Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women's Writing,1920-1945

5. PAVING THE WAY: Willa Cather and Lillian Smith

The artist spends a lifetime in loving the things that haunt him . . . in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character. —Willa Cather, preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett Moments of sudden vision came over me . . . and I wrote with immense passion. —Lillian Smith, letter to Maxwell Geismar Willa Cather and Lillian Smith are two modern southern women writers who have never been read in juxtaposition with one another, probably because of what Terry Eagleton has termed the “disabling idea of aesthetic autonomy,” that is, the notion that true (literary) writers write in isolation of their political influences (9). Until quite recently, this theory ironically held both Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) and Strange Fruit (1944) in academic neglect, the former for lacking the artistic merit of Cather’s earlier novels, the latter for modeling too closely Smith’s public speeches, which vehemently inveighed against modern segregationist systems . This chapter urges a reading of Strange Fruit that probes the aesthetic injunctions invoked by the novel’s complex racial politics so as to underwrite its linkages to Sapphira and the Slave Girl. In both novels, I argue, we can trace an aesthetics of civil rights politics that not only challenges rigid critical distinctions between novelistic aesthetics and politics but also points to a correspondence between Cather’s and Smith’s mythic consciousnesses of racial progress in the modern South. Inheritors of the Myths Lillian Smith often characterized racial segregation as “spiritual lynching,” emblematic of the stranglehold that systematic oppression has on the human spirit. A maternal sensibility governed her theory of its psychosomatic e≠ects. “A child’s personality cannot grow and mature without selfPAVING THE WAY Willa Cather and Lillian Smith 5 J j 137 j 138 | Paving the Way esteem,” she maintained, “without feelings of security, without faith in the world’s willingness to make room for him to live as a human being. No colored child in the South is being given today what his personality needs in order to grow and mature richly and fully. No white child, under the segregation pattern, can be free of arrogance and hardness of heart, and blindness to human need—and hence no white child can grow freely and creatively under the crippling frame of segregation” (Gladney 87). This racial sensibility resonates in Strange Fruit, which opens in the aftermath of World War I as Nonnie Anderson, a young college-educated black woman, prepares to tell her white lover, Tracy Deen, that she is pregnant with his child. Nonnie and Tracy are citizens of Maxwell, a small socially and racially stratified southern town (the fictional equivalent of Smith’s birthplace , Jasper, Florida). Both are aware of the social (and legal) sanctions they face if they have the child; but only Tracy seems to care. He plots ways to handle the problem created by Nonnie’s determination to have the baby by proposing marriage to Dottie, the girl next door, whom his mother Alma favors, and by arranging for his lifelong friend and house servant Henry to marry Nonnie. Nonnie’s brother Ed discovers Tracy’s plan and kills him. Nonnie helps her brother escape Maxwell with the aid of their sister Bessie and the local black doctor, Sam. Tracy’s sister Laura helps Nonnie avoid being implicated in the crime. Henry becomes the fall guy for Ed’s o≠ense and is murdered by the town’s white lynch mob. In a January 1961 letter to Maxwell Geismar, from which the excerpt at the start of this chapter is taken, Smith said that there came over her, while she was working on Strange Fruit, “moments of sudden vision” in which she saw “what segregation as symbol and symptom actually was.” And it was these times when she “wrote with immense passion” (Sugg 161). The novel unfolds over the course of a two-day revival in Maxwell. Smith’s dexterous manipulation of stream of consciousness and narrative syncopation inflects bold commentaries on abortion, same-sex desire, and religious fanaticism while the technical elements of the novel clarify her opposition to racial segregation. As far as we know, Cather never candidly expressed her thoughts about race prejudice or any of the issues central to Sapphira’s rhetorical economy. What she did account for—and frequently—was her craftsmanship; but in [18.117.216.229] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 08...