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    Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee
    Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee
    Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee
    Ebook196 pages2 hours

    Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee

    By Wayne Flynt

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “Provides revealing portraits of the very private Nelle and her sisters . . . A welcome snapshot of the ‘real’ Lee.” —Kirkus Reviews

    An indelible portrayal of one of American literature’s most beloved authors—a collection of letters between Harper Lee and one of her closest friends that reveals the famously private writer as never before.

    The violent racism of the American South drove Wayne Flynt away from his home state of Alabama, but the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s classic novel about courage, community, and equality, inspired him to return in the early 1960s and craft a career documenting and teaching Alabama history. His writing resonated with many Alabamians, in particular three sisters: Louise, Alice, and Nelle Harper Lee. Beginning with their first meeting in 1983, a mutual respect and affection for the state’s history and literature matured into a deep friendship between two families.

    Flynt and Nelle Harper Lee began writing to one other while she was living in New York—heartfelt, insightful, and humorous letters in which they swapped stories, information, and opinions on their families, books, Alabama history and social values, health concerns, even their fears and accomplishments. Though their earliest missives began formally, their mutual admiration grew, their exchanges became more intimate.

    Beautifully written, this remarkable compendium of their letters—a correspondence that lasted for a quarter century—offers a compelling look into the mind, heart, and work of one of the most beloved authors in modern literary history.

    “A satisfying glimpse of a famously reserved literary great.” —Publishers Weekly

    “Flynt offers an overview of Lee’s life with admiration, humor, and palpable love.” —Library Journal
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 2, 2017
    ISBN9780062660107
    Author

    Wayne Flynt

    WAYNE FLYNT is a southern historian and educator who retired after teaching for decades at Auburn University, where he directed more than sixty graduate programs. He has lectured at Sichuan University in China, at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the universities of Newcastle, Oxford, Cambridge, and Sussex in Great Britain, at the Franklin Roosevelt Center in The Netherlands, and at the University of Vienna. He is the author of fourteen books dealing with Southern politics, history, white poverty, and culture (religion, art, music, literature). His numerous awards include the Rembert Patrick Award for Florida History, the Lillian Smith Prize for Nonfiction from the Southern Regional Council, the Alabama Library Association Award for non-fiction (three times), the C. Vann Woodward/John Hope Franklin Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum Award for Excellence in Writing, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize (1989), and the Alabama Governor's Award for the Arts.

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    Reviews for Mockingbird Songs

    3.5/5

    16 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      While reading this book I wondered if Harper Lee would have approved of her letters with the author, Wayne Flynt, being published. This gave me a bit of an uncomfortable feeling. But I did find them interesting and I especially enjoyed finding out more about her sisters and their close , caring relationship.
    • 5/5
      This short, compelling book is just what the cover says: the story of a friendship. It is not an in-depth analysis of To Kill A Mockingbird, nor is it a biography of Harper Lee. Rather, it is a series of vignettes of the relationship between the author, a noted Alabama historian and writer, and Ms. Lee and her two sisters. Like many such books of letters, it is easy to read and hard to put down. Flynt fills in the space between letters with details about what is happening in Lee's life and in his own. Perhaps I can say it is a Southern thing, being from Alabama myself (though having left it, like so many), but these stories of family are what is important in the relationship and what holds it together. There is also a shared sense of disgust at certain Alabama things, such as Judge Roy Moore, circa 2006. Flynt, despite being a devout Baptist, shares Lee's liberal sentiments about most things.One reviewer said this book was more about Flynt than Lee, and given that he wrote it, I guess that is the case. Lee's letters are also filled with praise for Flynt's work, such as his history of Alabama in the 20th Century and another book about poor whites. This is not self-promotion on Flynt's part, however. Lee requested that Flynt repeat one presentation he had given on To Kill A Mockingbird as her eulogy--which he did, the day after her death at her Monroeville funeral.So what is to be gained by reading this book? Certainly some insight into Harper Lee's character. In the earlier letters, before eye problems and a stroke limited her writing, she writes with great wit and shows a wide knowledge of literature and history. Her cutting remarks about others, her unwanted biographers in particular, but also Truman Capote, are entertaining and insightful. The reader will also gain an appreciation for Ms. Lee's remarkable sisters, especially her older sister Alice, who died in 2014 at age 103, and practiced law in Monroeville until she was 100! Mostly, you will appreciate the value of friendship, even if conducted over great distances and with infrequent meetings. It is something to treasure and hold on to.Throughout the book, Flynt revels in letting Lee know just how popular and influential her book continues to be. I guess that is why there is an interest in books like this one. We want to know what kind of person created such a book that continues to teach us lessons to this day. It is a book you can read as a teenager and return to as an adult and still be awed by. It was created by a pretty feisty, extraordinary lady, who tried to abandon Alabama for New York City, but could never put that home behind her. Reading this book helps explain why. It is a simple, heartfelt monument to the author of To Kill a Mockingbird--one that even she would have appreciated.
    • 2/5
      Again, too much Wayne Flynt -a history professor who befriended Harper Lee late in her life. Terribly boring & repetitive letters providing very little insight or interest in even its Alabama setting. Some fun in Harper Lee's letters. Some interest in "seeing" her two sisters -- all three living to their very late 90s & 100. Worth reading just to discover that she adored NYCity, had an apartment there & probably spent most of her life there. Hooray, Nelle! (Harper is her middle name) These letters are from a period in her life when she was fading & spent a lot of time back home in Monroeville

