Tiny Monroeville has its claim to fame
Remnants of To Kill a Mockingbird abound in author’s Alabama home
Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird is always nearby in the southwest Alabama town of Monroeville.
The quiet city is the birthplace and home of the 89-year-old author, and inspired the fictional town of Maycomb in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about race and injustice in the Deep South of the 1930s.
And with the release of the Mockingbird sequel Go Set a Watchman, Monroeville has sites aplenty that draw fans searching for remnants of that “tired old town” where attorney Atticus Finch defended a wrongly accused Tom Robinson while Finch’s children Jem and Scout watched.
There’s a Mockingbird Inn and a restaurant named for Boo Radley, the recluse-turned-hero in the book. Both fill up with visitors each spring when the community puts on a stage adaptation of Mockingbird that draws visitors worldwide.
Also, a bronze statue on the courthouse square and a wall-size Mockingbird mural on the side of a building are constant reminders of the town’s claim to fame.
But those are based on the book, not part of it. There are other spots around town that helped make Mockingbird, released 55 years ago.
Start at Mel’s Dairy Dream on South Alabama Avenue, a busy main road in the town of 6,300, and walk north toward the square.
The restaurant stands on the site of Lee’s childhood home which was torn down decades ago. Mel’s is just a short walk from the school where Lee attended classes and, by extension, her alter ego Scout and Jem began their “longest journey together” at the book’s climax.
Next door to Mel’s and across a weathered stone fence is a grassy lot with the remains of a house foundation and a historic marker that recalls the site as the one-time home of author Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend and the inspiration for the character Dill in Mockingbird. As adults, the two collaborated on Capote’s classic crime story In Cold Blood, published in 1966.
The homes of Lee — and Finch’s — neighbours are long gone, replaced by parking lots and stores, and the paved street is no longer shaded by big trees or transformed by rain into “red slop,” as Lee described in the book.
But the courthouse and jail that recall pivotal moments in Mockingbird are still less than a half-mile away on the courthouse square.
Now a museum, the old Monroe County Courthouse was completed in 1903 and is home to the balconied courtroom that served as the model for the crucial legal scene in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Inside, visitors can walk across the shiny wooden floor and sit in the old witness chair where Robinson, who was black, would have defended himself against false charges of raping a white woman before an all-white jury. The jail where Atticus would have protected Robinson from a lynch mob is now an office across the street.
And Lee is in town, too, “although very quiet,” as she wrote in 1993. Mostly deaf and blind, the author spends her days in an assisted living home in Monroeville.