LILLIAN SMITH: A MATCH FOR OLD SCREAMER
Long, Margaret
LILLIAN SMITH A Match for Old Screamer by MARGARET LONG rpHE great trees bloomed red, saf-fron, purple, and gold as late fall lingered sad and splendid on Old Screamer Mountain at Clayton,...
...He says we must not look at one hundred years, nor twenty thousand or fifty thousand years, because the movement toward purpose is so slow...
...But Miss Smith, slight and vivid in black pants and a figured shirt, her strong fair face ravaged by pain and thought and crowned with a shimmering cloud of softly curling white hair, her big, dark eyes intense, looked a valiant and vigorous match for Old Screamer Mountain and his wild autumn...
...But we can't get away from it in the South...
...She recalled her first awakening to the "ugliness" of color as a girl teaching music in China, where white missionaries and British colonialists barred Chinese from parks, swimming pools, and clubs...
...I knew the trouble was world-wide, and I've never thought otherwise...
...They don't understand them...
...The North has a tremendous urban problem complicated by race...
...and another one "a first-rate mind, real quality...
...of course anxiety comes along with thought and great questions and enormous change...
...I don't think Sartre is, except in his plays and melodramas...
...We kill, and they don't...
...The difference in the North and South is the difference between a neurosis and a psychosis," she said...
...Change always comes in evolution the first time people get very close together...
...We must be lovingly and respectfully interdependent...
...everybody agrees to that...
...In the North, it's a matter of blindness, prejudice, and indifference...
...If it happened to coincide with some of Freud's theories, well, so it did...
...Freud was an intellectual as against Jung, who was more of an artist intuitively grasping truths that were lost on Freud...
...No critics today actually love books...
...Miss Smith, MARGARET tONG, a native Southerner, has worked on several Southern newspapers and is the author of two novels, "Louisville Saturday" and "Affairs of the Heart...
...This little book may be the truest picture of these non-violent young revolutionaries to come out of the fearful spate of good and bad writing about the Negro revolt...
...What has been done in the last one hundred years is the most critical point," she pronounced in grave excitement...
...To wake up every morning to insults in the newspapers, friends falling away, and people turning their faces when I passed...
...But, my dear, always remember that there's a male and female South, which are two different entities...
...Man grows in his mind...
...My optimism about the world and human experience has not always been intellectually understood, though...
...It does not need to mean that any^ more, and, indeed, it doesn't...
...There are others, former campers and proteges at Camp Laurel Falls, who come back for introspection, talk, and Miss Lil's examination of their troubles until "I sometimes think I'll have to hang out a shingle and bill them for psychoanalysis...
...He has created no decent women...
...Carson McCuUers is a beautiful, small talent...
...it won't hurt you, you're not responsible for it any more than you are for China...
...Newspapers must acknowledge and espouse the brave truth, preachers must preach it in church, teachers must teach it in school...
...That's because it's a state of mind, of white supremacy...
...Started as a journal "strictly of literature and arts with no remote notion of discussing race at all," the little magazine did, however, publish stories, articles, and poetry by Southerners of both races, range audaciously into race and politics, and got up to a circula-tion of 10,000, despite troubles with a friendly but horrified printer whose conscience on one occasion would not let him print a race piece and some post office censorship in Atlanta, which was resolved in Washington...
...She objects to readers calling Killers of the Dream a Freudian interpretation of the South...
...Now, we're not doing that at all...
...I never talk about civil rights if I can help it...
...Finally, man appeared, and then a certain point was reached in this purposeful evolution...
...Such is Now Is The Time, a simple and vivid little "tract," as she terms it, calling on white Southerners after 1954 to meet the racial change with love and justice, a book she feels was "smothered" by publishers subject to angry pressure...
...And, in the curious Southern way, while Miss Smith was and is a favorite and favored citizen of the little town of Clayton, she has had three vigilante fires on her mountaintop and some property and uncounted letters, manuscripts, and book notes have disappeared...
...We don't have to be dependent, nor can we be independent...
...Any valid literary creation takes love...
...It explains the Goldwa-ter people—they realize we are at a critical point and they can't understand it...
