By Thadious Davis
From Southern Changes
Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 33-34, 36
When
Georgia author Lillian Smith died in 1966, the Southern Regional Council
established an award not only to honor her work and her memory, but also to
foster in others the spirit of her courageous struggle for human rights in the
South. Smith's first novel, Strange Fruit (1944), explored the human
tragedy resulting from racial segregation. That novel catapulted her to fame as
a white Southerner with a social consciousness who spoke out against a major
problem in her native region. With the publication of Killers of the Dream
(1949), she provided both an intensive psychological analysis of the effects of
segregation on whites and blacks and an uncompromising call for an end to a
debilitating system. Her visionary writing was accompanied by social and
political activism. Whether functioning with national organizations, local
groups, or personal friends, Smith committed her energy to persuading others to
work for social justice and racial equality under the law.
The
Lillian Smith Book Awards have been presented since 1967 in recognition of
outstanding writing concerned with the Southern region. Recipients have not
been restricted to Southerners, but they have been expected to contribute
understanding of social issues and human problems affecting Southerners and the
South. In sponsoring the awards, the Southern Regional Council recognizes those
writers who have translated Smith's "struggle into terms appropriate to
our own lives" today, as SRC President Paul M. Gaston puts it. Gaston
points out that the intent is "honor the authors not so much for their own
sakes. . . but so that others will, because of the award, learn about and read
their books."
This
year the Lillian Smith Book Awards have been jointly awarded in the non-fiction
category to Thomas L. Johnson and Phillip C. Dunn for A True Likeness: The
Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936 and to Pauli Murray,
posthumously, for Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage. The
1987 Smith Award in the fiction category is to Mary Hood for the collection of
short stories And Venus Is Blue.
A
True Likeness is a collection of the photographs
of Richard Samuel Roberts, a black Floridian who in 1920 moved to Columbia, S.
C., where he operated a photography business in the black commercial district
until his death in 1936. Selected from some three thousand extant glass plates,
Roberts's photographs document the lives of blacks in Columbia and the
surrounding area. They make a unique contribution to the historical record of
black communities in the urban South during the period between the world wars.
Roberts provided a rare glimpse into the activities and culture of emergent
middle-class towns people in the early decades of the modern South. He
photographed people and the artifacts of their material culture: studio
backdrops, city streets, public buildings and private homes; weddings,
christenings and wakes; family groups, school children and individual
portraits; prominent citizens, day laborers and community leaders.
Anthony
Paul Dunbar, a member of the awards committee, observed that "Not only are
the pictures artistically and technically excellent but they record a life that
very few people knew existed. If you read the captions to the photographs you
will see the civil rights movement emerging."
Published
by two regional houses, Algonquin Press of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Bruccoli
Clark of Columbia, S.C., A True Likeness is the result of a
collaboration between Roberts's surviving children (Wilhelmina Roberts Wynn,
Gerald E., Beverly N. and Cornelius C. Roberts) and Phillip C. Dunn, an art
professor at the University of South Carolina specializing in photography.
With
the support and assistance of the South Caroliniana Library's field archival
program, Dunn cleaned and restored the glass negative plates, developed contact
prints from which he selected "the most powerful and significant,"
and made exhibit-quality prints. Dunn and his co-editor Thomas L. Johnson state
that the true value of Roberts's work lies not merely in its "intrinsic
aesthetic appeal as a photography collection of undeniable technical finesse
and formal beauty," but in "it's revelation--its true
representation--of a lost world of a people whose identity was lost not only
upon the white world but also upon itself." Essentially, the recovered
photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts attest to the vitality of a Southern
black community and deposit a cultural legacy for the descendants of that
community as well as for those of a white community that never knew of its
existence. His pictures recapture for all an aspect of Southern life rarely
seen by outsiders and nearly forgotten by insiders; in the process, they
further an understanding of the multicultural South.
