She understood that, of course, because it was something they had in common. Both were southerners unwilling to leave a region that would have preferred to do without them: an unmarried, unconventional literary woman; an in-your-face progressive. She could have stayed in Manhattan; he could have started a fresh political career almost anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But Harper Lee returned over and over again to the town where she was born, and Big Tom never really left; both of them were deeply loyal to the South, even when it disappointed them or disapproved of them.