...It is clear that Miss Smith knows We Shall Overcome, from McComb, Mississippi, to Harlem and Stanleyville and Shanghai...
...We must face them...
...that this massive defense of segregation, of inhuman experience, is a symptom of our dehumanization, almost total dehumanization...
...Killers of the Dream is my knowledge and understanding and interpretation of the South, the way I lived and studied and experienced and know the South to be...
...I've re-read my books and evaluated them from my own point of view...
...we're just sweeping the truth under the rug and not acknowledging our brutal sins and asking forgiveness...
...I could cry when I think how white children have suffered from this...
...We're stepping into an enormous future, and any great writer must have a vision of that future...
...Racism has made us sick at every level of our culture...
...There is great heat in our proximity, our crowding together, and this is the heat that transforms us...
...We'll never move out of our trouble without this moral act...
...This great paleontologist, a Jesuit priest, believed that we can think of man in no other way than in sweeping spans of time, and when I read him—he is hard, I grub away at him—I knew why the cynics, from Beatsville to Sartre and existentialism were wrong: because they were thinking of man's experience in time spans of maybe a thousand years, when it seemed to me one must think of man in times of 100,000 or half a million years...
...Nobody writes better of certain aspects of life in perfectly pure memory of childhood...
...There's always much talk about the South...
...I don't like anybody, really, who leaves the future out of his writing...
...And, I just couldn't take Georgia that year," she remembered, shaking her shining white head...
...At sixty-six, Miss Smith—whose Strange Fruit shocked North and South and was read around the world in 1944 and ever since, whose profound and audacious analysis of Dixie, Killers of the Dream, became a classic, and whose One Hour was received indifferently because "it was about decent, upper-class, cultivated Southerners the Northern critics don't know about and don't want to believe in"—well, now, Miss Smith, who never did want to write about race but just about people, has decided she won't talk about "civil rights" any more unless it is a matter of "duty and housekeeping...
...Camus is great...
...Miss Smith mused over current letters, now and then in smiling joy, and here and there in fierce distaste or weary disapproval...
...they just squeezed them out, or smothered them...
...She realized "it was the same as the Southern thing...
...This is what evolution is, and since it is, Chardin believes that man was planned by the great Creator...
...I always loved Truman Capote...
...people-hungry in her hilltop isolation and illness, nevertheless was ablaze, too, with work, study, ideas, and her apparent triumph over her sixth cancer...
...She talked of tired and, troubled young personalities in the Negro Movement, battered from the suffering and courage it demands in the resistant South, some of whom "come by to see me, kids from the North and California," and of more than one white Southem activist whom "Miss Lil" and her friend, Paula Snelling, have entertained and mothered in the restoring haven of beautiful hills, good food, civilized comforts, and searching talk...
...If we do not have this, then we have lost our minds and have become evil...
...You must confess your sins and ask forgiveness...
...She remembers with satisfaction the originality and distinction of South Today, which she and Miss Snelling published from Clayton from 1936 to 1946...
...But there is high artistry in Miss Smith's penetration of the aims, sorrows, and heroisms of black and white boys and girls pushing and enduring the Movement and in her idiomatic and poetic expression of their feelings and thoughts...
...But white people have written truly of Negroes because they loved them, respected them, and believed in them as persons...
...Then there's a black South and a white South, which are two more cleavages...
...So, they're using race and segregation as a dead end in which to crawl and stay out of the troubling future...
...Neither hate nor fear gives understanding, only love does...
...And it is clear that "We" means God's good, thinking human beings...
...Criticism today is at a very low point...
...Maybe in Strange Fruit, my fumbling beginning and poorest novel, I might add two or three more chapters in the center, because I left out a Southerner, of subtlety and with a complex grasp of the South, which no character in the book really had...
...I like European writers—they have an intellectual content...
...Often the two have merged, in the demands of conscience and art, and have fed one another...
...She reminded me, also, that in her twelve year war with cancer, she always looks her luminous best under death sentence...
...Newspaper comments on the author of Strange Fruit included one Atlanta columnist's description of the novel as "an orgasm" and another's appraisal of the novelist as "a sex-obsessed old woman" who, he suggested, could not attract white men and settled for Negro men...
