A Lillian Smith Reader

Lillian Smith, Margaret Rose Gladney, Lisa Hodgens

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780820349992, 9780820349985
• eBook ISBN: 9780820349978
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

As a writer and forward-thinking social critic, Lillian Smith (1897–1966) was an astute chronicler of the twentieth-century American South and an early proponent of the civil rights movement. From her home on Old Screamer Mountain overlooking Clayton, Georgia, Smith wrote and spoke openly against racism, segregation, and Jim Crow laws long before the civil rights era.

Bringing together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews, and excerpts from her longer fiction and nonfiction, A Lillian Smith Reader offers the first comprehensive collection of her work and a compelling introduction to one of the South's most important writers.

A conservatory-trained music teacher who left the profession to assume charge of her family's girls' camp in Rabun County, Georgia, Smith began her literary careerwriting for a journal that she coedited with her lifelong companion, Paula Snelling, successively titled Pseudopodia (1936), the North Georgia Review (1937–41), and South Today (1942–45). Known today for her controversial, best-selling novel, Strange Fruit (1944); her collection of autobiographical essays, Killers of the Dream (1949); and her lyrical documentary, Now Is the Time (1955), Smith was acclaimed and derided in equal measures as a southern white liberal who critiqued her culture's economic, political, and religious institutions as dehumanizing for all: white and black, male and female, rich and poor. She was also a frequent and eloquent contributor to periodicals such as the Saturday Review, LIFE, the New Republic, the Nation, and the New York Times.

The influence of Smith's oeuvre extends far beyond these publications. Her legacy rests on her sense of social justice, her articulation of racial and social inequities, and her challenges to the status quo. In their totality, her works propose a vision of justice and human understanding that we have yet to achieve.

PART ONE

A Chain Reaction of Dreams 1936–1945

“Though they lived in communities indifferent or hostile to these ideas, the smaller groups who were her audiences were hungering to hear such words said aloud. Had they not been spoken by someone, in such manner as she said them, and at such times and places as they were said, the acceleration of change that has occurred in the last quarter-century could not have taken place.”

—PAULA SNELLING, “Preface” to The Winner Names the Age

These selections from Lillian Smith’s writings published from 1936 to 1945 exemplify the breadth of her political and cultural concerns as well as her multifaceted literary talent. Significantly, these examples of her early fiction, editorials, columns, book reviews, essays, speeches, and Laurel Falls Camp plays also demonstrate the importance of collaboration in Smith’s theory and practice as a writer. Lillian Smith published her early writings in the magazine she created and coedited with Paula Snelling. Like her development of Laurel Falls Camp, from which it grew, the magazine provides another example of Smith’s creative response to adversity.

Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling had worked at Laurel Falls Camp in 1921 and 1922, Snelling in athletics and Smith in music; but they did not become friends until they met again on the train to Clayton, Georgia, in the summer of 1925. Smith was returning from three years as director of music at a girls’ school in Huchow, China, and Snelling, from a year at Columbia University Teachers College where she had earned a master’s in psychology with a minor in English. After her first summer as camp director, Smith hired a new camp staff and put Snelling in charge of athletics. In 1928 Smith bought the camp and named Snelling her assistant director. Both women were intellectuals, and their relationship grew beyond their work at camp because of their mutual interests in psychology, literature, and the political and literary ferment that began in the 1920s South. After Smith’s father died in 1930, and when her mother was able to spend winter months with relatives in Florida, Smith shared an apartment with Snelling, who was then teaching high school math in Macon, Georgia. When not working on camp materials, Smith began writing fiction based on her experiences in China and her childhood in Jasper, Florida. Of Snelling’s influence in their early years together, Smith wrote: “She was intensely interested in books and poetry. We read together, we discussed literature a great deal, and it was through those discussions that I began to turn my creativity toward writing instead of music [. . .]. Without her encouragement I doubt I would have had the courage to go through those first four or five years of groping.” Between 1932 and 1935, Smith wrote two novels, And the Waters Flow On and Tom Harris and Family, and two novellas, Every Branch in Me and Julia. Although these manuscripts were never published, their subjects permeated Smith’s later writing (HH 9–11).

In the winter of 1935 both Snelling and Smith were confined to a small cottage on Old Screamer Mountain. Smith was responsible for the care of her invalid mother, and Snelling remained to recuperate from injuries she sustained in an accident with one of the camp horses. To relieve their boredom and isolation from life in Macon, Smith suggested they start a literary magazine. Conceived as an outlet for Southern American writers and as a review of Southern American writing representing a more recognizable and inclusive South, their magazine would include and review—for the first time in the region—the work of black as well as white women and men as subjects and authors. The magazine first appeared under the title Pseudopodia (1936), then North Georgia Review (1937–41), and South Today (1942–45); it grew from 12 pages and 27 subscribers to 110 pages and 10,000 subscribers (White and Sugg, xi).

To enliven their social life and in lieu of monetary payment for contributions to the magazine, the editors established a tradition of inviting contributors to spend a few days as their guests at the camp. Their guest lists expanded through the years to include a variety of people—editors, journalists, educators, political activists—mostly Southerners, whom Smith and Snelling thought would be interesting to know and whom they viewed as being involved in changing the South. They had their first biracial dinner party with guests from Atlanta in the fall of 1936. Through the magazine, as with Laurel Falls Camp, Smith was able to create on her mountain, at least periodically, another aspect of the South she wanted to live in: a place where intellectuals and artists could gather to exchange ideas, examine their society, and perhaps find ways to influence the development and direction of its future (HH 12–13).

