Southern Connections Between Lillian Smith & Ernest Gaines

Early in my career, I became immersed in the work of Ernest Gaines because I worked at the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. This position allowed me to dig deep into Gaines’ work, utilizing the archives at the center as well as Gaines himself. I had the opportunity to sit down with Gaines, multiple times, and just talk. Some of these conversations would take place at his home on False River, and I recall, vividly, walking into his house and sitting in his home library. These conversations took us in many directions, but we’d always come back to literature, about the books on the shelves and the writers who inspired him.

Gaines cites Jean Toomer, Zora Neal Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Ivan Turgenev, Willa Cather, and countless others as influences on his own work. When I knew Gaines, I didn’t have any real knowledge about Lillian Smith. He never mentioned her, and no one else in my circles, which was African American and Southern literature, spoke her name. If they did, it went over my head completely because I never encountered her in my coursework of my research. My only connection to Smith was a copy of Strange Fruit I picked up at a library book sale and put on my shelf, without thinking I’d read it anytime soon.