A New Day in Wilcox County: 1978

By Harriet Swift

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 15, 16, 28

“Bad Wilcox,” the civil rights workers used to call it.

“In Alabama they say that there are 66 counties and then there’s Wilcox,” sighs a federal official.

Wilcox County, resting squarely in the center of Alabama’s Black Belt, presents a storybook picture of the rural Deep South. Its sparse population has steadily declined since 1900, leaving only 16,000 people (about 68 percent of them Black) to populate the tiny towns and large plantations. A pleasing vista of fertile fields, rolling hills and proud Southern forests intertwined with the Alabama River, Wilcox is dotted with white-columned mansions and pathetic wood and tin shacks. The insular, provincial social life has bred a steady line of stock Southern characters from the imperious Miss Ann in the Big House to the wise and folksy Dilsey living out back.

The county’s abundance of traits identifying it as the archetypal Black Belt county have not gone unnoticed. In 1950 sociologist Morton Rubin published his well-known social anthropology study of the Southern plantation culture, “Plantation County,” which was entirely drawn from his field research in Wilcox County. Photographer Bob Adelman expanded his 1965 cover story on the county for the old Look magazine into a book in 1972, the poignant and moving “Down Home.” National Geographic, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journalhave all used the county as a Southern metaphor, while its motherlode of social patterns and inculcated race and caste obsessions have been steadily mined by graduate students and historians.

The characteristics of Wilcox County that have made it such an attraction for writers and journalists are the same features that have kept it a segregated, repressive society that has driven away the best and brightest of both races. In 1970 the median family income was $3,920 a year, compared with $7,200 for the state of Alabama. A recent study based on conservative data indicates that 1.1 percent of the county’s population owns at least 70 percent of the land. The infant mortality rate is an outrageous 32.6 per thousand births. Until 1965 no Black person had voted in the county since Reconstruction. Under the eyes of federal

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marshals dispatched by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Black voters were added to the poll lists. But Wilcox County remained in the tight grip of White office-holders until 1978, despite repeated attempts by Blacks to win seats on the county commission, school board and positions in the courthouse.

A combination of factors worked against the Black community, including splits within its own ranks. But none of these divisions and frustrations were visible on a rainy, bleak January night when men, women and children from all parts of Wilcox County and the Black Belt gathered to pay homage to the two men that they had finally catapulted into the antebellum red brick courthouse in Camden.

Billed as an inaugural ball and program, the evening had all the trappings of a formal event and was held in the cavernous National Guard Armory on Whiskey Run Road in Camden.

“Something has happened to the heat,” the Rev. Thomas Threadgill apologized to visitors who kept on overcoats and wraps over their tuxedos and evening gowns. No one mentioned that the armory is in the middle of a White residential section and almost adjoining the White segregation academy. At this moment of triumph there was enough warmth and generosity to ignore the chill and overlook the suspected pettiness.

The program was long and carefully structured. They had waited a long time and everyone was going to get a chance to share the glory. Ferdinand Ervin, a retired school principal, was the master of ceremonies and welcomed everyone to this “new day in Wilcox County.” It was the official theme of the program and every speaker used it at least once, some like Ervin rolled it out in a sonorous bass and savored each syllable.

Threadgill, a tall imposing man who has weathered untold crises in the county with courage and dignity took the podium early in the program. The unofficial leader of the Black community in the county, the “Rev.’s” influence goes far beyond the perimeters of his New Trinity Presbyterian Church.

“We come to make a collective pronouncement,” he said evenly. “We’d like to have some elbow room. To those crowding us in we say, get back and let us move about. Let us grow, mature and render contributions like other folk.”

“If there are those bent on preventing that, we say, ‘Get back. Here we come’.”

The “those” warned by Threadgill were not in attendance. Out of several hundred people gathered, only five were White: two out-of-county visitors and two old civil rights hands and their seven-year-old daughter.

Choirs from two county high schools were included on the program and their role was oddly reminiscent of a Greek chorus. One group was resplendent in blue robes, the other in pastel gowns and conservative suits. Their songs underlined the optimism and pride that filled the room like an aroma. “I want to be ready,” they sang earnestly, “to walk to Jerusalem.” Without a smidgen of irony, they poured most of their fervor into “God Bless America.” “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” sang voices that know what it is to attend a segregated school system that has little money and fewer resources – voices that know the hard physical labor of picking cotton and hauling water because there is not running water at home. Strong, clear voices that have rough edges and waver with emotion and energy said as much about the new day in Wilcox County as the men and women who held the podium.

