Long answer:

May 6 1998
Why the site? The story is so long. If I told you everything, the story would begin with my first awareness of Scout, sometime in the 1960s. It would end with today, or if I chose a more climatic finish, with the two days I spent in Monroeville in April 1998. If I really told you everything, it would end with daydreams of me and Miss Lee.

Working on the pages of this web site is like good manual work; like painting a house, or making picture frames—the work steadies the hand and frees the mind to wander, somehow allowing an ordering of thoughts, a calmness. There are techniques to be learned, problems to be overcome. There is little or no scholarly work or analysis here. The intention, beyond occupying myself, is to bring information to people trying to complete school assignments, and to those looking for more information for the love of learning and Mockingbird. What was Gilmer's first name? (Horace) Who or what was Uncle Natchell? (I don't know. Yet.)

I started collecting information on Miss Lee and Mockingbird three or so years ago, before I began using the internet. I became well acquainted with the Index to Periodicals, and the protocol of ordering photocopies of articles through the university library here. I believe it started truly when I realized that the articles on Miss Lee in Current Biography and tomes of that nature did not include a year of death. They said 1926- . I was in the reference section, on the second floor of the Spring Garden Branch of the Halifax Public Library. I remember that I looked up from the book, and into some distance whose features I still do not see clearly. That distance, I like to believe, is shorter, but yet a fair piece. Good. I don't like to think that what I do now: this page, this web site, or even the dreaming I now do, is anywhere near the end of what I was looking towards that day. I don't want it over. I want to know more, to do more.

The site went up onto the Net in March of 1998. I work at home, through a free-net that displays text only. When I learned that I could add color and graphics through HTML, as long as I knew the secret language, and then go to the library to check the results, I began to learn to do that.Still to come is an exploration of sound clips—I would like some clips from the film in the site.

I live now in Nova Scotia, and so have not had the access I have wanted to the archives of smaller, southern journals and newspapers, but many articles have led me to other articles and sources. Compiling the list of sources under has therefore taken the greatest length of time and most of the footsteps. Although the internet is that huge library in the sky, many of the newspaper archives require membership or a major credit card to access their articles, which can feel frustrating; in some ways it is more satisfying to plod through old soft thready indices in quiet rooms with solid chairs. Although at home I can smoke.

In a night dream, I saw Miss Lee. In the dream I was at the bottom of a few wooden steps leading onto a porch. At the top of the steps was Miss Lee, a strong sturdy looking woman, wearing a flowered sleeveless dress with a white shirt underneath. She was looking down at me, her face holding neither gladness nor (much more gratifying) ire. I think the porch came from the photo spread of Miss Lee that was in Life magazine in 1961; on the porch in my dream was an older man in a rocking chair and Miss Lee's father Amasa appears on the porch in the photo spread. I remember that I awoke from that dream, knowing that I would have the memory of it, feeling happy.

May 25 1998
It is a nice Monday evening. I have just come home from a reading at a local bookstore; Don Hannah, the playwright, has written his first novel, The Wise and Foolish Virgins. I talked to him earlier today. When he mentioned that Southern writers had been a strong influence on his work, I jumped at a chance to talk about Harper Lee. Alas, he said he had never read Mockingbird, which I think not necessarily a wretched state to find oneself in: in a way I envy those who still have their first reading of Mockingbird ahead of them—it can be one of those things that makes one happy to be alive. Hannah not having read Lee, though, moved us on to other topics of conversation. The epigraph to Hannah's novel is a quote from the poet Elizabeth Bishop, and I remarked on that, and he told me the story of her estate at first wanting 15% of everything he made off the book for its use. He didn't tell me what the final deal was.

At the reading tonight I introduced him to Sandra Barry, a renegade Bishop scholar, and after he went off to talk to others I told Sandra of the absurd misinformation about Mockingbird I ran across yesterday.

I was in a bookstore, and on the bargain books shelf was The Tuttle Dictionary of Dedications, and I turned, of course, to see if Lee's dedication was included. It was, but it wasn't. I reproduce the entry here:

For Mr. Lee and Slice,
in consideration of Love & Affection
The American author's first and award winning novel presumably dedicated to her husband and child, the latter called by a nickname.

