Joe Beck didn’t even know the client’s name when he started poking around one of his father’s old law cases some 25 years ago.
But he thought he knew who might.
Harper Lee.
"I was on a fishing trip in upstate New York with a guy who turned out to be Miss Lee's agent," recalled Beck, an Atlanta attorney whose father represented a black man being tried for raping a white woman in Troy, Alabama in 1938, when Lee would have been about 12. "I wrote a letter saying what I knew, and maybe she'd heard something about it (at the time) and could tell me more."
She couldn’t. But that didn’t stop the “To Kill a Mockingbird” author from sending Beck “a very nice letter” in response, back in 1992.
“She said she didn’t recall my father’s case,” Beck said. “But at the end, she said you should talk to elderly black people in Troy, who might know about it.”
Beck isn't the only metro Atlantan to have corresponded with the supposedly reclusive Lee over the years. After she died at 89 in February in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, Georgia Center for the Book director Joe Davich recalled receiving a two-page handwritten letter from Lee in 2006 (he'd invited her to make an appearance and she turned him down in charmingly witty fashion). Ditto for Stuart Noel, an associate dean and professor of English at Georgia State University, who corresponded with Lee in 2003 about a book he was working on.
Beck, who's senior counsel at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton here, has written a memoir to be published next month about his father and the issues that helped shape the outcome of that controversial case, the South and its literature. Go here to read more about "My Father & Atticus Finch," as well as a newly revised and released biography of Lee.
