
          The 1994 Lillian Smith Book Awards
          By Spears, EllenEllen Spears
          Vol. 16, No. 4, 1994, pp. 17-22
          
          The 1994 Lillian Smith Book Awards were presented in Atlanta on
November 18 to (from left) John Gregory Brown, winner for fiction, and
Henry Louis Gates and John Dittmer, co-winners for
non-fiction. Excerpts from their acceptance speeches follow.
          
            John Gregory Brown Decorations in a
Ruined Cemetary(Houghton Mifflin)
            By Brown, John GregoryJohn Gregory Brown
            Vol. 16, No. 4, 1994, p. 17-19
            It has occurred to me, as it may have to others, the striking
parallels between Lillian Smith's first novel, Strange Fruit, and my own: two white Southerners writing about this great region's great tragedy of racial division and the fierce power that such a division can wield in determining the course of individual lives; two white Southerners attempting to step, with their imaginations, into the shoes of characters on both sides of that great dividing line, creating circumstances where that line is crossed and exploring the pitiful consequences, the injustice and misunderstanding that result from such a trespass.
            I should stop here, though, to make a confession. I had not read
Strange Fruit when I set about writing my
novel. But you can't really blame me, can you? Despite its phenomenal and immediate critical as well as commercial success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, Strange Fruit was nowhere to be found when I was growing up. It had not made its way into the curriculum of any of the private schools I attended. It was no longer, if it had ever been, among the hundreds and hundreds of books my parents, both of them avid readers, kept on the shelves in our home. And it was not on the syllabus, or even the recommended reading lists, of the Southern literature and Southern history courses I took in college and graduate school.
            So while I am free of the charge of influence, it occurred to me
when I did finally sit down and read this novel, how sad it is that fifty years after Strange Fruit was published, another white Southerner might think to write a novel that covered such similar terrai—-a novel that ends, just as that earlier novel did, not with triumph but with tragedy, not with answers but a whole host of questions.
            I should point out that I did not intend to write a book about
race. Then I should add that Lillian Smith said the same thing when
asked about her book, about why she'd



come to tell such a story. Her answer, considering how fully and loudly she'd already raised her voice in protest, might have been disingenuous or coy, an act of self-defense. Mine is not.
            I am a young man. By the time I was a conscious being, the literal signs of segregation had all been torn down. I've no memory of President Kennedy's or Reverend King's assassinations. I've no memory of great swelling crowds and inspired speeches calling for—demanding—equality and civil rights. I do remember the sniper atop the roof of the flaming Howard Johnson's Hotel in New Orleans, a man the television reporters identified as a Black Panther, but I understood that name only as a metaphor, as a means of naming one whose name was, for the time being, unknown. The sniper, caught from time to time in the cloudy lens of a distant camera, was indeed black, wasn't he? And he was lurking in the shadows of a smoke-choked stairwell, was he not, like some cornered wild animal, dangerous and frightening?
            And why would I, as a child, have any thoughts or feelings about race? I lived in an all-white neighborhood, attended all-white schools, played on all-white sports teams, had all-white friends. I was one of eight all-white children, born in a span of ten short years, though if you asked my mother she'd say, I guess, that those ten years were not quite as short as I make them seem. And looking after that great brood were two shifts of maids, a cook, and a janitor—a railthin, buck-toothed, soft-spoken, gentle man with thick glasses whose last name I didn't know—calling him (as I did our two maids and our cook) by his first name, by the name I'd wind up stealing for my book: Murphy. They all had last names, too, I think. I'm sure they must have.
             So why would I think to write a book about race? The only black people I spoke to besides those who worked in our house lived in the St. Bernard Housing Project, where we'd go once a year to bring Christmas presents to the family of one of our former maids who was now losing herself, limb by limb, to diabetes.
            Of course I did see, when I occasionally accompanied my father to work, the black people who sat in his doctor's office for hours and hours, who knocked on our door from time to time to offer gifts in gratitude for the medical services my father offered for free because they could not afford them. And from time to time I would pass black people on the street, but we didn't pay each other any mind. We didn't snarl at one another. There was no animosity. We just didn't speak.
            So I didn't sit down to write a novel about race. That was the furthest thing from my mind. I wanted to write a book about the million swirling questions inside me, about how difficult it is to get any answers about one's life, how hard it is to know what one should believe. I wanted to get to that place where William Faulkner, the writer I admired more than any other, got—to the secrets in people's mind and hearts. I wanted to ask the questions that Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor ask about faith. I wanted my prose to sing with the great good grace of Reynolds Price.
            I had other aims, too. I wanted to understand this strange, beautiful creature who was my wife. A new parent, I wanted to know the boundaries of a parent's love for a child. And I wanted to figure out, for very personal reasons, the precise dimensions of sadness and loss.
            If writing, putting pen to paper, is a way of fighting and defeating the silence that rebounds in one's life when one asks such great unanswerable questions, is it any surprise that racial division came to be the metaphor I chose for such a silence?
            It was only, then, when I turned back to steal what I could steal from my life, to disguise all my questions and make them seem like just a story I'd made up—well, there came, as if out of nowhere, a man by the name of Murphy, a man who I didn't expect to speak up but who did and then wouldn't shut up. A man who, though I'd made him all I'd seen and known in my childhood of black people—poor, uneducated, a servant—decided for himself that he was going to be heroic, that he'd wear his dignity like a crown of thorns, that come hell or high water he'd take his place in the lives of Meredith and Lowell and Thomas Eagen, and my own.
            So I had to give him a last name, give him the dignity he demanded and deserved. I had to let him speak.
            So Murphy Warrington rose up in me the way I imagined him rising in
Lake Pontchartrain after he steers the station wagon over the
railing. He shouldn't have been there in the first place. He should
have sunk and drowned. He should have disappeared. But he didn't.
            
