“I can’t believe you are reading this book,” she informed me when I was thirteen. When I asked her why, she replied in a way that ended our discussion, “It reads like it could have been written by a child.”
Much later, of course, I came to understand that it was not Lee’s style that offended my aunt, for she, in fact, had never read the book. Like many Southerners, she was driven instead by a ferocious belief in the rectitude of white supremacy, and the article of faith that went along with it—that the South was never wrong, only misunderstood. It is easy to forget, from the vantage point of today, that when To Kill a Mockingbird first appeared, a majority of white Southerners refused to concede its most basic point. They didn’t want to hear about racial injustice, or our whispered history of oppression and violence, no matter how gently that story was told.
And so it was that Atticus Finch became a kind of prophet, a teller of truth in his own native land. Later generations may have found him paternal, or at least unremarkable in his racial understandings. Nevertheless, it was a memorable moment—made more so by Gregory Peck’s performance in the movie—when Atticus stood before Tom Robinson’s jury and proclaimed a truth that would seem unassailable:
. . . there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.
The problem, of course, as Harper Lee’s readers understood very well, sometimes much to their own discomfort, was that there had never been a time or a place in the South in which all men were created equal. Nor did most people want there to be.
Miss Lee was not the first to make that point; she was, in fact, only the latest in a line of women writers who compelled a more honest look at their place. It was a literary tradition, you could argue, that began to take shape in 1940 and became in the course of the next twenty years a force too powerful to be dismissed.
II
In the dog days of August 1940, the great black author, Richard Wright, published a book review in the New Republic. In it he registered his frank astonishment at the achievement of a young writer named Carson McCullers. He was full of praise for McCullers’s first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, comparing it favorably to Hemingway and Faulkner, and marveling at the fact that the writer was only twenty-three years old. But there was something he found even more surprising than McCullers’s tender age.
“To me,” said Wright, “the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.”
The Negro character that McCullers created was Dr. Benedict Copeland, a proud and fiercely intellectual man who hated the injustice he saw all around him. He found white people to be full of condescension, a “quiet insolence,” he often called it, and his despair grew deeper as he saw his own children drift through the aimlessness of Negro life. But Copeland was not the only desperate soul in the Southern mill town of McCullers’s creation. There were also a deaf-mute, a lonely young girl, and an alcoholic white man, who raged against capitalism and greed and flirted with the theories of Karl Marx.
What impressed Richard Wright as he read the story was not only McCullers’s concern for social justice—her quiet explorations of racism and poverty—but also her color-blind empathy for the people of the South. And the question he raised between the lines of his review was whether this was merely an aberration, or whether it might be a beacon of hope. The answer came quickly from two other writers.
First, in 1941, a young Mississippian named Eudora Welty published her first collection of short stories, a volume entitled A Curtain of Green. The closing story was “A Worn Path,” a tale so exquisitely beautiful in its telling that the prose alone left many people speechless.
She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles . . . as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.
The heroine of this eight-page epic is an ancient African American woman on a journey she has made many times. Phoenix Jackson, as the old woman is known, has a little grandson who has swallowed lye, and month after month when his throat swells shut, she follows a torturous path into town, stoic in the face of alligators, dogs, and contemptuous white people, driven by her patient love of a child.
As many critics have noted through the years, this was not a political tale Miss Welty was telling, not specifically racial in its intent. (That would come later in her long and distinguished career when she tried, for example, in one of her stories to enter the mind of a racist assassin.) But at the time it was published in 1941, “A Worn Path” had a powerful effect, for not only was the central character a Negro, she was a woman who carried herself with such courage that the whites she encountered seemed petty and small.
Such was Welty’s affirmation of humanity.
But for me the most impressive of the new women writers—the most unforgettable when I came upon her work in the 1960s—was Lillian Smith, a native Floridian who spent much of her life in Georgia and came from an upper-middle-class family. When I read her book, Killers of the Dream, a collection of essays published in 1949, it occurred to me that she might go down as the bravest Southern writer of all time. Certainly, there has never been one more bold.
Smith’s first taste of notoriety had come with the publication of her novel, Strange Fruit, a story of interracial love which took its title from a Billie Holiday song. Published in 1944, the novel became a national best seller, though it was banned for a time in Massachusetts because of its explicit sexuality. But it was Killers of the Dream that sealed Smith’s fate as a lightning rod of Southern controversy. There had simply never been a book—certainly not one by a white Southern author—that confronted so directly the prevailing way of life in the South.
