Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

by Casey Cep

nature instead. The untamed world seemed to them at worst like a mortal danger, seething with disease and constantly threatening disaster, and at best like a terrible waste. The numberless trees could be timber, the forests could be farms, the malarial swamps could be drained and turned to solid ground, wolves and bears and other fearsome predators could be throw rugs, taxidermy, and dinner. And as for the rivers, why should they get to play while people had to work? In the words of the president of the Alabama Power Company, Thomas Martin, “Every loafing stream is loafing at the public expense.”

Capitalist view of nature

Months passed like this. And then one day, where there had once been cabins and dogtrots, fields and farms, churches and schoolhouses, general stores and graves, there was nothing but water.

Many of the white residents of Coosa County and nearly all of the black ones were tenant farmers, victims of a brutal system that left those trapped within it barely able to eke out a living. Because they had to buy their seeds and fertilizers in the spring, sharecroppers were said to eat their crops before they planted them, and much of whatever they could later coax out of the ground went straight to the landowner.

The same prejudice that kept civilians separated by race in schools and churches and soda shops kept soldiers segregated in camp bunks, mess halls, and on the front lines.

Violence has a way of destroying everything but itself. A murdered person’s name always threatens to become synonymous with her murder; a murdered person’s death always threatens to eclipse her life. That was especially true of an economically marginal black woman in Alabama.

the life insurance industry was, by then, thousands of years old. Its earliest incarnation, however, looked less like companies selling policies than like clubs offering memberships. During the Roman Empire, individuals banded together in burial societies, which charged initiation and maintenance fees that they then used to cover funeral expenses when members died.

God, who kept watch even over the sparrow, would provide, and to doubt those provisions by making one’s own end-of-life preparations was thought to reveal a lack of faith. Thus was the life insurance industry caught between a math problem and God.

Of these various obstacles to establishing a life insurance industry—spiritual, mathematical, reputational—the mathematical one was solved first.

carnage of the Civil War, which did for the United States what earthquakes and fires had done for Europe: spread a sense of both dread and obligation around the country, creating a massive demand for life insurance. The total value of policies increased from $160 million in 1862 to an incredible $1.3 billion in 1870. Within fifty years there were almost as many life insurance policies as there were Americans.

A man accused of killing his wife is not likely to find another.

As Hurston quickly learned, outsiders had viewed voodoo with fear and suspicion for so long that insiders now returned the favor.

The healing aspects of voodoo were essential for a population routinely unable to access health care because of their race, socioeconomic standing, or distance from doctors and hospitals;

Ghost bells, war cries, the clanging of slave chains: if ever a land came by its haunting honestly, it is eastern Alabama.

the Radneys knew, a tragic roster of activists and innocents had died for the crime of being black or supporting blacks in their state.

We like to say that some people are ahead of their time, but it is closer to the truth to say that Tom Radney was ahead of his place.

business took off when Russell switched to teddies, better known at the time as camiknickers.

Radney was an expert at the game of repeating something until it became true.

Vengeance is as old as violence, and many white southerners can trace their moral genealogy through family feuds and gentlemen’s duels, across rivers and oceans all the way back to medieval courts and biblical dynasties.

when the jury acquitted Maxwell’s killer, that same newspaper lamented the decision. Vigilantism was both romantic and repellent: too practical to condemn, too dangerous to condone. But right or wrong, the case was now closed, and if some people had scruples about what had happened, almost no one outside his immediate family and thwarted law enforcement officers grieved the end of the long, strange career of the Reverend.

The last time she had so much as agreed to be quoted in print was another favor for Capote. In 1976, he had asked Lee to sit with him during an interview for People, which was running a profile of him. She had said a total of twelve words on the record, seven of which were, “We are bound by a common anguish.”

“I’ve signed myself ‘Harper Lee’ simply because the spelling of my first name is peculiar, and most people call it ‘Nellie’ when they read it (on checks + job applications)—something I can’t abide. I lopped it off just to avoid confusion.” As it turned out, that choice only swapped one kind of confusion for another, setting Lee up for a lifetime of having some readers assume she was a man. But the chain-smoking tomboy who played football with the boys and slept in men’s pajamas was used to confusing those around her.

Money does wonders for misfits. Thanks to their father’s prominence, the Lee children could be as odd as they pleased.

Nelle’s early years were low on supervision. But that wasn’t unusual for children in Monroeville, who were allowed to find whatever trouble they could, so long as they came home in time to wash their hands before supper and tame their cowlicks before church.

School might have sometimes been miserable for Nelle, but it was worse for Truman Streckfus Persons, a boy half the size of his name and twice as strange.

She loved the English countryside so much that when her courses finished, she rented a bicycle and pedaled around solo, staying in hostels. When word of her adventures reached Monroeville, her neighbors were alarmed, but the Lees, who had long since made peace with Nelle being Nelle, simply looked forward to the next installments of A Tomboy Abroad, which included an account of cycling into London and running into Winston Churchill while having tea.

Six weeks shy of graduation, Nelle Lee dropped out. It had become obvious to her that a writer is someone who writes, and also that sooner or later everyone disappoints their parents: better, she figured, to get started on both.

She had known countless men like the Atticus of Watchman, who would defend a black man in court only to bar him from the ballot box, not to mention the neighboring booth or bar stool.

“He writes not to communicate with other people,” Lee said of any writer worth his salt, “but to communicate more assuredly with himself.”

Lee, however, had a theory about why Pickett had stopped writing. “I do not believe that it was in him,” she said, “to write of the eventual fate of the Creek Nation, of the Cherokees, of the Chickasaws and Choctaws, which was decided well within his own lifetime.” Instead his narrative concluded with the “engagements” between Andrew Jackson’s army and the Creeks, which, Lee said, “began to spell the end, which came, as we all know, in a few furious hours at Horseshoe Bend.” Then Lee said something about the historian that was far more revealing than anyone in the high school auditorium might have realized: “I think Pickett left his heart at Horseshoe Bend.”

Unfinishedness is an emotional category as much as a chronological and aesthetic one; plenty of artists keep revising and revisiting their work long after the critics and the public have deemed it done.

Five years later, in November 2014, Alice Lee, who had practiced law into her triple digits, died at one hundred and three. By then, the family law office had moved from the Monroe County Bank and acquired an extra name on its shingle, Tonja Carter, who, after suing the author’s former literary agent, had taken over her affairs. Three months after Alice Lee’s death, it was Carter who declared her client’s enthusiasm for a shocking piece of news: Harper Lee would be publishing another book.