from her seat to take cover under the pew. Blood splatters the Reverend’s white shirt.
He freezes for just a moment and stares at his assassin, imploring. Then his head falls back and his arms splay out like Jesus on the cross. He collapses in his seat, dead.
• • •
The woman on the train wears the same thing she always wears: casual shoes, slacks, simple shirt. Her hair is cut short and her face is free of makeup. She is single, has never married, never will. She doesn’t fly, due to an inner-ear condition. She hates wasting money, and she has simple tastes, so she would have taken a bus or the subway to catch this train—she never takes cabs. Now, at the start of a 960-mile, twenty-hour ride from Pennsylvania Station, in New York City, to Birmingham, Alabama, she is wedged in her seat among commuters, retirees, and misbehaving children, strangers who likely know her name but not her face. Some of them can probably recite her words by heart.
It’s been seventeen years since the publication of her global bestseller, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Harper Lee hasn’t published anything longer than short pieces since. All this time, she’s been searching for her next book, for a story worthy of being her follow-up to the novel already considered one of the greatest American classics of all time. She is now convinced she has found it, and her opening scene could be a showstopper: the fatal shooting of Reverend Willie J. Maxwell in the House of Hutchinson funeral chapel, on a sweltering summer afternoon when God and the devil squared off in a corner of Alabama.
There it was in The New York Times on June 21, 1977: “Minister Slain … He Is Called a Suspect in Her Death and Four Others,” read the headline, and then came the story, which recounted all the bizarre details.
“Voodoo Man’s Rites Thursday,” read the Associated Press headline.
Surely she read the article in the Times or the thrilling accounts in the local newspapers. She likely also heard about the case from friends and family in Alabama. She couldn’t have missed the wildest crime story ever to come out of her home state.
One thing is certain: She will soon become convinced that the saga of Reverend Maxwell, with all its gore and gothic drama, is another Alabama story that, through her talent, could loom large. She will toil for years over this much anticipated second book, leaving behind a trail of words, agony, wasted time, and unanswered questions.
She is in her early fifties. It is 1977 or ’78, and she lives two lives: February to late summer, she is alone in her small, spartan, rent-controlled apartment, number 1E at 433 East 82nd Street in New York City. September to February, she shares a modest house with her sister Alice in their hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
The cities and towns pass in a blur. Like Jean Louise Finch, best known as Scout in both To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015, the author most likely takes the Crescent Line. It leaves Pennsylvania Station at 2:35 p.m., arrives in Washington, D.C., at 6:20, and then barrels overnight to Birmingham. The train starts and stops, passengers getting off while others get on. “All aboard!” she hears over and over again, throughout the night and into the morning and afternoon of the next day.
She does not need to take this trip. She has won the Pulitzer Prize. She was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Lyndon B. Johnson. She is a millionaire many times over, her book perpetually generating a gusher of royalties, as profitable as a Texas oil well. Soon To Kill a Mockingbird will be taught in a majority of America’s schools and be ranked second only to the Bible as “most impactful book” in a poll conducted by the Library of Congress.
But by now, fame and accolades have become a curse. She has politely refused press interviews since 1964.
“Poor thing—she is nearly demented: says she gave up trying to answer her ‘fan mail’ when she received sixty-two letters in one day,” her lifelong friend Truman Capote wrote in an October 1960 letter, just months after To Kill a Mockingbird was published. “I wish she could relax and enjoy it more: in this profession it’s a long walk between drinks.”
Although she mostly keeps to herself, she can talk a blue streak if the mood strikes or a kindly face appears. Her voice is a husky, southern-fried drawl. In the barrage of questions following her overnight success, she lampooned her thick twang of an accent: “If I hear a consonant, I look around.” With reporters, she had been self-deprecating and shy, but also funny and frank. On her writing technique: “I sit down before a typewriter with my feet fixed firmly on the floor.” On her life story: “I’m afraid a biographical sketch of me will be sketchy indeed … If I ever learned anything, I’ve forgotten it.” On her achievements: “Success has had a very bad effect on me. I’ve gotten fat—but extremely uncomplacent. I’m running just as scared as before.”
“What’s going to happen when it’s shown in the South?” a reporter asked after the release of the movie based on her book.
“I don’t know. But I wondered the same thing when the book was published,” she responded. “But the publisher said not to worry, because no one can read down there.”
