Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray

By Darlene O'Dell

In southern graveyards through the first decades of the twentieth century, the Confederate South was commemorated by tombstones and memorials, in Confederate flags, and in Memorial Day speeches and burial rituals. Cemeteries spoke the language of southern memory, and identity was displayed in ritualistic form—inscribed on tombs, in texts, and in bodily memories and messages. Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray wove sites of regional memory, particularly Confederate burial sites, into their autobiographies as a way of emphasizing how segregation divided more than just southern landscapes and people.

Darlene O'Dell here considers the southern graveyard as one of three sites of memory—the other two being the southern body and southern memoir—upon which the region's catastrophic race relations are inscribed. O'Dell shows how Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray, all witnesses to commemorations of the Confederacy and efforts to maintain the social order of the New South, contended through their autobiographies against Lost Cause versions of southern identity. Sites of Southern Memory elucidates the ways in which these three writers joined in the dialogue on regional memory by placing the dead southern body as a site of memory within their texts.

In this unique study of three women whose literary and personal lives were vitally concerned with southern race relations and the struggle for social justice, O'Dell provides a telling portrait of the troubled intellectual, literary, cultural, and social history of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2001
• ISBN: 9780813921983

Book preview

   SITES OF SOUTHERN MEMORY

The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray

DARLENE O'DELL

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF VIRGINIA

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

The University Press of Virginia

© 2001 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2001

9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

O'Dell, Darlene, 1962‘

        Sites of southern memory : the autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre

    Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray / Darlene O'Dell.

            p. cm.

        Includes bibliographical references and index.

        ISBN 0-8139-2071-X (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8139-2072-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. American prose literature—Southern States—History and criticism. 2. Autobiography—Women authors. 3. American prose literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature—Southern States—History—20th century. 5. American prose literature—20th century—History and criticism. 6. Women—Southern States—Biography—History and criticism. 7. Lumpkin, Katharine Du Pre, 1897- Making of a Southerner. 8. Smith, Lillian Eugenia, 1897‘1966. Killers of the dream. 9. African American women—Biography—History and criticism. 10. Southern States—Biography—History and criticism. 11. Race relations—Southern States—Historiography. 12. Murray, Pauli, 1910‘ Proud shoes. 13. Autobiographical memory. 14. Memory in literature. I. Title.

PS366.A88 O33 2001

818′.5208099287—dc21                                                                2001001719

FRONTISPIECE

Stephanie Yarborough puts a flag on the grave site of Robert Fitzgerald in Durham, North Carolina. (Courtesy of News and Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina)

Who would ever have thought that a dead body, strange fruit of the graveyard tree, could give harbor to such talkative seed?

Zimmer, King and the Corpse

The dead are loved in a different way. They are removed from the sphere of contact, one can and indeed must speak of them in a different style. Language about the dead is stylistically distinct from language about the living.

Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination

So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone.

Ezekiel 37:7

Attention! First Hour! In the Mist!

At the Flash! Come. Come. Come!!!

Retribution is impatient! The grave yawns!

The sceptre bones rattle!

Let the doom quake!

KKK Notice

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

1  In Memory Of…

2  His Flower-Strewn Grave

3  Forgotten Graves of Memory

4  Faces of the Tombstones

Epilogue: The Silence of the Graves

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Stephanie Yarborough frontispiece

Statehouse, Columbia, South Carolina

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin as a child

Wade Hampton Monument

Grace and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin

Grave Site of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin

Paula Snelling and Lillian Smith at Camp Laurel Falls

Pauli Murray

Fitzgerald Cemetery

Grave Site of Pauli Murray

PREFACE

Perhaps it was because I had visited the statehouse when I was a schoolgirl living in Columbia, South Carolina. Perhaps it had more to do with the intense debates concerning the Confederate flag that flew over the building. Regardless, a photograph I came across made a lasting impression on me at a moment when I was extensively reading literature from the American South. The photograph was of a 1913 postcard of the statehouse. The caption read, Confederate Flag formed by 1000 School Children on Steps of State House, Columbia, S.C. The photograph helped me to understand more acutely what the writers Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray sought to accomplish in their autobiographies.

These three writers were judicious observers of regional celebrations and memorial commemorations, particularly those regarding beliefs among whites of racial superiority that led to economic, social, and political oppression of minority groups. All three studied the ideology of Lost Cause celebrations and rituals, and each was profoundly concerned about the impact white supremacy had on both individual and collective psyches of the region. Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray spent considerable personal and professional efforts attempting to redefine southern identity and to reshape the region's conception of itself.

