Lillian Smith: Reflections on Race and Sex

In February of 1956, Lillian Smith wrote from Neptune Beach, Florida: 

“This morning a sixty-eight year old woman swam into the sea in front of our house and tried to drown herself . . . she would not let them help her on a boat. She fought wildly for her right to die . . . she stuck it out one hour and a half before she weakened and succumbed to life’s insistent demand that she survive. It was fascinating to watch.”¹

It must have been fascinating, for Lillian Smith was engaged in a life and death struggle of her own — against cancer — that went on for 13 years. Refusing to succumb to the insistent demand of recurring malignancy (she once told a friend, “my body will probably die before ‘I’ know I’m dead’’),² Smith wrote five books in this period, revised another, published numerous articles, lent her physical presence and the fund-raising capabilities of her writings to the nonviolent civil-rights movement, and traveled about the country discussing with college students and various civic groups her convictions about the human condition. 

She sometimes described the cancer as a “friendly enemy.”³ It left her in pain and in debt and was a horrible drain on her physical strength. But other, more spiteful adversaries — censors, editors, critics, vandals — did deeper damage. They zeroed in on her very reason for being, her work. Her novel, Strange Fruit, was banned in Boston in 1944. Reviewers ridiculed her books, as when the Atlanta Constitution wrote of Killers of the Dream “There is one chapter, or orgasm. . .”⁴ Sometimes the books were slighted, as with her last novel, One Hour. And sometimes they were burned. 

The historian must say that fire was certainly Smith’s worst enemy. An accidental blaze from an overheated stove in 1944 destroyed part of her correspondence and files relating to the magazine which she had co-edited since 1936. Teenage vandals were responsible for a fire in her study in 1955 that consumed an estimated 13,000 letters, a completed novel set in China, two autobiographical novellas, materials from which she had planned to write a book on India and countless other items of personal and historical value. In 1958, unknown intruders started two forest fires on the mountain where she lived. Although fire fighters were able to save her home, the psychological toll was great. “It broke me up rather badly,” she wrote. “I wanted to leave and never come back.”⁵ 

Lillian Smith faced such opposition largely because she broke taboos on sex and race. Born and raised in Jasper, Florida, making her home for most of her life in Clayton, Georgia, Smith was one Southern white woman who preferred slacks to crinolines and who bothered her head about matters that only men were supposed to discuss. She opposed segregation years before the United States Supreme Court made such a position tenable for most white Americans. She used modern psychology to analyze the patterns of sexual and racial behavior that prevailed in the American South. Her conclusions, though always framed with compassion, were seldom flattering to her ancestors or neighbors. 

 

I

In 1915, when Lillian Smith was 18 years old, her father lost the lumber mills, turpentine stills, light plant, ice plant and store in Jasper, which had comfortably supported his wife and nine offspring. The Smiths moved permanently to their summer cottage in Clayton, Georgia. In 1920, as part of their many-faceted battle against poverty, Mr. Smith opened the first private summer camp for girls in Georgia, naming it for the Laurel Falls that cascaded below their cottage. Lillian had to divide her attention between her promising career as a concert pianist (she studied in Baltimore at the Peabody for substantial periods between 1919 and 1922) and the duties this family enterprise forced upon her. Finally, her parents’ failing health dictated a complete end to her efforts as a musician. In 1925, she was called home from the position she had assumed three years earlier as director of the music department of Virginia School in Huchow, China. Now she became — most reluctantly — director of Laurel Falls Camp. “I saw nothing challenging or interesting in it,” she later recalled.⁶ But, characteristically, she channeled her discontent into creative experimentation. Within two or three summers, the camp had become a living work of art. 

The campers were white girls between the ages of six and sixteen, mostly from the South. Many returned year after year, some graduating to the status of counselors and continuing in that capacity well into their adulthood. The girls received instruction in horsemanship, tennis and swimming, and the camp was nationally noted for its programs in sculpture, drama, dance and music. But the uniqueness of Laurel Falls lay in Lillian Smith’s concern with the inner growth of girls, seeking to come to grips with the emotional, biological and social forces at work in their lives. The campers and “Miss Lil,” as they knew her, talked about subjects that little girls dared not broach anywhere else: their bodies, their hates, their fears, their sense that not everything their parents did and said was right. 