            The truth, of course, was that he was there all along, lingering in my imagination, lingering the way all my questions about race and racial division had lingered in me despite the fact that during my childhood, I didn't even known they were there.
            There is a difference between words and deeds, between sitting down to write and standing up to fight. I know that much. And I am not, alas, a crusader. I'm not sure I'd recognize courage if it was staring me in the face or, more likely, shoving at my back, whispering, "Go on. Go stand up for what's right."
            But maybe that's the great, wondrous thing that art can do. It can allow imperfect, cowardly men and women to reach out for, draw near, and sometimes get at some measure of truth. It's better to do it on your own, in your real life, the way so many of you have done. But to try to get it into a book—well, at least that's something.
            I think, I hope, that's what I tried to do. "It's the very feeling of loss, not what's been lost, that shapes a life," Murphy says in my book. And I swear it's as if he were speaking to me, not me speaking through him. What I mean is, were it not for his presence in my book, I'd never have thought to say such a thing. I'd never have been able to.
            It wasn't until I'd finished this novel, seen it published, and sent a copy to my parents in New Orleans that I dared to ask them what had become of the real Murphy, why he'd stopped working for them, where he'd gone.
            "He got some better job," my mother told me.
            Good for him, I thought. Good for him. 
          
          
            John Dittmer Local
People(University of Illinois Press)
            By Dittmer, JohnJohn Dittmer
            Vol. 16, No. 4, 1994, p. 19-20
            I am proud to receive the award named for Lillian Smith, who was active in the struggle for social justice long before most Americans could even conceive of a nation that was not governed by racial proscription and segregation. And I know that in recognizing this book, you are also honoring the "local people" whose stories I have tried to tell.
            Nearly a half century ago, black World War II veterans like Amzie
Moore, Aaron Henry, and Medgar Evers returned home fighting, vowing to make Mississippi safe for democracy. In the mid-1950s, however, the hopes raised by the Brown decision were dashed by a combination of Citizens' Council thuggery and the Eisenhower administration's indifference to violations of federal law in Mississippi.
            It remained for "outside agitators" to keep the flame of freedom alive. In the aftermath of the sitins and freedom rides, young men and women affiliated with SNCC and CORE moved into black communities across the state, working with local people on the range of problems facing them in this "closed society."
            In this, the most activist phase of the struggle, women emerged as leaders across the state: Fannie Lou Hamer, SNCC's oldest field secretary, surviving a brutal beating in Winona to become the symbol and conscience of the Mississippi movement; Annie Devine, mother of four children, counseling the young CORE militants in Canton; Victoria Gray, a successful Forrest County business woman who decided to work full time in the movement, using her literacy project as an organizing tool in Hattie sburg; and Winson and Dovie Hudson, two militant sisters standing up against Klansmen and night riders. "The more they did to us," Winson Hudson recalled, "the meaner we got."
            The Mississippi movement was instrumental in creating the climate of opinion that forced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Working at the grassroots, across lines of class and generation, activists did win the right to organize black communities.
            As the years passed, it became apparent that the civil



