Back Home Again: Tru and Nelle: A Christmas Tale by G. Neri

Mother had finally had it with him. "I wish I'd given birth to Pinocchio! At least he turned into a real boy in the end." "Pinocchio isn't real, he's fiction," was all Truman could say (he was a writer, after all).

Her answer was to ship him off to St. John's Military Academy, of all places. No cadet had every been more ill-suited than delicate little Truman. Every day he was bullied. Finally his only choice was to run away, hoping that his only chance was to run far away, hoping his curse wouldn't follow.

The only place he could think to go was Monroeville. He just wanted to see Sook, to eat Little Bit's butter beans. even to hear Jenny lecture him. He missed them all. But mostly, he missed Big Boy and Nelle.

It's 1937. Two years before, Tru had chosen his mother's custody and living in New York City with her and her new husband, Joe Capote. But he soon learned his mother didn't really want him around. She hated the way he was different, his squeaky little voice, artsy friends and clothes, "the way he sashayed when he walked."

The military school was torture, and that was how, just before Christmas, Tru, still dressed as a cadet, came to be in a freezing boxcar approaching a railroad crossing near Monroeville, Alabama. His hobo fellow traveler gave him a push and told him "tuck and roll," as the train slowed, and that's how Truman Capote found himself face-planted in the hard, cold Alabama dirt beside the tracks.

I must be cursed, he thought.

When he opened his eyes, he saw it--not a vision, but a magnificent cedar standing right before him, the perfect Christmas tree. With a tree like that, his curse would go cowering into the night. A tree like that announced a fresh start. A tree that erased the past.

As Robert Frost said, "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

And his Alabama cousins do take Tru in, but his curse still seems with him. He finds Nelle Harper Lee wearing a dress, her hair long, looking surprisingly like a girl. And when she spots him shivering in their old treehouse and, dress and all, climbs up to pelt him with a million questions, she's just in time to see cousin Jenny's house next door suddenly take fire. Jenny, Sook, their cook Little Bit, and dog Queenie, are homeless and forced to move in with cousin Big Boy Jenning's family just before Christmas. But Sook still believes in her Christmas fruit cakes, and Truman still believes that perfect Christmas tree will make everything right, the way it used to be.

But when Truman and Nelle set out to claim that tree, they meet up with their old nemesis Boss Henderson, now bigger and meaner, son of the former Klan Grand Dragon, who's claimed the tree for himself. Just as he's about to beat the stew out of Truman for disputing the matter, Nelle clobbers Boss from behind with a big limb, and they take it on the lam, afraid Boss is dead.

He's not, but now he's really on their case. And a real murder draws Truman as Sherlock and Nelle as Watson back to their old sleuthing game. An elderly man is found dead near the river landing, and Nelle, nearby with her dad A.C., remembers noticing two colored men nearby. When two black men are found in the area, the towspeople railroad the two into a conviction, and despite A. C. Lee's defense, a Klan lynching seems a real possibility. Nelle believes she will be the cause of the wrongful death of two innocent men, and Truman is sure he's brought his own curse upon the Lee Family, the defendants, and the whole town of Monroeville, Alabama.

Even a Christmas morning snow, the first in history, doesn't make this holiday seem like Christmas, with A.C. Lee himself staked out at the jail in hope of averting a Christmas Day lynching. But then the whole Lee-Jennings family decides to move their feast--butter beans for Tru, fruit cakes for the two prisoners, and amazingly, the perfect Christmas tree--all to the Monroeville jail for Christmas dinner. It's not what Tru had hoped for, exactly; it's even a little weird, but maybe..., maybe his curse might be gone after all.

Nelle looked at Truman. "You can't keep running. You need to stand up for yourself. Tell them you are who you are.

"I'll promise to stay true to myself if you do, too. It's not all left to fate or curses, Truman."

In G. Neri's second book in series, Tru and Nelle: A Christmas Tale(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Tru and Nelle are, of course, cousins Truman Capote and Nelle Harper Lee, coming together for a Christmas that marks a turning point in the lives of each.

Like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in this sequel, life in Monroeville is not unlike one of Sook's fruit cakes, sweet but dark, rich, complex, and full of the flavor of home from Snake Joe's whiskey and dried kumquats to Sonny Boular's (a.k.a., Boo Radley's) pecans, the mix of Southern sunshine and the clouds of racism that fed the imaginations of two of the most famous American authors of the twentieth century. A worthy sequel to Neri's noted Tru and Nelle (see my 2016 review here), this is a strong novel, beautifully written, imbued with a sense of place, a tale that tells the truth as only fiction can, about family and home and finding your own way when you leave both behind.

