Letters from Old Screamer Mountain

Letters from Old Screamer Mountain

In 1939, when Melanie Morrison’s mother, Eleanor, was eighteen, she spent a winter weekend at the home of Lillian Smith on Old Screamer Mountain in North Georgia. Smith was a white Southern author who wrote scathing critiques of white supremacy.

That weekend was an unforgettable turning point in Eleanor’s young life as she and her college friends stayed up late listening to Lillian read from her manuscripts and talk about the shriveled-up heart of whiteness.

Seven decades later, in 2012, Melanie made a pilgrimage to the Lillian E. Smith Center on Old Screamer Mountain to write about the intergenerational legacies of lynching and how that reign of terror remains largely unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators.

From the mountain, Melanie wrote letters to her mother describing the avalanche of emotions and epiphanies she was experiencing. She did not send those letters, because Eleanor was living with significant dementia, but she intended to read excerpts to Eleanor when she returned home, hoping to retrieve pieces of her mother’s history that dementia had erased.

Letters from Old Screamer Mountain is an intimate testimony to the power of intergenerational legacies and the urgency to write what must not be forgotten.

(RCWMS Press)

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PRAISE FOR LETTERS from OLD SCREAMER MOUNTAIN

With infinite tenderness, passion, and compassion, Melanie Morrison tells a multilayered story linking generations of strong women doing the work of racial justice. Family history, the role of community, a legacy of anti-racist activism, and the profound grief (and eventual acceptance) that accompany loss and change are woven together in these unsent letters, written from Old Screamer Mountain. Morrison’s skill in working these strands loosely, and with great love, makes this a model of epistolary storytelling.
—Laura Apol, author of “A Fine Yellow Dust”
In “Letters from Old Screamer Mountain,” Melanie Morrison connects two angles of anguish: historical silences about lynching in white Southern communities and attempts to reach a beloved elderly parent through a slowly thickening wall of dementia. From the mountain in North Georgia where Lillian Smith lived and wrote, Morrison explores the witnessing of painful truths and probes the toxicities of American racial violence. Brimming with devotion, loss, and tenderness, this is a uniquely approachable and beautifully honest rendition of love between daughter and mother and of resolute intergenerational commitments to social justice.
— Teresa Barnes, Associate Professor of History and Gender/Women’s Studies
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Melanie Morrison has seemingly done the impossible, blending particular intimacies—her reverence for Lillian Smith’s anti-racism work, a parent living with dementia, the loss of place—with the universal imperative to reckon with a past that is not past. I wish stories like the one Morrison has so deftly brought to life were taught in every classroom and home. What a different world we could begin to build.
— Claudia Horwitz, social justice facilitator, activist, and author of “The Spiritual Activist”
At a time when white supremacy abounds, this book is a must-read. Through Morrison’s remarkable series of letters to her mother (who is “graced” with dementia), the reader learns of these amazing women who devoted their lives for the cause of racial justice.
— Demetria Martinez, activist, poet, and novelist from Albuquerque, New Mexico
This little book is immense. It is far more than a recitation of days spent in a writing retreat surrounded by the ghostly beauty of a former girls’ camp. The letters weave many threads in a heartfelt, personal journey: the early stages of Morrison’s work on lynching and the long wake of trauma that lynching inflicted. Writing to her mother, who is slipping into the mists of memory loss, Morrison writes real life into thirteen letters, each “inhabited” by courageous spirits and the power of love.
— Laurel Schneider, Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University
Historical excavation, intergenerational anti-racist legacies, family systems, ecological love, dementia and white supremacist forgetting, place, retreat, ghosts untended and their hallowed haunting—“Letters from Old Screamer Mountain” pulls us in like collage. How could these pieces all possibly fit together? This book does in word what Dr. Morrison does in the flesh: wraps us ever increasingly (oh that last page!) in the bonds of love so that together, without flinching, we can face what must be faced.
—Emily Joye McGaughy, facilitator, activist, and writer