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

by Casey Cep

Water, like violence, is difficult to contain. No sooner had the Alabama Power Company dammed the Tallapoosa than the river began seeking its revenge, in a series of floods that brimmed Lake Martin over its boundaries and droughts that drained it dry. Sometimes the towns submerged beneath it seemed to be avenging themselves, too; late at night, boaters on the lake and people along its shoreline claimed to hear the tolling of the church bells long since drowned. Other, more deeply buried histories haunt the waters, too. On March 27, 1814, the warriors of the Creek nation, having lost most of their land by force and the rest by treaty, took their last stand just north of Lake Martin, at a spot where the Tallapoosa River doubles back on itself in a sharp oxbow known as Horseshoe Bend. It was there that future president Andrew Jackson and his troops slaughtered 557 Creeks, leaving hundreds more to die while trying to escape across the river, and taking the survivors prisoner; later, he forced those survivors across the Mississippi on the Trail of Tears. Sunk beneath Lake Martin are Creek burial grounds, and on the pocket of land inside Horseshoe Bend, where the weeds grow wild and the river and its bloody history are always just behind you, the sound of a turtle slipping off a rock into the water can make a grown man jump. Ghost bells, war cries, the clanging of slave chains: if ever a land came by its haunting honestly, it is eastern Alabama. In the long empty miles between t...

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

Writing, Lee argued, was a never-ending self-exploration for the writer, “an exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.”

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Richard Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

“Books succeed, / And lives fail,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, and indeed throughout Lee’s life To Kill a Mockingbird succeeded. In 1993, she told her agent Julie Fallowfield that she wasn’t interested in writing an introduction for an anniversary edition of her novel. “Please spare Mockingbird an Introduction,” she wrote. “Although Mockingbird will be 33 this year, it has never been out of print and I am still alive, although very quiet. Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity. The only good thing about Introductions is that in some cases they delay the dose to come. Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble.”