Lee Smith: "A Life in Books"

On Thursday, February 21, despite the terrible weather, about 130 people came to the University Center Theater to hear acclaimed fiction writer Lee Smith share with us her charming “life in books.” She spoke about the relationship between a writer’s real life and fiction. The event was enlightening not only for budding writers, but for anyone with at least a passing interest in writing. She began the event with a story about how two friends measured their lives—one friend saw her life terms of the people she came across, while the other said that she visualized her life in terms of time and places. By contrast, Smith said that she measured her own life in terms of books—first as a reader, then as a writer.

As a child, Smith said, reading actually introduced her to writing, since she just could not stand her beloved stories ending. She called herself an obsessive reader who read all night long; she then created her own chapters to her favorite books, which fulfilled her need to see her literary heroes and heroines live on. She soon began writing little books herself, and with her childhood friend Martha Sue, she began publishing a weekly, hand-crafted neighborhood newspaper which they delivered door to door on bikes for only a nickel.

Traveling around her neighborhood with her friend, they would see “really neat stuff” that later made its way into Smith’s fiction. In her Davy Crockett spiral notebook, she wrote down all of the scandalous sights she saw and included the date, time, weather, physical descriptions, and her reaction. She would use her discoveries later on in her life in her writing.Reading from her work, she recalled how they saw their fourth grade teacher necking on the couch with her boyfriend and smoking cigarettes.  She also claimed to see her neighbor running past the kitchen window wearing nothing but her apron, followed shortly by her husband wearing nothing at all and carrying a spatula – but Smith later admitted that she fabricated that story!

Smith’s first actual novel, published in 1969, concerns a nine-year old, strange girl similar to herself whose family is breaking up due to the mother running off with a man. Smith was excited to hear what her mother thought about her book, but her mother, concerned that the town would believe that she actually ran off with a man, proclaimed that she did not like it and actually threw it in the river. Her mother helped to censor Smith’s first and second book (the second book had sex in it, and her mother did not approve). Her hilarious anecdote of the creation of her first two novels showed how she incorporated events in her childhood and adolescence into her material.

After her first book, though, Smith said that she had used up her whole life up to that point and had nothing more to say. Luckily, she then became a reporter for the Tuscaloosa News in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and through her new position, she covered the “All South Majorette Competition,” an enormous event where the winner would be named “Miss Fancy Strut.” The competition was filled with charming young ladies and their “bitchy” mommas, she said. Of course, she named her next novel Fancy Strut.  It is a story about majorettes and their moms; her third novel was a breakthrough for her as no one in the novel was anything like her. She said that writers had to eventually stop writing about what they knew and about what they could learn and imagine. That way, she said, writers would come to experience that great pleasure, as Ann Tyler put it, of writing so as “to have more than one life,” which Smith called the greatest privilege and pleasure in the world.

Along the way, Smith had also realized that the relationship between real life and fiction is more complicated than she would ever have guessed. She said that she also wrote to find out what she thought. For instance, in 1980, she wrote a novel entitled Black Mountain Breakdown, where the protagonist Crystal Spangler alters her image for the various men in her life. Crystal loses her own true self and ends up literally paralyzed, but the most terrifying aspect of her condition is that she is happy. When Smith wrote the novel, she understood she was in a marriage that should have ended earlier. By reading the words from her novel, she understood how she felt during the last part of her marriage and was able to then deal with its inevitable ending. She said that her writing gives her a record of her former self.

Smith also said that writers, through their work, often express what is mute or unvoiced in their personality and minds. Along with expression, she said that writing has also become a source of strength for her. She intended for her novel Fair and Tender Ladies to be an honest account of the lives of all the resourceful mountain women she had grown up with. As she began the book, two catastrophic illnesses struck her family, and she spent two years sitting by hospital beds. Smith said that she did not know what she would have done if she had not been writing her novel. The heroine of the story, Ivy Rowe, grew stronger the more Smith needed her and actually became her best friend. Afraid that her mother would die, Smith did not want to finish the novel and began to write slower. Her mother eventually died slowly, and then after her mother’s death, she wrote the last line of the book. To her, writing is comforting and therapeutic. 

Smith’s last point concerning writing was that it has given her a chance to run into all kinds of people. She said that at times, she would meet someone only briefly and get curious about them.  Then, she just had to complete that person’s story. To her, writing has been a journey. She ended by saying that writing is a great pleasure and pastime that she would recommend to everyone.

Lee Smith’s entertaining and insightful talk was made possible by MOCH, the River City Writers Series, and the Creative Writing club, with important assistance from Public Service Funds and Student Event Allocation.  Thank you to all who came out!

The Warmth of Other Suns

About 700 people came into the Rose Theater on Thursday, February 7, to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson deliver the Belle McWilliams Lecture in American History for 2012-2013.  She spoke on the “great migration” of blacks from the American South during the period 1915 to the 1970s. Her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, was the basis for her lecture. 

As a preliminary to the lecture, the audience was treated to two choral pieces by Street Corner Harmonies, one of the ensembles of the Stax Music Academy, an institution that produces college-bound students from the Soulsville community and the greater Memphis area through music education. The first piece, “Middle Passage,” borrowed from the classic by the Reverend Thomas A. Dorsey, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” It was restrained, yet soulful.  But it hardly prepared the audience for the strikingly choreographed and vigorously performed “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel (and Why Not Every Man?),” which followed and received a standing ovation from the audience.

