Nelle is allergic to press, not people, and that through the years she could be found at David’s Catfish House, the Piggly Wiggly, and the McDonald’s on Highway 21, feeding the ducks by the pond at the park, or playing the slots at the casino in the next county.Īlmost everyone agreed, though, that things had changed in the last few years. Nobody I spoke to was ever more than one story away from the sisters, and people laughed whenever I said that the rest of the world thinks of Harper Lee as a recluse.

Nelle, as everyone calls the sisters here, are well known in this community of six thousand or so. At eighty-eight, Harper Lee rarely leaves the Meadows she was last seen outside the facility in November for her sister’s funeral. Her health otherwise, though, has been fiercely debated, especially during these last few weeks. Her physical decline has been well observed: confined to a wheelchair, she’s mostly blind, from macular degeneration, and nearly deaf. Like the seasons, Harper Lee came and went: usually home to Alabama for the winters and then back north to the city for the rest of the year.Ī severe stroke in 2007 brought her home for good, first to Birmingham, and then eventually to the Meadows, an assisted-living facility not far from the center of Monroeville. Her sister Alice had joined their father’s law firm, in Monroeville, and her sister Louise was raising a family not far away in Eufaula. She maintained a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side for decades, but she returned to Alabama often to see her older sisters. She’d moved to the city in 1949 after dropping out of law school. Lee was living in New York City when her first and, up until now, only book was published. Nobody, not even Lee’s lifelong friends, seemed to have known that the manuscript existed, and many were confused about why it is being published now, so many decades after the author appears to have forsaken it. I drove there the day after the announcement, and everyone from the postman to my hotel clerk had something to say about Harper Lee’s new book. South of Montgomery and north of Mobile, Monroeville is the kind of town that feels like it’s at least a hundred miles from anywhere else. The tiny Alabama town where Harper Lee was born was shocked earlier this month by the announcement that, fifty-five years after she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” she would finally publish a sequel, “Go Set a Watchman,” although it will be a sequel by release date only, since Lee actually wrote “Watchman” first. Maycomb may have been hot enough to wilt men’s collars before nine, but Monroeville in February has a chill.

To kill a watchman