Clifton, Tennessee: T. S. Stribling: Literary Landmarks of the Southern United States, #15

T. S. Stribling (1888–1965) was born in Clifton, Tennessee, and after short and unsucessful (because half-hearted) attempts at being a teacher and a lawyer, he soon took up writing. At first he only wrote short pulp fiction stories, and his first novel – The Cruise of the Dry Dock (1917) – is largely an extended version of these kind of stories. But his second novel, Birthright (1922), is a much more serious and mature work, which concerns an idealistic young man of mixed race who's straight out of Harvard, and who moves back home to the imaginary Hooker's Bend in Tennessee, where he meets the same racial prejudices. In the end he feels the necessity to move back north.

Stribling went on to write 'The Vaiden Trilogy', consisting of The Forge (1931), The Store (1932), and The Unfinished Cathedral (1934), of which the second novel won the Pulitzer Prize. This trilogy is set in Alabama from the beginning of the Civil War through to the 1920s, and the exploitation of blacks by whites is a major theme.

Stribling's two final novels, The Sound Wagon (1935) and These Bars of Flesh (1938) are set in Washington, D.C, and New York City respectively.

Stribling later returned to Clifton, Tennessee, where he died. This was his front porch.

Cliton Library above is a few hundred yards from the small town of Clifton, and now doubles as a small museum dedicated to T. S. Stribling. Opposite it is a fine view of the Tennessee River, where there is a marker stating 'Here the command of Bedford Forrest [a lieutenant general in the confederate army] twice crossed the river on the first west Tennessee raid Dec. 1862–Jan. 1893'.

We now travel about three hundred miles east, via specacular scenery, up and down Monteagle 'Mountain', with its lofty ear-popping ascent and descent with sand bunkers for runaway trucks, and through Chattanooga to a hotel in Cleveland, Tennessee, where we cool off before driving to Clayton, north Georgia, which is still in the mountains.

T. S. Stribling's Birthright

T. S. Stribling was born in Clifton, Tennessee in 1887, and Birthright (1922) was his first excursion into serious novel writing territory. It's the story of the mixed-race Peter Siner, who, following a Harvard education, travels back south to encounter a huge culture shock; not only does he meet racial prejudice by the whites back in Hooker's Bend, but in the black area - Niggertown - he finds the blacks complicit in this prejudice:

'This constant implication among Niggertown inhabitants that Niggertown and all it held was worthless, mean, unhuman depressed Peter. The mulatto knew the real trouble with Niggertown was it had adopted the white village's estimate of it. The sentiment of the white village was overpowering among the imitative negroes. The black folk looked into the eyes of the whites and saw themselves reflected as chaff and skum and slime, and no human being ever suggested that they were aught else.'

Siner has lofty visions of healing the rift between black and white in the South, of, er, making a stand against the movement of (often more gifted) blacks to the North, but in the end the book is pessimistic about these notions, and Siner leaves Tennessee, with his octoroon bride, for work in Chicago. Black readers were unhappy with the book's conclusion, and Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Redmon Faucet, for instance, claimed that the white Stribling greatly contributed to her becoming a novelist; Nella Larsen and Walter White were similarly disturbed by Birthright. Nevertheless, in 'The Myth of Objectivity in T. S. Stribling's Birthright and Unfinished Cathedral' - the latter of which was the final part of the 'Vaiden trilogy', Hyeyum Chung states that several critics have claimed that Stribling was 'at the vanguard of the Southern Literary Renaissance'.*

T. S. Stribling is generally considered to have written all of his significant work in the 1920s and 1930s.

* In Southern Quarterly, (October, 2002).