
          The 1991 Lillian_Smith Awards
          By StaffStaff
          Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 18-20
          
          The Smith Awards were founded in 1968 to recognize and encourage outstanding writing about the South. Named in honor of Lillian_Smith, a Georgian who long distinguished herself as a advocate of human rights and one of the region's most sensitive writers, the awards are sponsored annually by the Southern_Regional_Council. They are the oldest regional book awards honoring work about the South.
The 1991 winners are J. L. Chestnut, Jr., and Julia Cass for Black in Selma for non-fiction and Mary Ward Brown for Tongues of Flame for fiction. The statements that follow are excerpted from remarks at the awards ceremony luncheon in Atlanta on November 8, 1991.
          
            A Measuring Life
            By Thomas, CleophusCleophus Thomas
            Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 18-19
            We have the need to know how far we have come, the distance traveled. We need to know the extent that notable individual efforts have preceded our own. Thus our preoccupation with "all-time records." The life of J. L. Chestnut is a notable individual effort.
            An interesting man, born in interesting times, he is a restless, imaginative man whose efforts in the field of what is known as civil_rights helped to make the times in his native Selma interesting.
            The story of that life, Black in Selma, tells us what one person can do. It also tells us that one person is never truly just one person. A notable social life is the embodiment of values, values received from parents like his own; from teachers like John Shields, the intellectual, free thinking Knox Academy teacher that appears in Chestnut's life as an omniscient angel; from comrades like Marie Foster, the tireless voting_rights advocate; from relatives like his uncle Preston Chestnut, entrepreneur and race man; from mentors like pioneering attorney Peter Hall, who in his perfectionist view found both blacks and whites to fall short of his standards causing Chestnut to see Hall as a member of a "third" race; even from approachable adversaries  like James Hare, the white circuit judge who was preoccupied with racial theories that discounted black abilities, but who was nonetheless something of a mentor to the neophyte negro lawyer. Black in Selma is a com-

pelling autobiographical narrative. It is, too, a tribute to all of the sustaining forces--the family, the church, friends--which make one's strenuous efforts possible, worthwhile, and ultimately successful.
            Chestnut's account is a unique portrait of black professional life in the 1950s and 1960s. There is the unforgettable vignette of our hero who we come to know as Chess, flying about in the Piper Cub airplane of another black burgher, Dr. Bill Dinkins, landing on this particular Saturday on the football field in Nashville at the halftime of the Tennessee State football game. But those flights of fancy are not representative of Mr. Chestnut's life. He is first and foremost a lawyer trying cases. His legal career spans a time when in jury cases there was virtually a certain outcome in a case involving black defendants and black lawyers. His efforts in the area of voting_rights lead to jury reform which brought change. Not all cases were lost and not all of a black lawyer's clients were black.
            What is exceedingly fascinating about this book is precisely what first attracted Ms. Cass to her subject: the incisiveness and depth of understanding that Mr. Chestnut has of his culture. His ability to detect, to discern, to intuit and ultimately to know what motivates say, a Joe Smitherman, Selma's longtime mayor. From boyhood forward, Chestnut has been able to identify the hidden pockets of power and to devise means to pick them, and where locked to pick those locks.
            Black in Selma is a story of hope--parent's hope for their children, a citizen's hope for his community. It is a book about change, about how things can change and about why they remain the same. It is a book filled with hard cold facts about dreamers and killers of the Dream, opportunity seized and missed opportunities. I found it most revealing to read of the successful effort in Dallas County, Alabama, to elect the first black to a county-wide office--tax collector--only to have her die tragically in an automobile accident before she could assume office. An enlightened democracy would have bowed to popular will and southern tradition and appointed her exceedingly competent husband. But alas, her spiteful opponent who gracelessly failed to accept his initial primary defeat and ran unsuccessfully as a write-in candidate in the general election, wins the appointment.
            Black in Selma, like so many Southern stories, is a family saga. There are parents, a devoted wife, and many others who made being black in Selma less a burden, and more a moral imperative to do good. It is for all of us an inspiration.
          
          
            Cleophus Thomas is an Anniston, Ala., attorney and a member of the 1991 Lillian_Smith Awards jury.
          