rights movement had created the climate for change in Mississippi. While segregation remained a fact of life, the Jim Crow signs began to disappear. A degree of civility had come to the Magnolia State. The small black middle class made significant gains in the 1970s and 1980s, but the most visible and dramatic victories occurred in the political arena. Mississippi now has more black elected officials, and more black members of the legislature, than any other state.
            Despite these achievements, the movement failed to bring about the social revolution envisioned by the earlier activists. Whites continue to hold most of the positions of real political and economic power. Mississippi still leads the nation in poverty, infant mortality, and illiteracy. Black per capita income remains less than half that of whites, while the state's per capita income remains the lowest in the nation.
            Still, if black Mississippians and their allies did not achieve all their goals during the movement years, they did bring about extraordinary changes in a state that had been locked up in the caste system for nearly a century. They had transformed the "closed society," opening up the political process to African Americans, making it possible for a new generation to build upon the solid foundation laid by that band of brothers and sisters who had "challenged America" in search of the Beloved Community.
            When I teach about the 1960s today I try to convey to my students that the movement years were a time of hopefulness, dedication, and courage, where people reached out to each other across lines of race and class, risking their livelihoods and lives in the cause of freedom. Although that time is long past, and history does not repeat itself, I do believe that the civil rights activists have something important to say to us today, in the aftermath of an election that has seen the forces of repression and reaction temporarily triumphant in both the South and the nation.
             Another teacher, Julian Bond, has written that, "Today's world holds few heroes for my students, and this lack of heroes, coupled with their pessimism, makes them unlikely candidates to create a movement of their own." But Bond concludes that, "By giving voice to the hopefulness of earlier generations who faced resistance and oppression my students have never known, we make heroism more available, more attainable to a generation inclined to see through a glass darkly."
            Those of us who write about the Movement of the 1950s and 1960s,
then, have an obligation to tell the stories of the unsung black women
and men who were the real heroes of that turbulent period in our
history. And I am particularly pleased that the Southern Regional Council, through this award, will make it possible for this story of the freedom struggle in Mississippi to reach a larger audience. Thank you all, very much. 
          
          
            Henry Louis GatesColored People: A
Memoir (Knopf)
            By StaffStaff
            Vol. 16, No. 4, 1994, p. 20-22
            Gates's comments are excerpted from the "Writers Making a Difference" workshop at the SRC annual meeting, which followed the Lillian Smith Awards Luncheon.
            Gates: The Kerner Commission report [on the
1960s rebellions] did not talk about class. It talked about two nations, white and black—because of the residue of white racism. It was a moral warning. Now we have two nations, one is rich and one is poor. And in the black "community"—also two nations; one is rich and one is poor. We always had class in the black community, but not a class of black people who had white money, as my mother used to say, as opposed to colored money. We used to live in the same neighborhood because of segregation: you could see the preacher, you could see the doctor, you could see the undertaker. You had role models. Now, I live in the suburbs. And so do a lot of my counterparts, whether they're in Atlanta or Birmingham or Montgomery or wherever. I mean we live in integrated neighborhoods, our kids go to integrated schools, etcetera. This is one of the things that I tried to get at in Colored People. There were many gains but there were costs, and no one could predict those costs. No one could predict the world in which we live today, a world in which the black community is riven straight down the center by class.
            ...I tried to write about what was good and bad about the
segregated colored world. But the reason that's so much on my mind ...
well, there are two reasons, one's very personal because my mother
died and I was in mourning for my mother. And contrary to popular
wisdom, time did not make that grief go away, time did not make that
grief dissipate. In fact, I have two daughters and the older they get,
the more I miss my mother, I mean the more I sympathize with my
mother, the more I understand my mother, the more I understand things that she did that I thought were totally crazy and bizarre. And that makes me sad. So I wanted to work that out—it's like complex therapy.
            But the other reason was, I wanted to write about a segregated
colored world because now we have a segregated African American
world. Because it's segregated by class. I keep coming back to
that. That we have this world of the black poor and the world of the
black suc-



