SUBVERSION AND THE DOUBLE VOICE IN LILLIAN SMITH AND KATHERINE DUPRE LUMPKIN

Lillian Smith and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin provide a subversive framework for the history of the South through the genre of autobiography. This paper will explore how both authors use a double voice to articulate their confrontation with the Lost Cause. On the one hand, the child protagonist is a Southerner and therefore an insider and participant, while on the other hand, the adult protagonist subverts the dominant social discourse thanks to a critical distance which is both physical and psychological. Smith and Lumpkin use autobiography to challenge tradition, hence subverting the central roles of race and gender.

“Crashing to Bits”

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.

Reviewing the South: Competing Canons in South Today and the Kenyon Review

This chapter considers the editorial careers of Lillian Smith and John Crowe Ransom. Lillian Smith co-edited the little magazine South Today from 1936 to 1945 out of Clayton, Georgia, while John Crowe Ransom was the long-time editor of the Kenyon Review, a journal important in the proliferation of the New Criticism. This chapter uses these two figures, their periodicals, and their editorial decisions to show two competing criteria for a literary canon at the moment of World War II. Smith, whose magazine published many of her own essays on southern culture, was an anti-segregationist, and values literary works that established a progressive view on race relations. Smith’s ideal literary canon was a socially and politically engaged one. On the other hand, the optics of being apolitical by emphasizing aesthetics were the guiding principles for Ransom in his leadership of Kenyon Review, evidenced by the kinds of criticism and reviews published.

Lillian Smith

Lillian Smith (b. 1897–d. 1966) was born in Jasper, Florida, and grew up in a large and well-to-do southern family. In 1915, in the wake of the First World War, her father, Calvin Warren Smith, lost his financial standing and relocated his family to their summer home in North Georgia where he opened first a hotel and then a summer camp for girls, which Smith would later own and direct. It is somewhat surprising that no one has yet made a feature film based on Smith’s life. She is the Floridian teenager who found herself transplanted to a scenic but rural environment in the north Georgia mountains; the young woman who superintended elementary schools in this rural setting; the undergraduate student at both the local Piedmont College (1915–1916) and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore (1917–1918, 1919–1922); the music teacher at a missionary school in Huzhow, China, an experience that solidified her social consciousness (1922–1925); the progressive director of Laurel Falls Camp for girls, many of whom came from the state’s wealthiest families (1925–1948); the publisher of South Today, a quarterly magazine and forum for liberal thought that she coedited for ten years with her life partner Paula Snelling (1936–1944); the controversial author of Strange Fruit, one of the best-selling novels of 1944; the self-analyst who published Killers of the Dream, a groundbreaking work of autobiography and cultural criticism that appeared first in 1949 and then again in an expanded edition in 1962; the friend and advisor to influential players on the national scene, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and the combative social activist who withstood threats as she promoted her liberal vision through fiction, letters, essays, speeches, and pamphlets—including Now Is the Time (1954), her ardent defense of school desegregation—and creative works of self-writing and nonfiction prose, including The Journey (1954) and her final book, Our Faces, Our Words (1964). Smith was diagnosed with cancer in 1953, the disease that took her life in 1966 at the height of the civil rights movement that she, through her writings and activism, had helped to bring about and which she saw as evidence that human beings can in fact evolve. Smith turned a searchlight on the workings of white supremacy and blasted conservative ideologies of both race and gender. She has, since her death, emerged slowly but steadily as a pivotal figure in attempts to redraw the boundaries of the literary and cultural renaissance in the mid-20th century South.

Desegregating Liberalism

Lillian Smith, born in the American South, became a leading critic of white supremacy and segregation in the years from the 1920s to the 1960s. Her essays and most famous novel were radical challenges to the Jim Crow system and notable for their feminist critique of patriarchal gender norms. The chapter traces Smith’s development as an activist and writer, examines the literary devices she uses in her writing to educate readers, and considers her lasting impact on race studies and women’s studies. An analysis of her bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, demonstrates Smith’s commitment to exposing how racism and repressive sexual mores distort the lives of its major protagonists. Examination of the two editions of her major work, Killers of the Dream, shows how its autobiographical and pedagogical devices further develop the formal characteristics of liberal race fiction.

Reception

In Pantheon’s Andre Schiffrin, Loewen and Sallis secured, with Pat Watters’s help, an unlikely but sympathetic publisher. In addition to critiques by experts in the field, the authors also gained the cooperation of two teachers who tried their manuscript with their students. When published in 1974, Conflict and Change received enthusiastic reviews by Bill Minor, Robert Coles, and others in the few publicatons that reviewed it. In 1976 the Southern Regional Council awarded the book its Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction.