
          Excerpts from the 1988 Lillian_Smith Awards Presentations 
          By RJNRJN 
          Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 20-22
          
          In 1966 the Southern_Regional_Council established the Lillian_Smith
Book Award in honor of a life member of the council who had made great
contributions to improving human relations in the South. Lillian
Smith, a native of Clayton, Ga., wrote a number of very important
works on the subject of race and gender relations. Among the most
widely read and appreciated were Strange Fruit, a novel
set in a small Southern town that dealt with an interracial love
affair; and Killers of the Dream, a psychological
analysis of the Southern system of racial separation. Killers
of the Dream became a classic of sectional understanding and a
ringing demand for liberation of white and black Southerners from the
bonds of segregation.
          Lillian_Smith also devoted much of her time to practical
concerns. She wrote tracts and speeches; she participated in seminars
on human relations; she walked picket lines; she served on the boards
of national human rights organizations; and she worked in her own
little town to help her friends and relatives cope with their
lives. All these labors of love and duty interrupted her writing, but
they also rounded out her experience and made her the great
humanitarian we honor by this award.
          One purpose of the Lillian_Smith Book Award is to keep alive the
memory of Lillian_Smith. We want to keep it alive so that people will
read her books, take courage from her crusade for human rights, and
translate her struggle in terms appropriate to our own lives. A second
purpose is to honor authors like her, who have written books, that in
one way or another, help us to understand--perhaps give us the courage
to join--the enduring struggle for human rights. We want to honor the
authors not so much for their own sakes, although that is appropriate
and pleasant, but so that others will, because of the award, learn
about and read their books.
          In selecting the winners of the Lillian_Smith Award, the SRC tries
to choose works that reflect the spirit of Lillian_Smith. We look for
serious works, with artistic and/or scholarly integrity, and we also
look for high craftsmanship. We want books that contribute to an
understanding of the human problems which concerned Lillian_Smith, and
are also central to the concerns of the Southern Regional
Council. This year's awards were made at the SRC Annual Meeting in
Atlanta in November 1988.
          Since 1968 thirty-five books have been honored with the Lillian
Smith Award. The winners have included a few major best sellers and
many minor classics; every one has made its own powerful statement for
the ideals of justice and human dignity that Lillian_Smith herself
struggled to uphold.
          This year we considered more than fifty books, and most of them, in
one way or another, were worthy of Lillian_Smith's ideals. It was not
an easy task to make a choice of two winners but neither was it an
onerous task to read some remarkably good books. I should note that,
while we received a number of very good books to consider, we had
relatively little difficulty in deciding on our two award winners. The
judges were, in fact, all of one mind about the best choice in each
category.
          
            Excerpts from the 1988 Lillian_Smith Awards Presentations.  The
Award for Non-Fiction: Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in a
Segregated South by Melton A. McLaurin (paperback published by
University of Georgia Press, 1988, $7.95,167 pages). 
            By Norrell, Robert J.Robert J. Norrell
            Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 21-22
            Melton A. McLaurin's autobiographical work, Separate Pasts:
Growing Up White in a Segregated South, must be placed on the
same shelf with the remarkable collection of revealing autobiographies
of 20th-century Southerners, a shelf that would hold, among other
works, Virginia Durr's Outside the Magic Circle; Will
Campbell's Brother to a Dragonfly; Theodore
Rosengarten's All God's Dangers; William Alexander
Percy's Lanterns on the Levee; and even Booker
T. Washington's Up From Slavery.
            Separate Pasts is the story of Melton McLaurin's
youth in a little eastern North_Carolina village called Wade. McLaurin
gained a remarkable insight into the interaction between blacks and
whites as he worked at his grandfather's store, which was situated
near the boundary of the village, amongst the local black
population. There he had daily conversation with blacks of both
genders and all ages. He tells us that he found black_people to be
generally more interesting than white_people; that their conversation
held his attention more than the mundane gossip of the many whites who
frequented his grandfather's store.
            At the store he heard in the idle conversation of whites the common
racist stereotypes of blacks. But he also encountered individual
blacks whose character and behavior belied the stereotypes. Perhaps
the most influential black in McLaurin's experience was the man called
Street, an itinerant handyman and Jehovah's Witness
missionary. Street, the village eccentric, revealed to
MacLaurin his keen intelligence and his sharp critical
judgment about the world they both inhabited. The message for the
teenaged Melton in his relationship with Street was that blacks were
capable of intelligence equal to--and in Street's case, superior
to--the whites of his acquaintance. The discovery of this reality--the
fundamental equality of intelligence, judgment, and sensitivity
between blacks and whites--is the overriding theme, which Melton
McLaurin reveals through a series of profiles of blacks he knew in
Wade.

