Mystery in Monroeville
Maycomb may have been hot enough to wilt men’s collars before nine, but Monroeville in February has a chill. The tiny Alabama town where Harper Lee was born was shocked earlier this month by the announcement that, fifty-five years after she published "To Kill a Mockingbird," she would finally publish a sequel, "Go Set a Watchman," although it will be a sequel by release date only, since Lee actually wrote "Watchman" first.
South of Montgomery and north of Mobile, Monroeville is the kind of town that feels like it’s at least a hundred miles from anywhere else. I drove there the day after the announcement, and everyone from the postman to my hotel clerk had something to say about Harper Lee’s new book. Nobody, not even Lee’s lifelong friends, seemed to have known that the manuscript existed, and many were confused about why it is being published now, so many decades after the author appears to have forsaken it.
Lee was living in New York City when her first and, up until now, only book was published. She’d moved to the city in 1949 after dropping out of law school. She maintained a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side for decades, but she returned to Alabama often to see her older sisters. Her sister Alice had joined their father’s law firm, in Monroeville, and her sister Louise was raising a family not far away in Eufaula. Like the seasons, Harper Lee came and went: usually home to Alabama for the winters and then back north to the city for the rest of the year.
A severe stroke in 2007 brought her home for good, first to Birmingham, and then eventually to the Meadows, an assisted-living facility not far from the center of Monroeville. Her physical decline has been well observed: confined to a wheelchair, she’s mostly blind, from macular degeneration, and nearly deaf. Her health otherwise, though, has been fiercely debated, especially during these last few weeks. At eighty-eight, Harper Lee rarely leaves the Meadows; she was last seen outside the facility in November for her sister’s funeral.
Ms. Alice and Ms. Nelle, as everyone calls the sisters here, are well known in this community of six thousand or so. Nobody I spoke to was ever more than one story away from the sisters, and people laughed whenever I said that the rest of the world thinks of Harper Lee as a recluse. Over and over again I was told that Ms. Nelle is allergic to press, not people, and that through the years she could be found at David’s Catfish House, the Piggly Wiggly, and the McDonald’s on Highway 21, feeding the ducks by the pond at the park, or playing the slots at the casino in the next county.
But the Lees were an ocean, and the people in town always waded in slowly, retreating whenever they went too far. When Monroeville wanted to put on the stage version of "To Kill a Mockingbird," rather than ask Lee for an exemption, the town acquired the dramatic rights the same as any other theatre company. Lee once objected to a cookbook based on "To Kill a Mockingbird" being sold in the local museum, and it was removed right away. Bookstores had her sign extra copies of the novel until she realized that they were being sold online at higher prices; she started signing only personal copies. No matter what I asked about Harper Lee, people in Monroeville responded as if she needed their personal protection: they are very cautious about what might appear in print about their beloved Ms. Nelle.
Almost everyone agreed, though, that things had changed in the last few years. Harper’s health did not improve in the years after her stroke, and her sister Alice, who was a full fifteen years older, had her own health issues, which forced her to retire from the family law firm shortly after turning a hundred, in 2011. Even before Alice retired she had ceded much of her authority over Harper’s affairs to a lawyer named Tonja Carter. According to the press release earlier this month from Lee’s publisher, HarperCollins, it was Carter who discovered the manuscript of "Go Set a Watchman," and Carter who negotiated with the publisher.
Carter, who is forty-nine, was born in Leesburg, Florida. Her family moved to Monroe Country, and she married at age nineteen. Following a divorce, she remarried in 1990, this time to Patrick Carter, whose father, Jennings Faulk Carter, was a cousin of Truman Capote and grew up next door to the Lees. Sometime before marrying into the Carter family, she came to work as a secretary in Alice Lee’s law office. Like other young women in Monroeville, she was encouraged by Alice to continue her education, first at Faulkner University, in Montgomery, then at the University of Alabama School of Law, in Tuscaloosa, where she earned a law degree in 2006. She passed the bar that same year, and in January of 2007, the firm where Harper’s father and then sister practiced reorganized itself legally as Barnett, Bugg, Lee, & Carter, L.L.C. Carter handled the estates and trusts of several clients, and, according to newspaper reports, presided as a judge in the local municipal court and represented the nearby town of Excel. Her husband, who served briefly as a lay minister in the United Methodist Church, went back to his previous occupation of piloting planes.
In the spring of 2013, the Carters opened a restaurant with a name that nodded to their respective vocations: the Prop and Gavel. They gutted an old furniture store in Courthouse Square, dividing the space between a new office for the law firm and the restaurant, where one of their daughters worked as the general manager and their other three children worked sometimes, too. Just over a year later, the restaurant closed, though there are still salt and pepper shakers on the wine-cask tables and candles in the front window. Steven Dunn, who moved to Monroeville from Kentucky to work as a chef at the restaurant, remembered cooking for both of the Lee sisters. He said that Tonja Carter had referred to Harper as her "godmother" and mentioned that Alice had encouraged her to become a lawyer.
