I spend a lot of this space writing about growing up in Alabama, a rich source of material for anyone looking to tell a story. Recently , I found a small commentary in my hometown newspaper about Truman Capote and Harper Lee.
Capote, the famous and sometimes infamous writer (and subject of a recent movie about his writing of “In Cold Blood”) , grew up in South Alabama about 30 miles west of my hometown, down Highway 84 in Monroeville. His best friend at the time, Harper Lee (also from Monroeville), wrote “To Kill A Mockingbird,” a semi-fictionalized account of a trial using Monroeville as the background. Pretty heady company for a small town.
Truman’s parents divorced when he was young, and he moved from Louisiana to Monroeville, Alabama , to live with relatives. The article mentioned that the local Heritage Museum had received some of his family letters. Mar Ida Faulk Carter (my mother’s family were Carters from that same neck of the woods) was Truman’s favorite aunt and they exchanged letters often. Her son and Capote’s cousin, Jennings Faulk Carter (now a retired crop duster), collected his mother’s letters from dresser drawers.
On July 9th, Capote writes that Nelle (Harper Lee) was publishing a book, saying, “I like it very much. She has real talent.” Evidently. “To Kill A Mockingbird” was voted “Best Novel of the Century” by The Library Journal.
In the letters, he writes about everything from New York to Hollywood and his screenplay for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s ” to Tallulah Bankhead’s habit of staying up all night. Ending one letter, he tells his aunt, “Oh I do wish I could have some butterbeans. Now! This very minute.” The South isn’t easily ironed out of a person even by fame or East Coast socialites at his notorious Black and White New York parties.
As a teenager, I worked for the Coca-Cola Bottling Company in Andalusia, Alabama. One of my important jobs was to fill up the Coke machines at the Vanity Fair plant over in Monroeville. So besides reading the words of both Capote and Lee, I was afforded the pleasure of often riding and walking the same streets and visiting the same haunts that they frequented as children only a few years before.
I have often tried to imagine the strange, little Capote and the outspoken Lee in the same humidity-choked little one-horse town surrounded by about 7,000 characters, tense racism, thousands of acres of cotton and peanut fields, countless brush arbor revivals and endless family tales. Heroes and villains, friends and idiots, all writ large in the minds of small Southern children. Capote was the inspiration for Dill in “Mockingbird”. Lee helped Truman in Holcomb, Kansas, researching material for “In Cold Blood.”
As a student at the University of Alabama, Harper Lee wrote for the campus humor magazine, Rammer Jammer. I followed her years later, offending every group within 100 miles of Tuscaloosa (the university administration, student government, every single fraternity and sorority, Governor George Wallace, the Klan, The Jewish Defense League, Neo-Nazis – I actually ran out of victims). I am sure her verbiage was more elegant than my biting weekly rituals.
As I watched “Capote,” the movie, I thought about how the unique literary fabric of The South is disappearing. The weird, wild and wonderful characters who were part of our lives growing up in the Deep South are slowly being extinguished from the streets and lives of children as they watch TV and play video games today and become like everyone else.
I remember my Uncle Cecil, who got in a fight with a mule and broke his hand – on the mule’s face. I remember watching my grandpaw standing under a wooden bridge, swinging a water moccasin like a bullwhip and snapping its head off into the bushes. I thought about the old man in my hometown who walked South Three Notch Street talking to the picket fences. I thought about Miss Pearl, all of 99 years old, living in a house in the middle of town with no electricity and no plumbing and no bitter words. I thought about the mayor who was likely elected less on political skill than his skill at the barbeque pit. I have more memories of more characters than I could ever write in a book a million pages long.
Most of those characters are now gone amidst a roar of me-too media and one-size-fits-all conformity. All we have left are their stories, and we have to tell them. Truman Capote understood that. Nelle Harper Lee understood it. As I type these words, I, too, am beginning to understand it.
Look for some of those stories in the next few months.
