A Christmas visit to the racist poor in Harper Lee's 'Mockingbird'

In Harper Lee's 1960 novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," the lawyer Atticus Finch takes his two children, Scout and Jem, to visit the Ewell family at Christmas. The novel is set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Ala., and the Ewells, who live behind the town garbage dump, are Maycomb's poorest family. Bob Ewell is a white racist, who has falsely accused the innocent Tom Robinson, a black man, of raping his daughter. As Scout tells it:

 "Nobody was quite sure how many people were on the (Ewell) place. Some people said six, others said nine; there were always several dirty-faced ones at the windows when anyone passed by. Nobody had any occasion to pass by except at Christmas, when the churches delivered baskets, and when the mayor of Maycomb asked us to please help the garbage collector by dumping our own trees and trash.

...A dirt road ran from the highway past the dump, down to a small Negro settlement some five hundred yards beyond the Ewells'. ...In the frosty December dusk, their cabins looked neat and snug with pale blue smoke rising from the chimneys and doorways glowing amber from the fires inside. There were delicious smells about: chicken, bacon frying crisp as the twilight air. Jem and I detected squirrel cooking, but it took an old countryman like Atticus to identify possum and rabbit, aromas that vanished when we rode back past the Ewell residence."

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.