The two new office-holders present an interesting contrast between the old and the new in the county. The newly elected sheriff is college-educated, young (26) and well versed in the unfussy rhetoric of the ’70s. He is a “home boy” who headed for California and found urban America unsympathetic and unlivable.

His colleague, the tax collector, is a white-haired veteran of many civil rights campaigns. He has lived in the county all of his life, making his way with various jobs at various times.

Prince Arnold, the sheriff, was introduced first. A former special education teacher, he radiated confidence and pride. A handsome, compact man in a well-tailored three-piece suit, Arnold stepped up to the podium and waited for the standing ovation to subside.

“We are facing crucial decisions in the year ahead,” he told the jammed auditorium. “We must win the war against racism by a landslide!”

He talked earnestly of brotherhood and unity, and like Threadgill, spoke to the people who were not there. “I will be sheriff of ALL the people of Wilcox County,” he vowed to warm applause.

Arnold then addressed himself to specific issues which had much to do with his election. “I’m greatly disturbed by the number of murders in Wilcox County,” he said as a murmur of approval circled the auditorium. “Today, here tonight, I am declaring a war on murder in Wilcox County!” This declaration was greeted with the most sustained applause of the night. The indifference of White law enforcement officials to crime within the Black community is a sore point in the county. Killings and other violent crimes are desultorily investigated and trials are casual. Light sentences are the rule and early parole is frequent. As one “Plantation County” resident explained to Morton Rubin in the 1940s: “When a White man kills a colored man, it’s self-defense. When a colored man kills a White man it’s murder. But when colored kills colored, it’s just one less nigger.”

Not any more.

The declaration of war was also extended to drug dealers, “overseers of those who would like to enslave us; Judases who would betray us for a few pieces of silver while calling us ‘brother.'”

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Arnold summed up his approach to law enforcement simply. “Freedom must be deeply rooted in responsibility,” he said. “We will work within the constitutional framework of the law.”

When the affable Jesse Brooks took over the speaker’s place he didn’t talk about his office (a non-controversial job) or campaign promises.

“I stand here before you as your tax collector,” he told his friends and neighbors. “But I also stand here tonight for someone else. I stand here as the grandson of a little Black slave boy who was brought down river from Charleston, South Carolina, to Lower Peachtree, Alabama, and sold for a thousand dollars. Thanks be to God there’s not going to be any more bidding off of human beings!”

It was a wildly emotional moment and Brooks stood in the center of it ramrod straight, letting the cheers and clamorous applause roll around him. It was a golden moment when the years of struggle, pain and despair were faced squarely and dismissed. The sufferings of that “little Black slave boy” had been vindicated. Against ridiculous odds something very fine and strong had survived in Wilcox County and was now going to take its place in the sun.

Brooks did not fail to mention that what is ahead is more struggle, but “we plan to push forward until justice runs down like mighty waters.”

He vowed to walk into the courthouse “just like John walked into Jerusalem” and begin working hard to build what he predicted will become “one of the best counties in God’s country.”

Bobby Joe Johnson, a Vietnam veteran who lost a hand and a leg in the war, stepped forward to close out the program. He is the president of the Wilcox County Democratic Conference, the Black arm of the Democratic Party in the county. He also has a seat on the more powerful Democratic Executive Committee, but it was the conference that sponsored the inaugural celebration. Johnson began introducing the evening’s “Special guests,” an exercise which turned into a sort of who’s who in the Black Belt. One by one he asked them to stand and be applauded, elected officials and activists from Perry, Dallas, Monroe, Bullock, Marengo, Lowndes, Greene, Macon and Montgomery counties. Men and women who had fought the same long, harrowing battles and knew the price that had to be paid to elect Blacks in Bad Wilcox.

Like those before him, Johnson reiterated the need to look to the future. He also took the occasion to announce his candidacy for the Wilcox County Commission in 1980. “We can’t stop now!”

“Things in the county are going real well,” says Bobby Joe Johnson a month after the inaugural ball. “Prince is doing a good job. Now there’s some that thought just because he was Black and they were Black, well, he’d just look the other way. But he arrested them and put them in jail. ‘If you break the law I’m going to arrest you,’ he told them.”

