The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee by Marja Mills Page A

commonly known that Miss Alice had worked for seven years for the IRS, so people assumed she was well versed in income tax law. They didn’t know that her work for the IRS had been in the Social Security division and that she had never filled out an income tax return other than her own. Tax clients poured in. Miss Alice studied the tax code by night and did tax returns by day. She became the tax lady.”
    As much as she was known for her legal work, Alice’s role in the Methodist Church was probably the defining work of her life. When Tom asked Alice for a list of offices she’d held in the Methodist Church, she said simply, “Well, I’ve never been the pastor.” She served on every committee they could come up with, much as her father had.
    Tom took special pride in recounting her actions at a regional Methodist conference. “It was in the midsixties when the rhetoric of racism was loud and vitriolic. A committee report concerning theproblems about our racially divided church and society had come to the floor. Amendments had been made and debate had started. And the advocates of continued racism were poised and ready to try to drag the church deeper into institutional racism. But before their leader could get to the floor, a wee woman from Monroeville, Alabama, got the attention of the presiding officer of the conference. Miss Alice Finch Lee went to the microphone to make her maiden speech to the Alabama–West Florida conference of the Methodist Church. Her speech electrified the seven or eight hundred delegates there—I was there. It consisted of five words. She said: ‘I move the previous question’ and sat down. The conference applauded enthusiastically and voted overwhelmingly to support her motion and then adopted the committee report without further debate. The advocates of racism were left on the sidelines holding their long-prepared speeches. Miss Alice became the hero of the conference and from that day on the enemy of the racists. She’s always been a person of few words but important words said at the right time and the right place.”
    It wasn’t an impassioned speech, but the Southern Methodist Church was deeply divided on the question of race in the 1960s. Alice’s stand carried quite a lot of weight with the congregation. It’s an example of the quiet work for equality that has been a hallmark of the Lee family. The sweeping change that came to the South in the 1960s was largely the work of the civil rights movement and its brave leaders. But people like the Lees played an important role behind the scenes. Of course, Nelle’s novel itself was influential for generations of Americans in how they understood the questions of civil rights.
    One of the more common criticisms of the character of Atticus Finch is that he did not do enough to fight the racism of Maycomb. His way was to do so rather quietly, and behind the scenes. A.C. andAlice were cut from that Atticus cloth. Or, rather, Atticus was cut from the A.C. and Alice Lee cloth.
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    A year after the Lee profile ran, I was on to other topics and continuing to struggle with my health. I was in the hospital and at home more and at work less. Periodic inflammation in the lining of my lungs wasn’t serious, but it was painful and tiring. Nausea was a problem. I’d had a few surgeries in recent years and now underwent a few more, one to repair a femoral artery damaged during a diagnostic procedure and a couple of others to repair stress fractures in my left foot that were slow to heal. I spent a fair amount of time on crutches or in a walking cast.
    My editors were mostly understanding, but in 2003 they told me I needed to go on the Tribune ’s medical disability plan. It was a blow. I didn’t want to leave a job I liked, even though it had become a test of will to work through the periods of wipe-out fatigue. I was hopeful I could return in a couple of months or a half year, tops. My list of story ideas, things I wanted to write about for