But Tonja Carter seemed to take a different approach to representing Harper Lee than Alice had: where the latter might have mediated informally, Carter litigated. In May of 2013, around the time that the Prop and Gavel opened, Carter sued Lee’s former agent, Samuel Pinkus, to secure the royalties and rights for "To Kill a Mockingbird," which had first been transferred from Lee in 2007 and were reconfirmed in 2011 by a document that Carter herself notarized. That court complaint is one of the only public sources of information about Harper Lee’s affairs, including her finances: the author earned $1,688,064.68 in royalties from "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the period ending in December, 2009, and then another $816,448.06 for the subsequent six months. In October of 2013, she sued the local museum in Monroeville for trademark violations. Both lawsuits were settled out of court, the second one around the time that the Prop and Gavel closed.
When I stopped by the Monroe County Museum earlier this month, a handful of people waited outside for it to open, including a florist who was there to plan a May wedding. Stephanie Rogers, the museum’s director, sent us both upstairs to look at the courtroom that was made famous by the 1962 film adaptation of Lee’s novel, starring Gregory Peck. A $2.5 million restoration, completed in 2002, left the rolled-tin ceiling gleaming and the narrow-planked gum-tree floors glistening.
Rogers, who has worked for the museum since 2007, declined to say much about last year’s lawsuit. "We’re excited for the new book," she told me. The gift shop downstairs still sells coffee mugs, magnets, shirts, and key chains with the words "To Kill a Mockingbird" on them. "We don’t do anything but honor and respect Ms. Nelle," Rogers said. She showed me a handwritten note from the author thanking the museum for flowers they had sent on the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, in 2010: "My dearest friends, the roses are spectacular and I love them. Sincerely yours, Nelle Harper Lee."
Tim McKenzie, who works just off Courthouse Square and has served on the museum’s board for two terms, said that the lawsuit "knocked us blind" and that "it left a lot of folks with hard feelings." He and others explained how, previously, the Lees had a softer way of dealing with the museum. Alice Lee would make her sister’s wishes known through third parties, and the museum would comply with their requests, including, for example, the removal of "Calpurnia’s Cookbook," which was understood to have violated Harper Lee’s specific preference about the use of the novel’s characters. "We’re small-town folks, we usually just work things out," McKenzie said. "Ms. Alice had a different way of doing things."
Janet Sawyer, who owns the Courthouse Café next door to McKenzie’s office, is one of the few residents willing to speak specifically about the controversy over the new book. "It breaks my heart," she said. "Ms. Lee just wouldn’t want any of this." Sawyer repeated what many others had already told me: Harper Lee said often and emphatically, privately and publicly, that she would never publish another novel. Drinking coffee at the table where the Lee sisters used to come for lunch when their health allowed it, Sawyer said that her business for that day’s lunch had doubled, and that many customers thanked her for speaking to the media. "I don’t really know why they’re not speaking up, but I’m not afraid," she said. "Somebody has to, and I speak my mind." A man knocked to see if she had any food left, and after she’d sold him a cheeseburger that she promised was still warm, she came back to the table. "I just don’t think Ms. Lee wants this book published," Sawyer told me. "This is her lawyer doing this, being greedy."
Wayne Flynt, a professor emeritus at nearby Auburn University, dismissed what he called "the conspiracy theory" about the new novel, and said that Harper Lee "obviously isn’t demented." He said that he visits with the author every month, and that he saw her the day before "Go Set a Watchman" was announced, though curiously she never mentioned it. Lee, Flynt said, has "always had a lover’s quarrel with Monroeville," and he suggested that some of the town’s response has more to do with that than any concern for her wellbeing. "I’m absolutely astounded by what I’m hearing from down there," he said.
Several people who attended Alice Lee’s funeral, in November, have said that Harper’s behavior there was troubling, because she babbled and talked loudly during the service. But Flynt disagreed with their accounts. He told me that Lee was only mourning her sister: a public display of grief that he compared to those common in the Baptist Church. But Flynt added that he has never asked Tonja Carter about her legal or financial relationship with Harper Lee, and while they had exchanged e-mails since the announcement of "Go Set a Watchman," he had not asked her any questions about the book. "If people are so worried about this, why don’t they file grievances with the legal ethics committee of the Alabama Bar and let this go to trial?" Flynt asked. (If a complaint had been filed, we wouldn’t necessarily know: any such complaint or investigation would remain confidential unless a lawyer were found or pleaded guilty.)
Tonja Carter did not respond to e-mails or telephone calls, and her law office, which is an unmarked storefront next to the Prop and Gavel, was closed when I tried to visit. Her comments so far have been confined to the press release and a statement from HarperCollins—in which she was identified as Lee’s "dear friend and lawyer"—and a series of texts and e-mails that she exchanged with the New York Times. Questions remain about where and when she found the manuscript of "Go Set a Watchman": the publisher said that it was found in the fall, but Carter said that it was August; both have said that it was found in "a secure location," but have not been more specific.
