The Roles of Wilma Dykeman

Early in life, Wilma Dykeman got it in her head that she wanted to be an actress. She never made it to Broadway, for reasons that will become apparent, but she played a number of significant and sometimes simultaneous real-life roles. This essay describes some of her roles that may be lesser known than those of novelist, environmentalist, journalist, historian, or book reviewer.

Daughter

My mother was born in 1920 at the head of Beaverdam Creek just to the north of Asheville, North Carolina. The house she grew up in was tucked below the north slope of Iron Ore Ridge and looked out onto the side of Elk Mountain. Just to the east lay Rice Knob and Craven Gap on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Her father, Willard J. Dykeman, had grown up in Putnam County, New York, had lost his first wife to tuberculosis, and in his grief had moved south for a while. He met 21-year-old Bonnie Cole and, at age 57, married her. They raised their only child, Wilma, in Lynn Cove among her aunts and uncles and cousins of the Cole family. Nine years after Wilma was born, the stock market crashed, the US economy collapsed, and mother’s college tuition money vanished from two Asheville banks. Five years later—1934, in the depths of the Depression—her father died from a heart attack at age 73. So it was that Wilma Dykeman, age 14, and her mother Bonnie Cole Dykeman, age 38, faced the world almost alone. They stuck together for the next 58 years until Bonnie’s death in 1992, and there never was a daughter who better honored her mother and father.

Wilma attended elementary and high school at Grace, a little community at the mouth of Beaverdam Creek. She wanted to go to acting school at Northwestern. But she did not have enough money, so she went to Biltmore College in Asheville for two years before making the jump to Northwestern. There she wrote many letters to her mother. One letter, which she wrote home on her nineteenth birthday, reads as follows:

On my nineteenth birthday—May 20—Sat 1939 Dearest Mother,

On the evening of my nineteenth birthday, my thoughts are where they have been many times today—with you, my darling. I went to hear Kirsten Flagstad sing tonight, and she was wonderful. We sold coca-colas and were admitted free, and got very near to Flagstad. My, but she is glorious. Listening to her sing Wagner made me realize the heights a person can rise to—a human soul.

In looking back over the past year I realize how much I have grown, and how much farther I must go if I am to be a person worthy of those things I want. And you—mother—along with an indefinable something in me—have been my guide and my strength. Without you in my life, with your infinite love and abundant unselfishness, I cannot imagine what a vacuum there would have been. . . .

You gave me the tiny rocks that go to build a solid foundation, and you let me put them together. Without the strength of character, or the enjoyment of living, or the continued reach for higher ideas that came from you two, and you alone, I just cannot imagine a person living! And I know that if I do fail in some of the goals I want, or cannot always reach the best, it is through fault of my own, and not of the people loving me. . . .

Gosh, I guess this letter’s slushy and rambly and about as clear as mud. But all I’m trying to say is: I love you most awfully, and you must remember you’re as much my life as I am yours. And I’m saying it because: well, it’s my nineteenth birthday, and I thank you for the nineteen years of life you have given me. . . .

I’m happy tonight. When I think on how much there is to give and find from life, it simply sets me afire. . . .

Adoringly, Wilma

Wife

After graduating from...