Lillian Smith and the “Sex-Race-Religion-Economics” Tangle

Over the past week, I’ve been reading Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream for my Women in the Civil Rights Memoir course and her debut novel Strange Fruit for a book club at the end of January. If memory serves, this is the third, maybe fourth, time I have read each of these books. However, I have never read them at the same time, moving back and forth between the narrative in Strange Fruit and the memoir style of Killers of the Dream. As I read them together, I am constantly thinking about the ways that Smith presents the same ideas and themes in different forms. I notice the descriptions of the South as both a comforting home and violent landscape; the psychological impact of white supremacy on whites and Blacks; and on the tangling together of sex-sin-segregation and the ways that these tangled threads impact the economy and power. It is this last aspect that i want to look at today.

Strange Fruit opens with a description of Nonnie as she stands at the gate waiting for Tracey to arrive. She is “[t]all and slim and white in the dusk.” We hear what the white community thinks about her and her college education, what her sister Bess thinks about her, and what Mrs. Brown, the woman she works for as a domestic, thinks about her. At the end of the opening description, we see Nonnie walking down the main street in Maxwell as “white boys whistled…