    Book preview

    Mockingbird Songs - Wayne Flynt

    Preface

    On a crisp spring day in 1993 not long after I received Nelle Harper Lee’s first letter, I was tending my rose garden when a male northern mockingbird began singing. Looking in its direction, I spied a calico cat halfway up a scrawny ten-foot-tall pine tree; up in the branches could be seen a small nest and chicks. The mockingbird, perched on the limb of an adjacent sweetgum, was singing fair warning of its intent to defend its family. The cat seemed frozen in space, torn between the nearby threat and the tasty morsels nearly within its grasp. Suddenly the bird dived for the head of the cat, which met the threat with an outstretched paw. The bird circled back to its perch and repeated the chorus of threats. When the cat resumed its climb, the bird swooped down again, this time attacking the cat’s haunches. Now completely absorbed by the standoff, I put down my tools and watched.

    After minutes of parry and thrust, advance and stalemate, the cat realized that the prize, however close, was not worth the risk to its life. But when the poor animal decided to reverse direction, it lost its footing. Frantically trying to regain traction, the cat part ran, part fell to the ground, an avalanche of bark bouncing off its head and back. The mockingbird, merciless, continued its attack as the cat tried to restore its breath and balance. When sufficiently recovered, the cat raced across my yard in search of sanctuary. The triumphant bird, apparently taking me for the cat’s accomplice, swooped down at my head as I retreated into the carport. The mini drama concluded, the mockingbird returned to its perch in the sweetgum tree and resumed its singing.

    Originally, the mockingbird’s range extended toward Canada on both coasts of North America, but from the late 1800s to the early twentieth century the beauty and diversity of the birds’ songs attracted not only mates but also trappers. So many were captured to be sold as pets that they became scarce at the upper edge of their range. After the so-called cage bird trade ended, the species recovered and pushed its boundaries north again. Although ornithologists inadequately understand mockingbird migration patterns, they have established that some birds move south in the fall, while others prefer the northern edges of their occupation zone.

    Why Harper Lee named her masterpiece after these fascinating birds may be explained in one of its key passages. After Atticus Finch tells his daughter, It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, Miss Maudie explains why: They don’t eat up people’s gardens, they don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

    Nelle Harper Lee was in many ways like the mockingbirds Miss Maudie described that hot Maycomb day. They are complicated and independent—and so was she. They boldly defend themselves and their families from predators, including the two-legged variety, and so did she. And like Nelle, mockingbirds have the most piercingly beautiful song. For that reason, she spent much of her life eluding people who wanted to capture and cage her. I loved and respected her for her fierceness and her commitment to singing the songs she wanted to sing the way she wanted to sing them.

    Introduction

    How does one chronicle a friendship? How does one remember the twists and turns, accidental meetings, serendipitous events, shared interests, and habits of the heart? How does a relationship progress from Dear Mr. Flynt / Dear Ms. Lee to Dear Wayne / Dear Nelle to Beloved Professor / Dear Madam Famous Author to Dear Ones / Dear Prime Suspect? How does mutual respect morph into formal acquaintance, warm friendship, and finally love?

    These letters record the progress of my relationship with Nelle Harper Lee, but they can only hint at the reasons we became such special friends and correspondents, from the first letter between us, in 1992—when she was sixty-six and I was fifty-two—to the last, about a year before she died in 2016. Perhaps in another life Nelle wanted to be a historian of the South, as I have been throughout my career as a writer and professor. Or perhaps, as Nelle sometimes hinted humorously, she fell under the spell of my wife, Dartie (whose name confused Nelle for years as she tried to master my pronunciation), who brought her exotic chocolate concoctions and told her so many funny stories, and I was merely the appendage who came with the deal. Perhaps we became close because Dartie and I were there for her at three critical junctures of her life: when her sister, Louise, slipped into dementia; when she herself suffered a stroke and, obsessed with maintaining her privacy, isolated herself at a rehabilitation facility; and when she was forced to give up her second home in New York City and live out the rest of her days in Monroeville, the town from which she had fled to freedom sixty-five years earlier. Or perhaps we three met in the twilight of our lives and just needed each other.

