To catch a mockingbird

As an English teacher, Charles Shields loved to teach “To Kill a Mockingbird.” When a student asked him if the man who wrote the book was still alive, he discovered how difficult it was to find biographical information about its author, Miss Harper Lee.
“The kids wanted to know about her,” Shields said. “Did she just make this up, or was this something she lived? How old is she?”
He assigned his students the task of doing a biography on Lee. It was the days before Google, and they found encyclopedia entries conflicted.
“Some say she has a degree in law from the University of Alabama. Some say she has a degree in English... but the actuality is she has no degree. She dropped out her senior year.”
One thing “all the encyclopedias agree” on, Shields said, is that Nelle Harper Lee “is a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee.
“Which is wrong,” he said. “I found that if something is printed once, it is repeated over and over,” Shields said.
It was at that point Shields realized, to teach Harper Lee, accurate information had to be found.
Shields began four years of research on Lee. He interviewed over 600 people who had known her, and researched both her papers and those of her best friend, Truman Capote.
In Capote papers, Shields “found 150 pages of typed single-space notes taken by Harper Lee” while the two were in Kansas researching Capote’s book “In Cold Blood.”
Capote and Lee were neighbors growing up, Shields said, and he became the character Dill in her book.
“I don’t know of any other situation in American literature where you have two writers who are the same age living next to each other separated by a rock fence,” Shields said.
“I traced her family back to Virginia piedmont,” Shields said. Lee’s family were farmers, and migrated south looking for better land. “The family got poor and poorer the farther South they went,” Shields said. “Her grandfather was in the bottom third of income of all farmers in Alabama.”
After completing his research, he sent the genealogy to Lee and her older sister, Alice.
He has never met the reclusive author, he said, but he did correspond with Alice for a time. After receiving the family history, Shields said she told him, “You are thorough.”
Shields said each year brings 100,000 new readers of Lee’s only novel, a story of racial unrest in the segregated south. It is most often read by high schoolers.
In the generations between when the story is set, when the story was written and the present, much has changed. Students are surprised to learn segregation was a forced system, Shields said. “They thought it was a southern custom, that blacks and whites just wanted to be separate.” Students in the world of cell phones and instant messaging are amazed by the pace of Maycomb, the book’s fictional setting.
Yet Maycomb accurately reflected Monroeville, the town Lee grew up in.
“The town was so small, they didn’t even have a policeman,” Shields said.
When four high schoolers in Monroeville decided to go on a spree, they figured they wouldn’t get caught.
“They were wrong,” Shields said.
That incident birthed a central figure in Mockingbird.
Boo Radley was based on one of the four boys who one night raided the town’s soda fountain and broke its high school windows. While three of the boys were sent to reform camp, the fourth was released to his farther, who said he’d take care of the matter.
The father confined his son to his home, where he spent the next 25 years or so until he died at age 42 from tuberculosis.
“He only went out at night,” Shields said of the real-life Arthur Bullwar.
And the children of the town did treat him as a specter, Shields said, warning each other not to breath the air around the Bullwar property, as it was “Arthur’s air.”
There are many other autobiographical foundations to the book, Shields said. Like Scout in the story, young Harper Lee was a tom boy with an attorney father. Unlike Scout’s father Atticus, however, Lee’s father was very formal. Even his wife called him “Mr. Lee,” Shields said.
Shields said Lee did not include a mother figure in the story as her own mother was a victim of bipolar disorder, and during her depressive states was emotionally unavailable to her children.
“She was just lost in her own sadness,” Shields said. “Then, during her manic phases, Mr. Lee had to plead with her to stay on the property,” as she would wander the town weaving elaborate tall tales, he said.
In Mockingbird, “Scout matter-of-factly says ‘My mother died when I was two so I don’t remember her.’” In real life, Shields said, Lee’s mother attempted to drown her at that age. “Only Alice walking in on her saved her life.”
It’s no wonder, he said, that Lee would omit any mother figure in the book.
The book, Shields said, is an homage to her father.
As a young attorney, he was given the case of two young black men who had murdered a shopkeeper during a botched robbery attempt. It was Mr. Lee’s first criminal case. He was 24.
