By Jim Stokely
In 1878, a 19-year-old named Willard Jerome Dykeman visited the Asheville area for a summer. A teenager whose father operated a successful dairy farm in upstate New York, Willard was well-equipped to herd sheep on Elk Mountain. He never forgot the experience.
Willard J. Dykeman
As an adult back in New York, he married Jessie Kelley in 1884, raised two children and continued dairy farming. After Jessie took a severe fall and died in 1908, Willard looked for a radical change of life. He returned to the Asheville area. Here he met Bonnie Cole, a woman 38 years younger than he, descended from the earliest white pioneers of northern Buncombe, Madison and Yancey counties. They married in March of 1917. Their only child, born 1920, was Wilma Dykeman.
He was old enough to be Wilma’s grandfather, but Willard’s impact on his daughter was profound. A decade following her father’s fatal heart attack in 1934, Wilma structured her memoir around Willard Jerome Dykeman.
“I believe my father was Puritanical in many ways,” she wrote in Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood. “There was a sternness of character in him, a toughness of fibre, that did not yield itself readily to alien ideas, or even change….He was what many today would label conservative, I suppose. But one quality he did have which redeemed him. That quality was a sense of humor. It was a humor which saw the ironies in life, the paradoxes in man.…Often, when he was most touched with sympathy for someone, or riled to anger against someone for what he believed was their own stupidity, I have seen him pause while a quick look of humor and laughter passed over his face at the thought of some incongruity in the whole trifling affair.”
Bernice (Bunny) Carter, whose older sister was Wilma’s best childhood friend, grew up across from the Beaverdam Baptist Church (now Revol Church) in north Asheville. Bunny was a tomboy, always getting in the way of Wilma and sister Katherine (Kit). She had fond memories of Willard Dykeman, who was 63 years her senior. “I called him Dyke,” she says. “I thought he was the greatest thing in the world. Kit would play the piano. I’d be outside.
One time, I was up in a tree. Dyke walked all around the tree looking for me. I said, ‘Hi, Dyke.’ He said, ‘Jump down and I’ll catch you.’ He was like Santa Claus to me. One time we were at the creek looking at minnows. I was around six. I told Dyke, ‘Go get me a jar so I can take these home and play with them.’ He explained to me why the minnows would die, even in the creek water, if I did that.”
Upcoming Events
• Author Wayne Caldwell reads from and discusses his novel Shadow Family on Thursday, November 12, at 7 p.m. at the West Asheville Public Library.
• Author Aisha Adams discusses her memoir, This Is What Made Me, on Thursday, December 10, at 7 p.m. at the West Asheville Public Library.
Both events may be attended in person or via Zoom. Register at WilmaDykemanLegacy.org.
The Wilma Dykeman Legacy is an independent nonprofit organization whose mission is to clarify and promote social and environmental justice through the written and spoken word. Staffed by volunteers since its founding in 2012, the Legacy is supported by community donations. The Legacy owns no real estate; its “home” is its rich website presenting a new article every two weeks about Wilma’s core values of environmental integrity, social justice or the power of the written and spoken word. Learn more at WilmaDykemanLegacy.org.