            The awareness of black_people that McLaurin gained in the store
seemed to prepare him to challenge the barriers dividing blacks and
whites in Wade. One message of Separate Pasts might be that when white
Southerners established close relationships with blacks, they were
often preparing themselves for the recognition of the injustice of
segregation, and for a commitment to changing the system of human
relations in the South.
            I am struck by the stark honesty of McLaurin's memoir. He opens his
memory wider than I myself could contemplate having the confidence and
courage to do. Few among us who know the reality of conflicts within
families over racial matters would have the courage to put into print
these deeply felt and often painful memories. Any of us who has
cringed at the open bigotry of a parent or a sibling, and then
struggled with the anger that often cannot be vented, will find much
in Separate Pasts that rings true. He has ruthlessly searched his
mind, it seems, to examine his own motives and feelings about race
relations at the most basic of human levels. He apparently has
withheld little from his readers. He tells us, for example, about his
own youthful lust for a black girl, Betty Jo, with whom he was
acquainted from behind the counter of his grandfather's
store. McLaurin's sexual attraction to this girl and other black_women
had a natural, liberating effect on his racial attitudes. When he
realized that black_women had the same appeal to him as whites, he
began to recognize the equality between the races at the most basic of
human levels.
            I believe that much of the power of Separate Pasts
comes from the sense that this describes the most commonplace of
Southern white experiences. So many of our great autobiographies of
Southerners are the stories of uncommon people. As much as we love and
admire Virginia Durr or Nate Shaw or Will Campbell or Lillian_Smith,
their experiences made them uncommon. But Melton McLaurin's early life
seems to me as regular and everyday as cornbread and cotton picking
and country_music. I think it is from the sense of its being a
commonplace experience that the book derives its greatest power. It is
McLaurin's awakening in the midst of daily, regular, mundane
relationships that gives his memoir such authority of meaning. How
many regular, smalltown Southern boys grew up in circumstances similar
to Melton McLaurin's? Probably millions, though he alone, as far as I
know, has explained how those circumstances gave rise to his keen
sensitivity to the costs of racial separation and alienation. It is a
great pleasure to honor a signal achievement with the Lillian_Smith
Award.
          
          
            Robert J. Norrell is author of Reaping the
Whirlwind and director of the Center for Southern History and
Culture at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Anne Jones is an
associate professor of English at the University of Florida. Serving
with them on the 1988 Lillian_Smith Award Committee were Mary Frances
Derfner of Charleston, S. C.; Paul Gaston, a professor of history at
the University of Virginia; and Anthony Dunbar, of New_Orleans, La., a
writer and lawyer, as well as the 1971 winner of the Lillian_Smith
Award for his book, Our Land, Too.
          
