Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Horseshoe Bend is an oxbow lake of the Tallapoosa River. An oxbow lake is what’s left when a meander from a river peters out. In Furious Hours Cep uses Horseshoe Bend as a symbol for the futility of Harper Lee’s attempts to publish anything after To Kill a Mockingbird.

In addition, Cep’s title is taken from a speech Lee gave about how the events at Horseshoe Bend, the site of the defeat of the Creeks by the US military, stymied historian Albert James Pickett, who prematurely ended his history of Alabama at this battle because, Lee claims, the spectacle of the violence at the battle led him to lose “his heart” (252). Cep’s gloss of this speech is that it was an indirect statement by Lee about her decision to stop writing about the sickening violence committed by Willie Maxwell and her decision to stop writing entirely.

Finally, Horseshoe Bend is the name of the motel where Lee stayed while doing research for The Reverend. At the Horseshoe Bend Motel, Lee was in her element as she completed interviews, drank, smoked, and shared meals with friends. Horseshoe Bend symbolizes the centrality of social contact to Lee’s happiness, something she lacked as she struggled to write in her New York apartment.

Published in 2015 after Lee’s agent assumed control over her affairs, this novel is the deeply flawed but morally complex precursor to To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel symbolizes Lee’s unfulfilled desire to represent Southerners as complicated people who opposed racial violence perpetrated by white supremacists but still endorsed racist ideas. While To Kill a Mockingbird represents the result when Lee collaborated with others to revise her writing, Go Set a Watchman represents Lee’s adherence to her vision without the influence of others. Most critics acknowledge that Go Set a Watchman is an awkward, poorly executed draft, the implication being that collaboration with editors served Lee’s writing process well.

The Reverend is the title Lee assigned to her incomplete and unpublished second book. The book symbolizes the incomplete nature of Lee’s literary legacy and the mystery of why that legacy is so incomplete. The partial and fragmentary nature of Lee’s life as a writer is reflected in what little there is of the manuscript—a few pages that Tom Radney’s granddaughter found in a letter from Lee to Radney. That the pages came enclosed with a letter is apropos, given that most of what people know about Lee’s writing after 1961 comes from the contents of the many letters she wrote.

Tom Radney named his expanded legal offices the Zoo to indicate the wide range of activities that took place there, while the community named it “Maxwell House” to indicate how the legal fees from Willie Maxwell’s lawsuits against insurance companies made Radney rich. The Zoo symbolizes how even well-intentioned whites like Radney profit from black death.