Lillian Smith’s Enduring Legacy

What makes Lillian Smith’s work endure? What makes any writer’s work endure? The relationship between an author and their text, and a text and its audience, is a cooperative experience — they hold hands, speaking to one another in a circle. This “collaboration of the dream,” as Smith refers to it in “Trembling Earth,” encourages artist and audience to collaborate in the construction of meaning.

Writing in the 1961 reissue of her memoir Killers of the Dream, Smith states that she composed her memoir as a means of self-discovery: “I wrote it because I had to find out what life in a segregated culture had done to me, one person. I had to put down on paper these experiences so that I could see their meaning for me. I was in dialogue with myself as I wrote, as well as with my hometown and my childhood and history and the future, and the past.” Smith’s unflinching exploration of herself and the experiences that shaped her is what makes Killers of the Dream, Strange Fruit, and The Journey works of art that endure to this day. She infuses each of them with an honesty that allows her audience to follow her own exploration into herself while also exploring themselves.

In 1953, during her composition of The Journey, Smith was diagnosed with “a malignancy of the breast.” She told Lewis Gannett in December of that year, “Cancer is the only big fear I had ever had. Always I had…