Pat
Conroy, whose loss we mourn today, received a Lillian Smith Book Award in 1981 for "The Lords of
Discipline." In accepting this award, he observed as follows:
I
know well what the life and spirit of Lillian Smith represents--the
transcendence of the artist over the unspeakable atrocities of her time. She
was the word made fire. She was the writer who possessed the indissoluble
courage to say "no." She was the artist who loved the South with all
her heart, but knew in her heart that the South was both glorious and
completely wrong. She was the kind of Southern writer I tried to learn from and
emulate--the kind who would throw up if they wrote Gone With The Wind.
I
never cared that Scarlett O'Hara went hungry in the Civil War, in fact, I was
glad. Because Scarlett O'Hara, and those fierce, abiding citizens like her,
came out of that War and created the South to which I was born. Scarlett was
true to her promise and rebuilt Tara and never went hungry again. Nor did she
give a damn that millions of Southerners, black and white, would be hungry from
the time they were born until the time they died. Give me Lillian Smith; let
who will take Margaret Mitchell. Give me Nat Turner over Rhett Butler. Let me
walk the long miles with Harriet Tubman instead of listening to Uncle Remus.
Let me write love letters to the Grimke sisters of Charleston and say thanks to
Abraham Lincoln. Allow me to tell General Lee that I'm delighted he lost the
war and that I loathe any man, no matter how refined or cultured, who kills
other men in defense of slavery. Thank General Sherman for me, for burning
Atlanta, the city of my birth, the city I love, because slavery could only end
in a blaze of horror and fire. Put a rose on the grave of Martin Luther King
for me. Apologize for me that I once hated his guts and called him nigger. I
was a white boy raised in the South and he will understand. Tell him it was
people like him, people like Medgar Evers, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Will
Campbell, Courtney and Elizabeth Siceloff and hundreds of others who made me
look in the mirror.
When
I looked in the mirror I saw Bull Connor, George Wallace, Birmingham, Selma,
separate drinking fountains, fire hoses, and blood in the streets. I saw the
whole bruised tragic history of the South in those Southern blue eyes. In the
mirror I was seeing myself for the first time as an enemy of the family of man.
When I was a teenager the South was at war again, but the most splendid and
magnificent warriors in the history of America carried no weapons into battle.
They carried only a single word, "Freedom," and all the guns of the
South, all the troops and all the sheriffs, all the governors and fine
Senators, all the armies of the Klan and the death squads from the Virginias to
Mississippi learned something of the magic and the grandeur of the English
language. They were defeated by that one glorious word. I wish I had been old
enough or wise enough to have used that word in my childhood, but Scarlett
O'Hara and I were at the country club working on our tans when the horses
stormed across the Selma Bridge.
I
grew up in the South and I hated niggers and Jews--in fact, I think I hated
everybody. I brought remarkable skills to the art of hating. But I was granted
a gift when I was taught the alphabet at Sacred Heart School on Courtland
Street in Atlanta in 1950. I was taught to read and I learned to listen to the
language. The learning of the alphabet began a slow revolution in my soul. I
could hate niggers until Eugene Norris, a white English teacher in Beaufort,
S.C., made me read Richard Wright and James Weldon Johnson and Countee Cullen
and James Baldwin. I could hate Jews until the same teacher made me read The
Diary of Anne Frank. I could hate everyone until synagogues were bombed,
black girls were killed in church, and men and women were firehosed and bitten
by dogs, beaten and clubbed at bus stations, and murdered and buried in levees
in Mississippi. They taught me how to feel. Then they taught me to write and I
learned that all writing is worthless without feeling; all writing is worthless
without passion and faith.
In
the late Sixties I became one of those tiresome Southern white changelings. You
know the type. Blacks grew weary of the type very quickly, but I was
irrepressible in those quickstepping days and my calling to the priesthood of
civil rights, as I saw it, was to make my white brothers and sisters understand
the spiritually crippling malady of racial prejudice. Always fear the
convert--and at the same time I was one of the most zealously obnoxious converts
to the cause of civil rights I ever encountered. I'm sure I did much accidental
harm to the movement. I was perfectly ridiculous. It was at this moment in
history I volunteered to teach on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South
Carolina during the first year of teacher integration. This was 1969 and it now
seems a thousand years ago. I had once argued persuasively with yankee
classmates that the South had separate but equal school systems and still
rather believed it on the day I reached the island. On the first day of school
I learned that not one child in grades five through eight knew what country
they lived in and my education as a Southerner was complete. I have never heard
one Southern politician from Strom Thurmond to George Wallace to Herman
Talmadge admit that they were monstrous, unconscionable liars when they claimed
the separate but equal doctrine. They were all liars. I loathe them to this day
because I once believed them. And they never had the grace to recant. They
never even had the common decency to say they were wrong.
In
closing, I want to tell you that the Great American South will never exist and
it will always be waiting to be born. Dreams are almost never born; they are
gently urged along. The Southern Regional Council has done much of this quiet
gentle urging. You are desperately needed; you are required. Because of
President Reagan and his administration the Southern poor and the American poor
will suffer grievously. There will be hunger and sadness in the land again, in
the world again.
Fight
them.
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