Smith’s target was segregation itself, not only racial violence or the desperate excesses of the Ku Klux Klan, but the very foundation of Southern society. As her book makes clear, her sense of the absurdity of Jim Crow began to take shape when she was a child. She had overheard her parents talking in whispers. Not far away, a little white-skinned girl was living with Negroes, a scandalous thing in a small Southern town, and many of the neighbors began to speculate that maybe the child had been kidnapped. Against the protests of the black foster family, the little girl was seized by the local authorities and brought to live with Lillian and her family in a rambling farmhouse, full of laughing children, with a garden out back and wide open fields in which to play.
For a few happy weeks, Lillian took delight in this new and sweet-tempered younger sister, who seemed, in turn, to be astonished at her own good fortune. But then one day, a call came in from a Negro orphanage. “There was a meeting at our house,” Smith explained in Killers of
the Dream. “Many whispers. All afternoon the ladies went in and out of our house talking to Mother in tones too low for children to hear. As they passed us at play, they looked at Janie and quickly looked away again, though a few stopped and stared at her as if they could not tear their eyes from her face.”
What the ladies of the community had learned was that Janie, despite the fact that her skin was white, was the orphaned child of a Negro family. She was sent back immediately to colored town—to the foster family from whom she was seized—and Lillian and her siblings were told never to speak of the incident again. “You’re too young to understand,” Smith remembers her mother saying, in a command that seemed both brittle and rigid. “And don’t ask me ever again about this!”
For more than thirty years the experience was wiped out of my memory. But that night, and the weeks it was tied to, worked its way like a splinter, bit by bit, down to the hurt places in my memory and festered there. And as I grew older, as more experiences collected around that faithless time, as memories of earlier, more profound hurts crept closer, drawn to that night as if to a magnet, I began to know that people who talked of love and children did not mean it. That is a hard thing for a child to learn. I still admired my parents, there was so much that was strong and vital and sane and good about them and I never forgot this . . . Yet in my heart they were under suspicion . . . I was shamed by their failure and frightened, for I felt they were no longer as powerful as I had thought. There was something Out There that was stronger than they and I could not bear to believe it . . .
As I read that story in Killers of the Dream, I remember thinking that even as late as my own generation, every Southern child probably had some similar experience, some startling moment of racial revelation that may or may not have touched the heart. I certainly did. Though the memory, like Smith’s, had been submerged, there was a day in the early 1950s when I was maybe five years old that my mother and I, along with another member of our family, went to visit a servant who had been taken ill. This elderly African American woman lived in a cabin on the edge of Mobile; only two rooms, as I remember it now, with very little paint and no electricity or indoor plumbing. Children played on the dusty lane leading to similar houses nearby, and I remember being struck, though I was far too young to express it at the time, by the terrible bleakness that must cripple their lives.
“Aren’t these children unhappy?” I remember asking. And my mother, a lovely and kindhearted Southern woman, who would one day emerge as a racial liberal, did her best to stammer out a reply.
“They are not like we are,” she said.
Reading Killers of the Dream, I felt the memory come flooding back, giving added force to Smith’s explanation of how it all came to be. As she understood it, the oppressions of slavery, sharecropping, and segregation compelled Southern whites, who wanted to regard themselves as decent, to regard their African American neighbors as somehow less than human. Otherwise, how could they explain the appalling conditions they saw all around?
That was what it came down to, and from the tangled roots of that belief, which twined back deep into Southern history, came a complex set of notions that produced a society of moral cripples. That was how Smith saw it, and in her unrelenting critique she also argued that our very ability to think was compromised in a fundamental way, for we were compelled every day of our lives to rationalize things that our hearts inevitably understood to be absurd.
I do not remember how or when but by the time I had learned that God is love, that Jesus is His Son and came to give us more abundant life, that all men are brothers with a common Father, I also knew that I was better than a Negro, that all black folks have their place and must be kept in it, that sex has its place and must be kept in it, that a terrifying disaster would befall the South if ever I treated a Negro as my social equal and as terrifying a disaster would befall my family if ever I were to have a baby outside of marriage . . . I learned it the way all of my Southern people learn it: by closing door after door until one’s mind and heart and conscience are blocked off from each other and from reality.
