Monroeville, Alabama
by Teresa Tumminello Brader
Last November my husband and I set out on a two-week road trip from our New Orleans area home. Between our first stop at Fairhope, Alabama, to experience the “Southern Writers Reading” program and our next stop in Tennessee to savor the brilliant colors of autumn, we squeezed in a visit to Monroeville, Alabama, home of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee and the inspiration for the town of Maycomb in that same novel. I can’t count how many times I read To Kill a Mockingbird as a child; and after rereading it only months before, I was delighted to see how well it stood up to my memories.
Resting in our Fairhope hotel, we remembered we’d spoken of possibly visiting Monroeville before leaving Alabama. I did some quick internet research, only to find that nothing is open in Monroeville on Sundays. As our choices were either Sunday or not at all, we decided to forge on and my husband mapped our route. As we drove along the next day, he commented on the remote roads needed to get to our destination. I’d recently read Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields and recalled the description of her father driving Nelle Harper Lee to the station in Evergreen, where she boarded the train to Tuscaloosa to attend the University of Alabama.
From the back seat of our van, I glanced out at the side of the road, but I was more interested at the time in watching the New Orleans Saints football game on the in-vehicle TV. Frustrated with the reception and then becoming even more frustrated with the play of the Saints against the Houston Texans, I perked up as we made our way into Monroeville. On the outskirts of the town, the first Harper Lee-related site I spotted was the office of the Monroe Journal, the newspaper Nelle’s father once published.
The afternoon was dim and misty, but that didn’t account for the lack of vehicles on the road or people on the street. I was reminded of the Sundays from my early childhood when blue laws were in effect and families only traveled between home and church. As the van rounded the corner, a To Kill a Mockingbird mural loomed through the window. Painted on the entire side wall of a jewelry store, the muted colors portray the children in Lee’s novel, Scout Finch, her brother Jem and their friend Dill, peeking through a fence, trying to garner a glimpse of their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley. A white dome can be seen in the distance, and a townsman sits on a chair in the foreground. The real-life dome is on top of an old courthouse, contains a clock, and is only steps away from the mural.
The red brick ‘Old’ Monroe County Courthouse stands in the middle of a public square. Now a museum, this courthouse was Lee’s inspiration for the edifice that holds the trial of Tom Robinson. Truman Capote, Nelle’s childhood friend and the model for Dill, mentioned in some of his works the sound of the courthouse clock as it strikes on the hour.
Two women in front of the post office called friendly greetings to each other, not even glancing at us, as we parked in one of the spaces around the courthouse. Across the streets that wind around the square are old buildings used for purposes other than their original ones. A furniture store that was once a millinery shop run by Capote’s spinster cousin Jenny Faulk occupies the same street as the post office. A tall, attractive brick building that once housed the law office of Lee’s father (he was the role model for Atticus Finch) is now the On the Square Gift Shop. The old jail, where I conjured up Atticus facing down a lynch mob, features wide storefront windows.
Three small house facades, sets for a theatrical version of To Kill a Mockingbird staged every May, flank one side of the old courthouse. The replica of the Finch residence sported Christmas decorations, but Boo Radley’s place and the facade used for the different dwellings of other residents of Maycomb did not. On the south lawn of the square a monument, consisting of a plaque on a boulder and a birdbath with a bird perched on its edge, dedicated to Atticus Finch by the Alabama Bar Association, left me wondering how many other tributes exist in honor of fictional characters.
Armed with Scarlett Slept Here: A Book Lover’s Guide to the South by Joy Dickinson, a guidebook that luckily I had the foresight to pack, we got back in the van and drove around some back streets. We found Monroeville Elementary, which both Nelle and Truman attended, and discovered that the two youngsters could’ve made a shortcut through a clump of trees and bushes behind Nelle’s home to the school playground, just as Scout and Jem did the night of the school pageant. Two blocks south of the square, a small take-out restaurant called Mel’s Dairy Dream sits on the former site of Nelle’s childhood home. Lee refused a historical marker at the spot, but a sign on the neighboring lot tells the story of Capote’s seven years at the Faulk house with Jenny and her siblings until his mother wanted him back. Capote spent subsequent summers with his Faulk relatives, still right next door to the Lee family. A stone wall is all that’s left of the original Faulk house.
I was initially disappointed that we wouldn’t be able to get inside the museum. I would’ve liked to check out the Truman Capote memorabilia, read the one note by Harper Lee affirming that this courthouse was the model for the one in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird, and sit in the courtroom balcony and imagine Scout and Jem looking down at the proceedings. But I ended up pleased with what we did see, and the attention-shunning Nelle would’ve thought that was plenty enough for us anyway.
