Young Capote: Miserable in New Orleans one long-ago Christmas

When Truman Capote was no more than a baby, to hear him tell it, his mother and father split up. His mother deposited him in a small Alabama town with her relatives, the Faulks. An elderly cousin named Sook Faulk raised Truman, and it was this woman he loved most in the world. But one Christmas, his father, who lived in New Orleans, managed to wrangle legal custody of the boy for the holidays and young Truman rode the bus south, already missing Sook. He was miserable in New Orleans, but he tried not to let on, as he writes in "One Christmas," which came out in a 1982 boxed, gift edition from Random House.

"The day before Christmas, as we were walking along Canal Street, I stopped dead still, mesmerized by a magical object that I saw in the window of a big toy store. It was a model airplane large enough to sit in and pedal like a bicycle. It was green and had a red propeller. I was convinced that if you pedaled fast enough it would take off and fly! Now wouldn't that be something! I could just see my cousins standing on the ground while I flew about among the clouds. Talk about green! I laughed; and laughed and laughed. It was the first thing I'd done that made my father look confident, even though he didn't know what I thought was so funny."

A visit with Harper Lee's sister Alice and the charming town of Maycomb

Alice Lee in her law office, 1977

 The death of Harper Lee's sister Alice Lee at 103 early this week sent me digging through old photos for a picture of a tree that was inspiration for the Boo Tree of Harper Lee's 1960 novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

I not only found the photo of the Boo Tree -- or at least the sizable stump it had been reduced to -- but also one I'd taken of Alice Lee.
It was 1977, and I'd ridden a bus to Monroeville, Ala., to write about the childhood friendship between Nelle Harper, as she was called, and her tow-headed, precocious friend Truman Capote, the  model for the fictional Dill.

I found Miss Lee -- we met in her law office -- to be a courteous woman, reserved and matter-of-fact.

In a voice that rode a pogo stick of deep South inflection, she told me, "As far as I'm concerned, Nelle just sat down and wrote a book."
The trouble was, she said, her sister had "made the book so believable that people don't want to believe it didn't happen."
If Miss Lee was less than chatty, words cascaded from Capote's aunt Mary Ida Faulk Carter, whose square face was a near-carbon of her nephew's.
"Truman is a marvel with words," she said, "but he can't stick to the truth."
Carter said his short story, "A Christmas Memory," about fruitcake-making time at another aunt's house in Monroeville, was a real stretch.
"Truman had as much as any boy in Monroeville could want, and he made out like his family was so poor that we had to go scratching in other people's yards to get our pecans."
As kids, Nelle Harper and Truman were back and forth between the Lee house and the Faulk house so often, according to Mary Ida, they wore a gap in the hedge.
Sadly, the Lee house and the Faulk house were no longer. But the town was still there, though the streets had been paved since the Lee sisters were children. You could almost feel how Harper Lee had absorbed the place into her veins -- the smells, the people, the trees -- and how she poured it all back into her only novel.
I couldn't get enough of the town during those couple of muggy July days. As I walked, characters resumed their lives. Trees their silhouettes against the evening sky. Was that Scout and Jem on Boo Radley's porch? Here, the Lee house and the Faulk house. There, the gap in the hedge where a tomboy of a girl and a tow-headed boy spent summers in a tree house making up stories.
With Alice Lee gone, the charming old town recedes a bit more into the distance.