But there have been problems. The new tax collector isn’t scheduled to take over until this year’s taxes are all closed out in the fall. Until that time the current tax collector is not allowing his successor in the office. A small vexation, says Johnson. A plan has been worked out for Brooks to work in the tax collector’s office of a neighboring county until October.

Despite the great success of the inaugural ball, all did not end pleasantly. Several persons left the armory to find their tires slashed. Eye witnesses named the outgoing sheriff one of his former deputies and two other men as the culprits. All four have been arrested and charged. Although they have attempted to end the incident by apologizing and paying for the damage, they’ll be tried in circuit court.

But nobody expected Bad Wilcox to crumple in a day. “We’re making it,” says Johnson confidently. “We’re doing real well.”

Harriet Swift is a copy editor at the Birmingham Post-Herald.

Making Things Healthy

By Harriet Swift

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 12-16

There’s a familiar 1960s feel to the scene that recalls VISTA television spots: energetic, attractive college students bustle up and down the halls of the summer-emptied Black high school. Country people, mostly Black but a smattering of Whites, come into the building slowly, a little hesitantly. It’s late morning on a sweltering July weekday in the Alabama Black Belt. Most of the people trickling into the Amelia Johnson High School in Thomaston are elderly or women with young children. They are here to have a physical examination, get their blood, eyesight, and hearing tested, have their blood pressure checked and perhaps receive some advice from a nutritionist and law student. They’re participating in the health fair.

The health fair, with its retinue of 30 travelling members has already been in Thomaston once and has set up in two other rural Alabama counties for weeklong stays. Now, the health fair is back in town for a follow-up week before returning to the other towns for second visits that will end with community meetings to consider the state of health care in the area and what local folks want to do about it.

Debby Hicks, 21, one of two community organizers living in Thomaston for the summer says that almost 500 people have been through the health fair here. Hicks, an anthropology graduate student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, explains that her job is to help the community prepare for the health fair’s arrival then ensure that all the necessary follow-up work is done after the “travelling” part of the fair leaves town. Follow-up can involve seeing that records are sent to area doctors, arranging for visits to specialists if some unusual medical problem has been discovered during a check-up, or assisting community work to build a clinic.

With the help of three CETA workers

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arranged through the county, Hicks and the other community organizer, Ann Wade, have visited almost every church and civic group in Marengo County telling people about the health fair, urging them to come and enlisting their support.

“This is not a do-gooder project,” says Wade, 24, who hopes to go to medical school next year. “The community must ask for us to come, then they have to provide housing and food for the students. There’s got to be something here for us to build on.”

Health fairs have been an energetic force in rural Alabama since 1974, when a group of Alabama undergraduates, medical and nursing students began seeking “something to build on” as part of their commitment to improving rural health care. Sponsored by the Student Coalition for Community Health, a loosely-organized group based around the church-connected Wesley Foundation at the University of Alabama, the health fairs have had more spectacular successes in the past five years. One small town in North Alabama now has a doctor, clinic, and pharmacy, and other communities have established nurse-practitioner clinics and organized community improvement projects.

Not every community visited by the health fairs has found tangible results from the visit, but the coalition doesn’t write off these experiences as failures. “Sometimes,” observes a follow-up report written on a disappointing health fair site, “the best thing to help a community is to leave it alone.”

There’s a healthy lack of dogma about the coalition and its attitude toward the small communities that it visits.

“Rural places don’t need anyone’s charity,” bristles the Rev. Jack Shelton, the mentor of many of the student leaders involved in the coalition. “It’s important for our whole society for the rural community to be healthy.”

Shelton, who until recently served as director of the UA Wesley Foundation is now with the university administration, working in President David Mathews’ office on rural development projects. He’s pleased with the evolution of the student coalition which he describes as being “not very self-conscious about its own life.”

He traces the coalition’s beginnings to a group of “bright, hard-working, thoughtful” students that gathered around the Wesley Foundation in the early 1970s. Reading Robert Coles’ studies and after serious discussions about the South and what it meant to be a Southerner, the students eventually hooked up with a group of Vanderbilt University students in 1973. The Nashville group

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had been sponsoring health fairs in rural Tennessee since 1969, blending primary health care and community organizing in an open non-elitist manner that the Tuscaloosa group found attractive.

