From: Kerry Madden <kiffnkerry>
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 14:02:02 -0700 (PDT)

Ed, Thank you very much for your kind words. Visiting your school in Anderson County, Tennessee was one of the highlights of my week in East Tennessee last November. Certain biographies grabbed me when I was a child, especially one in particular I read of FREDERICK DOUGLASS. I don?t know who the author was, but I vividly remember the feeling I had reading it, and I couldn?t put it down. He came alive for me, and I was riveted by his story. I wanted to try to capture some of that feeling in writing this biography for kids.??

PICTURES AND STORIES FROM EAST TENNESSEE VISIT, including, LAKE CITY MIDDLE SCHOOL http://mountainmist.livejournal.com/150485.html

* * *

Susan, You asked if I used a tape recorder. I used an IPOD recorder on the second trip. The first trip I just took copious notes and reshaped them into monologues to help me fall into the rhythm and speech of Lower Alabama, so I could get closer to writing the story. I?ve been a playwright since college, so my natural tendency is to reshape the stories into narratives.

* * *

Tish, Thanks very much for your kind words. My editor, Catherine Frank, first approached me about writing a biography of Harper Lee. We had worked on my three Maggie Valley novels together: Gentle?s Holler, Louisiana?s Song, and Jessie?s Mountain. She knew I had a love for the South and all the stories and people. When she asked me about writing a biography of Harper Lee, I felt like I?d been given a gift.

Tish, I loved coming to visit The BLUE MARBLE bookstore in April. I had no idea I would be walking into ?THE GOODNIGHT MOON ROOM.? Here is the link:

IN THE GREAT GREEN ROOM THERE WAS A TELEPHONE? http://mountainmist.livejournal.com/165983.html

* * *

And finally, Tessa, thank you so much these questions.? You wrote:? ?Even with all of the insights and anecdotes, I'm wondering if Kerry still has questions she'd like to ask Nelle if she ever got the opportunity. Kerry, do you have a "dream" question list?? Or would it be more about the personal experience of just being able to talk face to face with the subject of your book??

* * *

In answer to your question, I don?t really have a ?dream question list.? I suppose my dream would be simply to visit with Miss Nelle Harper Lee. That would be a dream come true, but I don?t hold out much hope. And I have to say that her silence led me to so many stories that I didn?t anticipate discovering. And the gift of writing this book was interviewing so many people in their eighties and nineties and listening to their stories and memories.

One of my favorite people from Monroeville, A.B. Blass, passed away two months ago right after the book was published, and I am very sad to think I won?t see him again. He was a lovely man and our interview with him lasted approximately five hours or more. We met at Radley?s Fountain Grill, and the first thing he said to us was, ?I eat slow.? And this was true. Supper took approximately two to three hours and lots of sweet tea and red velvet cake for dessert. Here is a little bit of A.B. Blass on that day. He can also been seen in Timothy Hutton?s film about the Scottsboro Boys, HEAVEN?S FALL:

http://www.heavensfallthemovie.net/?

He plays a character in the movie involved jury tampering - something he fought against when he was on the jury commission in Monroeville during the reign of Short Millsap. (see below: CROOKED JURY SYSTEM)

Radley's Fountain Grill http://www.800alabama.com/yof/restaurant/radleys_fountain_grill.html

Here are some of the stories of A.B. Blass as he told them to me and to my sister, Keely, in April 2007. He always played the Court Clerk in the play TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in Monroeville each year. He especially enjoyed telling Madeline Albright "Now Rise!" when the cast performed the play in Washington DC.

THE STORIES OF A.B. BLASS The Yankees hit the consonants and the Southerners hit the vowels. That?s how I explain it to folks. I moved to Monroeville in 1940 over from Mississippi. I was in 7th grade, and I had to leave my beloved girlfriend, Willard, back in Mississippi. Nelle was a tomboy who played with the boys. She was a year ahead of me at school. We played marbles and spin-tops. She wanted to compete with the boys. Her good friend was Sarah Anne, but Sarah Anne wasn?t a tomboy. She and Nelle would walk up to the baseball field together and Nelle would get into the game. Sarah Anne would watch. Sarah Anne later married Nelle?s brother, Ed.

