Private funeral held for Harper Lee on Saturday

The Lee family cemetery plot is seen Saturday, Feb. 20, 2016, in Monroeville, Ala.

Lee, known here as Nelle, was a Methodist, and Alice Lee held a number of prominent positions with the church and was also its lawyer. Lee died Friday at age 89.

The eulogy was the speech Flynt wrote in 2006 entitled “Atticus inside ourselves”, as a tribute when Lee won the Birmingham Pledge Foundation Award for racial justice.

News of Lee’s death spread widely on social media and tributes poured in from well-known figures, such as Apple CEO Tim Cook, who quoted the author in a tweet by saying, “Rest in peace, Harper Lee. Name one that really has had more of an impact on Americans than that book”.

“If I deviated one degree, I would hear this great booming voice from heaven, and it wouldn’t be God”, Flynt said in an earlier interview.

Details of the service were fiercely guarded.

“She wanted to be buried before anyone knew she was dead, and we’re getting as close to it as possible”, said George Landegger, an industrialist and philanthropist, who attended the service.

The town was appropriately sombre a day after their native daughter’s death.

James McBride, victor of the National Book Award in 2013 for the novel “Good Lord Bird” and author of the upcoming nonfiction “Kill ’em and Leave” about James Brown, said reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” as a child made him want to become a writer and that it “crystallized” for him an awareness of racism that had been “floating around him”.

In the first book, Atticus Finch was the adored father of young narrator Scout and a lawyer who nobly but unsuccessfully defended a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman.

Among the crowd of loved ones, was Lee’s best friend.

“She’s a part of it and always will be”, said Mote. The town even served as the inspiration behind the fictional Maycomb County, where much of the novel takes place. The courthouse is now a museum that pays homage to her creation. There’s the Mockingbird Inn on the edge of town and a statute of children reading, “Mockingbird” in the courthouse square.

“When I saw her just six weeks ago, she was full of life, her mind and mischievous wit as sharp as ever”, her agent, Andrew Nurnberg, said in a statement.

Lee was largely unseen in her hometown in recent years, as she first sought privacy and then was secluded at an assisted living home. Reports confirm she has died. Her librarian handler at university events called her “just a very regular woman” and said talking with her was “like spending time with an aunt”.

‘Today I join Alabamians and all Americans in mourning the passing of Harper Lee, ‘ Shelby said in a statement. “But I would like her to say, ‘I’m Scout'”.

But it is Atticus who shocks her and To Kill a Mockingbird fans.