In response to the endless questions about her next book, she had this to say: “I guess I will have to quote Scarlett O’Hara on that. ‘I’ll think about that tomorrow.’”
Her first published story after Mockingbird was an essay in the April 1961 issue of Vogue. Entitled “Love—In Other Words,” it was a reflection on the meaning of love.
“Here, for Vogue, is the first article written by Harper Lee, a shy young woman who has an engaging drawl, immense happy eyes and, this year, the pleasure of having written an uncommon novel: To Kill a Mockingbird,” read the editor’s note introducing the essay. “Not unlike someone who might crop up in her own fiction, Nelle Harper Lee lives with her father and sister in a small Alabama town; they practice law, she writes. (A nonpracticing lawyer, she studied a year after law school as a Fulbright scholar at Oxford, then worked a stretch as a reservations clerk for BOAC [British Overseas Airways Corporation].)”
Later that same year, 1961, Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire, commissioned her to write a story about a subject she knew well, the Deep South. And while her draft of the story no longer seems to exist, the rejection letter does. “I feel lousy about returning this to you,” Hayes wrote, thanking her for her “willingness to be pursued relentlessly by us for a piece that was our idea for you to do.”
Next, in the December 1961 issue of McCall’s magazine, she wrote a short essay entitled “Christmas to Me.” It was a tender, heartwarming story of how a gift from her adopted family in New York City led to her writing To Kill a Mockingbird. Four years later, in the August 1965 issue of McCall’s, she wrote another short essay titled “When Children Discover America.”
Now, almost twenty years after all of that, she is once again ready to produce greatness, distill the world, catch lightning between the covers of a book. She is prodded, too, by her ardent older sister Alice, who, still vigorous at eighty-eight, will work in her law office every day into her hundreds.
Does she think about this next book on the train? Maybe over a $1.50 Scotch in the club car, as the Amtrak of those days advertised, or a $3.75 plate of “Fried Chicken in the Southern Tradition with Grits and Country Gravy (May we suggest a Chablis or Rosé wine to complete this entrée—$2.00 extra)”?
Does she drift off to sleep through the bumpy night? Or, if she sprang for the sleeper berth, does she lie awake and stare at the ceiling?
The Reverend, the Reverend, the Reverend … The words must have rumbled through her brain like the monotonous rhythm of the train barreling down the tracks. Behind her was what she once called the lonely life of writing; ahead were things she loved—crime, reporting on real things and real people, and, most of all, Alabama.
When the train dips down into the Southland, she is almost home. Soon she will be crossing the state line. As she wrote in Go Set a Watchman, the first draft of Mockingbird, the train “honked like a giant goose at its Northbound mate and rumbled across the Chattahoochee into Alabama.”
The impetus for her trip is the attorney John Tomas “Big Tom” Radney, a man of titanic will who represented both Reverend Maxwell and (only in Alabama) the man who killed him. “Oh!” the local folks exclaim upon hearing his name, one awestruck term to convey the famed attorney’s intense powers of persuasion. “Tom Terrific,” as the local newspaper editor called him, lorded over Alexander City, mythic in his victories in both politics and the courts. Once Tom Radney set his mind to something, it would be done.
Some say he summoned the famous author over the telephone, commanding her to get there pronto. Radney himself would say in a letter to a filmmaker, “Harper Lee called me and made arrangements to come to Alexander City.” Either way, persuasion was Tom Radney’s business, and he no doubt delivered a pitch that few writers could refuse: Five strange deaths. Small Alabama town. Voodoo preacher. Shot down in front of hundreds of mourners during the funeral for his last alleged victim, At the story’s center: none other than the famed attorney himself, who, Harper Lee would later write, “seemed to see himself as a cross between Robert Redford and Atticus Finch.”
And of course there was his name: Radney, only one letter away from the name of Mockingbird’s antihero: the recluse who finds redemption, Boo Radley.
On the train, she must be thinking about the last time she rode across America in search of stories. It was 1965, and she was traveling with Truman Capote to investigate what would become his true-crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood, about the brutal mass murder of a Kansas farm family, the Clutters. She had loved Capote since they were both five, living next door to each other in Monroeville. He was the thinly fictionalized Dill Harris in Mockingbird, that “pocket Merlin whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.” Capote became her co-conspirator and fellow writer when her lawyer father, Amasa Coleman Lee, the model for the forthright Atticus Finch, gave them a typewriter to share when they were kids.