THE TOWN SQUARE All our daddies had businesses on the square. We?d play baseball in the vacant lot near the courthouse. We played football and ?Capture the Flag.? They almost tore the old courthouse down to make room for parking, but too many folks complained.

One time, Truman arrived in a chauffer-driven Buick and asked, ?Can I play ball with you fellows?? Nobody chose him. So he offered to get us ?set-up? ? ten cent drinks at the dime store. Double Limade or Dope. We chose up again and picked him, but he swung the bat like he was chopping wood and he sat down out in center field. Whenever he asked to play after that, we made him get us a ?set-up? first.

We had no coaches then. The coaches were all off in the war. We played on our own. One time, when Nelle and Sarah Anne came by, Nelle wanted to get in a game of football.? This one boy, a 12th grader, Jack McGuiness, didn?t want her to play. He thought girls shouldn?t play. I was small, so I gave the ball to Nelle. She took off around to the right,? and she stiff-armed Jack and knocked him under a tree and made a touchdown.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD I was the paperboy. My paper route lasted from 1940-42. I delivered 40 papers for 40 cents. I made $1.60 a week. I was scared of Son?s Boulware?s house. (People believe that Alfred ?Son? Boulware inspired the character of Boo Radley.) We all were scared. I delivered newspapers there. It was an old two-story house. The Conoco gas station is there now. We heard that he ate people - that he was a deranged person. We?d skid our bikes over the gravel. I?d try to get Son to reach out and get the newspaper. Sometimes, I saw his white hand come out. And then one time I got brave and knocked on the door. He took paper, but I tugged back. We had a little tug of war. Son and his mother came out at night to garden around 10:30 pm, which was late. They gardened under the light of a little streetlamp.

(A.B.?s friend, George Thomas Jones, another Monroeville native, said this about Mrs. Boulware in a different interview: ?Mrs. Boulware worked in the garden at night. She had lost her mind. She fed chickens with chicken scratch in her apron. But there were no chickens to feed. No chicken scratch in apron. There was a wire fence around the Boulware?s yard, which was next to the school, and if you knocked a ball into the yard, you drew straws to see who would have to go get it. Son was 42 when he died. He?s buried up in the graveyard here. The family was Baptist. He had two sisters.)

A neighbor lady, Mrs. Hendrickson, would call children ?ugly? who passed by her house.

Nelle Harper?s mother sat in a swing every day around 3:30 during my paper route, and she?d say, ?Aren?t you a nice young man?? Same thing, everyday. Mrs. Lee didn?t go to church with Mr. Lee. She was a nice lady who always smelled like talcum powder.?

AC Lee and my daddy played golf together. He wore the same clothes golfing and lawyering. He wore a suit with black dress shoes, fedora hat. He had a funny golf swing. He?d swing and jump three times. He could hit the ball one hundred yards. I was their caddy. The last time Mr. Lee and my daddy played golf together, they were old, and so they just walked around the course together.

Mr. Lee was a man of few words. He was at church every Sunday. He played golf with Nelle. He had his own pew at the Methodist Church ? the second pew ? he carried a pen knife.? Miss Alice and Nelle donated money to have the chapel built behind the church.

SCHOOL We walked home from school for lunch, but then my mother started working, so I started eating at school, and I ate with the country girls, who ate at school too. I became student body president because I got the country girls to vote for me.

We had Indian pennies and we?d slick them up with mercury. We made them shine like dimes. We?d roll it around in our hands ? we did it all the time.

We had a principal, Mr. Brock. He was tall and thin, a very progressive principal. He took a liking to me. He gave me an old Victrola, a portable one, to woo my girlfriend, Sally Ann, at Little River State Park. I played ?Tear It Down? by Clyde McCoy ? good old love song.

FIGHT WITH NELLE HARPER IN MONTGOMERY (Harper Lee has said this never happened but A.B. swears it did.)

