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 felt I could take anything but that.” While Smith does not address her cancer directly in The Journey, it hovers over her words, casting a shadow over her search for that which could “fuse past and future, and art and science, and God and one’s self into a purposeful whole.” She went in search of the answers to questions about her very being, our very being. As she told Gannett, “I knew what I did not believe; I thought I even knew what was ‘wrong with things’ but I did not know what I believed nor did I know what is ‘right with things.’ So I journeyed forth to find out.”

During a 1962 television interview, Dick McCuthchen asked Smith if she had ever thought about leaving the South as so many others had done before her. Smith told him that if she moved to New York or Paris instead of remaining at home in the mountains of North Georgia that “all of it would begin to fade,” the memoires, the feelings, but most importantly the hurt. She acknowledged that…