This was unusual: Maryon Pittman Allen could not find a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
[
To Kill a Mockingbird
] throughout Washington.
Maryon was the second wife of James Browning Allen, newly appointed Senator from the great state of Alabama, and as such she was not only compelled to attend the official luncheon of the Ladies of the Senate, but also to entertain the first lady of the United States, Rosalynn Carter. , with a representative book of his native land.
Allen was very clear about which book to bring him, since there was no more famous story in Alabama than the adventures of Scout, a true girl, and his father, a heroic lawyer named Atticus Finch.
But even though millions of copies of Nelle Harper Lee's novel were being published at the time, Allen couldn't find a single one for sale in the nation's capital.
Allen was Lee's age and they had both dropped out of the University of Alabama around the same time.
Lee had started studying law and dropped it to write;
Allen had enrolled in Journalism and left it to have children.
Her first marriage was unsuccessful and she had three mouths to feed, so she went to work as a reporter for a few newspapers around Birmingham.
This is how she met her second husband, James Browning Allen, then Lieutenant Governor, a widower with two children.
When he was going to interview him for a report, he heard the bells of a church ringing and he thought that he wished it was not a sign, but after four months they had married and four years later they moved to Washington so that he could fill his seat in the Senate of United States.
Allen didn't want to hype her role as Senate lady, but she also didn't want to hurt her husband or her condition.
So she was determined to bring Mrs. Carter the appropriate gift.
And since he couldn't find the book, he started looking for its author.
Allen and Lee had a mutual friend from the Tuscaloosa days, so he figured maybe he knew how to locate her.
Almost everyone in the state would have recognized John Forney's voice, and for half of his Alabama fans it was God's voice: Forney had been broadcasting Crimson Tide games for more than a decade.
"John," Allen said when the sportscaster picked up the phone, "do you know where Nelle Lee is?"
I have to get a copy of your book somehow.
As soon as he explained why, Forney revealed that Lee was in Alexander City.
Allen knew Alex City well;
her first husband had been born and raised there.
Back in the days when she lived with her mother in a tent on the Mississippi shore while her father built embankments on the river, her ex-father-in-law rubbed shoulders with state senators.
Later, J. Sanford Mullins settled in Alex City to practice law for three decades.
As Allen remembered, the most exciting thing that could happen in the Lake Martin area was for his ex-father-in-law to climb into the back of a pickup truck to deliver one of his speeches, unfailingly stormy slogans that drew audiences from three counties.
But the Channahatchee Creek Speech Wizard was long dead, so she couldn't think of what might be in Tallapoosa County that would have sparked the interest of an internationally renowned writer.
"May I know," Allen asked Forney, puzzled, "what he's doing in Alex City?"
Lee had come to write, Forney told him, and if he gave him a little time, he would try to locate her.
After a few hours, Forney called her and told her that he had found her at the Horseshoe Bend motel (she knew it, a hexagonal building off Highway 280) and that the writer authorized him to give her her private phone number.
"Anyone would think he had gone there to hide in the trees," Allen recalls, "but I got the secret number and we had more than an hour of chatter.
Since Allen thought Lee knew something about his ex-father-in-law, they talked about country lawyers, and since Lee was a regular reader of the column that Allen sold through a press agency,
Reflections of a pen
, they talked about journalism.
When Allen was finally able to ask her what she was doing in Alex City, the writer didn't reveal much, except that she had been there for a few months, and that she was working on something related to a voodoo priest.
What he also told her was that he would see that a copy of his novel reached the nation's capital by May 15, 1978, in time for lunch.
True to his word, Lee sent him a first edition of the book, with the cover dedication "To Rosalynn Carter," along with a verse from the book of Proverbs: "Her ways are delightful ways and all her paths are peace."
Mrs. Allen presented it to Mrs. Carter at the Ladies of the Senate luncheon, which also happened to be the last one the senator's wife attended.
Two weeks later, while Maryon and her husband were vacationing in Alabama, he died of a heart attack at their Gulf Shores beach home.
Not long after, Governor George Wallace assigned the widow her husband's position, making her the second woman in the state to hold a Senate seat.
Overwhelmed both personally and professionally, she completely forgot about the Pulitzer Prize winner who had hidden in the Horseshoe Bend motel.
It was easy to forget about Harper Lee back then.
It was eighteen years since
To Kill a Mockingbird
had been out,
and in all that time Lee had published virtually nothing else.
Three short essays for two picture magazines, two biographical notes that were favors for his friend Truman Capote, and a satirical recipe for pork rinds cake for a novel cookbook.
In almost two decades, those were the only texts that he produced.
There was no second novel to follow the first, nor did he give an interview in fourteen years.
The last time she agreed to be quoted in the press, it was Capote for another favor.
In 1976, he asked him to accompany him during an interview for
People
, which did a report on his life.
In it, only twelve words of his were recorded, of which five were: "We are united by the same anguish."
Lee had become tremendously rich with
To Kill a Mockingbird
, but no one would tell by looking at the life he led.
When I was in New York, I lived in a small rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side;
when he went to Alabama, he was staying with one of his sisters, on a modest ranch in Monroeville, his hometown.
Wherever he was, he shunned the press, admirers and anything that sounded too literary;
He tried to live as if he had never published one of the most successful novels in the history of the country.
In 1962, the year the book's film adaptation (which earned Gregory Peck an Oscar and further etched his portrait of a small southern town in the nation's collective memory), Lee told a reporter from
The Mobile Register
that he would have liked to leave the forum, which was basically what he did.
Now, alone in a motel in the middle of nowhere, without the world noticing her, she was almost as free as she was in the little apartment where she wrote
To Kill a Mockingbird
.
So he decided not to tell Maryon Pittman Allen that day on the phone what he was doing in Alexander City: Harper Lee was in Alexander City because at last, after so many years, he was going to write another book.
Bloody hours.
The Story of Harper Lee's Unfinished Book
Author: Cep Casey Translation: María Alonso Seisdedos Pages: 416 Format: Softcover
Look for it in your bookstore
