Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream is somewhat of a hybrid – an essayistic autobiography, an introspective social critique of the Jim Crow South. Her urge to reach beyond the micro scale of autobiographic writing manifests itself at the very outset: the first chapter is titled “When I Was a Child” [emphasis added] – a title which suggests some degree of self-centeredness characteristic of a memoir. Yet the opening paragraph is concerned with collective experience, as reported by a third-person, omniscient narrator: “Even its children knew that the South was in trouble” (Smith 25). In the following four paragraphs the distant, off-stage perspective shifts into the perspective of “we who were born in the South” (Smith 26). Only after such introduction does Smith proceed to actually speak for herself: “In this South I lived as a child and now live” (27).
In fact Smith quite often sheds the individual, subjective “I” perspective, as if the first person singular voice was not sufficient. Now and again she assumes the collective “we” voice. The problem is that her narrative is not really plural. Smith does not interview or survey white Southerners whom she tries to represent. Killers of the Dream relies on Smith’s personal experiences and ruminations, which she extrapolates to the whole white South in a way that makes her outlook appear more neutral and universal than it really is. She makes hasty generalisations.
We Conceal as Much as We Reveal
Smith’s use of the “we” voice implies a greater degree of social cohesion of the white South than might have been the case. Smith is aware of the fact: “I use the word we on many pages of this book: yet, never in this movement backward or forward has there been unity in the South” (223). Nonetheless, her insight is limited. What she means by the lack of ‘unity’ is that the South develops unequally. Her definition of development includes raising the living standard as well as propagating enlightenment. Responsible for the development were Franklin Delano Roosevelt and emerging liberal leaders – writers, magazine editors, preachers, college professors (Smith 223); in other words, members of the intelligentsia who shared with Lillian Smith the same social class, cultural capital and political views.
Smith’s “we” seems to be comprised of the agents of progress (liberal intellectuals), complacent moderates, misguided traitors to change (Agrarians and Communists), the rabble, the rabble-rousers and demagogues. The real lack of unity in the South consists in the fact that Smith’s “we” probably much differs from the “we” of a Republican or the “we” of a sharecropper. When she assumes the “we” voice, she speaks for the whole white South, but her “we” is not a particularly cross-sectional sample. The act of extrapolation of her outlook is at best far-fetched, sometimes aggressive, often pretentious. Consider the following paragraph in which Smith presumes that the post-war South has commonly undergone some sort of a Lacanian mirror-stage transformation; note how the “we” perspective is appropriated:
The old southern mold had cracked wide open and we had begun to see what it had done to us. This exposure was a tremendous experience: we actually saw ourselves for the first time; and seeing, we reached out and touched our arrogance, weighed the fear in hearts, peered in the chasms made by the separation of ideals from acts, slowly realized that anxiety, not love, dominated areas of our lives; began to see that things and machines and systems were our substitute for human relationships. We felt ourselves shrinking as we looked – and we could not endure the sight … (228)
The use of the “we” perspective in Killers of the Dream is a transition in focalisation that effaces Smith’s authorial presence. This kind of self-effacement does not spring from humility. It is rather a rhetorical strategy that aims at legitimising her narrative. Dissolving “I” in the collective “we” allows Smith to constitute herself in the text as an in-group member of the Southern community. Reinforcing her status of an insider might have been crucial in the South that feared any kind of outside intervention.
At the same time, Smith’s self-effacement creates a highly suspicious illusion of her own neutrality. For instance, it becomes easy to overlook Smith’s class privilege, which determines her outlook to a far greater extent than she seems to be aware of. It is especially worrisome when she simply assumes that she understands and is able to speak for poor whites. As a progressive intellectual she is concerned with reducing poverty, yet she succumbs to classist, paternalistic, infantilising rhetoric when she refers to the poor:
The New Deal gave the poor white so much, there was little room for resentment against the Negro, at first. Food in stomach, WPA jobs, money in the pocket, the NYA, rural electrification, and other projects gave to our people not understanding of human relations but a temporary tolerance as bland and undifferentiated as a well-fed, dry-diapered baby feels toward the world that surrounds it (Smith 226).
Smith continues to ridicule the underprivileged who benefited from Roosevelt’s welfare reforms, reproaching them for being overly absorbed in their own poverty. They stubbornly refuse to pay enough attention to racial discrimination. From Smith’s point of view, their self-centredness is a failure, as if the poverty with which they have been struggling was merely a red herring, and not a force that defined their habitus:
… the once-poor and once-ignorant whites now climbing the first rungs of the status ladder were expressing an unformulated anxiety in outbursts of violence. It was obvious that prosperity does not automatically bring with it a commensurate esteem for human rights.
