Among the many already-written books keeping Lee company in her apartment was a copy of Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe, which she had read, as she put it, umpteen times. Crusoe had been shipwrecked twenty-eight years, and Lee must have identified. Ages had passed since she had published Mockingbird, yet there she was surrounded by loneliness, struggling with a book that didn't seem to want to be written, on what must have felt, at times, like her own Island of Despair. Her father, like Crusoe's, had wanted her to stay home, but she had gone adventuring instead and was now alone in her apartment notching her days.
In an opening letter from author Casey Cep, she explains that when she first learned that Harper Lee would be publishing the novel Go Set a Watchman, she travelled to Alabama in order to write an article on the book's surprise release for The New Yorker. While there, she learned of a different book that Lee had been trying to write in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird; a true crime, in the vein of In Cold Blood (for which Lee had acted as a research assistant for Truman Capote before Mockingbird hit the public), and the more that Cep learned about the bizarre tale of a Black serial killing voodoo preacher, the progressive white lawyer who represented him, and the vigilante who took down the fraudulent preacherman – and the more she learned about Harper Lee's struggles to put the story on the page – the more Cep felt the urge “to pick up where she left off”. You might say it takes some chutzpah to accept that torch and carry on where the fabled Harper Lee had failed, but the resulting Furious Hours is a compelling and rich narrative. Who knows what Ms Lee might have made of her material if she hadn't so firmly blocked her own way, but Cep does the story proud. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted might not be in their final forms.)
Ghost bells, war cries, the clanging of slave chains: if ever a land came by its haunting honestly, it is Eastern Alabama. In the long empty miles between towns there, the highways rise and fall over hills that keep most things out of view and make every sight a sudden one. Where the pavement ends, the roads turn to dirt as red as rust or blood. Pines and oak trees line them, tattered moss hanging from their branches like wraiths. At night, the fog is so thick that anything can disappear into it or come walking out of it.Furious Hours is separated into three sections: The first tells the life story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell; the second is the life and career of Big Tom Radney – the lawyer/politician who not only got rich helping Maxwell collect on the proliferation of life insurance policies that the Reverend held on the people around him, but who also defended the man who shot Maxwell down in public; and the final section is on Harper Lee: her life, career, and what she was up to in the years that she had self-exiled from public view. Each section is jam-packed with detail, and as I always find with this kind of book, these details are of varying degrees of interest to me. I didn't really like when the story of Willie Maxwell was interrupted by the history of the life insurance industry – starting in the Roman Empire, through the Great Fire of London, to America's Civil War days. (But then I did like the included nugget that the man to best capitalise on London's post-fire building and insurance boom was named Nicholas If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-for-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone.) The following suited me perfectly (which only proves that Cep, nor any nonfiction author, could possibly suit all tastes, all the time):
The Reverend Maxwell claimed that he was afraid of what was out there, too. All his life, he insisted that he was innocent – of his first wife's murder, of his neighbor's death, of his brother's death, of his second wife's death, of any crime whatsoever, of the practice of voodoo. All claims to the contrary, he said, amounted to vicious gossip spread at the expense of a righteous man widowed twice in only two years. The fact that he had insurance on all those who died did not suggest a motive; it showed only that he was a scrupulous spouse and sibling.
There were courts in Alabama even before there were courthouses. In the early years of the nineteenth century, a judge in Baldwin County presided from the fork of an oak tree, with the jury on his right, the spectators on his left, and another oak – one for the hangman – not far away. In Jasper, the seat of Walker County, the judge sat on a big rock, the jury on a bigger one. Over in Randolph County, the judge's bench was a stump, and those he sentenced to jail did their time in a hollow log along the Tallapoosa River. After one prisoner nearly drowned after the river flooded and carried the log off the bank with him inside it, the court turned over a wagon instead, put prisoners underneath, and had a sheriff sit on top.Being a poor Black man from Alabama in the mid-twentieth century, there wasn't a whole lot of information about Willie Maxwell outside of his court cases; so where there were rumours of him practising voodoo, Cep gives us a look into conjuring; where he was a circuit preacher, we learn about revival tents; where Maxwell worked in pulpwood, we learn about the industry. Being a progressive up-and-coming Democrat in George Wallace's segregationist South, there's plenty of meat to put Tom Radney into context (I loved that when he was defending Maxwell's killer, this former hobnobber with the likes of JFK included in his summation to the jury, “I am only a simple country lawyer...”) But the real story begins in the third section, with Harper Lee – a section that explains the history of Go Set a Watchman, her complicated relationship with Truman Capote, the starts and stops and writer's block that kept her from publishing anything of note beyond what she referred to as “The Bird” and a few short magazine pieces. Because Cep tells us what Lee wanted to accomplish with Maxwell's story (which she eventually thought she might novelise, as honouring the victims in nonfiction felt unworkable), this seems a fitting revival of Lee's ideas; and since Cep so carefully details Lee's reclusive post-Mockingbird years, she sheds a light on where Watchman belongs in Lee's story (which pretty much fits Cep's original assignment). Maybe this felt a bit like three different stories, but I liked them all. Informative and interesting, a compelling read.
