Wilma Dykeman (1920–2006)

This, then, was what a glimpse of truth might be like; hard as stone, beautiful as stars, satisfying as bread.

The Tall Woman is the story of Lydia Moore, a girl born in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and raised in a hard-scrabble world that gets no easier when she becomes a woman and marries Mark McQueen. It is in the years following the Civil War, when the hurt and division has not been healed, that Lydia must find a way to live her life, raise her children, and bind her community together. Dykeman’s descriptions of the mountains and its people are so vivid and real that you close the book feeling you are losing a place you know and friends you can barely bear to leave.

There is a mountain stream that figures in Lydia’s life...a favorite place that she keeps clean and fresh and from which she draws her water. I cast back into my childhood to visits with my Great Uncle Naman, who lived in the North Georgia Mountains, part of the same ridge that crosses North Carolina. One of the things that stands out clearly is going to the church there to clean the graves of my great-grandparents and drinking from the stream that ran behind the churchyard. The water was the clearest, sweetest-tasting liquid that ever touched my lips. I knew Lydia’s stream.

There is a flavor of the mountains that comes from the genuine and easy way Dykeman has her characters speak. There is Aunt Tilda, whose “Eh, law, child” echoed the expressions of my own grandmother and aunts. And such wonderful expressions as “Could he but buy himself for what he's worth, and sell himself for what he thinks he's worth, he'd be princely rich overnight." I laughed aloud at that one and don’t think I will ever forget it.

Lydia’s life is hard, in every way that a life can be. She faces her personal trials with a wisdom and fortitude that is inspirational. She draws her strength from the very mountains she stands upon and from the faith and love she has inherited from her parents.

Sometimes it seemed to Lydia that work was the only certainty, the only lasting truth in a human world of fitful change. Work and the mountains remained. Joy was deceitful and as brief as a summer rainbow. Love was a spear upon which you hurled yourself in ecstasy--to discover pain and bear the wound forever

Even in the face of this, Lydia never gives up. Her progression from girl to wife to mother is gratifying to behold. I loved her, along with every other character with which Dykeman peopled her world. How, oh how, do these kinds of wonderfully written books fade in obscurity? Why is Wilma Dykeman’s name not listed on all these “before you die” lists? I am so happy to have read her at last and hope someone else will pick up this book because of this review and then pass the word on.

My particular thanks to Laura at the Southern Literary Trail who has told me time and again that I didn’t know what I was missing.… (plus d'informations)

KIRKUS REVIEW:
"In the sad, bad, mad, mod world, there will be those who will happily adjust their bifocals to the rustic, restorative musings of Mrs. Dykeman which begin with an elegy to the elementals (""a fresh crust of bread"" or a ""clump of fragile green ferns"") and ascend to the triumphant assertion--""I just love being a woman. . . especially in the spring. . . . I can buy a hat the color of dandelions and decorated with a froth of flowers."" Her whole book is indeed a froth of flowers along with homebody details on anything from curtains to calendars, on having a son wear a starched shirt--or sending him away to school, on travels here and in Europe (Biarritz to Dachau). Throughout it all the abundant sentiment is anti-materialist and to a degree anti-modern, as aromatic as sassafras and sometimes as sticky as her native honeysuckle." [Ouch!]

North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame:
"Look to This Day (1969) is a book about wilma Dykeman Stokely's own life and convictions... Her many honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 1985 North Carolina Award for Literature. She held the honorary title of Tennessee State Historian from 1981 until she died. A popular lecturer, she taught a spring course for many years at the University of Tennessee. Sally Buckner relates in her anthology Our Words, Our Ways that: “Ms. Dykeman urges students to learn to listen and look at the world with keen eyes and ears, then apply themselves diligently. She also draws a keen distinction between aptitude and attitude. ‘The talent comes from developing the aptitude,’ she has said. ‘The writer comes from developing the attitude.'”… (plus d'informations)