As Smith lay dying in the autumn of 1966, a woman who had spent several summers at Laurel Falls wrote of her “Sunday morning talks” with Miss Lil: 

“‘Honesty,’ ‘Courage,' ‘Dignity,’ just words until Miss Lil made them into unforgettable pictures of human achievement. She did not go into the inequities of race. I don’t think she ever used the word ‘integration. ’ . . . [But these were] words you remembered when Birmingham became more than a place . . . Words you remembered when a hate-filled face screamed obscenities at a small colored child going to school. Words you remembered when the streets of Washington resounded to the marching feet of men and women crying for their place in history . . . When she talked about dignity, courage and honesty, you had pinned the words to your heart. ”⁸ 

At the end of each summer it was customary for the campers to present a play which was an outgrowth of their conversations with Miss Lil. Two of these dramas survive, “Behind the Drums,’’ a dramatization of the struggle of black people to free themselves from “white man’s chains, white man’s gold, white man’s lust,” and “The Girl,” a portrayal of the female child emerging from a “large, pale pink egg, lighted from within, the opening covered by layers of pink chiffon” into a long battle against Hates, Fears, Guilts, and Failures. ⁹ Who could guess that these images of black history and female strength were entertained on the ridge of a mountain in north Georgia by little daughters from some of the “best” white families of the South? 

 

II 

If the activities at Laurel Falls were atypical for the time and the region, the ideas that Smith and a camp counsellor and close friend, Paula Snelling, promulgated in a “little magazine” which they began in 1936 were simply heretical. Like the camp, the magazine was sparked by adversity. In 1936 Smith was tied to a widowed, invalid mother; Snelling had suffered an accident with emotional side effects that were hard to shake. The two women were about, as Smith later recalled, “to lose ourselves in some desperate fashion.” So she suggested that they direct their common love for literature into a magazine. ¹⁰ 

They chose the name Pseudopodia, explaining in their promotional material that a pseudopod is “a tender and temporary projection of the nucleus of the inner self.” ¹¹ After several issues the name changed to The North Georgia Review and the contents broadened to include nonfiction. The magazine assumed its final title in 1942 as The South Today, a journal of what we would now call interdisciplinary thought. The editors’ catalogue of what they wanted their readers to learn about the South included: “its books and writers, its great fortunes, who possess them and how they were made, its business, its political leaders and their opinions...its churches, its schools...its mores, its folkways, its dances, its crafts...its crime centers, its disease centers ‘the Negro,’ ‘the tenant farmer,’ ‘the textile laborer,’ ‘the mine worker,’... the South’s peaches and cream complexion and its warts.” ¹² 

Insight on all these topics was provided through editorials and review articles by Smith and Snelling and through the writings of others. The South Today was the first white Southern journal to publish the work of black scholars and artists. Moreover, Smith and Snelling were among the few writers in the region concerned with how women felt, dreamed, created, suffered as human beings. Editorial comments laid bare the myth that lynching was a requirement for preserving white womanhood. A jointly composed essay titled “Man Born of Woman” exhorted women to overcome culturally imposed habits of keeping an empty head and using a seductive body to maintain the status of parasites. Critical but supportive reviews of the work of women writers such as Carson McCullers and Evelyn Scott appeared as frequently as reviews of the work of better known male writers. Aspiring female authors were given space and encouragement for their work. Pauli Murray’s Dark Testament first appeared in The South Today, and she has called Lillian Smith the “guardian angel” for the early chapters of her first book, Proud Shoes. ¹³ 

At the same time, the editors of the magazine looked at the malevolent effects that traditional sex patterns had upon men. This was one of the themes of an essay entitled “Man Born of Woman” and it was strikingly expressed in a short column written by Smith in 1944 called “Susy and the Bulldozer”: “The American notion of the male as a kind of halfback-gentleman cowboy-quick-on-the-draw must often have been a difficult role for little boys to live up to.” And she wondered, with a daring that would not find acceptance in many corners of our society today, “what effect it would have on their personality and our culture if little boys were permitted to play dolls as long as they want to, if they could, without guilty feelings play at life and love... [instead of] toy machine gun play [which] gives the experience of feeling power without feeling the tenderness that restrains and inhibits power.” 

In this and other such writings one finds a sting in the tail of Smith’s feminism, an expression of her abiding dissatisfaction with the weaknesses exhibited by her own sex. “The only trouble with doll-playing is, it is so much fun that some children are never weaned from it. We all know the women who though they have put on the mask of maternity are still little girls playing dolls with their children.” She concluded that “a nest of machine guns and a couple of bulldozers are preferable to that kind of doll playing.”¹⁴ 

Lillian Smith explored the themes of race and sex in her major published writings — two novels, Strange Fruit and One Hour; two social, philosophical and autobiographical essays, Killers of the Dream and The Journey; a handbook for living up to the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Now is the Time; a warm and often humorous reminiscence, Memory of a Large Christmas; and Our Faces, Our Words, a set of monologues which explore the hearts and minds of participants in the 1960s civil rights movement. From the standpoint of historical impact, Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream are the most significant. 