"The Game Is Afoot!" Tru and Nelle by G. Neri

When Truman first spotted Nelle, he thought she was a boy. Barefoot and dressed in overalls with a boyish haircut, she perched on a stone wall that separated their rambling wood homes. He was trying to avoid her stare by pretending to read his book.

"Hey, you!" she said.

Truman gazed up from pages. He was sitting quietly on a wicker chair on the side porch of his cousins' house, dressed in a little white sailor suit. "Are you talking to me?" he said in a high wispy voice.

"Come here," she commanded.

Truman was taken aback. "You're a ...girl?"

Nelle stared back. Truman's high voice, white-blond hair, and sailor outfit had thrown her for a loop.

"You're a boy?" she asked, incredulous.

It's not a propitious meeting. Two misfit kids, self-possessed but lonely, are drawn to each other, and when Nelle spots the cover of Truman's book, The Adventure of the Dancing Men: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, she senses a kinship to this strange, bossy, but sissified boy. With some bragging about his days of tap-dancing on a Mississippi steamboat, he admits that he's been left by both parents with his elderly cousins, and despite herself, Nelle is intrigued. She takes possession of the book imperiously, promising to return it when she's "good 'n' done" with it.

And with that, a friendship is made. Nelle Harper introduces Truman to life in the small Alabama town, the bullies, the Court House, and her enticing treehouse, where the two bond over their love of Sherlock Holmes and conspire to solve mysteries of their own. Naturally, Tru has to be Sherlock, allowing Nelle to be his Watson, and neighbor Jennings (a.k.a, Big Boy) is assigned the role of Lestrade. Truman's cousin Sook even turns a couple of old baseball caps into a deerstalker hat, and they are ready for action. All they need is a case.

And a suitable mystery, a break-in at the local drugstore, soon presents itself. Nelle's suspicions fall on the local bully, Elliott, called Boss, and his sidekick Billy Eugene. And when Nelle discovers a slingshot contraption in a tree, rigged to fire rocks  through the store's plate glass windows, they have real evidence in hand. The slingshot has a curved shape carved into the handle--a snake, or perhaps the letter S. Nelle leans toward the snake as the clue, but Tru has another insight, their reclusive young neighbor, Sonny Boular.

The game is afoot!

Nelle and Tru's detecting lead them into late-night surveillance. Recruiting Sook's cook, Little Bit, for cover for their pretense of catching fireflies, they duck down in the tall grass when they hear a group of men assembling in the field.

Someone struck a match and lit a torch of some kind.

Truman's view was blocked by Little Bit, but he could see silhouettes of pointy heads. He saw the flames lick at the bottom of the sheets wrapped around the tree. The fire shot up the sheets and set the whole tree ablaze.

Only it wasn't a tree. It was a cross. And the men didn't have pointy heads; they were dressed in white robes and hoods with holes cut out for their eyes.

The Ku Klux Klan.

Young adult readers who know the the novel (or even the movie) may recognize the small town setting and the young Sherlock and Watson as the doppelgangers of the fictional Scout and Dill, the real Truman Capote and Nelle Harper Lee, two towering literary figures of the twentieth century whose childhood exploits led to the friendship which gave us To Kill a Mockingbird and whose shared passion for crime-solving led to Lee's uncredited but real collaboration on Capote's award-winning In Cold Blood.

That amazing happenstance of history makes for a new and delightfully fictionalized account of that friendship, G. Neri's Tru and Nelle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), a novel with all the fun of the free-range childhood that Madisonville, Alabama, offered two brilliant but offbeat kids growing up together in the 1930s. Tru teases Nelle about her accent, calling her "Na-il Harpuh," and Nelle (Ellen, spelled backwards) gives the prissy Truman as good as she gets about his signature white suits, all in the easy style of kissin' cousins, in a portrayal of the early and epic pair of soul mates who were to cast a long shadow across the literary future. Savvy readers will recognize Atticus in Nelle's father "A.C." and Boo Radley in the mysterious "Sonny Boular." Readers who have yet to experience Harper Lee's landmark novel will find the re-told childhood adventures of Nelle and Tru both funny and poignant in their own right, perhaps steering them to read her Pulitzer-winning novel even before it is assigned to them in school.

"Tru and Nelle is a wonderfully imaginative re-creation of the childhoods of two great American writers, but even more, it is a novel that affirms the mysterious and glorious ways that friendship reaches across boundaries of all sorts to claim unexpected kinship." says two-time Newbery author, Gary D. Schmidt.