Their writings describe the Lost Cause South as a time when notions of white supremacy became further embedded in regional celebrations and rituals, particularly as these rituals positioned their observers to look wistfully back on the Civil War as a noble war fought by gallant heroes for righteous reasons. Some of these celebrations and rituals included Confederate reunions (one of which the 1913 postcard commemorated), Memorial Day services, funerals, and monument dedications. Throughout Sites of Southern Memory I will adhere closely to the descriptions these three writers offered of the Lost Cause and of the white supremacy on which it rested, examining white supremacy not only as economic and political oppression of African Americans but also as an excruciating assault on their hopes and dreams.¹ Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray knew that public monuments, as Kirk Savage writes, are important precisely because they do in some measure work to impose a permanent memory on the very landscape within which we order our lives and that inasmuch as the monuments make credible particular collectivities, they must erase others.²

Confederate flag formed by schoolchildren on the steps of the South Carolina statehouse, 1913.

COURTESY OF SOUTH CAROLINIANA LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, COLUMBIA

During the Lost Cause period of southern history, Confederate monuments sprang up in both graveyards and town squares throughout the region and were often accompanied by ritualized events. In these events white southerners relied on rituals of memory to express what they believed about their society, what they wanted remembered, and, as important, what they wanted forgotten. The rituals surrounding the placement of living and dead bodies across the landscape of the South mattered a great deal to Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray, becoming a central metaphor in their works. In their autobiographies, cemeteries serve as figures of speech metaphorically representing the region, as sites perpetuating white regional identity while eventually giving voice to alternative ways of thinking about the South. In the graveyard and in the memorial ceremonies, these writers found a reverence among white southerners for the maintenance of white supremacy. In their texts Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray returned to the graveyard to revise and rewrite regional identity, to reestablish the South's understanding of itself as a region, and to replace notions of white supremacy with efforts in cooperation, acceptance, and diversification.

The sites of memory particular to this study receive an overview in chapter 1, where the graveyard (the memorials and the tombstones), the body (both dead and alive), and the text (as a site of personal memory) are examined as sites where regional identity was sustained. While providing a brief history of the importance of memory as a cultural tool in maintaining social identity, this chapter also introduces Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray, focusing on their professional lives and accomplishments.

Chapter 2 isolates Lumpkin and explores problems she faced in seeking to represent a female voice from the South, particularly one in contrast to Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett and to historical romances Lumpkin knew as a child. Chapter 3 examines Lillian Smith's revision of Lumpkin's work and her insistence on carrying the consequences of segregation into the human body and mind. For Smith, the triangle of segregation, sex, and sin divided the psyche, creating a schizophrenic, alienated, disturbed individual (and region) who had divorced mind from body and body from soul. Chapter 4 looks at how Pauli Murray used Smith's Killers of the Dream as a fundamental text in her own analysis of race relations and how she revised Smith's work to include and uphold the African American body as a site of leadership in the continued development of American identity. The epilogue briefly discusses issues surrounding the sexualities of the writers, aspects of their lives that, by and large, remained outside their public discourse.

Without the support and guidance of many people, I would have been unable to complete this project. Susan V. Donaldson has read many drafts of this work, always commenting in precise, understanding, and motivational ways. Her critiques, while discerning, were framed in the language of a diplomat and often delivered over a jovial lunch. Colleen Kennedy, Cam Walker, and Robert Gross perused drafts, even in the midst of their heavy teaching and research schedules. In 1991 Kirk Savage helped me frame questions about collective memory and monument formation. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall introduced me to the autobiography of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin early in my graduate school years and served as an outside reader of my dissertation in 1997. In addition to Hall's insightful comments on my project, her own works have done much to influence me both academically and personally.

The staff members at the University Press of Virginia have aided me step-by-step through the publication process. Boyd Zenner has been both patient and diligent in her work with me, and Ellen Satrom and David Sewell have helped me understand formatting and other logistical issues. The board of directors and the Press's anonymous readers gave me useful comments, critiques, and inspiration. I also extend my thanks to Toni Mortimer, who worked with this manuscript letter by letter and offered many helpful suggestions.

At important moments, grants from the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture and from the Grants and Research Office at the College of William and Mary helped me to complete archival research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Athens, Georgia. I appreciate the help of the librarians of Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia; Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at the University of Florida; South Caroliniana Library; and South Carolina Historical Society. I offer special thanks to Anne Womack, Mary Ellen Brooks, Nelson Morgan, Carmen Russell, Jill Snider, John White, Allen Stokes, Beth Bilderback, Pat Hash, Susan VonSalis, Sylvia McDowell, and Marie-Helene Gold. Thanks, also, to the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc., and to Schlesinger Library for permission to use the works of Pauli Murray, to the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Annie Laurie Peeler for permission to use materials from the Lillian Smith Papers, and to Wilson Library for permission to use materials from the Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin Papers.