Even I in my small corner have seen too many inaccuracies about the book and the film and Miss Lee herself. Like most of us, much of what I read regarding Miss Lee I must take on faith; but there are things that do not ring true, and I am left wanting more. Some of the writers of reviews of Mockingbird printed at the time of its publication seem to miss extremely important ideas and facts about the book. But in that bookstore yesterday, reading of 'Slice' I laughed out loud. How delicious! I wanted to go see Slice immediately and show her. I still do.

June 11 1998
I am delighted to have found concordance freeware on the internet. It has been on my mind lately that I would like to make a concordance of Mockingbird. In the public library I found a few, of the Bible, of Shakespeare's works. The older ones, obviously constructed before software, before computers, before the Selectric typewriter, were amazing to me. I tried to imagine the labour involved. Impossible for me to do so.

I downloaded the software and have tried it out on the three essays Miss Lee published in the 1960s. First I put them all into the same file, saved it as text only, ran the application, and Bob became my uncle as the concordance was generated! Very exciting. There are lists of words to be omitted: she, he, you, I, and, the, etc., and I dithered with those. I have decided to print myself a copy with a page layout that will manufacture a document that will slide nicely onto the shelf with my hardcover copies of Mockingbird. Nice gift to myself. I am now looking into scanning the novel into the same application, and thus being able to generate myself a concordance of the novel. It will run to 500 pages. (!) No doubt the delight will dissolve when I contemplate printing out the beast.

Much of the mail coming in from students has been from the Antipodes; most of North America is still on vacation, but schools have been open in New Zealand and Singapore and Australia.

Tom Williamson and I have been writing. He is sixteen. He lives in a small town outside of Adelaide, Australia. He works part time in a cafe. (The cafe has one of those appalling names that promote eccentric spelling skills—Koffee'n'Snax.)

Tom was given the assignment of choosing a character from Mockingbird, analyzing the person, and orally presenting the results. He had chosen Mayella Violet Ewell, and wanted suggestions about how to proceed. We ended up sending notes back and forth, he as Mayella, me as her pen-pal. As Mayella, he wrote things that were new to me: that Mayella was saddened by the name of Ewell being further trashed, that she missed Tom Robinson coming by. Today he did his presentation in class. He took flowers in with him, four tins cans of lavender, geraniums, and just some weeds that looked good, not too many in each, and he made them wilt with a little poison. He lined the tin cans up in a row, talked about how he felt as Mayella, and then, as he recounted Mayella's Paw telling her that Tom Robinson was dead, cut the heads of the flowers off, deliberately, slowly, one by one.

Tom's teacher told him she reckoned the class was his and he could do with 'em what he liked.

I have been reading the Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb, because of the epigraph of Mockingbird, and some of his life and letters. The essays are wonderful! They have a humour and humanity that is timeless. I'm also reading about Methodist bishops and missionaries. There was a strong Missionary presence here in Nova Scotia, which makes me wonder if that's partly why NS is the Canadian place mentioned in Mockingbird.

Today I was at the library; another set of microfilm reels of The Monroe Journal had come in--the fourth set over the last few months. It takes a long time for the request to get to the Alabama State Archives and then the reels to get here and only two reels can be borrowed at a time. So far I have looked at newspapers from 1933-1936, 1951, and 1960-1963. They are a wonderful trove, mostly for the front page news, relating to the publication of Mockingbird, and the life and times of Monroe County. The Social Pages are very interesting for minutiae... who spent the weekend visiting whom, who motored to Mobile.... I have a growing binder of photocopied clippings. There is new information on this site, mostly in the biography and film sections. I was able to send an Uncle Natchell advertisement to Nancy Louise of the Student Survival Guide; she was the one who first asked me about Uncle Natchell, and later it was Nancy who gave me the answer after I had failed to find it. The wall above my desk is now festooned with notices of the film opening in Monroeville. Very nice. I am now working on an annotated bibliography. It is structured differently than the 'Further Reading' list on the site; when it is done it will join the original one—I think there may be room and need for both ways of looking for sources.