In Kansas, doors would have slammed shut on Capote if he had been traveling alone. “Flamboyantly homosexual at a time when most people thought homosexuals should stay in the closet,” a Kansas professor of literature later reminisced in a story in the Wichita Eagle, recalling Capote speeding through town in a rented Jaguar. In his Charles de Gaulle hat and full-length pink Dior coat, Capote never would have gotten very far with the locals if not for Harper Lee.
In Kansas, she was likely greeted as just the “girl,” as Capote’s publisher, Bennett Cerf, once called her. “Nobody ever heard of her,” he’d said. She proved to be much more. With her sweet smile and good southern manners, she got those closed doors to open wide. She spent months “knocking on doors, buttonholing people in stores,” the Eagle reported. “She did much of the talking at first.”
Without Harper Lee, Truman Capote might have been lost. She accompanied him to interviews, covered the trials of the two murderers, and produced pages of neatly typed and immaculately organized research notes that showed both her fine eye for the telling detail and her insatiable quest for facts.
On and on her notes went, the facts from which Capote would mold his masterpiece. On her cover page she typed, “These Notes Are Dedicated to the Author of the Fire and the Flame. And the Small Person Who So Manfully Endured Him.”
All during her time in Kansas, she extolled Capote’s “genius” while making no mention of her own. But her grit and determination so impressed the two murderers in Capote’s book—the ruthless Perry Smith and Dick Hickock—that they invited her to attend their execution, according to Charles J. Shields in his 2006 biography, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. She declined, so as not to overshadow Capote, who not only attended but supposedly had fallen in love with one of the killers.
“The crime intrigued [Truman] and I’m intrigued by crime—and, boy, I wanted to go,” she once said. “It was deep calling to deep.”
Now deep is calling her again.
This time, though, she is riding solo. Without Capote, who has become a clown, a drunk, and, as she will later write, a “compulsive” liar. Without the support system that guided her through To Kill a Mockingbird: her trusted agent, Maurice Crain, who once wrote that he “handled it [Mockingbird] from the time it was a short story and a gleam in the author’s eye,” dead in 1970; and without her iron-willed editor, Tay Hohoff, her “invisible hand,” as The New York Times would call her, who helped turn her “series of anecdotes” into the Great American Novel, dead in 1974.
Now Harper Lee is alone on the tightrope, with only Alabama to catch her if she falls.
• • •
At the Birmingham train station, her niece is waiting.
Her name is Molly Chapman. Sweet Molly is the daughter of Harper Lee’s late older brother, Edwin Coleman Lee, who died at thirty-one and served as the model for Jem in Mockingbird. Recently married to Alexander City native Bobby Chapman, Molly taught junior high school in one of the poorer counties. She and her husband will serve as ambassadors to the author as she delves into the bloody story that has rocked their town to its core.
To Molly, the woman on the train is not Harper Lee. She’s her Aunt Dody.
The aunt whose bedroom window she climbed through as a little girl, seven years old, to watch Mockingbird being born and sneak peeks at the fresh new pages before Lee could shoo her away. “Do not go into my bedroom,” her aunt had commanded. “Do not touch my papers.” Which, of course, meant she climbed through the window and examined the papers the instant her aunt left the house. Molly often thought of those magical summers in Monroeville and the stacks of yellow paper growing beside her aunt’s typewriter, and the names she read upon them: Dill and Jem and Scout and Atticus, names that would soon live in readers’ imaginations worldwide.
For seven-year-old Molly, the world revolved around that close-knit family in Alabama, where her aunt created greatness, seemingly from thin air.
As she waits for the train to pull in to Birmingham Station, Molly recalls another time she was here: May 1976, the year of her wedding.
She remembers her famous aunt disembarking from the train with a magazine rolled up beneath her arm: the May 1976 issue of Esquire. Inside it, nitroglycerine: the third installment of Truman Capote’s serialized novel in progress, Answered Prayers, in which he continued his skewering of the women he called his Swans, his supposed best friends, the leaders of the international jet set.
“Truman has lost his mind,” Lee told her niece upon disembarking from the train that day. “All his friends! All his friends! He has just thrown them under the bus! I can’t believe this!”
Now, once again, the train comes screaming down the tracks. In white clouds of engine steam and a symphony of screeching train whistles, there she is, Harper Lee, appearing through the haze, invisible to all in her disguise of absolute austerity.