    Although Nelle and I communicated for more than twenty years, we never worked together, lived in the same town, or talked for hours on the telephone. Our friendship hinged on certain encounters, most of them face-to-face, and in between was lots of time and space—and letters. Her first to me was typewritten and formal. I didn’t keep a copy of my response, but I remember that I replied in kind. She didn’t write me again for a decade, not until a family crisis prompted her to reach out. From that point on, we both dropped our awkward formality in favor of ink-on-paper intimacy. Nelle preferred fine stationery. E-mail was never an option. Her letters were like those of two other southern literary icons of the time, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. Sally Fitzgerald, editor of O’Connor’s correspondence, notes that the Georgia master of the short story had a reputation for reclusiveness by inclination. But O’Connor, like Nelle, was also a witty and gregarious storyteller and conversationalist who often penned wonderful letters.

    Though she lived into the age of personal computers, Facebook, and Twitter, Nelle rejected them, vociferously and profanely, believing them merely alternative ways of invading people’s privacy.

    Conversely, she once sent us a Charles Rennie Mackintosh card from her precious and dwindling stock purchased at the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow just because she wanted us to have one. Her letters are self-consciously of another age, less flirtatious, gossipy, and trivial than Jane Austen’s, her literary idol, and more like O’Connor’s and Welty’s: colloquial, chatty, funny, satirical, brutally honest, unflinching, emotionally warm, intensely personal. Because her circle of close friends was small, her correspondence was doubly treasured. In time, others will no doubt share their hoard of letters to, from, and about Harper Lee, and an editor will compile them, as R. W. Chapman did for Jane Austen and Sally Fitzgerald did for Flannery O’Connor. This collection is, by comparison, small and far from comprehensive, but I hope it offers some interesting moments and important feelings in the life of my friend, and whets the reader’s appetite for more.

    As for the hinges to our relationship, these are easier to identify. We first met Louise—Nelle called her Weezie—Conner, and her little sister, Doty (a nickname of endearment for Nelle within the family), in March 1983 in Eufaula, Alabama. Louise—whose name Nelle would incorporate in her central character in Mockingbird, Jean Louise Finch (though the sisters would argue all their lives about who Scout really represented)—was the often overlooked second daughter of Frances and A. C. Lee. She had gone off to college at Auburn, fallen in love, married, moved to Eufaula on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, given birth to two sons, and become a mainstay of the First Baptist Church. Our paths crossed because she was serving on a committee to organize an Alabama history and heritage festival, and I, then a professor of history at Auburn University, about an hour away, was invited to be one of the speakers.

    Decades earlier, during the civil rights movement, the mayor of Eufaula had asked Louise to serve on a much more important committee, one called Community on the Move. This five-person group had been started by a black woman Louise knew who was concerned about education, racial divisions, and drug trafficking in their town. Louise, asking the committee founder what she could contribute to the effort, was told simply, You have a white face. Some local folks would have been offended by such tokenism. Louise agreed to serve. She and the other committee members met twice weekly, ate together, discussed community problems, and tried to make the town better. Her black friend began stopping by for coffee, a small act of personal friendship in most places but a racial blurring of the color line in civil rights–era Eufaula.

    Citing her father as inspiration, Louise explained to us that he had been an inside Christian, by which she meant a man of honor and personal decency, attuned to his duty as a community leader, one who treated all people fairly and with respect, though he was not liberal, self-righteous, or ostentatiously religious. His Methodist upbringing had persuaded him that the Kingdom of God was as much concerned with justice in Alabama as with heaven in the hereafter. Although he did not endorse the civil rights movement as early as Alice and Nelle, he moved more rapidly than most white Alabamians.

    It was the history-and-heritage event that first brought me together with Nelle. Committee members wanted the keynote speaker to be Louise’s famous sister, Harper Lee, but all were aware that she had made no formal public appearances in decades, except to accept honorary degrees. So they proposed instead to invite Nelle’s childhood friend Truman Capote, by then world-famous for his book In Cold Blood. Hearing of this, Nelle stepped in. Knowing Capote’s foibles and idiosyncrasies all too well, she feared that he would embarrass her sister, so she stunned the committee by volunteering to speak at the conference herself. It was an act of pure affection for her sister, but delivering on it was pure agony for Nelle, who had difficulty eating or sleeping for days before such an event.

    Speaking just before Nelle that day was Nancy Anderson, a professor of English who was a colleague of mine at Auburn. Faced with both a large audience and a speaking slot that preceded a literary icon’s, Nancy later told me she was feeling nervous and intimidated. But just before she walked onstage, she was introduced to Nelle, who put her at ease by whispering, Are you as terrified as I am? I feel like an owl that came out at midday. I let my sisters talk me into this, but I will never let them do it again.

    Later on, Nelle talked for over an hour to a group of children who’d been in the audience, and offered to sign copies of Mockingbird for them. Among the fortunate recipients that evening was our son, Sean, who had turned fourteen that day. When I asked Miss Lee to sign our book as well, she replied icily, I only sign for children. That was our first, not very promising, exchange.

    A decade later, the Alabama and

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