I become more saddened by the trade in copies of Mockingbird; the buying and bidding on ebay in particular, for all the nice-nice sellers' descriptions I see as using the novel as a commodity. People write to me asking about buying first editions, signed editions, offering to sell me signed books, but I cannot help them.

April 15 2000
It is a coincidence that I live (for now) in the one Canadian place mentioned in To Kill a Mockingbird, but I do take pride, delight and comfort in the serendipity of it.

Nova Scotia is one of ten provinces. It is on the east coast of Canada, and relatively poor. Why Nova Scotia? Why did Miss Lee choose to have Dill boast of being here, and not Alberta or Ontario?

My research and maunderings have unearthed three lines of thinking. Recently one of those lines was embellished in a beautiful way.

The Monroe Journal is the newspaper of Miss Lee's home town, Monroeville, Alabama. At one time it was owned and edited by her father, A.C. Lee. On May 9th 1935 the Journal published a photograph titled Floods Take Heavy Toll in Nova Scotia. The photo shows the flood waters, a church on the bank of a swollen river and a man in a canoe. The long caption says:

"Receding flood waters at Halifax NS [bared?] a toll of 1 person dead, one person missing and an appalling property loss. The flood, heightened by rain and a mid-winter thaw, inundated a number of communities to a depth of several feet causing residents to abandon their homes for higher ground. Several rescues were made by aid of rowboat and canoe. The photo was made in the Schubenacadie district which bore the brunt of the flood. The canoe became a popular means of transport as refugees went to and from their homes, salvaging whatever they could carry away."

I wondered if Harper Lee, just turned seven, might have seen that photo in the newspaper and been impressed by it, remembered the name of Nova Scotia.

I mentioned all of this in a column I wrote for the Sunday paper here and got e-mail from a government worker who said he was intrigued enough to have looked at the local papers for early 1935, and had found nothing about a flood. Perhaps the photo, was not, after all, from Schubenacadie?

There it stayed for a while, until I went myself to Schubenacadie, on other business. The photo and flood were on my mind. The church of the town didn't seem to be the church in the photo and I mentioned this to the person I was seeing. She suggested I go see Harry Smith, an unofficial historian of the town, and having the time to spare, I did.

To find Harry I had to go see a woman named Helen Ettinger in the hardware store. Helen told me Harry used to be a tinsmith, and had run the old hardware store. He was now in his nineties. He lived across the road. She said she would take me over and see if Harry felt like company.

Thus I met Harry Smith, a man 96 years old, bent over, mostly deaf, gorgeous. Handsome. He showed me around. Introduced his cat, Lazy Boy. The old hardware store joined onto his house, and was got to via the kitchen. Harry took me through.

There was a two burner hot-plate by a back window and on top a small aluminum pot boiled dry, the heat still on full force. In fact the bottom of the pot was partly burned out. "Harry," I said, "I'm going to take this pot off the stove. Too bad it's burned out."

"That's okay," he said, "I've got plenty more." And so he did - the stock of the hardware store when he retired and closed business. It was all still there - like a store out of time - pots pans, pails, rope, dishes, paint. And all the tinsmithing tools and equipment. And treasures of the ages, things Harry had collected. He showed me many of them, and many photos of cunning things he had made.

"This," he said, "is a photo of the tin aeroplane I made." Harry held up to me a photo of two men sitting in a small plane.

"This," he said, "is the tin snow car I made." Harry held up a photo of a prehistoric snowmobile.

"And this," he said, "is a picture of the tin canoe I made. That's me in it." And Harry held up almost the exact same photo that had been in The Monroe Journal on May 9th 1935. Same place, same day, just the canoe slightly to the right.

We went and sat down for a while and I told Harry about the Monroe Journal's photo. In the months that followed I met Harry again, copied that photo and gave him a photocopy of the Journal page. Harry told me he had not been a refugee, but a curious man in his tin canoe going to check on the ice jam under the town bridge. A friend had taken the photograph. Years later he scuttled the canoe in the river. The church had been replaced in 1950.

