“It’s a great testament to them that their affection, overall, has not wavered,” he said.

And no matter what the town and Lee meant to each other, they are eternally connected. As Jones put it, “You can’t divorce one from the other.” On some level, Lee needed Monroeville, and Monroeville still needs her.

“When Vanity Fair was thriving, we were the manufacturing center, and it was very important to us. It was a tremendous blow to lose that,” Pat Nettles said. “Around the same time, we had a pulp mill running. That was a golden time.”

Smith sees golden times still on the horizon. “We have Georgia-Pacific here as well as a pre-cast concrete plant. And everything about Harper Lee and the interest in her work keeps growing,” she said. “Now, with her passing, we are seeing just as many visitors if not more.”

Crissy Nettles thinks things might even get a bit easier in Monroeville. “While she was alive, there was great tension in wanting to honor and celebrate her without exploiting or insulting her,” she said. “Now that she's gone, we still feel the need to be respectful, but I hope the sense of having to walk on eggshells disappears with time. Some entities in Monroeville have been accused of unfairly exploiting Lee. I don't think that was ever anyone's intention, but we are gun-shy now and still wonder how our actions would make her feel.”

She also sees an opportunity for the museum’s collection to expand and allow more people to learn about Lee and her hometown. “I hope Lee's heirs will donate some of her papers and personal effects to be archived in our museum, where they will be treasured and cared for and made available free of charge to literary scholars,” she said.

For literary scholars and average Lee fans alike, one thing worth learning about her is this: Nelle Harper Lee was more than Harper the writer, more than the Pulitzer Prize on a pedestal, more than Nelle, more than the characters she created, more than her childhood memories and her adult disillusionment that stripped them of their gilded edges; she was all of them.

Whatever we do or don’t know, feel or have felt about Lee, it wouldn’t have mattered a whit to her. It never did. If, as Atticus once advised, anyone was able to climb into her skin and walk around a bit, they’d realize that she was quite comfortable there; she didn’t crave or need the world’s attention, understanding, approval or love.

“She was always secure enough that she didn’t care what we thought of her,” Flynt said. She alone was enough.

One of my last conversations with my mother-in-law included a discussion of Lee. We were talking through the drama that had surrounded the publication of “Watchman” and the rights to the “Mockingbird” play changing hands.

“How strange must it be for her?” my mother-in-law mused. “Everyone thinks they know her; it’s like we’ve claimed her and feel some right to an accounting of everything she thinks or does. Some of the talk about her sounds like she’s an entity, not a person. But she’s really just a girl from Alabama.” Nelle was just a girl from Alabama. Harper Lee became an icon.



And while Nelle is gone, Harper Lee will live on. She’s cemented her place in the cultural consciousness of the world, in the literary legacy of Alabama and in the history of one tiny country town. And because of that, Monroeville — what it was, what it is and what she imagined and hoped that it could be — will live on, too.