          
            The Hard Part Is Learning to See and Tell the Truth
            By Brown, Mary WardMary Ward Brown
            Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 19-20
            First I want to say that I am greatly honored to be given the Lillian_Smith award for fiction. When Dr. [Jeff] Norrell called me to tell me about it, he asked first if I knew who Lillian_Smith was. Almost everyone of my generation knew Lillian_Smith from her famous, best-selling novel, Strange Fruit. Since then, I had thought of her more in connection with civil_rights than with literature.
            Being a jazz aficionado, I came to associate "Strange Fruit" with Billie Holliday and a song that she made famous, the song with which she liked to close her performances. I assumed that she got the title from the book. Now I find that both song and book titles came from an unknown poet who sent the lyrics to Billie in protest of 

lynchings in the South. Billie recorded the song before the book came out.
            Originally, Ms. Smith had given her book manuscript the title "Jordan Is So Chilly. "When asked by her publisher to look for something better, she chose Strange Fruit, but with reservations. She thought that linking the novel with a song about a lynching distorted the theme of the book. In her view Strange Fruit was about more than a lynching. It was about the strange fruit of a racist culture. She spent most of her life trying to change that culture.
            So when I accept this award in her name, I feel like something of an imposter. As Chekhov once said in the face of acclaim he thought he didn't deserve, "I feel like a scoundrel."
            Writers of fiction are not so much participants, certainly not movers and shakers, as observers and recorders.  To be both doer and truth-teller (different from reporter) is like trying to serve not God and Mammon, but two gods.
            The primary concerns of a fiction writer are not ideas or causes but people. The subject of this conference is democracy. I must confess that when I think of that word and the grandeur of its implications, I want to be in the back row of the audience. A fiction writer's consuming interest is in people, in what they say and do, and why they say and do it. Consciously or unconsciously, he or she never gets away from this born fascination.
            Writer after fiction writer has attested to this predilection, shortcoming, whatever. Not the least of these was William Faulkner, whom Ms. Smith didn't like. According to her biographer, Anne Loveland, she regarded him as a talented writer of fiction, but said that "he was not an intellectual... not a thinker.., not mature psychologically and socially." She admitted that he said some good things on the race problem, but he was at best, and only since receiving the Nobel Prize, a "mighty lukewarm liberal."
            As for Faulkner, he said repeatedly that what the fiction writer is trying to do is to create living people, in conflict with their own hearts, their fellows, or their environment. "I am writing about people, not ideas or symbols," he said time after time in taped interviews at the University of Virginia. He said he tried to make his characters "whole, intact, breathing, and standing up," with no judgment on the author's part whatsoever. A fiction writer is not interested in man's behavior. "His job is to tell what man will do, not what he should do. Maybe what he can't help doing..."
            I would say, in addition, that if what the characters do should illuminate a certain human landscape so that improvements result, as in the case of Dickens and his novels, it's all to the good but incidental.
            This could be viewed as a cop-out, except that if the fiction succeeds, it becomes art. And art is the great sustainer of humankind in all its struggles.
            The late John Gardner, in his book titled On Moral Fiction, defines morality as "nothing more than doing what is unselfish, helpful, kind, and noble-hearted." He goes on to say that great art celebrates life's potential, offering a vision unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love.
            By love I think he means that simple but acute appreciation of being alive, of having the opportunity to walk on this earth, to know and care about other human beings, animals, or even a place.
            I think it has to be tough love, though, and the vision has to be true. That is the hard part, seeing and telling the truth. For the truth has more than one aspect, as in the case of a divorce. Learning to see and tell the truth is the work of a life, and of a lifetime.
            So back to the lives of two gifted women, one a writer, the other a singer, both indelibly associated with the phrase, "Strange Fruit," and all of its connotations. Both women gave their all, one to her art (Billie loved being called an 'artist,' as she was in England), the other primarily  to a cause, as I see it.
            Now Columbia Records has just released the ninth and final CD of "The Quintessential Billie Holliday." According to Whitney Balliat in the New_Yorker, "It is now possible to see the whole beautiful and invaluable Billie Holliday landscape of the thirties." Later, sadder years are available on Decca and Verve recordings.
            Lillian_Smith is also still very much alive, for what she wrote and what she did. Her best books, notably Killers of the Dream, are still in print and still being read. Here today she is memorialized by this group for the twenty-fourth time, with two awards, one of which I am honored to receive. Thank you very much.
          
        