cessful which never meet, except symbolically. Except when people make statements like "the Black Community is this" and "the Black Community is that." But the harsh truth is that very few people in this new black middle class actually interact on a meaningful basis with black people who are left behind in those inner cities.
            John Gregory Brown: Is that why your book ends
... on such a sad note about the loss of the mill picnic?
            Gates: Yeah, I mean in part, that was the thing that killed my town. All the black people from the diaspora we would call it, no matter where they had moved—Detroit, Dayton, Cincinnati, Rochester—on Labor Day they would come back. And they would come back from as far as California. They would rent big Cadillacs—that's when I found out about rent-a-car; I didn't know—if you were up in Piedmont [West Virginia] you couldn't rent a car. And my Dad would say, "Shit, that isn't his car. That boy, he rented that car." Red Cadillacs and stuff, cause you wanted to show you were doing good, right?
            But everybody would come back and it was a way you recharged your batteries as a community. It was this big ritual. Settle old scores, people had affairs, people had fights—everything. Got to know your cousins. It was wonderful. And then—and this is the real reason I wrote it, just to show the ironies of the Civil Rights Act—the reason the paper mill, the Westvago Corporation shut down the all-colored picnic was because me and my buddies—the fearsome foursome, three other black guys and I—integrated a place called the Blue Jay Restaurant. In the book we had to change it to the Swordfish. We were eighteen years old. All the white kids would go there on Friday and Saturday nights and they would have a band. And you would drink beer—you know 3.2 percent beer—and eat potato chips, and you would dance a little bit. And so we decided—nobody black could go there—so we said we're going to shut it down. So we went there and they literally threw us out, in fact the owner picked one of my friends, Ronnie Fisher, and threw him against the wall—I'll never forget that. So then, that was a Saturday night, on the following Monday we called the state human rights commission—Carl Glass, I think was his name, was the head of it. And within a month the Blue Jay was shut down. That's the long and the short of it.
            The executives at the mill looked at this and they said these guys are going to raise hell because of this segregated mill picnic, but it never crossed our minds. We didn't want to be with the white people at the mill picnic. I mean white people could always come, if they wanted to, but there was a white mill picnic and a black mill picnic. And some white people did come because it was so much fun.
            So they issued this directive that because of the Civil Rights Act and because of the dangerous troublemakers in the community, we feel that we should shut down this thing. And the book ends with my Aunt Margarite and other people saying, "This is not what Dr. King's about. This is not segregation; segregation means when the white people won't let us in, not when we want to be with ourselves."
            And now, as an official of the university, as a department chair,
I'm being confronted with the difference between protecting the right
of students to associate willingly by religion, by political interest,
by culture, or indeed by ethnicity, on the one hand, yet protesting
against and railing against any sort of enforced segregation or what I
think of as the failure of—particularly black kids, in my case—to do
what Ralph Ellison said which was to run the gamut of their full
humanity. I don't want black people to associate with each other
because they're afraid. I want them to associate with each other for
good reasons, not for bad reasons. And to not make associating with
each other on the college campus the sole parameters of their
universe. I want them to be with each other and be with other peoples
sort of simultaneously. So that's why I did it ....
            
            One of the themes of my critical work is that we have multiple identities. In this country, particularly in the South, we think of each other as black and white, and that's the primary thing. But I think it's more important that we both watched "Leave it to Beaver" in 1957 once a week.
            You know we have a common culture in this country, although you often have to go to Europe or Africa or someplace in order to realize it. I mean I'd read about it, James Baldwin says that, right, so I'd read that when I was fourteen or fifteen, but I didn't know what it meant. But then when I went, and all of a sudden I knew I wasn't French, I knew I wasn't English—God knows—and I knew I wasn't Italian or an Israeli, and then I went to Africa and I knew wasn't an African any more. Though I kissed the ground and did all that Pope stuff when I got off the plane, "Roots" and all that, and said "That guy looks like Mr. Mayfield, that guy looks like ..."—it's a black American thing, I'm sure you all understand.
            But I also realized that that little blue-gray passport was my ticket back home. My attitude about money, about life, about health, about food, about cleanliness, about ten thousand one hundred things was American. When I sailed back from England a year later after living in the bush in Africa when I was nineteen, and I saw the Statue of Liberty, it meant a lot to me.
            I mean, I don't want to go corny on everybody, but I'm just saying we have more in common with each other than we do with anybody else. And the differences diminish, considerably, as soon as we get out of our immediate circumstances.
            And I think that one of the things that fascinates me about Bill Clinton, specifically, is that he is a representative of our generation. Bill Clinton's body language around black people is more natural than any president in the history of the United States. There's no question about that. He is completely comfortable about black people. And before, I mean even somebody like John Kennedy—a black person was like an alien to John Kennedy. He didn't go to the heart of black people. And Richard Nixon, God knows, George Bush, even Jimmy Carter, it was more of a condescending... I don't mean to be cold, I don't really know what the right adjective is, but you were not inextricably intertwined culturally in an intimate way, the way that our generation is. And ours is the first generation for whom that was possible. And Clinton is the first president who represents that generation, and I think that's a side of our common culture, that's why the culture wars are so heated.
            I think that more of us are trying to get this common culture that
we truly share lifted from under the table, from subterranean realms,
into the official public discourse, so we can redefine who we are—not
seeing ourselves as all heirs only, or primarily of a tale of total
triumphalism, but a story that is more complex; it has more parts
which we share.
          
        