These were the books that earned for their author the reputation of a guerrilla. Edward Weeks described Strange Fruit as “a novel which is like a hand grenade tossed into a tea party.”¹⁵ When Howard University conferred the Doctor of Humane Letters on Smith shortly after Killers of the Dream appeared, the citation declared, ‘‘You are a dangerous revolutionist. There is enough dynamite in what you say to blow up the very foundation of segregated civilization.” ¹⁶ And they might have added, ‘‘the foundations of sexist civilization” as well. 

It is not necessary to agree with every detail of Smith’s story of how the South “grew its children” to appreciate the impact which her telling of it had upon the minds and souls of those who read or even heard about her books. In Strange Fruit she depicted fictionally the way sexual and racial conditioning in childhood can create pathology in adult society, a process she spelled out explicitly in Killers of the Dream. The furor over Strange Fruit was allegedly caused by her use of the word, f-u-c-k. More obviously the trouble was that the story told of love between a black woman and a white man. Even more fundamentally disturbing was the unrelenting human complexity of all the novel’s characters. Some black readers enjoyed the dissecting of infected white psyches but took umbrage when the lives of the black characters fell short of an ideal. Marxists appreciated scenes of labor exploitation by the capitalist millowner but were incensed by the depiction of a kindly side of the man. 

Smith and her sister adapted the novel for the stage, and it came to Broadway in abbreviated form under the direction of Jose Ferrer. The play was a financial success, but American critical response was mixed. Among the play’s critics was the eminent Walter White, father of the leading lady, who objected to his offspring’s role as the lover of a white man. Yet, the character Jane White portrayed has been called “one of the most memorable women in modern fiction.” And about the entire story Richard Wright said, “There has never been a more truthful picture of the Southern Negro’s desperate plight.” So readers and audiences could not agree about the ideological or social merits of Strange Fruit.¹⁷ There was no question, however, that as a work of art it was gripping. 

Strange Fruit left room for varying interpretations of the author’s meanings and purpose. Smith’s next book, Killers of the Dream, did not. Unequivocally, and with a wealth of autobiographical documentation, Killers details how the South raised its daughters and sons to be gracious and genteel and arrogant and callous at the same time. Racial segregation bred the arrogance and callousness; the graciousness and gentility masked profound sexual and psychological distress. And all this, Smith argued, began at an early age: “[W]hen we as small children crept over the race line and ate and played with Negroes, or broke other segregation customs that were known to us, we felt the same dread fear of consequences, the same overwhelming guilt that was ours when we crept over the sex line and played with our body, or thought thoughts about God or our parents that we knew we must not think. Each was a “sin, ” each “deserved punishment”.... Each was tied up with the other and all were tied dose to God. These were our first lessens. ”¹⁸Her vivid descriptions of the individual and social disorders resulting from these lessons were bound to insult some of her neighbors, including “liberal” Southern editors whose acceptance of segregation she openly challenged and whose own psychological and moral health she was questioning by implication. 

Killers of the Dream, Smith often said, “is the book that turned the South against me...blasted me out of existence—Men like Hodding Carter and Ralph McGill and others on the [Atlanta] Constitution did a dirty job on me in those days.”¹⁹ Sales, reviews, promotion, access to public media never came again for Smith in the big way they had come after Strange Fruit. She felt "smothered” and with justification. 

In part, her work lent itself to being smothered by opponents and undervalued by others, because of the persistence with which she stuck to a belief that had taken root during her experience with South Today — that “nothing literary in this country is profoundly serious if it evades segregation, color, race, the body image.”²⁰ As Margaret Sullivan has noted, this “unabashed acceptance of the moralist’s role made it fairly easy for critics to dismiss her works as propaganda or ‘problem novels.’” And Smith was certain that racism among the literary establishment in New York contributed to lack of recognition for her work. 