I don't know the answer to my original question, why Miss Lee used Nova Scotia in Mockingbird, but I met a man, a nice man, and saw for myself how small and huge, how awesome the world can be.

June 5 2000
At the end of April I drove from Nova Scotia to Kansas, for a Mockingbird event called Scout Remembers Mockingbird. It was amazing, my going, but planets had come into some benign conjunction, and a line of credit had come through for me at the bank. The rental car had been upgraded free, to a Buick LeSabre, and I rode in electronic style.

The twenty-seventh day of April I crossed over from Missouri into Kansas: my name state, the state of my birth, where I had not been since 1956. It was evening. I was on Route 66, the fabled mother road. In Joplin I had cruised down the wide flat strip of road, eating a hamburger, windows down, whispering the names of the vintage motels, auto body shops, discount furniture joints - the businesses that seem to freckle the skin around every city. In Galena guys were out on the ball field. There was no wind. The trees were in a luscious bloom - young giggling greens that have not yet known thirst.

Route 66 passes through eight states between Chicago and Santa Monica. Many stretches of it are gone, turned into interstate, or left to weeds and dust. In Kansas it has its shortest length, thirteen and a half miles. I turned from it onto 166 and began driving square into the west, into a gob of gold westering ahead. The greens were beautiful. Birds swooped near the car, trilled and took off. The cows were marvelous. West I went, in the loveliest evening I had seen in a long long time.

I slept in Coffeyville, in a motel that had been around for quite a while. The night stayed warm.

Friday morning I drove into Arkansas City, the home of Gary Gackstatter. He heads the music department of Cowley County Community College, and directs the Winfield Regional Symphony. From him came idea and fruition of the concert I had driven 2618 miles to hear. I found a motel, and attended to some traveling business. I left a message on Gary's answering machine. During the day as I mooched around Ark City I felt alone and struck by a melancholia. I thought of not going to the party that I have been invited to.

Gary called at about five. He had been to Wichita to pick up the three actors - Phillip Alford, Mary Badham, and Brock Peters, and deposited them at their billet in Winfield, the next small city north, about a twelve minute drive. He gave me directions, asked me if I wanted to be picked up. I said no, I would see him there.

The party was at the home of one of the symphony musicians, violinist Teri Andreas. It was a nice, big house, and about fifty people were in the backyard. I brought three books, one for each of the actors‹Canadian novels I had chosen with some thought although of course it is a risky business choosing books for strangers. I also brought a binder of clippings and photocopies relating to the movie.

Everyone was very nice. People knew I was the crazy one who had driven so far, (it turned out there had been a small story about my trip in the local paper) and they all were very easy to talk with. Mary Badham has a little of Scout on her, perhaps a squinking around the eyes. Her hair is shoulder length and curly. She seemed on edge. Not surprising, since she had a performance the next night, and was the object of much attention. Phillip Alford is a trim man almost an ex-military bearing, except that he wore loafers with no socks. He doesn't sound much like Jem, but Jem is there, in his soft jaw-line. Brock Peters was an amazing comfort and joy to meet. Of the three, he was most like his screen character, and that makes sense: Mary and Phillip had been children, nine and thirteen years old, and as Tom Robinson, Brock Peters was already an adult, with his final voice and body type and nose. That's where I saw Tom: in the nose of Brock Peters.

He is very charming and cultured‹a Laurence Olivier from Harlem. To feel the warmth of his hand, and see the gleam of life in his eyes was moving: it was as if in some crazy way Tom Robinson, had after all, survived. I wanted to say sorry, I am so sorry.

I gave the actors their books, and sat with them for awhile, but many others wanted to speak with them, have their attention, so sometimes I just wandered around, talking with musicians. Everyone drank and ate. It was Harper Lee's birthday. I asked to give a toast. Mary leaned over me and called to Phillip: "It's Miss Lee's birthday! We should call her." A wonderful thing to witness, that. I don't think they did call.

I drove back south to Ark City and watched a little American TV.

