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Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, and Artelia Bendolph was born on August 7, 1927. I am fairly sure they never met though they grew up just thirty miles from each other in the Black Belt of Alabama. Harper Lee came from Monroeville. Artelia Bendolph was raised in Gee's Bend, a place accessible by a ten-minute ferry ride or an hour over rough back roads to Camden.

Harper Lee was known as "Nelle," but I don't know if Bendolph had a nickname or not. There is not much written about her. She wasn't famous. The picture of her is more famous than she ever was. I know that she left Gee's Bend for Mobile approximately the same time Lee left Monroeville for New York City. Lee moved to New York to become a writer. Bendolph left to find a job in Mobile to send money home.

Harper Lee was white.

Artelia Bendolph was black.

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"The Yankees hit the consonants, but Southerners hit the vowels," was how A.B. Blass described the difference in speech between the North and South.

Our interview with A.B. Blass went for six hours. It started with dinner at the Radley Café and a trip to the town square. In the South, a story takes as long as it takes. That is the way it was with Blass, too, a childhood friend of Harper Lee's.

Even as adults, Blass and Harper Lee swapped stories whenever she came home from New York. She liked to work at her father's office in the mornings, and when she'd see Blass leave his hardware store, she'd call out, "A.B.!" and he'd say, "Nelle Lee!" And the two of them would have coffee and catch up on gossip.

As a high school boy, the clock tower of the courthouse proved irresistible to Blass. He explained that a man who "liked a drink" happened to be in charge of winding the clock. Blass said, "The man gave me the key to go up there if I'd wind it up for him. Well, this one time I got this idea to add an extra gong after clock struck midnight. I hit the bell with a heavy piece of metal. The next day at church everybody was saying, "Did you hear the clock struck 13 times last night?" Blass did it again the following week, and the old clock man said to him, "A.B., I need the key back. Clock is broke, striking 13 times, upsetting folks."

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Jane Ellen Clark, the curator at the Monroe County Heritage Museum, told me that I had to interview Jennings Carter, the likely inspiration for Jem Finch, since Carter, his cousin, Truman Capote, and Harper Lee played together constantly as children. She said she got chills the first time she met him because she noticed that his arm was broken in the same place as Jem's arm.

We met Jennings Carter in Clark's office, and like she said, his left arm hung shorter and seemed to be at a ninety-degree angle to his body. He had a shy smile and right away said, "I don't know what I can tell you that hasn't been said."

I asked about the games he'd play with Truman and Nelle. He said the Truman and Nelle loved to read the comics with Truman's elderly cousin, Sook, and sometimes Sook would get the word wrong, but she never minded if they corrected her. Jennings said that Sook did send a fruitcake to President Roosevelt, but that he never wrote back.

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We met George Thomas Jones on Tuesday evening in his home. He is the town historian and newspaper columnist, whose columns have been made into books, "Happenings in Old Monroeville, Volumes One and Two." He was born in 1922 and moved to Monroeville in 1926 and was about three years ahead of Harper Lee in school. He has also been caring for his wife, Louise, who has been bedridden for fifteen years with Parkinson's disease. Louise and Harper Lee were good friends and played golf together. Bunny Hines, the librarian, remarked about him, "George Thomas Jones will have a jewel in his crown!"

Jones' mother started the lunchroom program at school. She made ham, pimento, and banana & peanut butter sandwiches. Baby Ruth candy bars cost a nickel. Vegetable soup and crackers were ten cents. She knew the country kids couldn't go home for lunch, and she felt the school needed a lunchroom, so she set up one in the school basement.

Sitting in his living room, we were transported back to the days of old Monroeville. He told of us childhood games like "Hot Grease in the Kitchen" and watching "Nelle" take on three boys on the playground after a hair-pulling incident.

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Author's Note: I went to Alabama three times to do research on the Harper Lee biography for young readers. This week’s blog is mostly about the first time I traveled to Alabama with my sister, Keely Madden, in the spring of 2007. In her hometown, Harper Lee is often referred to as “Nelle.”

Miss Alice is the older sister of Harper Lee who still works three days a week at the law office in Monroeville, Alabama. She will be 98 on September 11^th. I had contacted her about an interview, and I received a call from her secretary on our first morning in Monroeville. The secretary said that Miss Alice would not be talking to me out respect for her sister. I said that I understood, and I asked if I might bring my children's novels to the law office, which was located in a bank building off the town square. The secretary said that would be fine and that she would be there all day.

Our plan was to drop my children's books off with the secretary to give to the Lee sisters and then leave immediately. Maybe they would see from my books (akin to Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables) that I wasn't out to write a sensational biography. Yet, when we arrived at the law office about an hour later, the secretary was no where around. Only Miss Alice Lee was there. I was terrified, and so was my sister, Keely. Miss Alice is also deaf and so did not hear us. We stood in the hallway within her sight range debating what to do. I felt sick to my stomach.

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Kerry Madden is our guest blogger during the week of March 23rd. If you have any questions for Kerry Madden, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information about Harper Lee: Up Close:

Nelle Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and became an instant bestseller. Two years later it was an Academy Award– winning film. Today, it remains standard—and beloved—reading in English classes. But Lee never wanted “the book” to define who she was, which explains her aversion to any kind of publicity. Kerry Madden conducted extensive research for this Up Close biography, which reveals Lee to be a down-to-earth Southern woman who enjoys baseball games and playing golf—and whose one and only published book happened to win the Pulitzer Prize.