In addition to these explanations stands the fact that Lillian Smith was a woman who did not write about the domestic transactions considered appropriate for “women writers.” Instead she offered grimly realistic portraits of racial and sexual disaster. Time and again she came up against hostility, incomprehension and faintheartedness on the part of men who controlled the newspapers and magazines and television networks, the publishing houses and their advertising departments. When Now is the Time began making waves, for example, it mysteriously disappeared from bookstore shelves. Smith’s editor assured her that his company was only counting the copies. But those copies never reappeared.²¹ When NBC announced that Smith was to appear on the Dave Garroway Show with James Eastland of Mississippi, pressures brought to bear against the network prevented the author from reading the statement she had prepared, while Eastland was allowed to monopolize the “conversation.”²² 

In 1961, she wrote: “There is a group in this country who have done all they could to low rate every book I have written; there is tremendous anger against me felt by many white men not because of racial ideology but because I told their sex secrets — and secrets that were not too bright and honorable to look at. There is this sex jealousy and I have known it for many years.”²³ Smith was equally certain that the leading white male authors in America — “Williams, Miller, Faulkner, Hemingway” — all failed to understand “women or Woman.... Because they dare not return to the womb, dare not come close to the Dark Mother, they write often like boys.” Faulkner, Smith observed, feels like "a helpless boy when confronted with female strength and female blindness ...and he takes scissors and cuts women up in little paper thin pieces. ”²⁴ 

In conscious contrast Smith labored to make the women in her fiction as fully complex as life itself. “The women in her novels,” Paula Snelling has said, “reveal nuances of female behavior seldom visible to male authors; they also show societally generated perversions of this inherent feminity.” Snelling continues, “Had cancer not intervened, her long-worked-on novel Julia and her contemplated autobiography would have been her major, deeply felt and pondered, works on this seductive subject of gender.”²⁵ 

Lillian Smith contended that no western woman had ever written a great autobiography, that down through the years we had allowed men to “create one image after another” of who we are — madonna, bitch, whore, doll. The time had come, she felt, for us to engage in the “great and daring creative act” of discovering for ourselves our own identity.²⁶ Smith longed to create from her own life a model for this female act of discovery. A premonition that death would overtake her too soon surely lies behind the letter she wrote to another Southern female writer less than a year before she died, in which she said, “I wish so much that sometime — while I am living or afterward — that you’d do at least a magazine study of me as writer and woman. I feel that you can see more,” she explained.²⁷ 

For Lillian Smith it was usually women in her personal sphere who could see more, who were the most supportive, whose love was the most enduring. When she privately listed the people who had been the closest to her she named one man and six women, adding, “and there were others, some of the camp counsellors; a few of the campers themselves, now grown...”²⁸ At a time when the research of scholars such as Carroll Smith-Rosenburg and Nancy Cott is awakening our interest in the socio-historical significance of “sisterhood” in America, it seems valuable to note this deep emotional bond between Smith and her few close women friends, especially her colleague Paula Snelling and her youngest sister, Esther Smith.²⁹ 

Yet Smith also acknowledged her intellectual and emotional indebtedness to men. When news reached her of the fire in 1944 one of the few people she could stand being with in the early days of her shock and grief was a man. And there were authors — including Ashley Montague, Robert Coles, most especially John Howard Griffin, with whom she shared inner feelings and explored the pains of her personal struggles. 

On one of the rare occasions when she spoke of her unmarried status, Smith told a group of college women: “We of my generation did go out into the world hungering for careers; marriage was important if we could find the right man but...men wanted us to be dolls and not talk, except baby talk.... It hurt like hell...to find that the interesting men liked us in the office and laboratory and on the stage, but didn’t want women like us in their homes.” But this same speech ended on a note of hope for sexual harmony: “It all comes down to our mutual willingness to...think of ourselves first as human beings and second as women and men. ”³⁰ 

Paula Snelling has stressed that Smith knew “the sharp two-edgedness of swords that separate: she had seen that men no less than women, whites no less than blacks are deformed and stunted” whenever one group denies the other full human status.³¹ “I believe,” Smith wrote, “that future generations will think of our times as the age of wholeness: when the walls began to fall; when the fragments began to be related to each other.”³² In the last months of her life, as a result of reading Teilhard de Chardin, she began to set this vision in a time frame of a hundred thousand or a half-million years. 

Perhaps this perspective gave her added courage not only on behalf of American and human civilization but on behalf of her own place in history. Long ago she had told her father, “it’s just as much a sin to cheat yourself as it is to cheat anyone else.”³³ In the late 1950s, she told an agent who tried to get a bargain from her on the movie rights to Strange Fruit, “I am not quite what you and Hollywood think I am, a has-been.... I don’t need to sell Strange Fruit as if it were a bankrupt property...I am patient; I know my worth; I know my historical value to this country.” ³⁴ 

It remains to be seen whether this country will ever agree. 

 

Footnotes 

Most of Lillian Smith's papers are at the University of Georgia at Athens. The citations below are to that collection, unless material in the possession of Paula Snelling at Clayton, Ga., is specifically indicated. In addition, there are Smith papers at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Fla., and in the Julius Rosenwald Fund Papers at Dillard University. The only published biography is Louise Blackwell and Frances Clay, Lillian Smith (N.Y., 1971). 

