Woman on a Mountain

Woman on a Mountain by Wilma Dykeman During the early years of our marriage myhusband, James Stokely, andIenjoyed two memorable evenings in the Appalachian mountains of north Georgia. One was with the poet Byron Herbert Reece at his parents' small farm near Blairsville. The other was with Lillian Smith at her home and summer camp for girls on Old Screamer Mountain near Clayton. We drove poet and novelist Olive Tilford Dargan (Fielding Burke) down from Asheville for a visit with Smith and her close friend and companion, Paula Snelling. That initial meeting and subsequent years of shared thoughts and concernsthatlasteduntilafinalpencillednote shortly before Smith's death, surfaced in memory recently because of a book just Eublished (1986) by Louisiana State iniversity Press, written by Anne C. Loveland. The title of her biography is Lillian Smith, A Southerner Confronting the South. Lillian Smith was a woman who defied easy definition and whose fate it was to be defined, categorized, stereotyped and sometimes casually dismissed by insensitive friends, professional associates , inquisitve strangers and powerful opponents. This matter of perceptions is central to an examination of Lillian Smith's life and 18 work. Understanding her experience is instructive in comprehending the limitations , frustrations and fulfillments surrounding others of her time and place and sex. Itis an experience seldomconfronted in our regional and national intellectual history, social studies or literature and seems especially appropriate for discussion in the context of this magazine's special issue. Lillian Smith was one ofthe south's earliestandmostconsistentprotestorsagainst racial segregation. Long before southern liberals who would eventually become more nationally acclaimed had risked any role of leadership on this sensitive—indeed , explosive—issue, she understood and proclaimed the injustice of an evil system. It was a system which had nurtured her, terrified her and puzzled her as she grew up in the smallnorth FloridatownofJasper and then movedwith herfamily, atthe age of eighteen, to Old Screamer Mountain in the Georgia Blue Ridge, her home for the rest of her life. There she and Paula Snelling eventually ran a girl's camp where fresh ideas as well as athletics and fresh air were part of the agenda and influenced a cadre of young women from some of the south's well-known families. Later this became a refuge in the south where black and white leaders and others could meet, talk with each other as fellow human beings, share problems and dreams. But Lillian Smith's conscience stirred and informed her creativity. In a lively magazine written and edited with Paula Snelling, in a novel, Strange Fruit, that became a sensational best seller, and in classic non-fiction books, Killers of the Dream and Now is the Time, Smith probed, interpreted and challenged not only the laws and economics ofhernative region but its very psyche: ancient fears, hidden wounds, love and hate intertwined like smothering kudzu sapping the strength of two races and the freedom of individuals entangled in its web. She was the first to examine and emphasize the toll that segregation took on southern whites as well as blacks. As spokesperson for an emerging, more democratic, less hypocritically religious south, she was—in a recent historian's acknowledgement—"a pivotal figurein southernintellectuallife." But she was more. Racial segregation was only one limitation afflicting human health and creativity. Other divisions— economic, cultural, and especially barriers of gender—-diminished life's rich potential . She wrote: I used the Negro-white situation ... as symptom and symbol of a broken fragmented world, and too, as a symbol of a dehumanized culture. Man is not solid ... but in his essence is broken and fragmented; all of human growth is an attempt to bridge over the segregated parts of his nature and his culture. And that in abig sense is my theme in writing. In a non-fiction book, TheJourney, and another novel, One Hour, she addressed again that fragmentation, the many faces of segregation which divided the individual from himself/herself. Smith felt a fierce tug-of-war within her own career, between what she described as the Mary and Martha sides of her nature, one the creative writer, the other a civil rights activist and social reformer. She once described this dilemma: I am...