In Alabama at the at time, Shields said, there was something called “Negro Law.”
“You gave cases to young white lawyers to practice on. They might get it wrong, but it didn’t matter,” because the defendants were black, was how the thinking went, Shields said.
Her father posted six objections in the case, the first being that the dead man’s son was on the jury. The next was that the sheriff, in selecting jurors, had thoroughly discussed the case with them all. All his objections were overruled. The defendants hanged.
“But there was worse to come,” said Shields. That Christmas, the shopkeeper’s other son received a package in the mail. “It was the scalps of the two hanged men.” Included was a note, “Justice has been served.”
Disgusted, “Mr. Lee never took another criminal case as long as he lived,” Shields said. “His view was, why participate in a system that’s broken?”
Harper Lee wrote the book to honor her father’s stance. She spent eight years of weekends and evenings after work writing Mockingbird.
She lived in a 12 by 14 foot apartment in New York City, with a closet door as a desk and no hot running water. Capote found her an editor, and she was told she had a natural voice, but no story.
“What have I got, then?” Shields said she asked.
She was told she had a series of character sketches, but no plot line.
Lee spent the next two years re-writing Mockingbird. She was assisted by a gift from two dear friends, a couple who believed in her ability. They gave her a year’s living expenses so she could seriously focus on her book. She did. After two revisions, she was given an advance by J.P. LIppincott to finish the book.
By November of 1959, she was on her third draft. But by then, “Nelle was tired of the book,” Shields said. “She realizes, ‘I hate this book. Everyone has gone on with their lives and I’m still sitting at a door.’”
She opened her window and threw the pages to the wind. Then she called her editor and told her what she had done.
Ty Hohoff, her editor, saved the book, Shields said. “She told her ‘It’s not your book to throw away. I have worked with you for two years and my professional hand is on those pages.’”
“Then,” Shields said Hohoff continued, “there’s the little thing about the advance. If you do not turn in that book, you owe us $8,000.”
Lee went to the alley, gathered the pages, typed them up and turned them in, he said.

J.P. LIppincott retitled the book, which Lee had called “Atticus” as “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Mockingbird says South,” Shields said, “and kill is always a zinger in a title.”
Hohoff warned Lee the book would probably sell about 2,500 copies.
“Before the civil rights movement, a book about racial injustice was not going to make people sprint to the bookstore,” Shields said. Instead, after publication in 1960, the book met with steady positive reviews. “By the end of 1960, it had sold half a million copies.”
In May 1961, Mockingbird won the Pulitzer prize for literature.
“She took her $500 prize money and gave to her local library in Monroeville. They bought their first set of encyclopedias with it.”
The book was then made into a low-budget film. “You can tell it was low-budget,” Shields said. “It’s not that they didn’t have color in 1961.” Plus, he said, “The movie only has three sets.”
Major studios thought the move would never sell. Popular movies had big sets and guns, he said. “A movie about a small town in Alabama wasn’t going to be popular,” Shields said.
Actor Gregory Peck ended up footing half the bill for the film’s production. The film won three academy awards.
By 1964, Shields said, “Harper Lee discovers she doesn’t enjoy being famous. There are some people who just crave attention. She’s not one of them.”
“She’s had a bellyful of ‘What’s your next book about? Does Atticus make a comeback?” So she retired to Monroeville, where she still lives today, he said.
Harper Lee and her sister Alice, now 96, share the family home. After church on Sundays, they go for catfish and then they go get Nelle’s letters, Shields said.
“The third generation is still asking ‘Are you Scout? Is your dad Atticus?’ And just sending plain fan letters saying ‘I love your book.’”
The only book that consistently outranks “To Kill a Mockingbird” in its influence is the Bible,” Shields said. “That’s not being blasphemous, it just is.”
“It’s the kind of book that sticks with you,” Shields said. “You get something out of it every time you read it. It changes as you get older.”
“It’s a great piece of literature,” Shields said, because it asks each individual who reads it ‘What would you do?’
“It puts you in those shoes. It tackles the biggest issue everywhere on the planet: Getting along with people who are a little bit different. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong, just different,” he said.
“It just stands the test of time.”