Books: Tract from the South

KILLERS OF THE DREAM (256 pp.)—Lillian Smith—Norton ($3).

When Lillian Smith was a little girl in the deep South, a new Negro family moved to town. With the family came Janie, its adopted white-skinned child. Janie disturbed white folks. “They must have kidnaped her,” said one of the ladies in Mrs. Smith’s club.

Spurred by righteous clubwomen, the town marshal took Janie away from her foster parents and brought her to the generous Smiths, who let her share Lillian’s room, clothes and toys. But one day, after a phone call from an orphanage, Lillian was told Janie would have to leave.

“Why?” asked Lillian. “Because Janie is a little colored girl,” replied her mother. It was an answer Lillian could not understand and, when she grew up, would not accept.

Years later she wondered why “the mother who taught me what I know of tenderness and love and compassion taught me also the bleak rituals of keeping Negroes in their place.” To think out and try to solve that problem, she has written Killers of the Dream, a red-hot Freudianized tract against racial segregation, which is certain to anger even more Southerners than her Strange Fruit did.

Gnawing Memories. In the beginning, says Author Smith, there was evil, and from it flowed the guilts that have kept the South in unhappy restlessness ever since. The evil, of course, was slavery —as visible as an overseer’s lash. But the guilts are hidden and unprobed. “We have known guilt without understanding it, and there is no tie that binds men closer to the past and each other than that.”

Even in the years after the Civil War, she continues, “the South’s conscience hurt; always there were doubts and scruples.” Had the South been able to make a clean break with its past, the evil might have been exorcised. But gnawed by memories of its defeat and provoked by harsh meddlers from the North, the South gradually transformed “the Negro question” into a fanatical folk bias, coloring its segregated religion, its sex attitudes, its every moment in life.

Crooked Canyon. According to the Smith hypothesis, the South could not find peace; its guilt drove it to a collective persecution complex. “Beyond the mountains was the North: the Land of Dam-yankees, where live People Who Cause All of Our Trouble; and at the end of the North was Wall Street, that fabulous crooked canyon of evil winding endlessly through the Southern mind which is, like the dark race, secretly visited by those who talk loudest against it.”

In its sexual mores, the South further entangled itself in the guilts bred by the evil of slavery. To buttress his sense of superiority, the Southerner elevated the white woman to an impossible level of “purity” and then, to satisfy his instinctual needs, he turned to the Negroes with their “physical grace and rhythm and . . . psychosexual vigor.” Each time that the Southerner “found the backyard temptation irresistible, his conscience split more deeply from his acts . . .”

This, as Florida-born Lillian Smith sees it, is the problem of the South. The solution she advocates is extreme and impractical: an end to segregation, with its taboos and secret violations of taboos, both of which, she feels, only result in soul-twisting and hate-breeding guilts.

Indigenous Rebel. Killers of the Dream may remind readers of the untempered, slapdash “psyching” fashionable in the 19205 when Freud hit the U.S. with his sharp hook to the unconscious. Though valuable for many neat insights and unassailably just in its championship of full freedom for the Negroes, it is a book written with more gallantry than historical care, more moral power than analytical precision. Historians are likely to question Miss Smith’s too-easy identification of the Southern whites with “Puritanism,” her too-easy assumption that the stresses of Southern life which inhibited white life left the Negroes carefree and easygoing. Many readers will feel that her schematic account of Southern life is based on a substitution of the legend about the South for the more complex historical reality.

Killers of the Dream is badly organized, excessively repetitious and too persistently eloquent; reading it is somewhat like eating seven courses of soufflé. Miss Smith is an indigenous American rebel, and she carries herself on the soapbox with more charm and dignity than most; but her readers, including those who agree generally with her moral position, may well wish she had never mounted it. While she has dramatized the plight of the Janies and has taken her stand beside them, she has hardly related her moral position to the possibilities for action and behavior in the South today.