Home again and, most important, ready to write again.
The two women embrace in a chorus of Deep South exultations. Molly helps her aunt with her baggage: suitcases packed with simple, casual clothes, along with files, notebooks, cassette tape recorder, and manual typewriter. They climb into Molly’s burnt orange Volkswagen Beetle for the hour-and-a-half drive to Alexander City.
Lee would have surely made the place where the Reverend and his alleged victims died a character in her novel, just as she had immortalized Monroeville, thinly disguised as Maycomb in Mockingbird. “Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired town when I first knew it,” she wrote.
Alexander City, only 150 miles north of Monroeville, is anything but tired upon her arrival in the late 1970s. It is booming, its pretty little downtown square crowded with banks and restaurants and offices to serve the local population of nearly thirteen thousand. Most everyone works for the textile factory, Russell Mills, manufacturer of uniforms for professional and amateur sports teams worldwide, so successful that the mill runs night and day and still can’t keep pace with demand. Russell runs not only the town but also Lake Martin, at this time the largest man-made lake in the world, a vast body of water where the Russell family owns hundreds of Russell Cabins, leased out to vacationing local families through a company called Russell Lands. Molly’s in-laws lease one of these cabins, which they’ve graciously loaned to Harper Lee for her stay.
As Molly’s Volkswagen bumps along, it kicks up a storm of dust. The clay of Alabama is “so overwhelming,” as local author E. Paul Jones will later describe it, “that the leaves on the trees on the side of the road were covered in the mostly red dust as were the houses or other buildings near the road or downwind from the road.”
The cabin has no address. Just drive down this and that dirt road and eventually you are there. They pull up to the wooden structure, primitive at best, which surely makes Lee feel at home. She has just left a tiny apartment, from which she takes buses to restaurants, Mets games, museums, and anywhere else. Fiercely private, she doesn’t allow even her closest friends or family inside. Most neighbors know her only by the completed crossword puzzles she leaves on the building’s lobby entrance table each morning, according to the New York Post.
The cabin is on par with her spartan quarters in New York: one bath, two bedrooms, living area, and a dining table for a desk. In this strange new world, in a state she thought she knew so well, Lee will go forth in her rental car, a pint-size Toyota, which she keeps clean and polished to a sheen. And which, despite her stubborn loving care, is quickly covered in red dust and mud.
She doesn’t yet know that she has stumbled into a horror story. A story whose supposed ghosts haunted one local writer’s rented house near the Reverend’s former home. The writer fled after hearing scurrying sounds and bumps in the night, and experienced what she believed to be visits by various spirits. This despite the house having been painted floor to ceiling in “haint blue,” the color of protection against evil forces.
And now it is Harper Lee’s turn.
At this point, she has nothing but confidence and enthusiasm and, thanks to Molly, a crucial source: a local schoolteacher named Levelma Simmons, who knows the black community that Lee needs to penetrate, knows everyone Lee needs to interview, and is ready and eager to help. She and Molly used to teach underprivileged kids—black and white—at the same junior high school, and the teacher had regaled Molly with tales about the supposedly murderous deeds of Reverend Willie J. Maxwell. It was a story that seemed to unfurl like a radio serial, one death after another, each one more shocking than the last.
Molly reported these cases to her aunt as Lee shuttled between her apartment in New York City and her home in Monroeville—until the writer in her overcame her pursuit of privacy and she boarded a train headed south.
She would tell Maxwell’s story in a novel. While it would most likely be fiction, it would be based on what she called “straight journalism of the old-fashioned kind: facts.”
But Harper Lee is white, and the story is black.
• • •
In late-seventies Alabama, for a white woman like Lee, the black community was another world entirely. Going there alone would be like Capote’s arrival in Kansas: doors closing, along with mouths. Levelma Simmons, though, was not merely a teacher; she was a legend. The first African American to teach in the then all-white Coosa County schools before integration; the first black person elected president of the prestigious Alabama American Legion Auxiliary. And she had frequently been named Teacher of the Year. She had of course read To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a novel that transcended color and creed and distilled the racial problems in Alabama into a solution rooted in tolerance.
“My aunt is coming to write the Maxwell story,” Simmons recalls Molly telling her one day. “Could she come and talk to you?”
Of course she could, she replied.