...Then, in the South, not one of us has escaped...
...LILLIAN SMITH A Match for Old Screamer by MARGARET LONG rpHE great trees bloomed red, saf-fron, purple, and gold as late fall lingered sad and splendid on Old Screamer Mountain at Clayton, Georgia, And Lillian Smith, analyst, artist, and prophet of the South, beheld the last bright blaze of the ebbing year, restive in the benign embrace of Old Screamer's gentle peaks...
...In the last few years I've been so very ill, with long hours of reflecting...
...Rather, they want to fight writers, and people—to praise or damn them, personally...
...You can be merely prejudiced without killing people, but in the South we kill them...
...Literary people don't like me very much," she observed...
...So, Martha's chores—helping her father after a depression business failure with a girls' camp at their summer home in Clayton, speaking and writing for important causes, nursing her mother in her last four years of illness, ministering to this troubled brother, sister, or friend— provided experience and perception for Mary...
...I'm a great admirer of Freud, a great mind, the greatest of all in his field, who opened the gate and explored the heart," she said...
...Laura, the artist and sister of the troubled boy, could have represented this Southerner...
...In China, my brain woke up...
...This great weakness keeps Strange Fruit from being great...
...Now, our people whom we drove away are metamorphosed into victims of the ghetto, poverty, crime—and enough problems to beat us all to death...
...The book which has influenced me more than any other book on the face of the earth is Tielhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man...
...I just felt it...
...I wrote in the revived Killers of the Dream that man is evolving and participating in his own evolution, now that he has a mind, and that it is increasing rapidly in brilliance, as it is pushed and polished by other minds...
...We must suffer more than we have—not because we're the South—but to deny old ways and come to right and wisdom...
...She protested "that dangerous writer, Ayn Rand, who has the strongest following of any writer in the United States," with the dictum: "Anybody who says he can live his own life and be responsible to nobody else is a wicked fool...
...Miss Smith considers perhaps twenty per cent of her output of countless magazine stories, pamphlets, seven books, innumerable lectures, TV and radio discussions, and talks with needful groups—to be "Martha work...
...And the human temperature has gone way up...
...Then we really knew who our friends were, and there were some great ones...
...Scientists, philosophers, painters, people of the theater do like me...
...This maimed the personalities of most Northerners with false moral complacency...
...I don't genuflect easily, but I do here, so that I hate to point out the gaps in his great accomplishment...
...another one has literary talent...
...That's not to say I don't see evil...
...Thirty years ago white writers had the same trouble, and wrote of Negroes only in stereotypes...
...but I've always been positive in my feelings, almost in my bloodstream, that good is stronger...
...The North didn't write letters of invitation asking for them...
...Julian Huxley is a great optimist, and a stronger mind than Aldous...
...That makes four Souths...
...Many of us have tried to...
...Miss Smith made a face of distaste for the appraisal of her as "that earnest little old lady up on the mountain, who wants the Negroes to have everything for the Negroes," and the witless tribe of readers and critics who stereotype her as a "race writer," and don't appreciate what she considers her best work...
...The South' has usually meant the male, white South...
...Oh, they have all done nice things you can relish...
...We're moving beautifully," she said, with a quick, bright smile lighting up her face like a girl's...
...I would not change a word...
...You can live there all your life and never see Harlem...
...At any rate, she lived between Brooklyn and Clayton for six years of celebrity, travel, work, and friendship with some of the top minds in the country...
...This coming together, acceleration and proliferation of thought, this great change that is upon us, is one reason for our tremendous anxiety today...
...I really don't enjoy any American literary writers very much...
...That's the greatest trouble the Negro artist has today: his feelings against white people make it impossible to create a white character real and whole...
...This one, poor little thing, "has more trouble than the Movement...
...There is no future in Faulkner's books...
...I've always seen evil since I was three years old, and I continue to see it everywhere...
...Chardin sees man's purpose—the purpose of it all—as achieving more and more complex forms of life and more quality...
