A Day With Lee Smith

FEATURED AUTHOR—LEE SMITH A Day With Lee Smith________________ Silas House Lee Smith is crying. People have seen her caught up in laughter many, many times; her friends and fans are always talking about how funny she is. But today, sitting in the warmth of her pink house in Hillsborough, North Carolina, she is in tears. She is thinking back to when she sat in Carnegie Hall during a performance by the soundtrack members of O Brother Where Art Thou? and saw Ralph Stanley come out onto the stage. "When I was a little girl, Ralph and his brother Carter used to come over to perform at my uncle's drive-in theater," she says. "They would get up on top of the flat-roofed cinderblock concession stand and play music for an hour or so before the movie started. Then, at the Carnegie, Ralph came out and stood all by himself on the huge center stage—all lights dark except for a single spot directly on him—and sung ? Death' a capella for a full 4 or 5 minutes. When his last keening note died out, the silence was extraordinary. Then everybody just went crazy, screaming and clapping. And I burst into tears myself. And now look at me, crying right now, just thinking about it." Smith says her emotional response is one of both pride and loss. "Because Ralph Stanley had been my own, you see, a little piece of my own real childhood," she says, "and now he belonged to the whole world." There is a similar passage in a book she wrote a decade before Ralph Stanley became a household name and a major player in what Smith calls "the Appalachianization" of America. In Smith's 1992 novel The Devil's Dream, she writes about a girl who is witnessing the birth of country music. Her family has traveled to Bristol to make the first country music recordings: "Head down under the pretext of tending to the baby, Lucie cries softly. For it seems to her that they have just given up something precious by singing those songs to these strangers, and she feels a sudden terrible sense of loss." Smith has always felt a sense of protection about her homeland, but also had the need to educate people about the place she calls "the terrain of my heart." She moves about the kitchen as she talks—she is 16 nearly always in motion, her hands a blur as she talks, her eyes darting and alive with expression. "I do feel a little protective, not wanting to give our culture to others. Yet on the other hand, I am so proud to share our region's beauty and culture and rich history. Sometimes, I worry that I have somehow exploited my heritage by writing about it so much, so often, even with the best intentions." She is, after all, a real, live Appalachian. She was born and raised in Grundy, Virginia, where she says she never once thought of herself as a mountain person. "In Grundy, the mountains were a given, surrounding and nurturing me just as dependably as my own large extended family," she says. "My grandparents' house was slam up against a mountain; the whole downtown was like town in a teacup, mountains rising on either side." She doesn't hesitate to say she couldn't wait to leave there, due in part to her "confining, curious, smothering family." In fact, her parents encouraged her to leave. "I was raised to get out. That's the way everybody put it—'get out,'" she says, "Even though my family loved Grundy, they'd always spoken of 'advantages' that they wanted me to have. . .advantages that were elsewhere." So, her parents sent her to visit her Aunt Gay-Gay in Birmingham every summer. They sent her to stay with Aunt Millie in Maryland. They also sent her off to St. Catherine's in Richmond, Virginia, for her last two years of high school and finali, to Hollins College, "where," she says, "everybody was interested in where I lived." And that is when she realized that she was, in fact, a mountain person. Her classmates loved to...