Ms. Wilkerson said that her book was about how far people are willing to go to improve their lives. During the period from 1915 to the 1970s approximately 6 million blacks left the rural South for urban areas of the nation, including the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Pacific Coast, the first time that the lowest class of Americans signaled that they had options and took them. In effect, they were seeking political asylum within their own country, she said.

Although her book, based on more than 1,200 interviews gathered over fifteen years, followed in detail the migrations of three of those 6 million — one to each to the sections just mentioned — Ms. Wilkerson chose to center her lecture on the more general reasons for the migration and the results that were achieved.

The situation that provoked the migration, she said, was the caste system in the South under the Jim Crow laws, an elaborate system of behavior based solely on skin color. She remarked that although many older audiences actually lived through some part of the period of migration or remember the system from its persistence long after the migration, high school audiences find it difficult to believe that she is telling the truth about a judge in North Carolina suspending a trial until a “black Bible” could be found for swearing in a black witness, a law forbidding blacks and whites in Birmingham from playing checkers together, or another law forbidding black motorists from passing slow white motorists. Students in Hawaii suggested that if they could not pass, they would have honked the horn or tail-gated closely to encourage the white motorists to speed up; they were appalled when they were told such things were just “not done” either with impunity. When one remarked, “Well, then, I would just have left,” she explained that was exactly what her book was all about.

Enforcement of the caste system always implied coercion and often went to the point of violence. During the period 1889-1929 there was a lynching every four days on average, sometimes just for “acting like a white person” or for committing minor offenses such as stealing small sums. Ms. Wilkerson remarked that the system caused a loss to whites as well — “to hold people down, you have to get in the ditch with them.”

Ms. Wilkerson explained that a partial reason for the migration beginning about 1915 was that the caste system had always depended on an oversupply of black laborers, most of them sharecroppers who did not own land themselves. The outbreak of war in Europe caused immigration to fall off at the same time that northern factories needed more workers to create the goods to support the Allies and later the American forces. Black workers from the South were part of the answer to the problem. Planters resisted, trying to keep blacks in the South, sometimes waving trains through passenger stations so that blacks could not board them.

She described in detail one particular migration by an Alabama family, sharecroppers with nine children, the youngest of whom was so frail that they worried about his ability to survive work in the cotton fields. Long dreaming of moving to Cleveland (they even named the youngest James Cleveland -- they called him J.C.), they finally made the move. The teacher in Cleveland could not understand his dialect and thought his name was Jesse and eventually the family followed suit. This was Jesse Owens, who in 1936 won four gold medals in the Olympics with Adolph Hitler looking on.

Other than Owens in sports, Ms. Wilkerson mentioned several writers and musicians who emerged out of the migration: Toni Morrison and Lorraine Hansberry in literature, and Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Jacksons, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane in music. Indeed, she maintained, much of American culture was transformed through the migration. (Later in the lecture she said that she owed her own existence to the migration, for her parents would never have met otherwise.)

Ms. Wilkerson also emphasized the political importance of the migration, maintaining that it in time produced the civil rights movement, which was directed as much against reactions to blacks which had developed in northern states as against the southern caste system. The early migration had no acknowledged leaders, she said, but represented rather a people’s decision. Together the people accomplished what Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation could not do — "they freed themselves," Ms. Wilkerson asserted.

Toward the end of her lecture Ms. Wilkerson directed attention to the moment of departure for the migrants, usually a very poignant moment. The migrants were generally young people and their leaving the South was often a virtually complete break with the family, whom they might never see alive again. She reminded the audience that there was no Skype and no cell phones, only letters and expensive long-distance systems for the few who owned telephones of any sort, as well as expensive telegrams.

She ended with a quotation from Richard Wright, who left Natchez, Mississippi, in 1927 and passed through Memphis on his way to Chicago: “I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.”

During the question-and-answer period which followed the lecture, someone asked Ms. Wilkerson what had prompted her to write the book. She explained that everyone knew The Grapes of Wrath, which described a much smaller group of migrants. She felt that there ought to be a book like it about the “great migration,” so she determined to write it.

A former correspondent for the New York Times, Ms. Wilkerson was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, for reporting she did in 1994 when she was with the newspaper’s Chicago bureau. The Warmth of Other Suns won over ten major literary prizes, including the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Nonfiction, and has been named to over thirty periodicals' lists for “Best Books of the Year.”

 

The Belle McWilliams Lecture in American History has been made possible since 1980 by the Department of History through a bequest from Major Benjamin Schultze and his sister Ms Louise Fellows. They named a fund in honor of Miss Belle McWilliams, their aunt and guardian, “who for 40 years taught American History in the Memphis Public School system.” Besides the lecture series, the fund supports the Belle McWilliams Scholarships and other activities of the department.

For several years the lecture has been part of a series sponsored by the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities. This year MOCH also recruited a large host of co-sponsors: the Program in African and African-American Studies, the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, the Department of English, the Center for Research on Women, the Department of Journalism, and Facing History and Ourselves.

MOCH further worked with a huge number of community partners to publicize the event: African American Educators of Tomorrow, the African American Studies Program at Rhodes College, Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the Bridges Foundation, the Church Health Center, the Junior League of Memphis, Leadership Memphis, the Memphis Cotton Museum, the National Civil Rights Museum, the National Society of Black Engineers and Technologists, St. Andrew AME Church, the Soulsville Foundation, the Spence Wilson Chair at Rhodes College, Teach for America, United Way of Memphis, and the West Tennessee Historical Society.

The evening with Ms. Wilkerson was a highlight of the 2012-2013 MOCH calendar, and it was a memorable evening for everyone who participated.