Carter has also not explained her involvement in transferring the copyright for "To Kill a Mockingbird" from Harper Lee in 2011, or her very public disagreement that same year with Alice Lee over a memoir by a writer named Marja Mills, titled "The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee." Mills first met the Lees in 2001, when she went to Alabama to write a feature for the Chicago Tribune. She had more luck at getting the sisters to talk than almost any reporter before her, and returned a few years later to live in Monroeville; for eighteen months, Mills lived next door to the Lees, renting a house with Alice’s help.
Mills had meals with them, watched the film "Capote" with Harper, interviewed Alice extensively about Lee family history, met with local family members and friends who shared their stories, and soaked up life in Monroeville like a sponge. By 2006, Mills had moved back to Chicago to shape her notes into a memoir. She continued to visit the Lees occasionally when her travels brought her to Alabama, and both sisters seem to have coöperated with the book—Alice more formally by allowing herself to be recorded; Harper by allowing Mills to take notes and then, according to Mills and a friend of the Lees, reviewing the quotations and stories that were included in the book.
But on April 27, 2011, after the memoir sold to Penguin Press, a statement signed by Harper Lee circulated that said, "Contrary to recent news reports, I have not willingly participated in any book written or to be written by Marja Mills. Neither have I authorized such a book. Any claims otherwise are false." That statement was quickly refuted by Alice Lee, who wrote in her own statement: "The letter signed by Harper Lee and sent on April 27 via the Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter email address was sent without my knowledge and does not represent my feelings or those of my sister. I hope this letter puts the whole matter to rest."
It did not, and three years later, when Penguin published "The Mockingbird Next Door," the matter was argued again by press release. On the eve of the book’s publication, another typed statement bearing Harper Lee’s signature went forth: "Neither my attorney nor I have retracted my original statement. Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood."
When I spoke with Marja Mills by telephone, she expressed confusion over those statements attributed to Harper Lee in both 2011 and 2014. Carter, Mills said, was "confrontational" about her seeing Harper Lee and publishing the memoir, while "at the same time Alice was making it clear that both were welcome." Mills produced a handwritten letter from Alice dated May 12, 2011, which she believes explains some of what was happening. "Imagine my shock," Alice Lee wrote to Mills, "when I began to read and get clear about the statement sent from BBL & Carter’s office. I had made no statement and could not [see] how that would get started. When I questioned Tonja I learned that without my knowledge she had typed out the statement, carried it to The Meadows and had Nelle Harper sign it."
Alice’s letter continues, "Poor Nelle Harper can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by any one in whom she has confidence. Now she has no memory of the incident." It ends, "I am humiliated, embarrassed and upset about the suggestion of lack of integrity at my office. I am waiting for the other shoe to fall."
Not long after that exchange, Tonja Carter obtained durable power of attorney for Harper Lee. Around the same time, Carter’s husband Patrick was involved in a lawsuit against his father over the family’s homestead in Monroeville. That lawsuit and the one against the Monroe County Museum were invoked several times by those who told me that they feared legal action if they spoke directly about Carter’s representation of Lee.
Of course, tensions between lawyers and small towns are central to Lee’s famous novel, and many outside of Monroeville believe those tensions explain the suspicions about this new book. Clark Cooper, an attorney from Birmingham, had the rare opportunity to meet Harper Lee at the Meadows in 2011. "I really feel like Tonja’s being thrown under the bus by some of the local residents," he told me. He came to know Carter when she helped arrange his meeting with the author and her sister, and based on that experience four years ago, he said, "Folks who think she’s riding rough shod over Harper Lee—they don’t have a clue."
HarperCollins, which will publish "Go Set a Watchman" in July, appears to have a similar level of confidence in Carter, since it has dealt with her and has had no direct communication with Harper Lee about the new book. Tina Andreadis, senior vice-president of publicity at the publisher, confirmed to me that HarperCollins has worked only with Tonja Carter and Andrew Nurnberg, who has been the author’s foreign-rights agent since 2013.
Talking with Harper Lee is not something that many folks get to do these days, even though the Meadows is only a mile or so away from Courthouse Square. A long-time friend of the Lees, Dr. Thomas Lane Butts, told me, "This business of cutting Harper Lee off from her friends and relatives has been going on a long time." Every day that I was in town, a security guard waited by the entrance to the Meadows to turn away unwelcome visitors.
Otherwise, life in Monroeville seemed to go on the same way it always has. White collars still came for the lunch buffet at the Sweet Tooth Bakery & Deli and got takeaway from the Courthouse Café. Girls rushed in after school to be fitted for ball gowns and prom dresses at Susie’s Formals and Fabrics. My Time Christian Bookstore sold choir robes and leather Bibles and novelty notebooks with "I Got This—God" and "God’s Not Dead" on their covers. Rehearsal for the town’s annual production of the "To Kill a Mockingbird" play took place the same as every other year for the last twenty-six, though the actor playing Tom Robinson had to work late, so his part was briefly filled by the female director. The whole town gathered for Mardi Gras, with bikers leading a parade that ended with riders on horseback and fire engines with their sirens screaming. As she has been for the last fifty-five years, Harper Lee was somehow the talk of the town and the only person about whom nobody knew quite what to say.
Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
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