From Whence Cometh My Help:
The African American Community at Hollins College
by Ethel Morgan Smith
University of Missouri Press, 2000
Reviewed by Katherine Bankole, Ph.D., director, WVU Center
for Black Culture and Research.
Ethel Morgan Smith, a WVU associate professor
of English, makes a tremendous contribution to literature, oral
history, and institutional biography in From Whence Cometh
My Help: The African American Community at Hollins College. Like
Nell Irvin Painter in her 1997 work Sojourner Truth: A Life,
a Symbol, Smith provides a voice to the "invisible people"
of the Hollins community. These people were the enslaved Africans
who were brought to Roanoke, Virginia, in 1842 by the founder
of the women's college, and who remained in the community after
emancipation.
Using the primary source data of the time, interviews with members of the Hollins community, and her own journal observations, Smith provides a glimpse into the important role of blacks in the area. Her work is indicative of the rich texture which is produced by scholars attempting to give a voice to people who were not privileged enough to leave the kinds of records mainstream scholarship relies upon to tell life stories. In this well-documented work, Smith weaves her own impressions as a researcher of how she gained entry into the Hollins community within the broader context of the African American experience in the United States. As a writer, Smith is able to move in a curvilinear fashion as she traces the lives of enslaved Africans at Hollins, documents their descendants, and gives a sense of the contemporary challenges and achievements of the institution.
In addition to the meticulous research, Smith, through her journal observations in From Whence Cometh My Help, provides insight into the historical and literary journey of a researcher. She brings you into the long exploration in unearthing the history of Hollins College. She is honest about what the work represents to the legacy of Hollins. And her personal narrative demonstrates the integrated nature of various African American experiences.
Smith also shows the ways in which the Hollins community was different from other early black academic communities. One feature she notes is that among many other schools with similar surrounding black populations, Hollins was one of the few in which the children of the servants of Hollins did not have access to education. She notes that in its history only one resident from the Hollins community earned a college degree from that institution.
Oral history is prominent in the work. This is where the silence of blacks in Hollins is broken. The participants speak candidly of the service work they performed at the institution, to the extent that one resident was the unofficial "dean of servants." The oral history also describes the various functions of members of the Hollins community in running the college, and how the people—through the work of individuals and the church—developed their own sense of community.
Importantly, Smith, in the literary tradition of Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison, builds on the fundamental research paradigms in the work of black women writers. This paradigm makes the assumption that African Americans are agents of their own historical experiences rather than passive victims to social circumstance. In addition, this work is as much "foundation literature" as it is an important rendering of the history of an enslaved people and their descendants. This means that Smith has contributed to an important area of Africana Studies: the early history of African Americans in the development of white academic communities.
This book will serve as a guide to those who seek to discover the history of African Americans in the cemeteries and in the work and perseverance of people humbled by the imposition of institutionalized prejudice. As a guide to students and burgeoning scholars, the work demonstrates the inordinate challenge of researchers in Africana Studies across disciplines. The book is a highly readable account of the African American experience through the microcosm of the Hollins community.
The people of the Hollins community understood the meaning of their lives. As one of the main subjects in From Whence Cometh My Help notes: "Our history is all that we have." Smith does an excellent job in translating the epic memory of the early African American experience at Hollins College.
Alumni Win National Writing Awards
WVU graduates Ann Pancake '85 and Ben Doyle
'98 have won prestigious national awards in creative writing.
Both were English majors at WVU.
Pancake, who received her B.A. in English summa cum laude,
was awarded the 2000 Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Prize
in Fiction for her collection of short stories, Given Ground.
The collection is published by the University Press of New England.
Doyle was honored with the 2000 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy
of American Poets.The award was given for his first collection
of poems, Radio, Radio, published by the Louisiana State
University Press.
Pancake's award-winning
collection features tales set in West Virginia. One of the judges,
David Bradley, called Given Ground "an astoundingly
rich rendering of one of America's most often caricatured and
most poorly understood heartlands." The Bakeless Prizes
are sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont.
Born in Romney, Pancake says: "I consider myself very fortunate
to have grown up in this state because I think few environments
in late 20th-century America provided a better writer's education.
West Virginia's storytelling traditions, its rich language, and
its bone-deep sense of place all shaped me as a writer and all
deeply inform my book."
Pancake received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University
of North Carolina and the University of Washington, respectively.
She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the
Erie campus of Penn State University. Her writing has appeared
in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and Massachusetts
Review.
"I'm especially grateful to my WVU professors, Margot Racin
and the late Jack Welch, both of whom gave me encouragement and
guidance when I first began taking fiction-writing seriously,"
she said.
Doyle earned his M.F.A. in creative writing from the Iowa Writers
Workshop in 2000. His poems have appeared in Boston Review,
Tin House, Fence, and New Republic.
Susan Howell, a judge for the Walt Whitman Award, said that Doyle's
poems are "rebellious, dangerous, ironic, unstable, and
deliberate. They brilliantly articulate the paradoxical, anticlimactic
inconsistencies of our postmodern American landscape."
Doyle is currently teaching in the WVU Creative Writing Program.