Saturday morning I drove into Wichita. Just after my parents were married in 1953 my father got a job with Boeing in Wichita, and so me and the next child, Sue, were born there. We left when I was two, and the Kansas memories I have are related only to the house where we lived, and the zoo: so there was no sentiment in my touristic rubber-necking. I looked around the downtown, which was mostly deserted, and went shopping at Target, which had been a goal of mine. I went to the Art Gallery and made my way back downtown for the three o'clock rehearsal.

The Orpheum Theatre was built in the 1922, at Broadway and First, and described as "an acre of seats in a garden of dreams". It hosted vaudeville acts like Burns and Allen, and silent movies, and then in 1929 it was wired for sound: the talkies came in.From the 1940s to the 1970s it was a popular place, but then changing attitudes and a migration to the suburbs lessened its fortunes and the theatre was closed on November 17, 1976.

Recently it has been taken on by a society and now hosts events and raises funds for its restoration. It is beautiful and red and plush. A thousand deep seats, brocade wallpaper, a high Sistine ceiling, grand light fixtures.

I had asked Gary Gackstatter about taking photos during the rehearsal and he had said that was fine so I roamed around - up to the balcony, back behind stage, taking some snaps. For the first while it was just the musicians on stage and then the three actors came on, and took seats on the left. At one point soon after that I walked down the aisle towards the front of the house and Mary called out "Hi Janie" and Brock wiggled his fingers hello.

That night about 700 people came. It was hot. Many got lemonade and popcorn. It all sounded wonderful. In between the movements of the score, played in the order they are heard in the film, the actors read narration or told stories.

Phillip Alford asserted that he and John Megna, who played Dill, had not gotten on at all well with Mary (much laughter from the audience at this). During filming things came to a head the day they shot the 'Rolling the Tire' scene, where Scout fits herself into a tire and Jem and Dill roll it down the street where, in the film, it bumps to a halt against the Radley porch. Phillip Alford said of that day,

"John looked up me like a big brother. We hated Mary with a passion. We did not like her. We fought constantly. She doesn't remember any of this. (laughs from the audience and a good-natured Mary) It's too bad; there were some memorable fights.

"The most memorable fight was this day—'Rolling the Tire.' It was one of those 'I hate your guts! I'm gonna kill you! I wish you were dead!' fights. It was an awful fight. So we get to the rolling the tire scene. Me and John agreed: 'let's kill her. If we kill her then we won't have to put up with her any more.' Then the movie would be over too.

"We knew we couldn't get enough speed up but there was a truck off-camera and we knew if we could get it going fast enough and if we could hit the truck with the tire going fast enough we could do her in and be done with her. It didn't work. Couldn't get the tire going fast enough and she lived."

Phillip sat in the middle. He said it would be the first and last time he would do something like this: not because he was having a bad time, but just that it wasn't his kind of thing. Mary had nagged him for a year to come. In fact, for thirty years he had refused to speak about his acting career at all—not about Shenandoah, and not about Mockingbird.

Brock Peters shared how he felt about getting the part of Tom Robinson, in warm tones and with affection and respect for James Earl Jones:

"I found myself the last of two people being considered for this role and of course it was a very difficult time, because I thought, 'I've come this far, surely, surely they're going to let me have this role.' And I was really worried because my competition was one of our finest actors: James Earl Jones. That's the pressure we often have to live under if we know who our competition is. That went on for a few weeks and at that time I lived in New York but I was in California shooting a television show and when that was completed I headed back home.

"My agent called me and said 'we have a meeting for you' to talk with the producers, the director and all those concerned, and after this meeting a decision will be made. Well of course I was scared out of my wits. I didn't know how to present myself in order to get this coveted prize. I went into the meeting—it was in a building at Park Avenue and 57th Street and I tried not to appear frightened but I wanted to look cool and calm and still suggest the character of Tom Robinson, and do that dressed in a suit.

"I came away from that meeting and within a matter of days they gave me the nod. And I was really very happy about that. I'm not so sure Jimmy was. Subsequently we have come head-to-head on a couple of other projects and he has won and I keep saying let's stop this. We don't need to do this Jimmy.