And so, after school one afternoon, Simmons awaited the world-famous author in the trailer that served as the underprivileged school’s classroom. The author of Mockingbird—in her classroom! Needing her help! Scenes from the beloved book raced through her head. And then, without fanfare, she was there: Harper Lee, arriving at the appointed hour, all hi and how-ur-yew, her usual warm and gracious self, down to earth, Alabama to her core.
Simmons sat at her desk in the empty trailer, and Lee folded her tomboy frame into a small student desk. She herself was now a student, starting where all writers do on a project, no matter their past achievements, no matter how great their fame: ground zero.
The teacher’s words poured out in a torrent.
“I know all of the people who died,” she began. “I cannot tell you that he did them.” She added that nobody could say he had murdered anyone for sure. “But he probably did.”
She would take Lee through all of the “accidents” and tell her about all of the people involved. She would try to open doors to families and friends she knew. For today, though, she began as she usually did when she told the story: with an encounter she’d had with Reverend Maxwell.
“The evil part of him was circulating,” she recalls having told Lee. “He approached and said, ‘Sister, there comes a time in every man’s life when he sees what he wants.’”
Oh, Lord have mercy, she thought. “I believe in prayer and I said, ‘God, you gotta give me some strength here.’”
Simmons was happily married, to longtime teacher and school principal Otis Simmons, but she had heard that the Reverend had powers. “He could have for himself any woman he desired,” E. Paul Jones would later write in his book on the case, To Kill a Preacher.
“Those eyes he had!” Simmons continued. “I went down to the drugstore and composed myself. And when I came out of the drugstore, there he stands, trying to hand me something!”
Was it an herb? A voodoo powder? A potion whose mere acceptance would result in the teacher’s immediate immobilization?
“I threw up my hands like somebody had a gun on me,” she said.
“He wanted to show me that he was not guilty of killing his wife. And I said, ‘You don’t need to explain anything to me. It’s between you and God.’”
“He said, ‘I’m still interested in what I told you,’” meaning the time in every man’s life when he sees what he wants.
“I said, ‘I can’t understand how you can be a reverend and say those things about somebody who isn’t your wife.’”
And the Reverend replied, “I consult God about everything I do.”
The story would have surely entranced Harper Lee, convincing her even more that she had found her subject, along with an invaluable source. But all Levelma Simmons recalls her saying is “I need to tape this. Can I come back tomorrow?”
Of course she could. Lee would speak with Simmons many times after that, until she’d been in Alexander City for six months. Her sessions with the schoolteacher moved from the classroom to the Simmons home and dinner table, where Lee would join Levelma and Otis for chicken, cornbread, turnip greens, and conversation.
Only later did evidence of her months in Alexander City emerge, usually in the unlikeliest of places. Sheralyn Belyeu received an “entire set” of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the Alexander City Salvation Army thrift shop as a gift from her husband, she says. The volume containing the H’s held a surprise: a thank-you letter from Harper Lee to a mother and daughter who had held a cocktail party for her in their home. The letter was dated July 11, 1978.
“You simply can’t beat the people in Alex City for their warmth, kindness and hospitality,” she wrote in the letter, later unearthed by the writer Casey Cep, who has written about Harper Lee for The New Yorker, including in a March 17, 2015, story titled “Harper Lee’s Abandoned True-Crime Novel.” “If I fall flat on my face with this book, I won’t be terribly disappointed because of knowing that the time I spent with you was not time lost, but friends gained,” Lee wrote. “This is not remotely goodbye, because I’ll be coming back until doomsday, so until next Fall, love to you both, Harper Lee.”
• • •
“I probably know more about the Reverend Maxwell’s activities than does any other individual,” she would write to the Alabama novelist Madison Jones in another letter discovered by Casey Cep.
To see the fruits of her labor, you have to go to a nice house on a suburban street in Alexander City, where the last known work of Harper Lee has come to rest.
There are only four pages.
Written across the top of the first page, in what appears to be Lee’s handwriting, is the title: THE REVEREND.
Ellen Radney Price, daughter of the late attorney Tom Radney, dead since 2011, shows the pages in her dining room: a long table surrounded by chairs for “company,” as dinner guests are called in the South. In a room nearby, shelves hold a dozen or more binders containing documents from the life of Tom Radney.
And there, in the center of the dining room table, are the pages.
Four typed pages by the immortal Harper Lee.
It is August 2017, the end of another hot Alabama summer. Ellen Price carefully turns the pages, which are encased in plastic and bound in a three-ring binder kept in a big leather scrapbook, one of many that hold her father’s papers.