Reading Killers of the Dream in the 1960s, I could not imagine how, in 1949, Lillian Smith found the courage to write it, or why the retributions she faced were not more extreme. Perhaps it was because she had that gift—that ability of Southern writers from Robert Penn Warren to Pat Conroy, Eudora Welty to Willie Morris and Rick Bragg—to create such beauty with the language itself. For even as her poetry helped her to dig through the hardest, least appealing layers of the truth, still she was able to give sweet voice to the things about the South that she loved:
. . . jessamine crawling on fences and trees, giving out a wonder of yellow fragrance, bays blooming white and delicate down in the swamp, and water lilies fattening on green pond water, making you love the loneliness you hate, making you want to stay even as you feel you must leave or die.
III
Lillian Smith developed breast cancer in the 1950s. But even as she fought it, until death finally took her at the age of sixty-eight, she pursued her career as a writer and an activist. In 1955, she published a new book called Now Is the Time, urging compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown decision, and the following year she threw her support behind the Montgomery bus boycott. She soon became friendly with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, and on the night of May 4, 1960, the Kings were driving her to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where Smith was undergoing cancer treatments. A policeman stopped them on the way, curious about this interracial group, and discovered that King, who had recently moved to Atlanta, still had an Alabama driver’s license.
For this misdemeanor offense, King received a one-year suspended prison sentence, and the following fall, when he was arrested during an Atlanta sit-in, the judge revoked the suspension and ordered King to spend four months on a Georgia chain gang. He was led away from the courtroom in chains.
Hearing about these events, Senator John F. Kennedy, who was running for president, picked up the phone and called Coretta Scott King, asking if there was anything he could do. Within a few hours, the senator’s brother, Robert Kennedy, made a private call to the judge in the case and persuaded him to release King on bail. Word quickly spread within the African American community, not only in Atlanta, but nationwide, and for his simple act of compassion John F. Kennedy became a hero. Black Americans, who had voted overwhelmingly Republican in 1956, voted for Kennedy in 1960 by the stunning margin of seventy percent to thirty percent.
Thus did Lillian Smith become a curious footnote to presidential history. But she is remembered, of course, for more than that, for hers was one of the strongest voices in a line of women writers—beginning with McCullers and Eudora Welty—who compelled a more honest look at the South. Flannery O’Connor followed quite importantly in the 1950s with her Southern Gothic characters and dissenting opinions on religion and race, and then Harper Lee. Each of these women, in her own way, left an important literary mark, and each had a powerful effect on the cultural and social history of the region.
There were important differences among them, of course. If Lillian Smith was intentionally political in much of her writing, the others were not. But all were caught inevitably in the current of the times. To Kill a Mockingbird appeared in 1960, the year of the first civil rights sit-ins, and the movie that followed premiered in Alabama at the time of the Birmingham demonstrations—the fire hoses and dogs, and a few months later the bombing of a church in the heart of the city, killing four children and creating a specter of deadly injustice. It was no surprise against such a backdrop that Atticus Finch would emerge as an iconic character, a repository of the sanity and fairness that many white Southerners believed—or hoped—lay dormant somehow in the heart of our place.
Maybe that is why of all the books by these great writers, To Kill a Mockingbird is the most beloved. For many of us, the most appealing thing about Atticus Finch was something profoundly simpl
e and reassuring. He was one of us.
3
Across the Divide
featuring:
Uncle Tom’s Children—Richard Wright
The Fire Next Time—James Baldwin
South to a Very Old Place—Albert Murray
Also, H. L. Mencken, Joel Williamson, Ralph Ellison, Henry Louis Gates, William Faulkner, Walker Percy
I
As America made its way through the racial crisis of the 1960s, a lot of us began to read black writers, trying to make sense out of what was going on. Some of the most fashionable —Eldridge Cleaver and Nikki Giovanni come to mind—were, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, “incandescent with racial rage.” I think I had a feeling even then that their work was more catharsis than literature, but for me at least, that was not the case with Richard Wright. From the moment I opened his first book, a collection of short stories called Uncle Tom’s Children, I was captivated by this Southern-born author whose life and writing had been shaped so profoundly by the terrible events of a troubled childhood.
He was born in Mississippi in 1908, the grandson of runaway slaves who had fought for the Union in the Civil War. Wright remembered his maternal grandfather, Richard Wilson, as a man of silent bitterness and rage. The old man, like others his age, had lived through what may have been the greatest disappointment ever inflicted on a generation of Americans. Having fled from slavery in 1865, he served three months in the Union Navy before the war was over and he was free. Like many former slaves, he expected to take his place as a citizen—to make a living, to vote, to worship in a church of his own choosing, perhaps to see his children educated—and for a while things seemed to be headed that way.
The Books That Mattered Page 4