...Miss Smith sternly dissents from the current liberal notion that in race prejudice and Negro disadvantage the North and the South are the same...
...While friends fell away and newspapers and preachers "tore to pieces my reputation as a woman," well-to-do parents of Laurel Falls campers rallied handsomely...
...We're sick people...
...The very elegance of the human race is in the love and concern which every member of it always felt for someone else...
...I'm not still talking in 1880, though, not still one hundred years behind in thinking, and perhaps that is why my writing is more recognized by scientists and intellectual people than by literary people...
...But we sent the Negroes up North, we drove them up there...
...He failed, I think, on the collective unconscious, and Jung did things Freud never got to...
...he loathes females and it shows in his work...
...I don't know a single Negro writer who can write about white people...
...She talked wjth love, solemn thought, and a lot of bite, of herself and her work, of mankind's grand advance through the aeons, of this piddling present person or that one, of Southern sins and Northern complacency, of "teensy-weensy" writing by deep, narrow talents, of men's hostility toward serious women, and —with most faith and fascination— of this crucial time in the history of humans when we are "so close together" as thinking beings that our intellects "push and polish each other into new brilliance" to light God's destiny for mental man...
...In the North, millions have...
...Looking back on her work, she made her own appraisals...
...Some of his disciples could go beyond him because he made the great beginning...
...I think Strange Fruit was the first book in the United States which treated Negroes as human beings...
...As a columnist for The Atlanta Journal in 1961, she received the Fiorina Lasker Civil Liberties Award...
...Miss Smith paused and smiled, relishing the Huxley minds, and then went on, her whole person inclining persuasively with her talk, her fine, small hands cupping ideas and qualifications, and her face smiling, wondering, and frowning, dramatizing her sentences...
...When man began to think, man began to participate in his own evolution...
...And our sins are terrible...
...I'm somewhat naturally an optimist," she mused...
...But it was my first novel and I didn't have the technique to let her into it without becoming awkwardly philosophical, then...
...Her new book, 128 pages of monologues accompanying photographs of the Negro direct action movement (Our Faces, Our Words, W. W. Norton, $2.75), written in dire illness after a precarious pneumonia, may be called "Martha work," she thinks...
...Regarding Southern community after community desegregating, for peace, for profit, for "law and order," for business as usual, Miss Smith still thinks the South "may lead the way for the nation" to racial justice and amity...
...that's housekeeping, cleaning up the mess...
...He always writes with love, imagination, and delicacy...
...only four parents withdrew their daughters and forty others applied for the vacancies...
...We, and some of the Europeans too, are still talking about the things Dostoevski talked about in 1880...
...But every time you walk out your door, there are the signs, the walls, the inhuman, 'dehumanizing separation, to manipulate you...
...Our literary world is not very intellectual...
...She explained that all her life, as the middle daughter of a large, well-to-do, high-minded Southern family, has been shared between "Mary, the creative one, the artist" and "Martha, who tends the house and cleans up the mess...
...Miss Smith talked fiercely, and carefully and often laughing, in the huge pine living room of her "cabin" house (once a part of the girls' camp, Laurel Falls) with its window wall open to the double mountain ridge and blue sky—a wildly gorgeous invasion of the spacious comfort and taste of the big room which a lesser woman might not sustain without draw draperies...
...Where the North was disturbed in its own psychic organization showed in Yankee willingness to be foreign missionaries to us, instead of home missionaries to their own black ghettos, blaming the South, shaking off their own responsibility on the South...
...Just beautiful...
...Of course, in Atlanta you open up everything and never think about why you closed up everything in the first place...
...Each individual must do it...
...a lot of them political confusion...
...He never wrote about his equals...
...I'll look lovely in my coffin," she promised happily...
...And, "no one tried officially to ban the novel, or Killers of the Dream in the South...
...We're a brainless lot...
...I'm interested in the whole thing, the meaning of the whole thing...
...We have a disease called Faulkner-ism...
...But, first," she declared solemnly, "we must humbly confess our sins and ask forgiveness...
...Freud used reason...
...it is my most famous novel, but One Hour is my best...
Vol. 29 • February 1965 • No. 2
