We Shall Pave the Way: Willa Cather and Lillian Smith's Aesthetics of Civil Rights Politics

NGHANA LEWIS We Shall Pave the Way: Willa Cather and Lillian Smith's Aesthetics of Civil Rights Politics The artist spends a lifetime in loving the things that haunt him, in having his mind 'teased' by them, 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 Moments of sudden vision came over me . . . and I wrote with immense passion. Lillian Smith This essay examines the novels of 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 Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Shve Girl (1940) and Lillian Smith's 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 essay 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 Siave Girl. In both novels, I argue, we can trace an aesthetics of Civil Rights politics that not only challenges rigid critical distinctions between aesthetic and political discourses but also points to a correspondence between Cather's and Smith's visions of racial progress in the modern South. Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 4, Winter 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1 610 34 Nghana Lewis It is no coincidence that Sapphira and Strange Fruit take up the themes of racial segregation, miscegenation, white supremacy and violence, and (repressed) same-sex desire within the context of relatively isolated southern communities. These were—and in some ways remain—the cultural determinants and spaces that distort(ed) and largely undermin(ed) the idealist ideologies that Cather and Smith adhered to. These were also determinants with and within which Cather and Smith struggled throughout their lives as white southern (born) aristocratic lesbians. While Cather's biography—from her acclaim as editor ofMcClure's magazine and literary champion of the frontier and Midwest to her near thirty-eight-year relationship with Edith Lewis—is widely known and documented, Smith's background has received less critical attention. And until the release of Witta Cather's Southern Connections (2000), little insight had been given into the particular influence of Cather's southern heritage on her aesthetic politics in a modern context.1 It is noteworthy, for example, that Cather's family, though sympathetic to the Union during the Civil War, remained loyal to the Confederacy, providing medical assistance to injured soldiers and shelter to troops. Cather's grandmother, Rachel Seibert Boak, the alleged prototype of Rachel Blake in Sapphira, is said not to have condoned slavery. Yet the Cathers maintained a number of slaves before the war and a number of black and white field and house servants after the war. Sensibly one can conclude, therefore, that the Cathers were rooted in the plantation economy, at least until they moved from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883. Smith's family, staunch Methodists who early migrated from North Carolina to Ware County, Georgia before settling in Jasper, Florida, a racially mixed town bordering the Okefenokee Swamp, strongly advocated systematic segregation, despite invoking liberal hiring policies in establishing a successful wholesale lumber and naval store. As Smith notes in the semi-autobiographical Killers of the Dream (1949), both her mother and father descended from a long line of slaveholding families and taught their children to believe in white racial supremacy. Smith claims that it was not until 1 920, when, at the age of twentythree , she traveled abroad for the first time to teach piano in Huchow, China, that she realized the oppressiveness of the South's cultural economy , particularly in racial matters. "For the first time in my life, I was ashamed of my white skin," she once said of the experience. "I began Aesthetics of Civil...