Afternoons with Harper Lee
© 2022 Wayne Flynt
256 pages

Recently I had the pleasure of listening to historian Dr. Wayne Flynt speak at my local library,  drawing from his new book, Afternoons with Harper Lee.   As with Mockingbird Songs, a collection of letters exchanged between himself and the famed author,  this memoir grows out of Flynt’s and his wife Dartie’s long friendship with the Monroeville native.  Afternoons takes its name from the Flynts’ afternoon visits with Lee in the care center she lived the last years of her life in following a stroke in her adopted city of New York.  The memoir combines a personable Harper Lee biography with a messy account of the Flynt-Lee friendship, along with musings on the meaning of  To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman.    Although I’ve been dubious about Watchman since its release and have never read it because of my suspicions that its publication was done over the head of its declining author,  Flynt’s conversations with Lee here indicate that she’d finished it in 1957, but that it simply hadn’t been published.  Even more interestingly, she penned a third work, a true crime piece about a Baptist preacher who was popularly regarded as a serial killer who’d only escaped justice through voodoo until he met a vigilante gunman. The manuscript, never submitted for publication because of fear of legal suits,  was lost over the years. Go Set a Watchman, Flynt suggests, depicted Lee’s own youthful innocence dying. Atticus Finch was the unparalleled hero of Mockingbird,  but in Watchman the young adult Scout has to witness her father making compromises to prevent worse evils. While Flynt’s lecture suggested Lee had come to terms with this, in the book itself she comes off as more permanently disaffected about her father, and  bitter about the South and Monroeville in general. Flynt reiterates although Lee often presented herself as a cantankerous recluse, she was warm and funny to those she admitted into her trust. She made for difficult company as a reader, but I was drawn to this out of interest in what it might reveal about Watchman and her friendship with the legendary oral historian Kathryn Tucker Windham. The book delivers substance about the former but only a brief mention of the latter.