One Hour

by Lillian E. Smith, Margaret Rose Gladney (Introduction)

Book by Smith, Lillian

Genres: Fiction

440 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Lillian Smith was a writer and social critic of the Southern United States, known best for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944). A white woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality, she was a southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, at a time when such actions almost guaranteed social ostracism.

Lillian Eugenia Smith was born on December 12, 1897 in the America before women's suffrage to a prominent family in Jasper, Florida, the eighth of ten children. Her life as the daughter of a middle class civic and business leader took an abrupt turn in 1915 when her father lost his turpentine mills. The family was not without resources however, and decided to relocate to their summer residence in the mountains of Clayton, Georgia, where her father had previously purchased property and operated the Laurel Falls Camp for Girls.

Now a young adult financially on her own, she was free to pursue her love of music and teaching for the next five years. She spent a year studying at Piedmont College in Demorest (1915–1916). She also had two stints at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore in 1917 and 1919. She returned home and helped her parents manage a hotel and taught in two mountain schools before accepting a position to be director of music at a Methodist school for girls in Huzhou, (now Wuxing, Zhejiang), China. While she was not a churchgoer and did not consider herself religious, it follows that her youthful Christian principals were challenged by the oppression and injustice she would witness there, and that this laid the foundation of her later awareness as a social critic.

Her time in China was limited however by problems back home. Her father's health was declining and she was forced to return home to the States in 1925. Back in Georgia, she assumed the role of heading the Laurel Falls Camp, a position she would hold for the next twenty three years (1925–1948). Laurel Falls Camp soon became very popular as innovative educational institution known for its instruction in the arts, music, drama, and modern psychology. Her father died in 1930, and she was left with responsibility for the family business and the care of her ill mother. It was this period of creative control over the camp, her ability to use it as a place to discuss modern social issues, combined with the pressures of caring for her ailing parents that made her turn to writing as an emotional escape.

Lillian Smith soon formed a lifelong relationship with one of the camp's school counselors, Paula Snelling, of Pinehurst, Georgia, and the two began publishing a small, quarterly literary magazine, Pseudopodia, in 1936. The magazine encouraged writers, black or white, to offer honest assessments of modern southern life, to challenge for social and economic reform, and it criticized those who ignored the Old South's poverty and injustices. It quickly gained regional fame as a forum for liberal thought, undergoing two name changes to reflect its expanding scope. In 1937 it became the North Georgia Review, and in 1942 finally settling with South Today.

In 1949, she kept up her personal assault on racism with Killers of the Dream, a collection of essays that attempted to identify, challenge and dismantle the Old South's racist traditions, customs and beliefs, warning that segregation corrupted the soul. She also emphasized the negative implications on the minds of women and children. Written in a confessional and autobiographical style that was highly critical of southern moderates, it met with something of a cruel silence from book critics and the literary community.

In 1955, the civil rights movement grabbed the entire nation's attention with the Montgomery bus boycott. By this time she had been meeting or corresponding with many southern blacks and liberal whites for years and was well aware of blacks concerns. In response to Brown v. Board of Ed

Reviews

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Her words were hardly more than speech automatisms, her voice was thin as a glass bell – it is always like that and irritating almost beyond belief. But she was doing it: she was reminding us that you keep moving, you walk like animal or machine if you cannot walk like a human being or a child of God, but you don’t stop walking” (230).

Probably one of the most devastating books I’ve ever read, and I essentially specialized in devastating literature in grad school. Also one of the most engrossing books I’ve ever read and believe me I eschew hyperbole – words like “engrossing” or “page-turner” are, for me, nausea-inducing…at least most of the time.

Smith is more famous for Strange Fruit. Apparently One Hour is actually still out of print and has been for some time now. Straonge Fruit is a great novel but it’s not as a large as One Hour – Strange Fruit is a portrait of a moment, or at least is presented as such, whereas One Hour is timeless.

I always teach my students that simile and metaphor are bridges to understanding: if you can draw a comparison for someone then you can more easily communicate with them. One Hour is hurtful in the same way that Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet is hurtful. One Hour is helplessness, frustration, and the nastiness of ambiguity and cosmic indifference.

Show, don’t tell: another thing I tell my students. Think of how people react to pictures of children harmed in war but imagine that the child is actually right in front of you, and you’re the only one who can do something to help him/her, but your hands are tied down and your voice is unable to reach above a whisper. Then you realize that the person who harmed the child has children of his own, and they’re looking at you blankly, and they don’t know what to do, or they’re starving.

Ok, maybe I’m just describing life on earth – or maybe that’s what One Hour does. Both. I ramble.

Read it.