The Women's Studies Program at the College of William and Mary has provided funds for conferences and research, but the program has given me much more than financial resources. A special thanks goes to current director Leisa Meyer, former director Nancy Gray, and student assistant Lizza Gonzales. Also, I owe a great deal to another former director, Deborah Green, who has helped me overcome language, computer, and publication stumbling blocks. The students in the Women's Studies Program are a constant source of inspiration. I especially thank those who participated in the Sites of Southern Memory course.

I am indebted to Annie Laurie Peeler and Estelle Smith from the estate of Lillian Smith. Ms. Peeler graciously allowed me to see a side in the life of Lillian Smith I could not have otherwise known. I offer the same thanks to Joseph Lumpkin, who gave up a Sunday afternoon to talk with me about his aunt and to share some of her letters, and to Stephanie Davis, who helped me to untangle the mysteries of the Smith family graveyard. And I thank Christina Looper Baker for sharing her research on Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, going to enormous personal effort to mail me information about her conversations with Lumpkin. Phil Rubio aided me greatly in his discussion with me about Maplewood Cemetery and about the memorial services conducted at the Fitzgerald family plots.

In the early days of my work, Sarah Bird Wright, Beverly Peterson, Valerie DeBrava, and Phyllis Hunter offered many promising insights to this project and supplied a much-needed group of support and camaraderie. In his role as mentor and friend, Dr. John Idol followed the golden rule while often deserving the Purple Heart. He and Margie Idol housed me during my trips to Chapel Hill, restoring my sanity after long archival hours with evening tales on topics such as Union-speak and Deep Gap. They also provided me with a quiet and beautiful workspace in the mountains. And I owe a special word of gratitude to Priscilla Dooley, who has patiently helped me through the mind fields of academic life and who has always said Yes to my goals when I could see only No.

My friends and family have offered encouragement, laughter, and, at crucial times, financial support. I thank them for their Saturday morning calls and spring break visits and for their expertise in dream interpretation, goat behavior, French wines, and the best way to eat a Chick-fil-A sandwich. Thank you Kathy and Ted Dickel, April Childress, Judy Aman, Chantal Mauldin, Tom and Ann Currie, Nancy and David Welborn, Katie and Alan Eyles, Florence DeWitt, Bill and Sandy Lawson, Jean Fox, Meg James, and Joanne Liebler.

I also want to thank Kim and Billy Winslow, Nancy and Scott Keim, and their beautiful children, all of whom have brought so much pleasure to my life and whom I love dearly. I am grateful to both of my sisters for showing me what it means to be an artist and for encouraging me, through word and deed, to be strong, capable, vocal, and tenacious. Nancy and Barry O'Dell, who have seen me through school longer than they might have imagined, deserve a round of applause. Their lives have frequently been complex and difficult, but they have taught me much about the human condition and the human spirit, as have the lives of their parents and siblings.

And many thanks to all of my teachers, family members, and friends. Of course, any mistakes are entirely my own.

1

IN MEMORY OF…

Even today the Old Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, North Carolina, remains a pertinent metaphor for the ways segregation divides the living and the dead. Pauli Murray recognized it as such in her 1956 family memoir Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family and would spend her life—and her death—attempting to reconcile what many in her society desired to separate. She and the other two writers examined in this study—Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin and Lillian Smith—used sites of regional memory in their autobiographies, particularly Confederate burial sites, to discuss how segregation divided not only the southern landscape and the southern people but southern minds and bodies as well.¹

In Maplewood, tombstones recording the past lives of Durham's elite stand distinguished across the cemetery fields. Julian S. Carr (Confederate Soldier of America), once the mayor of the city and the leader of the United Confederate Veterans (U.C.V.), is buried here underneath a Confederate flag and a host of stone angels. He is joined by many of his comrades-in-arms, including William J. Christian, another early mayor of Durham. The Duke family mausoleum is located on a high point in the cemetery, surrounded by a steel fence.² A visitor standing inside the fence can look across the mausoleum to the graves of other prominent citizens of Durham, including tobacco merchants, teachers, principals, commissioners, sheriffs, attorneys, superintendents, postmasters, and ministers.

Until relatively recently what the visitor would not have seen from this angle is the small Fitzgerald graveyard, where Murray's maternal grandparents, Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald, are buried. Barely distinguishable among the weeds and other undergrowth, the Fitzgerald plots were more accessible to the public in the pages of Proud Shoes, where Murray juxtaposes the Confederate cemetery with her family's burial ground. But in 1997 Maplewood annexed the Fitzgerald plots and cleared the underbrush; yet the cemetery continues to raise questions about the discouraging consequences of racial segregation. Murray used both Maplewood and her family's adjoining graveyard to discuss in Proud Shoes the nature of segregation, the difficulty of defining class and race identity in the South, and the opportunities denied to African Americans in the rhetoric of the American Dream.