Sally Ann sent me a ?Dear John? letter when I was in the war. Then a year later she wanted me back ? I wasn?t so sure. I took my sweet time getting home. We went to Alabama by way of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Then we took the Sunset Limited to New Orleans. Sally Ann wanted me to come up to Huntingdon College to carry her home. I saw Nelle before I saw Sally Ann. And Nelle wanted me to carry her home, too, and I said I wouldn?t because I hadn?t seen my girl in a year. Nelle said, ?You can?t be in the front seat and the back seat too!? She put her suitcase in the car, and I put it back out. We had a real fight and she wouldn?t speak to me for a year or so after that.? I don?t know how she got home. Of course, if I?d known she was going to be famous, I probably would have carried her home.

CROOKED JURY SYSTEM Short Millsap was our Huey P. Long. He picked the same 65 people in the jury pool over and over in Monroeville even though there were 300 names. Short found reasons to disqualify everybody. I was appointed as a member of the Jury Commission, and I saw it was crooked. Nick Hare appointed me. I started bucking the system. Short would say to folks, ?I?ll get you off if you vote for me.? He controlled the jury box. The juror cards (which were kept in the judge?s safe) had little codes on them to differentiate the jurors. For example, a dash might mean that someone was a drunk. When I was serving on the jury commission, I demanded to actually meet the jurors and question them - not just pick the people from the codes on the cards. But Short didn?t like me crossing him. Vanity Fair was the big company here. I had a engineering job there and then I didn?t. The man at Vanity Fair said,? ?Short blocked you, AB.? He wheeled power from Montgomery
 to Mobile. He sold mules at night and his wife played the piano.

MORE MONROEVILLE STORIES There were about 1500 people in town back then. I would call up the town operator, and she?d say, ?Number please.? I would tell her, ?149.? Then the operator would say, ?Are you hunting Sally Ann, AB? Why she?s over at so and so?s house??

When they went to build the grocery store in town they found some old graves. Jennings Carter had a brother, JB Carter, who wanted to buried on his own land out in the country under his favorite tree. But he was told, ?You can?t, JB.? You have to buried on a dedicated land for a cemetery.? So JB took a few of those old pieces from the tombstones they found by where they were building the grocery store, and he took them out to his own land and covered them with ivy under his favorite tree. Then he called the pastor and the man from the county out and said, ?Look at this?? And the pastor said, ?All right, then.? And the man from the county said, ?Well, I?ll be. I guess this is a graveyard.?? So JB was buried in his pasture.

JB Carter also had a casket built for him before he died. His wife kept the wooden box for her quilts. She didn?t want to give it up when he died, but they took it anyway. JB finished high school here, got on his horse, Troy, with a violin case and rode seventy miles. He married a cute little girl from Excel and brought her back here. He drank two fifths a whiskey a day?She worked, and he stayed home.

We called his brother, Jennings Carter ?Big Boy.?

KKK The following link is about when A.B. Blass stood up to the KKK over the annual Christmas Parade in Monroeville, Alabama. I wrote about it for the Penguin Blog in March. This was a story A.B. found very difficult to talk about, and it was the last story of the evening. He told it to us as we sat outside the courthouse in the town square.

A.B. Blass and the Christmas Parade and the KKK, by Kerry Madden
                                                                                http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/b-blass-and-christmas-parade-and-kkk-kerry-madden

Thank you once again for the opportunity to share these stories.

All best Kerry Madden

PS? Here is my daughter's ALABAMA BLOG when we did school visits in Monroe and Jackson Counties in 2008. Norah was nine at the time my guest blogger for the day.

A TRIP TO ALABAMA by Norah Madden-Lunsford http://www.capitolbook.com/Alabama%20Trip%202008.htm

UP CLOSE: HARPER LEE
"My needs are simple: pen, paper, and privacy." Harper Lee, 1961 www.kerrymadden.com
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Received on Thu 28 May 2009 04:02:02 PM CDT