It wasn’t hard to pick out Wilma Dykeman in any crowd with her penchant for big wide hats.
But beneath those couture creations, the demure lady demonstrated real literary talent, a sharp eye for detail and the right ear for the mountain dialogue of “you’uns” rather than “y’all.”
From the publication of her sweeping history “The French Broad” in 1965, Dykeman ranked the region’s first lady of literature with 18 books to her credit, including the Appalachian novels “The Far Woman”
Her first words as a child growing up in Beaverdam were reported as “water coming down” as she gazed up in wonder at the mountains and springs surrounding her. That wonder never went away, but turned into a passion to clean up and protect those life-giving waters.
Mark Twain had quipped that the Mississippi was “too thick to drink, too thin to plow.” But in the case of the French Broad, there were decades when no one dared swim in the fouled waters, let alone think of ever drinking from it. Years before Rachel Carson’s seminal “Silent Spring,” Dykeman warned of the evils of pollution that had turned the French Broad into little more than an industrial sewer.
Just as a dying downtown Asheville has seen a renaissance in the past 20 years, the French Broad River has recovered as a recreation draw and natural resource. The manufacturing giants have given way to art studios and breweries and a burgeoning tourism industry.
With more change coming to the river, it’s time to look back at Dykeman’s prescient book, for the second round of the Asheville Citizen-Times Book Circle, a virtual book discussion for our online readers. And please do come out for our live event 5:30-7 p.m. Nov. 5 in the boardroom of the Lenoir-Rhyne Graduate Center at the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce, Montford Avenue.
I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Wilma several times over the years, and she was always gracious in her answers. She had been a contributor to the Asheville Citizen-Times since she was a teenager and always had a soft spot for her hometown paper.
As a schoolgirl, Dykeman interviewed Thomas Wolfe at the Old Kentucky Home in 1936, when the famed novelist came home again to the town that had so reviled him for his first novel “Look Homeward, Angel.”
She remembered a giant of a man standing in the parlor, his arm draped across the piano. “I can just see him standing there,” Dykeman recalled in a 1998 interview. “He was so very gracious, very unselfish, not at all like some crude mountain of a man as some critics portrayed him.”
She recalled the intensity of his gaze, the piercing intelligence of his brown eyes. “When he looked at you, you knew you had been looked at. You wondered what he had seen and if it was going into the novel. He saw through and around people. He saw the total picture.”
She had fond memories of the Wolfe family since it was through Wolfe’s mother, Julia, and his sister, Mabel, that she was introduced to her future husband, James Stokel,y of the Stokely canning family.
It was fitting that Dykeman would win the inaugural Thomas Wolfe Memorial Prize in 1955 for her first book “The French Broad.”
Dykeman proved ever bit the seer in her own work, starting with her debut. She sounded the alarm about pollution in the river.
The publisher wanted to ax the chapter “Who Killed the French Broad?” but Dykeman stood her ground. Before her death in 2006, she saw the river transformed.
Dykeman saw not only the changes coming in the region, but also what remained in attitudes and authenticity. Her legacy was honored in RiverLink’s plan for the Wilma Dykeman Riverway, a series of trails that connect the Swannanoa and French Broad to a future.
With $50 million in taxpayer money and $200 million in private investment pouring into the River Arts District over the coming years, more change is ahead for our river, which worries some. What will that growth look like? Will we recognize the French Broad in years to come.
Dykeman had the same concerns a half century ago, in the 1965 introduction to the reissue of her book, she wrote:
“The landscape changes. The mountains remain. Many of the people do not … Natives went elsewhere in search of a livelihood while outlanders came here in search of refuge from the urban blight. It is one of the ironies, and perhaps one of the hopes, of much of Appalachia that many of its people have found the secret of making a way of life where they often could not find means of making a living.”
If you’re a newcomer to these parts, you can get a crash course in local history with “The French Broad.” Locals can refresh their memories and learn something perhaps they had forgotten dipping into Dykeman’s words.
“For the French Broad country, like most of the mountain region which surrounds it, nourishes paradoxes,” she wrote. “That is the source of much of its allure — and despair. The roots of the paradoxes, the problems, the promises, run deep into the past. This is one glimpse into that past, and one glance at the present. Perhaps it provides some perspective for the future.”
Book Circle
The Asheville Citizen-Times Book Circle is reading Wilma Dykeman’s “The French Broad.”
Follow the discussion and post your favorite passages at our Facebook Page www.facebook.com/AshevilleBookClub
Join us for a discussion 5:30-7 p.m. Nov. 5 in the boardroom of the Lenoir-Rhyne Graduate Center at the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce, 36 Montford Ave. Plenty of free parking.
Leave a Reply