Like Murray's works, the autobiographies written by Lumpkin and Smith were born from the racial tensions of their writers’ life spans, from a segregated social structure that divided the bodies, minds, land, and language of the South. Historians recognize that segregation had become an active, legal, and prominent institution early in the twentieth century. Joel Williamson, for instance, cites 1889–93, 1897–1907, and 1913–15 as years when segregation laws burgeoned, noting 1897–1907 as particularly fertile years (Rage 175–76); C. Vann Woodward writes that Jim Crow laws developed from the displacement of African Americans after Reconstruction, when white southerners publicly promoted and symbolized their views on African American inferiority. Segregation, Woodward concludes, extended to churches and schools, to housing and jobs, to eating and drinking…to virtually all forms of public transportation, to sports and recreations, to hospitals, orphanages, prisons and asylums, and ultimately to funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries (Career 74).³ In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that segregated facilities were constitutional. Although a landmark decision, few may have noticed the outcome since the law seemed merely to ratify the course of race relations in the years since Reconstruction (Ayers, Promise 327).

Searching for a means to end segregation, Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray examined segregation as symbolized and maintained within southern memory. They used autobiography as a literary genre defined by personal memory to address the way that public memory replicated and strengthened segregation. Lumpkin's The Making of a Southerner, Smith's Killers of the Dream, and Murray's Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family and Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet are sites of personal memory, places where the authors unearth the meanings of their culture's symbols and rituals. In doing so they bring their own bodies into the dialogue, discussing how their bodies fit into the patterns of both segregation's and integration's message and into the culture's understanding of memory and identity. Murray noted during a 1959 Lincoln-Douglas Banquet, Integration is a matter of the mind and the spirit as well as the body, acknowledging the body as a site where the South's ideological hierarchies were reinforced (Being 16).

Born in 1910, Murray described her youth as one cloaked by the effects of segregation and by violence against African Americans. Lumpkin and Smith, born in the late 1890s, each discussed their childhood as years when they learned the lessons, laws, rituals, and mores of white supremacy. The apex of Lost Cause ceremonies and rituals occurred between 1880 and 1920, meaning Murray, Lumpkin, and Smith spent their childhoods in the South at a time when death figured prominently in regional memory. The Lost Cause rituals stressed the South's role in the Civil War as a noble, even holy one, emphasizing both an affirmation and adoration of the Confederate veterans and the Confederate dead. In its early years the movement fostered memorial associations that maintained Confederate graveyards and established monuments in cemeteries. In these years of the Lost Cause cult, death—as Gaines Foster and Charles Reagan Wilson note—lived vividly in the white South's imagination. During the post—Civil War years, southerners seemed fascinated with death (Foster, Ghosts 37). Wilson writes that the Lost Cause was a cult of the dead, that every time a Confederate veteran died, every time flowers were placed on graves on Southern Memorial Day, Southerners relived and confronted the death of the Confederacy (Baptized 36). The cemeteries where southerners created their memory and identity were collective representations…of the community's basic beliefs and values about what kind of society it is and where each fits into the secular world of the living and the spiritual society of the dead (Warner 361).

By the 1880s the rituals and memorials became more celebratory in the representation of war, finally serving as a rationale for bolstering segregation and states’ rights. But because the rituals were celebrated on Confederate Memorial Day and, in their early days, focused on memorializing the dead soldiers and because the early monuments were placed in graveyards, the Lost Cause movement was closely connected to southern rites of death and memory.⁴

In the graveyard, memory of the Confederate South was stored in tombstones and memorials, in Confederate flags driven into grass plots, in Memorial Day speeches and rituals associated with the burial of the dead, and in other sites of regional memory within the graveyards. Dead bodies have enjoyed political life the world over (Verdery 1), and cemeteries have historically served as places where the language of southern memory and identity was spoken in ritualistic form—inscribed on tombs, in texts, and in bodily memories and messages—making cemeteries well suited as metaphors for the South in the autobiographies of Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray. This language of southern memory brought together an array of beliefs and representations about blacks and whites from the region. Blacks were represented as childlike and faithful on one hand, animal-like and vicious on the other. Their history during Reconstruction, according to myths, was one of ignorance, corruption, and lust. Whites, however, with the cooperation of their faithful slaves, had fought to preserve a glorious, organic heritage during the Civil War, even though they had lost their noble cause.⁵

These representations of the body are found in monuments, memorial dedications, media publications, public performances, and academic discourses. Scholars have argued that collective memory exists literally in the body, in the