The following selections of Smith’s early fiction, book reviews, and editorials exemplify the editors’ intent as stated in the Spring 1936 issue. The magazine would concern itself with the South and with “whatever seems to us artistic, vital, significant”—the goal was not to perpetuate “that sterile fetishism of the Old South” but “to expose rather than gloss over vapidness, dishonesty, cruelty, stupidity” (White and Sugg xii). All items originally published in the magazine are taken from the first posthumously published volume of Smith’s work, From the Mountain.

The Harris Children’s Town—Maxwell, Ga.

Published in the magazine’s first issue, Pseudopodia, in spring of 1936, the “Harris Children’s Town” was excerpted by Lillian Smith from an early draft of her novel, Strange Fruit. In this sample of her early fiction, Smith demonstrates her criteria for honest, truthful portraits of her region’s culture and people, which she hopes the magazine will promote. Refusing to separate the personal and the political spheres in her analyses of the American South, Smith intentionally draws into consciousness what she unconsciously absorbed as a child. The influences of race, religion, money (and how it is made), and the mysterious relationships between people she saw every day, appear again in Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream. Her sensory verisimilitude invites the reader to enter simultaneously her physical and psychic sense of place. Also evident and more fully developed in her later work is Smith’s attention to her physical environment, which complements and deepens her observations of the people who inhabit that space.

There are ten thousand other little towns of the size of Maxwell, Georgia, all very like Maxwell, all a little different but it happened that the Harris children were not born in any of these. They were born in Maxwell. And Maxwell was the warp on which the small patterns of their lives were woven. From which they could never cut themselves loose. Though some tried. Tried and found that they were only carrying Maxwell with them, wherever they went. As every child grown in a little town carries it forever with him until the threads rot and fall to dust.

Maxwell claimed a population of eighteen hundred, eight hundred whites, one thousand Negroes. The Harris children knew that. Knew too that cotton, lumber and turpentine made money for folks, or broke them—that people should have diversified crops, but didn’t—that their papa was the busiest man in town and maybe the richest—

But these facts were less than the sand which slipped unnoticed into their shoes during the day and as carelessly was emptied out on the floor at night. For folks as they had heard all their short lives had to make money or lose it. Their papa did both so being the richest man in town— if he was—did not give them more or less spending money than their friends had. And Maxwell’s eighteen hundred inhabitants were very simply people they said howdy to when they met them on the streets and they said howdy to every one of them, black and white, even though a face or name now and then might be unknown to them: because their papa did.

But out of the flux of Maxwell’s eighteen hundred human beings swirling in little slow eddies on the business streets on Saturday, about the Methodist and Baptist churches on Sunday, to and from school on week days, about the Woodmen of the World Hall, the Masonic Temple, the Knights of Pythias Hall on lodge night, out at the cemetery every week or so when there was a burying, on rare entertainment nights in the Opera House, at the baseball ground near the African Methodist Episcopal Church where a ball, eluding the outfielder, would crash into the Black God’s ramshackly temple to the gasping delight of the White God’s children—out of this fluid mass faces, and bodies, became three dimensional, solidified into sharp lines, and threw their shadows on the Harris’ hearts.

Hardly more than a shush of long, gray moss across your face as you ran on the white sandy paths beneath great oaks, hardly more than the crunch of acorns under bare feet, or the prickle of sandspurs, or the feel of cold iron on blowy days when skates jamming into sand you fell breathing hard and laughing against the new metal fence put up after the old pickets had rotted down; hardly more, but there, to remain there forever, as moving in its slow orbit Maxwell swung from God’s Sabbath to Nigger Sad’dy night, and gathering up its strength began anew.

Mr. Pusey, on Sunday the Methodist Sunday School superintendent, on week days manager of Maxwell Supply Store, at night the husband of a wife invalided by “female trouble”—Mr. Pusey five feet one inch in his shoes and a trifle pudgy about the belt took charge Sunday morning as well as he could of the squirming hot, clean, murmurous youth (he called them youth) sent or accompanied by parents anxious that the by-product of their weak moments learn so much about God that they’d never get in jail, never be talked about, never be radical, always make a good living, and die a respectable death in such a respectable manner that whoever the minister might be at the time he could convince their bereaved, broken, desolated hearts in firm, comforting, unassailable words that their dead child was safe in the arms of Jesus. That is what they wanted. The children wanted to be close together, hear each other’s voices, watch the grown folks and show off their knowledge—or their ignorance, as their mood might be—of the Golden Text.

After the classes, small chronological clusters scattered about the pews and hovered over by pretty young school teachers who talked gravely about vague segments of old Jewish history, Mr. Pusey would strike hard the iron bell on his table and reassemble the disintegrated congregation to hear old Dr. Munson expound the lesson according to Josephus. Old Dr. Munson from the North, curly gray beard reaching far below his belt, walked stiffly down the middle aisle each Sunday morning, knees popping in and out as he walked, opened a heavy book and resumed with the mysterious words, “Now according to Josephus . . .” the running commentary he had been making all the years of the Harris children’s lives on the Sunday School lesson. Only as the years passed his voice grew more quavery until sometimes you could not make out the words, and the book shook up and down in his hand until sometimes you could not tear your eyes from the shaking. They thought he looked exactly like God and they thought Josephus must too and it made it easier somehow for them to think of the Trinity when they thought of Dr. Munson, Josephus and God.

Only sometimes as they listened, they wondered what he did to Miss Ada when she ran wild-eyed and mumbling into the back door of his office in the drug store and (if you hung around the corner playing stick frog long enough) came ou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Trembling Earth
• Letter to Mr. Hartley
• Part One. A Chain Reaction of Dreams: 1936–1945
• Part Two. Sanity in an Insane Culture: 1946–1966
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Index
• Footnotes