Price is both proud and protective of Tom Radney’s papers. He gave Lee his files, correspondence, and other documentation related to cases involving the Reverend. He never got them back.
“Big Tom gave it to her with the understanding that she was going to write the book,” says Price. And then the illustrious novelist left with the files—part of his legacy! Lee not only didn’t return the files, but she kept stringing him along with hope that the book would soon be finished. “Saying, ‘Oh, I’ve done that much, I’ve done this much,’” says Price. “Big Tom certainly held on to hope that it would eventually be written.”
“Gave everything to her,” she continues. “Big Tom went to New York once to get it back, maybe twice.”
He was left with just these four pages.
If you want to see the pages, you have to come here, to Ellen Price’s home. You have to earn your way through the door. You must promise not to quote a word from the pages—you may describe them, summarize them, but direct quotes are strictly forbidden.
These four pages are proof that Harper Lee wrote something during her months spent researching the Reverend. They are also proof that she was close enough with Tom Radney, whom everyone here still calls Big Tom, to give him some of her priceless prose.
The pages are impressive. Just four of them, and yet her intelligence, sophistication, and sheer towering love for Alabama and its history radiate from every page. The hero, it seems, at least from this sample, was the attorney.
“This did not happen over a six-month time frame,” says Ellen Price about the relationship between Harper Lee and her father. “This happened over decades. Their friendship, her interest in writing the story, their admiration for each other. They talked about this book for years and years and years.”
The pages look mottled with time and stained with what might be sweat or tears—or maybe even Scotch, Lee’s drink of choice. She begins with a 3:00 a.m. phone call that jolts a lawyer from his sleep and changes his life forever. The lawyer is presumably Tom Radney but renamed Larkin. Like Radney’s ancestors, Larkin is originally from Ireland.
After her father’s death, Price found the pages in a box crammed with what she calls “keepsakes.” Radney had shown them to her while he was still alive.
“That is one of the things that kept him going, kept him hanging on,” Price says. “That she was writing more and more and more.”
According to Price, there is no question about their authenticity.
Additional proof is right there on every page, she says: The letter B is missing.
Sure enough, in place of every B, lowercase and capital, there is a mark.
Casualties of a broken typewriter, which only a famous spendthrift like Harper Lee would use. Also a famous perfectionist, she wrote in every broken B by hand.
Another woman enters the dining room: Tom Radney’s charming widow, Madolyn. “Just amazing to see them, it’s just wonderful!” she says of the sacred pages. “First draft of maybe the Great American Novel!”
Of course, the book would have led to a movie, and there was discussion about who might best portray Big Tom.
“We used to throw that around and laugh about that,” says Madolyn Radney. “I think Harper Lee said something one time about maybe Gregory Peck. Pipe dreams.”
Then, after page four, the writing stops and the mystery begins. Tom Radney often said that Harper Lee had told him there were more pages. Maybe a lot more.
“A writer of her magnitude did not work on something for that length of time and visit and have a relationship and only write four pages,” says Price. Maybe there is more—maybe even a whole book—hidden away somewhere, in a drawer, an attic, a safety deposit box, yet to be discovered.
For now, there are just the four pages. A portal into a lost world.
• • •
August 1970, one morning at 3:00 a.m.
“Mr. Radney?” asks the voice at the other end of the line. “They’re down here at my house, accusing me of killing my wife. Would you come down here and help me?”
The voice on the other end of the phone is a slow, rumbling baritone. There is no panic, no rush, just the facts.
Police. Accusing me of killing my wife. Will you help me?
Music to the ears of any attorney, but especially to Tom Radney. Big Tom has never heard of Reverend Willie J. Maxwell, but predawn phone calls are not unusual for a man in his line of work. “Somebody’s in trouble, they call you,” the lawyer likes to say. He rubs his eyes and sits up in his king-size bed, in his 5,500-square-foot home, set on a full acre of land on a wooded ridge that looms over Alex City. Some call the neighborhood Millionaire Hill. Radney’s house sits beneath a canopy of trees beside a flowing creek. It has six bedrooms, stone floors, fine wood paneling, a bar, vast stretches of bookshelves, chandeliers, and a stone fireplace. An oasis of beauty straight out of Southern Living magazine, designed to look as if it has been on this ridge forever. A house bought through the mortal combat of scores of criminal and civil trials.
