The sorrow, like everything in this small Alabama town, is more complicated than it first appears.
Harper Lee’s great book, To Kill a Mockingbird, was arguably the defining American novel of the 20th century. In a story accessible even to schoolchildren, she captured both the country’s original sin and its redeeming qualities.
The author lifted her hometown to global prominence, even as she personally pushed that prominence away. She was famous, and famously reclusive.
By the time she died on Friday morning, at 89, everyone in Monroeville, from those too young to read to those too old to see, knew of her. But almost no one really knew her.
At the old Monroe County courthouse – the setting for To Kill a Mockingbird – someone hung black ribbons on the doors. Outside the building stood a large birdhouse, a hand-painted mockingbird looking over its shoulder. There were signs of Lee and her book everywhere, from the Mockingbird Inn at the edge of town to the museum at the center of it. But there were no crowds of well-wishers. No public displays of loss. And maybe Miss Nelle, as people here call her, would have preferred it that way.
Lee’s contentious relationship with her hometown started with the release of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. It told the story of Maycomb, Alabama, a town modeled on Monroeville, and local lawyer Atticus Finch’s battle to save a black resident from a racist mob. It won a Pulitzer prize and, much later, earned Lee a presidential medal of freedom. But in little Monroeville, its publication was a shock.
“It was the civil rights time here,” her neighbor of 40 years, Sue Sellers, said. “People were afraid. Scared of change, I think. So when Nell’s book came out it seemed like she was approving what was going on. And looking back I approve it too. But at the time people were afraid of the change.”
Across the street, the house where Lee lived for years with her sister Alice sat quiet and empty. The inside of the house appeared unchanged from when she lived there – antique furniture was stacked with books, audio cassettes and gift baskets.
Sellers said Lee would have appreciated the quiet.
“She was such a private person,” she said. “All she wanted was privacy, but she didn’t get much. There always somebody following her around.”
Lee could be prickly, at times. “She wasn’t an insensitive person, but…” Sellers hesitated. “She wasn’t warm, either.” She told of a time, years ago, when her then seven-year-old son received a homework assignment to ask a neighbor two or three questions about his or her life.
“I’m going to ask Miss Nelle!” he said, and ran across the street.
A few minutes later, Sellers said, her boy returned looking dejected. Lee had answered her door, but it hadn’t gone well. “What did she say?” the mother asked.
“She said, ‘I don’t do interviews.’”
In recent years Lee’s health declined. Sellers said the last time she spent any real time with Lee was when they went to breakfast together.
“The whole way home she drove her big car in the turn lane,” she said. “She couldn’t see. I was scared to death.”
The last time she saw Lee was a few months ago at the Meadows nursing home. Sellers brought her old neighbor flowers.
“She just hollered out, ‘I can’t see and I can’t hear!’” Sellers said. “So I just told her goodbye.”
At the courthouse museum the executive director, Wanda Green, said that to her knowledge Lee had never visited.
“I did see her on the street, and I did speak,” she said. “And she spoke back.”
She said Lee’s death would be a loss to the town, but that “really, she will live on forever through her book.”
People here know about Lee’s second book, Go Set a Watchman, but don’t all regard it very kindly.
“I read it, because it was Nelle,” said Sellers. “But it wasn’t anything like her first book.”
With the success of To Kill a Mockingbird – it has sold more than 40 million copies – came acceptance in Monroeville, and finally embrace. But the town’s relationship with Lee never quite rested easy. In 2013, Lee – or rather her lawyers, locals are quick to point out – sued the museum, claiming its website and gift shop were “palming off its goods” such as mockingbird-themed T-shirts and coffee mugs. The dispute was later settled, but left a general air of resentment in the town.
More recently stories have abounded in Monroeville about the level of security at the Meadows, the nursing home where Lee spent her final year.
“They had a fire call and the security was resistant to allowing the fire chief in,” resident Shae Wyatt Cannon said.
It all seemed a bit silly, to people who had grown up seeing this silent old lady feeding ducks at the lake, or walking in the evenings. However eccentric she had been, and however distant her relationship with Monroeville, no one wished her harm. Locals even protected her privacy, refusing to give directions to her house when sightseers came to town.
Sellers said that when she went to the nursing home to visit Lee – her friend of four decades – Lee’s security guard stayed on her.
“He was always within a few feet of me,” she said. “I said, ‘Goodness.’”
On Friday afternoon, in the parking lot, a security guard turned visitors away.
“We’ve had a death in the home and the manager has had it up to here,” he said, placing a hand at his neck.
A handful of local television news crews camped on the courthouse square, grabbing any passerby who might be willing to talk. A few did stop, and expressed a general sense of loss about a woman who kept her own company throughout her life.
Then the people of Monroeville continued walking to the Courthouse Cafe, the bank, the bakery, and carried on with their lives.
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