"I never actually knew who made the decision, who gave the nod that I should be afforded the opportunity to play Tom Robinson, but to whoever it was or whatever combination of people who had the decision making power in their hands I am ever grateful."

Peters went on to tell how he prepared to play a role as intense as that of Tom Robinson. Brock Peters has a low trained cultured voice. The audience was no longer laughing as he described how as Tom Robinson, he cried on cue.

"But once having gotten the role the question was of being able to deliver what they wanted. I worked very closely with Robert Mulligan, who wanted to achieve certain things and I think he felt there was some resistance, something blocking his path to being able to get from me what he wanted. He was really very sensitive about this whole process. He didn't rant nor did he rave. He took me aside often and just talked with me. What he seemed to be searching for were those select moments of pain in my life: what were they? And in time he achieved his goal.

"Which put me on the track and leads me into a period of nearly three weeks when the courtroom scene was rehearsed. Then the first week of shooting that courtroom scene took place with no audience in the courtroom, just the principals—the jury box, the defendant, the plaintiffs and officers of the court, and we shot that entire sequence from every possible angle. "Now mind you, from day one I had to arrive at a point where I burst into tears, could not contain them, had to try to stifle them, and that's not easy to do but in Mulligan's hands it became very possible. Once we were on track I needed to go only to the places of pain, remembered pain, experienced pain and the tears would come, really at will.

"I don't say this is the process for every individual as an actor or actress, but it worked, and I thought at the end of that week, when they completed the shooting that I was done with that—hooray —and didn't know what we were scheduling for Monday morning. When Monday morning arrived I looked up and saw all these people and I thought 'oh what are they going to do?' Someone told me they were going to do the whole thing over again! Part of what I was fearful of was that I was dry - that I couldn't possibly summon another tear but when they filled the courtroom it all came back instantly and for another week every moment that it was needed they came to the surface and I am ever grateful to Bob Mulligan for reaching deep inside and finding those key places, helping me be able to pull them up at will. Fine director, fine human being. We spent two weeks that I call two weeks of tears—my veil of tears."

The music that followed this story was the very very emotional swell of "Guilty Verdict"—the music that in the film comes as Reverend Sykes prompts Scout: "Stand up. Your father's passing."

Mary talked about the cigar box.

"One of the fun things that I want to talk about was the box—the cigar box. How many of you had a cigar box filled with treasures? I know I did. [rippled applause] I still have mine.

"Phillip and Brock and I had been together for a satellite program up in Virginia, with one of the schools. On this trip we had a surprise visitor—Stephen Frankfurt, who did the opening credits: that whole sequence with the box. So he comes out and says I'm gonna make a grown women cry and presents me with the box... and I lost it completely. There was the box filled with all the treasures. I had looked for that box for thirty something years! I had asked the studio, I had asked Atticus, everybody! And nobody..."

Phillip interrupts: "Atticus is Mr. Peck." Laughs from the audience.

"And," cuts in Brock, "she still calls him that to his face!" Bigger laughs from the audience.

Mary resumed. "I don't know what else to call him: Mr. Peck? I think that's a little formal. I certainly am not going to call him Greg.

"The box is safe and sound. It was his box, it was Stephen's box when he was a kid and that whole sequence was shot on his kitchen table in New York, with all of his little treasures. Now it has a few added treasures from the film—including the wonderful little soap dolls that Whitey, our prop manager, carved for us to use in the film. We got to hold those again, which was a real treat."

It was all very nice. After, hundreds lined up in the lobby to get autographs. The magic and message of Mockingbird still ring for many people, 40 years after the publication of the novel, 37 years after the film adaptation.

June 13 2000
To Kill a Mockingbird & Harper Lee was first put up on the internet in March 1998. I knew nothing about html; I have learned as I've gone along. I still hand enter all the code: I've never felt comfortable with html generating programs. At least I've moved on from working in a text only-environment. (And by this very insertion started to explore the construction of tables!)

The number of visits to the site has steadily increased. These are the total hits on the site; a visit that starts on the main page and visits two others pages would register 3 hits. The tides of the school year are clear: