Chapter 3 considers the myriad nature of southern memoir, with particular focus on the anti-racist work of Lillian Smith. Published in a decade replete with southerners writing about the South, including W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, William Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream confronts southern paternalism in a stark, direct manner. Specifically, Smith responds to many of her contemporaries by presenting the South not as a romantic site of gentility, but rather as a psychologically traumatizing hellscape, one replete with specters of violence perpetrated against blacks as well as paternalistic control levied against women and poor whites. This chapter contextualizes Smith alongside these other writers, with primary focus on Percy's nostalgia and romanticization of southern gentility, as well as his disdain for poor whites, whom he derides as scoundrels and markedly inferior versions of whiteness.