Yet, steadily, things were being done that needed to be done: we plunged into housing problems, we learned the mysteries of contour plowing and cover crops, our poor whites discovered what a sanitary unit is although some declared “no Federal government kin make us squat where we don’t want to squat” and ruggedly kicked the damned thing over … New roads were built – better fertilizer used – better seeds – new farm machinery. So it went. It was good occupational therapy … (227)
Our father owned large business interests, employed hundreds of colored and white laborers, paid them the prevailing low wages, worked them the prevailing long hours, built for them mill towns (Negro and white), built for each group a church, saw to it that religion was supplied free, saw to it that a commissary supplied commodities at a high price, and in general managed his affairs much as ten thousand other southern businessmen managed theirs (33).
Inadequate Abstractions
Heavy reliance on her individual experience and unchecked assumptions would not necessarily come off as problematic in a work of commensurately limited scope. Killers of the Dream is not the case: it is a grand project in which Smith constructs a psychoanalytical model that is meant to account for racial segregation in the Jim Crow South. This model is compromised by logical fallacies in her reasoning, of which the most evident is the fallacy of hasty generalisation. It stems directly from the shortcomings of Smith’s methodology: first, she does not provide enough evidence to back up her theory; second, the evidence she does provide is not sufficiently inclusive. As a consequence she commits what Alfred North Whitehead defined as ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. It is an informal fallacy that occurs when a theory is “too narrow to be the best explanation of the real nature of the concrete situation” (Thompson 222).
Perhaps reductivism of Killers of the Dream is in fact based in the sheer choice of methodology: Smith strives to explicate racial segregation by means of psychological tools. The rationale for this approach is unclear. Applying a psychological framework to socio-political phenomena may be actually misleading. Another issue arises in the chapter titled “Three Ghost Stories”, in which Smith presents a theory that aims to explain how the South evolved into its Jim Crow shape. Smith does not want to be perceived as a mere story-teller, which manifests itself in the way she reaches beyond the autobiographic boundaries and steps into the realm of inductive reasoning. She wants her writing to appeal to reason, but her theory is mired in generalisations and oversimplifications.
In the first "Ghost Story" Smith posits sexual repression as the root cause of the South’s trouble. But there is hardly enough evidence provided to maintain that there is such a strong cause-and-effect relationship between repression and racial segregation. Smith goes on to infer repression as the cause from correlated phenomena, such as the taboo of interracial sex and the presence of biracial children. She devises a posteriori a chronological sequence of events that propelled the cycle of repression. She theorises a psycho-sexual mechanism that produces unhealthy individuals, who in turn produce an unhealthy society. At first sight Smith’s theory comes off as so convincing and logical, one could almost be tempted to conclude that racial segregation was primarily a mental health issue.
Obviously, there are more aspects of the South’s trouble that should be taken into consideration. Racial segregation, with its oppression and exploitation, existed within a particular hegemonic power structure and ideological framework, which should be somehow accounted for. But Smith distances herself from such considerations. She states, with unwarranted confidence, that “the Twentieth Century dialogue has to do with relationships not systems” (Smith 233). Her ‘relationships over systems’ approach seems to challenge Marxism in particular. She repeatedly ridicules materialist critics, according to whom “economics is the stork that brings all things, good and bad, to this earth” (Smith 125). Again, the rationale for such a stubborn rejection of Marxism is unclear.
Consider the third ghost relationship, the one between the white child and black mammy. This ghost relationship is a result of the specific shape that the division of labour took in the South: reproductive work, including breastfeeding, was carried out by black female wage labourers. If not for the division of labour in the white household, a black woman probably would not be even allowed to put a finger on a white child. It is possible, then, that the root cause of the cycle of repression – triggered when the white child is separated from the black mammy – is in fact division of labour, which accommodates this relationship in the first place. Additionally, if reproductive work was well-paid, surely white women would not outsource it to black mammies, because black people had to be kept low in a segregated society of the South. It follows that patriarchy (which keeps women’s labour cheap) and wage slavery (which keeps black labour cheap) can be also considered responsible for the creation of the ghost relationship.
Conclusion
Even though the political value of Killers of the Dream was unsurpassed in the pre-Civil-Rights-Movement America, from today’s perspective one can see clearly that Lillian Smith’s overgeneralising, psychoanalytical social critique is interesting and charismatic but unreliable. Smith is not sufficiently self-aware when it comes to privilege. And her theory cannot explain such a complex phenomenon as racial segregation in a satisfactory manner. There is no amount of Freud that could fully account for the Jim Crow South. We need maps to navigate reality, but a map is not the territory.
Angelika Samoraj
Dr Michał Choiński
Racial Identity in the Literature of American South
5 February 2021
Minor stylistic improvements added to the text: 18 April 2023
Works Cited:
Smith, Lillian. Killers of the Dream. 1961. W. W. Norton & Company, 1949.
Thompson, H. Edward. “The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: Its Importance for Critical and Creative Inquiry.” Interchange, vol. 28, 1996, pp. 219–230. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007313324927.
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