Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times

Lillian Smith (1887–1966): Humanist

166 Lillian Smith (1887–1966) Humanist John C. Inscoe    What accounts for the fascination that Lillian Smith continues to evoke among southern scholars today? Hers was a unique voice in the mid-twentieth century that was ahead of its time in terms of the hard truths and harsh judgments she poured out about the inequities and injustices of southern society, first and foremost in terms of race, but she also touched on other facets of southern life, including politics, gender, religion, and economics. No other white southerner of her generation was as openly and unabashedly critical of the region and its inherent flaws. In that volatile era in which Jim Crow’s strange career began to wane as an emergent civil rights movement made itself felt, Smith should have been a major player. And yet, despite the celebrity derived from her sensationalistic (some would say scandalous) first novel, Strange Fruit, in 1944, and her nonfiction jeremiad Killers of the Dream in 1949, she found herself increasingly marginalized or ignored as the great national discussions over civil rights and racial justice reached full volume. Smith greatly resented the fact that her voice was not more fully heard or acknowledged . She once likened herself to Cassandra, the mythic Trojan princess blessed with a gift of prophecy but cursed to never be believed. Margaret Rose Gladney appropriately titled her edited collection of Smith’s correspondence How Am I to Be Heard?, a reference to Smith’s constant frustration in her latter years. She seemed genuinely hurt when she wrote in the early 1960s: “When southern writers are discussed, I am never mentioned; when women writers are mentioned, I am not among them . . . Whom, among the mighty, have I so greatly offended.” One could argue that it was because she had offended so many of those “mighty” that she never fully enjoyed the credit or acclaim she Lillian Smith 167 rightly deserved. Her no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners critiques were never aimed only at the rabid racists and political conservatives who would have been the most obvious targets of her wrath; she also took on those southern moderates who might well have been her allies and promoters had she not been so quick to condemn them for their failure to express the same level of urgency and moral outrage that she herself did. Perhaps even more frustrating was the failure of African Americans to give her what she felt was her due, though she rarely—if ever—acknowledged their neglect or their criticism of her work. Yet since her death in 1966, no other Georgia woman, other than perhaps Flannery O’Connor, has inspired as much scholarly attention and analysis as has Lillian Smith; certainly no other southern liberal of her era has been scrutinized as fully by as many historians. I would argue that much of this ongoing fascination with Smith lies in the power of her prose. Few others brought as much passion, as much anger, as much emotional fervor to their writing. She had a flair for metaphor, analogy, parables, anecdotes, and other forms of literary expression, and used them all as much to probe the southern psyche as to condemn the region’s institutions and social practices. Much of what so distinguished Smith’s writing is that she conveyed often familiar truths about the South and its sins in such intimate and yet compelling terms. To some, her rhetorical flourishes often overwhelmed her message. As one critic noted of Killers of the Dream, “Reading it is somewhat like eating seven courses of soufflé.” But even more vital to the power of Smith’s work, I would suggest, is the sheer humanity that pervades it all. Her contemporaries often stressed the stridency and uncompromising condemnation that she poured out with such vim, vigor, and vitriol.AtlantajournalistRalphMcGillcalledher“amodern,femininecounterpart of the ancient Hebrew prophets Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah.” Virginius Dabney saw her as a southern version of that most radical of northern abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison. Far more recently, Fred Hobson noted that Smith saw the South “as virtually a nightmare society, a culture nearly as dark as that portrayed by Hawthorne as he looked back on his harsh ancestral Puritan New England.” Yet what her fellow southern liberals seemed to overlook (though certainly not Hobson and other recent scholars) were the remarkably fresh, vividly rendered emotional and psychological insights that distinguish the best of her work. No one else was so adept at interweaving personal feelings and experiences with...