1. Lillian Smith to Denver Lindley, February 23, 1956. 

2. Lillian Smith to Margaret Sullivan, January 22, 1966. 

3. For example, Lillian Smith to Harry Golden, January 28, 1966. 

4. Jack Tarver, Atlanta Constitution, February 9, 1950. 

5. Lillian Smith to Helen Lockwood, December 19, 1958. 

6. Lillian Smith’s autobiographical manuscripts at Clayton. 

7. Some of the essence of the camp can be found in catalogues, the “Laurel Leaf” newsletters to campers and parents and essays of instruction for counsellors. See also Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (N.Y., 1949), pp. 29 - 42. Frances Mendelson, “Psychology Teaching Stressed at Lillian Smith’s Girl’s Camp,” New York Herald Tribune, Sunday, August? ; Lillian Smith, “Growing Plays: The Girl," Educational Leadership, II, May 1945, pp. 349-360, and Lillian Smith, “Summer Camps,” in Andrew J. Ritchie, Sketches of Rabun County History, Clayton, Georgia, 1948, pp. 429 - 434. Most of the alumnae of Laurel Falls are still living and an oral history project on the effects of the camp on their lives would be a valuable undertaking. 

8. Jane Parks Ward,"Letter from Buss Eye,” September 1966, at Clayton. 

9. “Behind the Drums” reprinted in White and Suggs, From the Mountain, (Memphis 1972); “Girl” in Educational Leadership, op.cit. 

10. Autobiographical notes, Athens. 

11. Introduction, From the Mountain. 

12. North Georgia Review, Spring 1940, back cover; Margaret Sullivan, “Lillian Smith: The Public Image and the Personal Vision,” Mad River Review, Summer- Fall, 1967, pp. 3 - 21. 

13. Pauli Murray to Redding Sugg, October 10, 1971, at Clayton. 

14. Lillian Smith, South Today, spring-summer 1944. See also Redding Sugg, Jr., “Lillian Smith and the Condition of Woman,” South Atlantic Quarterly (Spring 1972), pp. 155 - 164. 

15. Atlantic Monthly, May 1944, p. 127. 

16. Howard University citation, at Clayton. 

17. Lillian Smith, “History of Strange Fruit,” Saturday Review of Literature, February 17, 1945. Lula Jones Garrett, “Strange Fruit,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 18, 1944, p.9. Lillian Smith to Jerry Bick, October 16, 1961 (re Walter White, p.3). Quote from Richard Wright, Current Biography, 1944, pp. 635 - 638. Life Magazine, December 24, 1945, pp. 33 - 35. 1

18. Killers, pp. 69 - 70. 

19. Lillian Smith to Mrs. Albright, October 21, 1957. 

20. Lillian Smith to Edward Keating, (date uncertain). 

21. J.O. Robinson conversations with Paula Snelling and numerous references in Lillian Smith’s letters. For example, Lillian Smith to Hazel F. Bailey, April, 1965. 

22. J.O. Robinson conversations with Paula Snelling and references in Lillian Smith’s letters, e.g., to Mrs. Albright, October 3, 1957. 

23. Lillian Smith to Jerry Bick, October 27,1961. 

24. Lillian Smith to Gerald Sykes, August 8, 1959. 

25. Paula Snelling, “Re Lillian Smith." 

26. Lillian Smith, “No More Ladies in the Dark,” Saturday Review, August 25, 1962, p. 24, and speech at University of Florida, May 10, 1962; unpublished manuscript at Clayton. Lillian Smith, “To Tame the Shrew,” Saturday Review, February 23, 1963, pp. 33 -44. 

27. To Wilma Dykeman Stokely, October 30,1965. 

28. Lillian Smith to Mrs. Morehouse, n.d. 

29. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual. . .,” Signs, Autumn, 1975, pp. 1 - 29. Nancy Cott, “Young Women in the Second Great Awakening in New England,” Feminist Studies, Fall 1975, pp. 15 - 29. See Lillian Smith’s comments on her friendship with Paula Snelling in autobiographical writings, Athens Manuscript and “In answer to questions from Joan Titus.” 

30. See autobiographical manuscripts at Athens; University of Florida speech, op. cit. 

31. Paula Snelling, “Re Lillian Smith.” 

32. Quoted in Saturday Review, October 22, 1966, pp. 53 -54. 

33. Lillian Smith to “Dearest Dad,” Fall, 1917. 

34. Lillian Smith to Jerry Bick, October 27, 1961.