With seed money from the United Methodist Church, the coalition managed to win a $100,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (of the Johnson Johnson toiletry fortune) to be spread out over two years. Although the money has been handled by the university, the coalition is emphastically autonomous and totally student-run.

It’s important, says Shelton, for college students to have a chance to “prove themselves.”

“The coalition is a chance to build up confidence in themselves, to take a job and be responsible for seeing it through – pulling it off not in the best circumstances, not with the most expensive equipment. It’s hard work and some of them can’t take it.”

The benefits to the students may be as important in the long run as the immediate gains in the communities. The future doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, mathematicians, nutritionists and pillars of the community who work with the health fairs each summer attesting to its profound effect on their outlook and judgment, The “final reports” published after each summer include personal evaluations of the project by each staff member, and most of these speak poignantly of these mostly White, mostly middle class college students’ reactions to living in small Alabama communities, many of them still clouded with racism, poverty and suffering.

“I’ve yet to see anybody come out of it unscathed,” Dona Norton, an unofficial advisor to the health fairs, says cheerfully.

Asked by friends to arrange introductions between coalition organizers and officials in his home county in North Alabama during the first year of the health fairs, Norton has never had an assigned position in the health fairs, but now works with the Agricultural Marketing Project, a spin-off from the health fairs that operates under the coalition umbrella.

“This just throws ’em up against real life,” he says. “There’s no typical coalition student, and there’s no typical health fair. One week he may be living up on Sand Mountain with a nice middle class White family with a swimming pool out back and the next week he’s down in the Black Belt with some poor Black family that doesn’t even have an indoor bathroom.”

Norton, 29, has a degree in regional planning from Alabama and expresses the same strong agrarian sentiments as Shelton. During his student days Norton was “infuriated” with the campus insensitivity to the rest of the state.

“All these professors who come down from Indiana or somewhere, calling everything ‘podunk,’ dismissing everything smaller than Atlanta as not worth fooling with . . . .” he shaes his head in disbelief.

The health fairs run, in Norton’s words, on “a constant series of miracles.” Generally there is only a small carry-over group from one year to the next. Health fairs, on the whole exhilirating, are also exhausting and demanding, easy to burn out on. As soon as one summer’s fairs are over, planning starts for the next year, more often than not with an entirely new group of students. They read the final reports, talk to old coalition workers, turn to Shelton and Norton for guidance.

“But nobody can tell you how to do it,” says

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Angie Wright, a member of the three-member directorship that ran this summer’s project. Wright, 22, a recent graduate of Davidson College in North Carolina, was looking for a way to combine her interest in medicine and community organizing when she heard about the health fairs.

There’s a feeling that the coalition’s strength comes from the constant infusion of new blood. If the health fairs seem to have the same problems with sloppy organization, uneven pacing and inadequate planning year after year, then they also have a freshness and enthusiasm that has gone out of too many other well-organized humanitarian efforts.

Shelton concedes that it was “easier’ to recruit students for the projects a few years ago. “They had greater social sensitivity,” he says. “They were a little more sophisticated generation of students; less dominated by the pleasure principle.”

Still, every year, the coalition manages to fill its openings with music students who learn to take

EKGs, medical students who work as community organizers, geology students who learn how to test well water. It all gets out together, and somehow, it works.

There’s some mumbling that the health fairs are being taken for granted, that they’ve taken a backseat to other coalition related projects. But no one foresees discontinuing the health fairs, at least not any time soon. Money has been a constant worry since the Johnson grant expired. In the last three years funds have come from the Methodist church, the University Student Government Association, the Chattanooga-based Lyndhurst Foundation and the Alabama governor’s office. The other coalition projects also have to scramble for funds, usually drawing on the same sources.

Norton’s Agricultural Marketing Project is similar to one run in Tennessee setting up “food fairs” in church and public parking lots throughout the summer. Farmers and gardeners bring produce to a market site on a regularly scheduled day and sell directly to consumers. The coalition has also undertaken a study of land ownership patterns in Alabama’s Appalachian counties as part of a grant from the Appalachian Regional Council. A newly-formed Community Health Development Project, headed by two former health fair community organizers, is coordinating follow-up work in health fair communities and working toward building a network of primary health care advocates in Alabama.

The unifying idea behind the coalition’s different directions is the group’s broad definition of health.

“People in a community are healthy because of what they do for themselves,” says Shelton.

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“The coalition has been intent on joining in a partnership with the communities that want to be self-reliant. This isn’t a charity, do-gooder thing. It’s just working to make things healthy. It’s just working with folks.”

In Thomaston, there’s a palpable feeling of discouragement among the staff.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t visit one of the other sites,” a visitor is told over and over. “The response has been so much more enthusiastic than here.”

The health fairs have scored their most satisfying successes in the small, primarily White towns in the hill country of North Alabama. The health fairs have acted as a catalyst in several communities, providing a vehicle to identify and act on the dissatisfactions shared by many in the area. The coalition always works with the established lower structure, but at the same time it offers new energy and new ideas that can generate their own momentum.

The coalition has had less success in the Black Belt, where communities are often split sharply along racial lines. Previous efforts have centered in Black communities, which are desperately poor and able to marshal few resources. In Thom aston the power structure is undeniably White, while the population is perhaps slightly more Black than White. There was a pronounced hesitancy on the part of the White community to participate, although several respected authority figures sanctioned the health fair. It seems a testimony to the dedication and high goals of the students that they are unhappy with the response to the health fair in Thomaston. Several key community persons were very pleased with the health fair, one pointing out that no one can recall Whites and Blacks ever working together as equals on a mutually beneficial project before the coalition came. What will happen in the months to come is unknown, of course, but the health fair has brought a moment of cooperation and sense of purpose to Thomaston that might never have been known otherwise.

Dona Norton sees a common thread of experience in all the small communities where the health fairs have worked: “They all talk about the past, things that happened twenty years ago. And it’s always traumatic, catastrophic stuff – when the school closed, when the train depot closed, when the lake came, we used to be known as the strawberry capital of the United States. The health fair is the first positive community experience that most of these folks can remember.”

It’s a time, he says, when the potential of the community can be revealed and mobilized. “One of the wonderful things is seeing so many good people surface,” he says. “Not whittlers and fiddlers and all that goddamn craftsy stuff, just ordinary good folks. They could be on the Supreme Court, president of the United States, some of them were so wise and good, but they were born in Cedar Bluffs or Boykin or Castleberry and that’s where they’ve stayed to live and die.”

A native Alabamian, Harriet Swift is a graduate of the University of Alabama and copy editor with the Birmingham Post-Herald.

Marie Faulk Rudisill. Truman Capote. William Morrow & Co., 1983.

By Harriet Swift

Vol. 5, No. 6, 1983, pp. 21-23

Marie Faulk Rudisill, Truman Capote’s aunt, has succeeded in accomplishing what most people thought was impossible: she has brought her nephew and the homefolks in Monroe County, Alabama, into complete agreement. Both Capote and Monroeville are deeply offended by Rudisill’s new book, Truman Capote, and are united in their opinion of the memoir: It’s all wrong.

The book, subtitled “The story of his bizarre and exotic boyhood by an aunt who helped raise him, “tells of Capote’s childhood, filtered through the history of lore of his mother’s family. Rudisill, now seventy-two and living in Beaufort, South Carolina, wrote the book with the help of James C. Simmons, a California writer with an academic background in Southern literature.

Rudisil1 opens her story with the 1954 suicide of Lillie Mae Faulk Persons Capote, her sister and Truman’s mother. After an intimate pre-funeral chat with her nephew about his homosexuality and her dashed hopes for a match with his childhood friend and Monroeville neighbor, Nelle Harper Lee (author of To Kill a Mockingbird), Rudisill settles down for one of those languid, repetitive family brooding sessions that every Southerner is acquainted with from birth. AII family closets and cupboards are emptied and ruminated over, underlining the favorite themes of love, love lost, betrayal, the inevitability of hardship and the evil in the hearts of men, women and small children.

Rudisill chronicles the fortunes of the Faulk tribe from the time of the War between the States, which she says devastated the huge family plantation and left the family destitute. One daughter, in the best Scarlette O’Hara tradition, grasps that King Cotton’s rule is over and determines to build a new life. She parlays her sewing talent into a small shop that offers hats, lingerie and other feminine finery to the town carriage trade. Jenny Faulk, who never marries, is a woman of iron will and razor-sharp business instincts. She builds a house in Monroeville and becomes head of a family which includes her widowed mother, a brother and two spinster sisters. Later, two young cousins from Mississippi are added to the household when their parents’ deaths leave them orphans.