PAULI
MURRAY'S Song in a Weary Throat, published by Harper and Row, is memoir
of self and society by a woman who insisted on her full humanity as a person of
color and as a female. It recounts with unusual clarity, passion, and
compassion Murray's journey toward achievement in the face of racial and sexual
discrimination. Murray chose her title from a verse in her book of poetry, Dark
Testament and Other Poems: "Hope is a song in a weary throat." Hope
is the keynote that sustained her through long years of commitment to civil
rights and moral justice. Robert J. Norrell, chairman of the awards committee,
termed it a "powerful statement of one person's challenge to a world that
put a lot of obstacles before her but that she would not let daunt her."
Murray
chronicles her life as "An American Pilgrimage" which took her from
early childhood in Baltimore to formative years in the black South of Durham,
N.C. She presents her youthful ambitions and dreams along with the nearly
devastating effects of discriminatory practices upon them. She recounts her
efforts to become a lawyer during a period when both her race and sex limited
her opportunities for professional education. The University of North Carolina
would not admit her because of her race; Harvard University would not admit her
because of her sex.
Murray
not only became a civil rights attorney and legal scholar, but she also was a
founding member of the National Organization for Women. From the 1930s through
the 1980s, she remained a tireless teacher-activist for the advancement of
blacks and women, a cause that she understood as necessary for the advancement
of all Americans. In 1973, she entered the seminary and in 1977 became the
first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. She ends her pilgrimage
with an account of the celebration of her first Holy Eucharist, a communion
service at the Episcopal Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, N.C., where her
white and black ancestors had worshipped for generations and where she herself
felt all the strands of her life as a poet, lawyer, teacher, friend, and
minister come together in "the spirit of love and reconcilation [sic]
drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness." Murray died in 1985
while completing Song in a Weary Throat; the book is a fitting tribute
to her quest for wholeness--for herself and all Americans.
MARY
HOOD'S And Venus is Blue is a collection of seven stories and title
novella. Published by Ticknor and Fields, the work is about white Southerners
in the contemporary world of change and transition. In these accomplished
stories of physical and psychological survival, Hood shatters stereotypical
views of the South. Though incorporating details of cultural reality not
restricted to the South (Harlequin books, Datsun cars, etc.), she treats rural
people with the expansive perception of one who recognizes the quiet valor of
their determination to remain fully human in dehumanizing times. One female
character envisions the world as "untrammeling. . . widening in ripples
about her," and sees herself as "the stone at the center that sets
things moving."
Without
condescension or caricature, Hood captures the often hidden meaning of ordinary
life, distills it with compassion, and renders it for others to share. Her
special gift is for articulating the often unspoken conflicts of the heart
among the working-class poor. A rural family man, for instance, struggles
against the limits of his existence:
There
was a little air stirring. The pines on tomorrow's cutting were tall against
the first stars. Up toward Hammermill the sky was lighter. Cheney could see,
after his eyes got sharper, the glint of the mayonnaise jar he had brought his
tea in for lunch....He picked it up. the lid was missing. Cheney tossed it--it
hit on something and smashed I'm so goddamn tired of being poor, he said.
His
voice may not be eloquent, but the scene encompasses with accuracy and
authority the contrast between the potential of the natural world and the
reality of the unending human effort to create an inhabitable space within that
world.
Hood
lives in Georgia, whose northern foothills and mountain areas provide settings
for her stories. Her fiction has evoked, for some readers, comparisons with
Flannery O'Connor, another Georgian and master of the short story form.
However, according to awards committee member Mary Frances Deriner, Hood's
people and landscapes are neither O'Connoresque nor grotesque, but are instead
the "essence of the modern South."
As of this writing in 1987, Thadious
Davis was teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a
member of the committee which selected this year's Lillian Smith prize winners.
Other committee members were Robert J. Norrell, Center for the Study of
Southern History and Culture, University of Alabama; Mary Frances Derfner,
Charleston, S.C.; and Anthony P. Dunbar, New Orleans, La. In making its
selections, the committee reviewed approximately forty strong entries in
fiction, history, and autobiography/memoir published between July 1, 1986, and
June 30, 1987.
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