Letters from Old Screamer Mountain

In 1939, Melanie Morrison’s mother, Eleanor, at age eighteen 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 on Old Screamer Mountain 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 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.