A Deleted Manuscript, an Early Story, and a New Approach to the Fiction of Lee Smith

In the summer of 2007, I had the opportunity to conduct archival research in the Lee Marshall Smith Collection at North Carolina State University’s D. H. Hill Library. I wanted primarily to investigate materials related to Smith’s 1983 novel Oral History, the work that marks this important and prolific contemporary writer’s “coming of age” as an artist. In both the scope of the story it tells and the experimental nature of its narrative technique, Oral History exceeds anything Smith had previously produced and anticipates the high caliber of her mature work. Set in the mountains of southwestern Virginia in the town of Black Rock and the more remote Hoot Owl Holler, the novel tells the story of four generations of an extended Appalachian clan, the Cantrells; their saga begins in 1898 and spans roughly the next eighty years. Smith also creates an ambitious narrative structure for her novel to complement its historical scope. As critic Linda Bryd explains, Oral History “is told from thirteen different points of view: seven first-person oral narratives and one first-person written narrative interspersed among four pieces told by third-person narrators, sometimes omniscient and sometimes limited to a single perspective.”¹ Within this complex narrative weave, however, some voices remain oddly unheard as certain key female characters do not tell their own stories; instead, their lives remain subject to interpretation by others—both male and female, native Appalachian and outsider.

One of the most intriguing of these silences involves the reputed “witch,” Red Emmy, whose supposed curse on the Cantrell family purportedly sets the novel’s tragedy in motion. Interestingly, Smith frequently acknowledges in interviews writing a section from Red Emmy’s perspective and subsequently deleting it in response to editorial suggestion. She told Dorothy Combs Hill in 1985, for instance,

Originally, I had a whole section written from the point of view of Red Emmy, who was the witch. It was a very disjointed stream of consciousness thing, because she was crazy. My idea about Red Emmy was that when she was a girl, she was an orphan who had been sexually abused—by a preacher, actually. Everything that happened to Emmy was clear in the narrative. It showed that she wasn’t a witch at all, that the way she was was probably understandable, given all that she had been through.²

Elsewhere, Smith, alluding to William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), calls the section “bad Benjy” and agrees with her editor that removing it leaves “a central mystery at the core of the novel.”³

Because of a particular desire to locate this manuscript if extant, I applied for and received sufficient and much appreciated funding from Transylvania University to conduct the requested archival research while on sabbatical leave for the 2007–08 academic year. This archival work did not pose the challenges often faced in seeking unpublished manuscripts or other not-readily-available materials. Smith donated many of her unpublished papers to North Carolina State University prior to her retirement in 2000, after a long career teaching creative writing there, and the Lee Marshall Smith Collection contains the entirety of this work. The collection has received excellent archival attention and remains well organized and meticulously catalogued. The special collections link on the NCSU library website offers easy access to the collection’s catalogue, and I pursued this resource carefully before arranging a visit to Raleigh. To my disappointment, the online index did not mention a “Red Emmy” document, nor does the collection contain the full manuscript of Oral History, although it includes manuscripts of many of Smith’s earlier and subsequent novels as well as her short fiction. Nonetheless, I communicated with the special collections archivist and arranged a trip to NCSU in July 2007 in order to investigate promising folders in the collection.

I had the most hope of finding the deleted “Red Emmy” manuscript in a folder of the collection’s materials pertaining to Oral History bearing only the comment “Notes.” To my delight and amazement the folder did...