          
            Excerpts from the 1988 Lillian_Smith Awards Presentations.  The
Award for Fiction: The Avenue, Clayton City, by
 C. Eric Lincoln (paperback published by Ballantine Books, 1988, $3.95,
 275 pages). 
            By Jones, Anne G.Anne G. Jones 
            Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 20-21
            In what after the 1988 political campaign seems as much a prophecy
as a memory, Lillian_Smith wrote nearly thirty years ago In
Killers of the Dream about her childhood' experience fifty
years before that, when she heard the singsong voices of
politicians...telling us lies about skin color and a culture they were
callously ignorant of--lies made of their own fantasies...--forcing
decayed pieces of theirs and the region's obscenities into the minds
of the young and leaving them there to fester. Listening [as a child]
I'd see my little colored friends on the rim of the crowd silent and
big-eyed and vaguely smiling, not knowing what else to do; or maybe
the Negro doctor who moved with dignity and spoke with quietness might
be standing there; or far back, a few of the colored millhands--and a
slow horror would drain the blood from my throat and I would think, He
is saying these things not caring that they hear, as if they were not
human! And then would come the tearing dialogue: Well,
are they? are they? of course they are! they're just like me! but are
you sure? of course! then why are they not in our church ? why are
they not in our school ? why can't we keep playing together? what is
wrong what is wrong--
            Eric Lincoln's brilliant new novel, The Avenue, Clayton
City, should have been there for Lillian_Smith. What Lincoln
accomplishes in this first novel, by no means his first book, is to
present the human world of those children and mill hands and
especially of that doctor as it existed in the small-town South just
before the second world war.
            Dr. Walter Eldridge Pinckney Tait's story is the story of a man who
aims to "learn" from the world he finds himself in. He is an observer
by nature, someone who keeps himself apart. What he learns first, what
we learn as readers, is a world of incredible richness--of people,
language, desire, imagination--and of repeated, remorseless
destruction, all the varieties of destruction, mental, emotional,
physical, 

that come out of racism.
            Dr. Tait lives on The Avenue of the title. The Avenue is like Toni
Morrison's Not Doctor Street. It's got an official name, Booker
T. Washington Avenue, and a name that the people use. It's also got a
different name when it goes to the white neighborhood--Morrison
Avenue--from the name it has when it loses its pavement and becomes
the major artery in the classiest neighborhood in the black
community.
            What you remember mainly from the novel, though, is the people
whose lives connect to The Avenue. First there are the teenage boys
who stand under the streetlight "talkie' that talk," playing the
dozens. Dr. Tait sees the dozens as a "teenage rite of passage"
that he says "undercuts the white_man's style of black denigration
by presupposing it... they had said it
first!"
            Guts Galligan runs the Blue Flame and longs for a call from God to
preach to the boys and get them to quit talkie' that nasty talk. Mish
is a bright and eager high_school boy who writes Victorian medieval
poetry to a white girl and signs it, "Black Knight." Coley wants to
move onto The Avenue and uses or misuses a shell-shocked black war
veteran to carry out his plan with tragic effect. There is Vernon,
whom God messes over bad. And there is Pank Hall who tells Vernon's
story and almost loses his faith in telling it. There is Paris
Appleby, the white girl who bears a black_man's baby and
disappears. There is Maybelle Yancey, the preacher's wife, who takes
the baby to raise. There is Big Walking Man, devoted to his surprising
love. And there are Goochie and Louella Peebles, whose house is
located right where some rich white_people want to develop property,
and which suddenly begins to act like it is haunted.
            It is not only blacks who are haunted by the racism of Clayton
City. Eric Lincoln includes the story of a Jewish girl who is rejected
by her fiance's family, and of a Japanese teacher whose eagerness to
help is rewarded by the FBI and deportation. So deep in Clayton City
runs the fear of difference.
            And sexual difference? Like Lillian_Smith, who observed and
reported on the links between racism and sexism, Lincoln shows story
after story of people who hurt women, and women who hurt themselves
because of racism. The novel begins with Jip Jipson, who proves his
manhood by bragging in her hearing about what he plans to do with
Poochie later that night. It ends with a pregnancy and a killing that
make it quite clear that black_women are the battleground on which the
power struggles between white and black_men are inscribed.
            Dr. Walter Tait ends his learning by seeing his own part in playing
the dozens. When he does this, he chooses to speak differently, to
speak out and to say no to the world he has inherited. I urge you to
read this brilliant, powerful novel and to learn for yourselves what
happens when Dr. Tait leaves the past, the dozens, and The Avenue
behind. Congratulations to Eric Lincoln.
          
          
            Robert J. Norrell is author of Reaping the
Whirlwind and director of the Center for Southern History and
Culture at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Anne Jones is an
associate professor of English at the University of Florida. Serving
with them on the 1988 Lillian_Smith Award Committee were Mary Frances
Derfner of Charleston, S. C.; Paul Gaston, a professor of history at
the University of Virginia; and Anthony Dunbar, of New_Orleans, La., a
writer and lawyer, as well as the 1971 winner of the Lillian_Smith
Award for his book, Our Land, Too.
          
        