One of the orphans begins a family of his own at eighteen, briefly bringing his sixteen-year-old bride to Miss Jenny’s house before striking out on his own as a horse trader. When he is mortally injured while breaking a horse, Miss Jenny brings his widow and five children to her house. The young widow grieves herself to death and Miss Jenny takes on the raising of the children. The eldest is the beautiful and spirited Lillie Mae. She and Jenny fight constantly.

In the middle of this unending battle of wills is Lillie Mae’s younger sister Marie, nicknamed Tiny, who is alternately Lillie Mae’s confidante and victim. The imperious Lillie Mae sets her cap for a rich husband and fetches up one Archulus Persons, the unattractive and unambitious son of a Fine Old Alabama Family from Troy. Their son Truman

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is born in 1924 and is more or less consigned to Miss Jenny’s household until Lillie Mae acquires a second mate in 1931, a wealthy Cuban businessman who lives in New York City. There are regular visits back to Monroeville but Truman has been molded by growing up amidst a family headed by a stern matriarch, an indifferent mother, an obsessively devoted older spinster (Sook, the model for the sweet, simple-natured cousin in A Christmas Memory), and the other “bizarre and exotic” members of the household and citizenry of Monroe County.

Although Truman Capote now issues a blanket “no comment” through his literary agency on his aunt’s book, he was quoted in The Washington Post shortly after its publication as saying “If there are twenty words of truth in it, I will go up on a cross to save humanity.” Monroeville, always more circumspect in its pronouncements than its most famous son, puts its feeling another way: “Why would she do this to her family?” is the first response when the home folks are asked about Rudisill’s book. “Why would she do this to Monroeville?” is almost always the next comment.

Capote’s discomfort is easy to understand. No matter how uninhibited one has been about coming out of the homosexual closet and making literary hay of an unorthodox family background in the mysterious South, it can only be painful to have childhood foibles and parental indifference committed to the printed page. Especially when the story is being told by a relative one has not seen or spoken to in fifteen years.

Monroe County’s unhappiness with the book is part of a larger problem. This dignified, tranquil Black Belt community prides itself on an unremarkable gentility that prized good manners, bland opinions and unbroken calm. There were no civil rights demonstrations in Monroe County, no “incidents” that made their way to the six o’clock news. There was no Ku Klux Klan to speak of, and the county has remained a bastion of temperance to this day. Into this peaceful Southern Eden came unwanted and distasteful celebrity through the successful writing careers of Capote and Nelle Lee. To Monroeville, Marie Rudisill’s memoir is yet another cross to bear.

Although the hometown reaction is rooted in a code that believes in keeping family skeletons in the closet and settling disputes behind locked doors, the predictable wail of “It’s not true! That isn’t the way it happened!” seems justified. There are some odd errors and omissions in the memoir that nod darkly toward hazy memories of half a century ago shaped for publication by, say, a California writer with a background in Southern literature. For the reader unfamiliar with Alabama and Monroe County, Rudisill stretches her credibility with supposedly verbatim quotes of long conversations that took place over fifty years ago and, in some cases, before her birth. For the reader who does know anything about Monroe County, the story is riddled with inaccuracies and puzzlements.

One of the strangest assertions concerns the love of Lillie Mae’s life, a proud Indian doctor from a nearby reservation. There are no Indian reservations in Monroe County and never have been, according to those familiar with the generally unimpressive history of the county. Rudisill places the reservation on the edge of town, Claiborne (consistently misspelled as “Clairborne), at the edge of the Alabama River. The names of families and institutions are misspelled (including her own college) and well-known facts are scrambled. She says, for instance, that Nelle Lee’s only brother died at birth, when he in fact was the model for To Kill a Mockingbird’s Jem.

Monroeville’s indignant howls of “how could she do this!” go to the heart of the book’s purpose and the town’s annoyance. Actually, it’s easy to see how Aunt Tiny could do this to her family (two sisters, reportedly very unhappy over the memoir, still live in Monroeville). The book is less about Monroeville and the shaping of a literary legend than it is about the settling of old scores. Lillie Mae Capote has been dead almost thirty years, but the wounds she inflicted on her younger sister have never quite healed. Lillie Mae, the egotistic beauty, delighted in humilating others and her apparently eager to please young sister was a target too easy to pass up. The guileless Tiny even followed Lillie Mae to New York, but complains bitterly about being used and manipulated by her sister. The sins of the mother are visited in the son, who seems never to have properly appreciated all that Aunt Tiny did for him.

“How could she do this to Monroeville,” is a bit more complex. Although Rudisill spins yarns that she knows go against Monroe County’s grain, telling of wanton young white women (Lillie Mae), interracial alliances producing children acknowledged by white fathers (in one case her uncle), wild bucks who rode horses into stores and staid businesswomen with secret lovers from New Orleans (shudder), she emphasizes her family’s refinement, uniqueness and charm at every chance. Her father’s horses weren’t just horses, but “magnificent white stallions,” they all attended “prestigious” schools, ordered clothes from “the finest stores,” and were included among the “gentry” of Monroe County. The Faulks, one is supposed to see, were a Fine Old Family of charming eccentrics in the best Southern tradition. Even without the notoriety bestowed by Truman Capote, the Faulks were an impressive and intriguing bunch, her book insists. Aunt Tiny may have been an overlooked middle child, but she is emphatic that her family was counted among the aristocracy.

Monroeville, however, is having none of it. Tiny has captured some of the atmosphere of the time, those who have read the book say politely, citing her descriptions of 1920s and ’30s which recount the long summers of heat and ennui, the insular life in the Black Belt. But the balance of the book is not credible, they add, taking special exception to Rudisill’s depiction of the Faulks as a leading family. She has “flowered up” the family’s story, to use the words of one Monroeville matron who hated the book. “The Faulks were rather common,” she says calmly, “not our kind of people.” There was no Taraesque plantation, say others who knew the family, vaguely recalling some acreage outside of town. The general consensus paints Miss Jenny and her clan as hardworking country people who took care of their own but were regarded as a peculiar bunch and relegated to the edges of the “nicest” circles.

Truman Capote (the book) has garnered so-so to hostile reviews in the literary world, causing only a small ripple of interest. In Monroe County, it is being received with a sigh of resignation. There’s a waiting list for the town library’s one copy. Those who have ordered personal copies from bookstores in Birmingham and Atlanta are plied with requests from family and frieds for a look-see. The town

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that Nelle Lee described in To Kill a Mockingbird as a “tired old” place in 1935 has grown and even prospered a bit. There’s a big Vanity Fair (lingerie) sewing factory, a junior college and several large pulpwood mills on the Alabama River. But it’s still a very conservative place, completely satisfied with itself. A little probing convinces one that the oft-stated indifference to celebrity is genuine. Even if Nelle Lee were not obsessive about her privacy (she has not published since the huge success of Mockingbird in 1960, she does not give interviews and cuts off anyone who is quoted in print about her) and if Truman Capote did not live what is delicately referred to as “an unusual lifestyle,” Monroeville would still not be interested in being known for its writers.

There is a market for Monroeville. Ann Pridgen, the town librarian, reports a steady stream of letters and visitors from all over the United States and several foreign countries seeking information about the town and its famous son and daughter. Steve Stewart, editor of the county’s excellent weekly newspaper, The Monroe Journal, is often called on by visiting writers and journalists who single out Monroe County when writing about the South. Yet there are no To Kill a Mockingbird T-shirts to be had in Monroeville, no signs proclaiming this the childhood home of Lee and Truman Capote, only a mimeographed handout available at the library of Chamber of Commerce office explaining that the Lee house is now the site of a Dairy Queen and Boo Radley’s tree does not exist. The reading room in the musty museum in the old courthouse is the Nelle Harper Lee-Truman Capote Room, but even that concession to fame seems unenthusiastic and underplayed. Something was expected of the town, and that seems to be [unclear]response.

“We’re the safest folks in the world,” explains one shrewd character in To Kill a Mockingbird to the disillusioned Jem and Scout. The safest folks are nice to know and pleasant to visit but ill at ease with the world of ideas and mystified by fame that seems to them based on stories that are not “true” and images that are distorted. Monroe Country, which did not choose to run for literary immortality, has nevertheless been elected, but firmly refuses to serve.

Harriet Swift, currently a reporter with the Oakland Tribune, is a native Alabamian who spent her childhood summers on her grandfather’s farm in Monroe County.