Lillian Smith--Killers of the Dream (1949)

Killers of the Dream is considered to be one of the most significant pre-Civil Rights era works by a white writer.  As early as the 1940s, Smith persistently called for an end to segregation.  In her foreward to the 1961 edition of this mixed genre text, Smith comments on the southernness of her text, as identified by her editor: “only one who feels deep in the bone the cruel perplexities and paradoxes of our way of life” could have written the book (13).  Smith says that it is the “apathy of white southerners which disturbs me” (20), and it is against this apathy which she writes. 

The text is divided into four parts: “The Dreamers,” “The White Man’s Burden,” “Giants in the Earth,” and “The Dream and its Killers.”  In the first section, she reflects on growing up in the South, the palpable trouble of racism which even children could sense as a haunting presence.  Smith identifies the heart of this trouble, which she describes as being taught “to split my conscience from my acts and Christianity from southern tradition” (27).  She relates the story of a little white girl who was “living with a Negro family in a broken-down shack” (35).  After Smith’s family takes her in, it is discovered that “Janie is a little colored girl” (36).  This early experience taught Smith the arbitrariness of race.  After similar childhood recollections, she ends this section with a list of clippings of quotes from southern leaders, to show the kind of racist teachings all southern children grew up with.

In the second section, Smith looks more closely at the ways in which Christianity is implicated in the perpetuation of racism in the South.  In this way, she anticipates Flannery O’Connor’s idea of a Christ-haunted South, when she notes that, “Stories about haunted houses on the edges of town…merely took our minds off our own haunted lives and gave us reasons for our fears.  We gratefully accepted the ghosts because they gave names to our fears” (112).  It is in this section as well that Smith addresses the particularly southern peculiar relationship between white children and their black caretakers, as well as the effect it had on their white mothers.  This is a very Freudian section, directly blame to these twisted mother-child relationships for a multitude of “perversions”: “we know now that these women, forced by their culture and their heartbreak, did a thorough job of closing the path to mature geniality for many of their sons and daughters, and an equally good job of leaving little cleared detours that led downhill to homosexual and infantile green pastures, and on to alcoholism, neuroses, divorce, to race-hate and brutality, and to a tight inflexible mind that could not question itself” (153). 

This Freudian mode is continued in section three, where she seems to blame the South’s lack of education and rurality for its backwards beliefs.  She does identify how poor whites in the South have been, because of this lack of education, taught to hate non-whites and to blame them for their own poverty.  In this section she uses parables to more fully explain how these dynamics of hatred have been used by those in power to maintain racist hegemonic structures and institutions.  In the final section, she points to both the hope and the tragedy in the then-recent past.  Most interesting in this section is her indictment of the Agrarians in their complicity in maintaining the racist status quo:

there was a group of writers…who should have been on the side of change but were not.  No writers in literary history have failed their region as completely as these did.  They called themselves Fugitives; some preferred the name, Agrarians.  The were not so opposed to change, if I read them accurately, as opposed to what we were changing into.  With soft stinging denunciations, they took their stand against a future which they equated with the machine and industrial clatter; they felt the answer was to return to some sort of medieval pattern. (223)

After further discussion of the Fugitives failings and the problematic ways in which these ideas were inherent in New Criticism, Smith cogently summarizes their problem:

The basic weakness of the Fugitives’ stand, as I see it, lay in their failure to recognize the massive dehumanization which had resulted from slavery and its progeny, sharecropping and segregation, and the values that permitted these brutalities of spirit.  They did not see that the dehumanization they feared the machine and science would bring was a fait accompli in their own agrarian region. (225).

And to me, this is one of the greatest strengths of the book, one which I don’t think is emphasized enough.  People still situate the Agrarians as a seminal point of southern studies, and I think it needs to be emphasized that Smith early on was pointing out the similarities between their ideas and Hitler’s.  I know that many find her mixed genre form to be distracting, but the ideas are important enough that they should continue to be remembered.

Flannery O'Connor--A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)

A Good Man is Hard to Find is O’Connor’s first collection of short stories, which followed her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952.  This collection includes both “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” two of my favorite of her stories.  Its stories contain over references to what O’Connor referred to as the “Christ-haunted South,” such as the story “A River, in which a young white boy is taken to a river baptism by his babysitter Mrs. Connin.  The childish point of view in “A River” provides a sardonic and yet tragic take on charismatic religion, as the boy finds Mrs. Connin’s religious ceremony quite educational: “He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ.  Before he had thought it had been a doctor named Sladewall, a fat man with a yellow mustache who gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert, but this must have been a joke….If he had thought about it before today, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like “oh” or “dam” or “God,” or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime” (160).  He is so inspired by the baptism that he finds his way back to the river to baptize himself, and the story ends with him being carried downstream alone.

In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” one-armed Mr. Tom T. Shiftlet from Tarwater, Tennessee, appears at the home of Lucynell Crater and her deaf adolescent daughter by the same name.  The one-armed man fixes things around their home, works on their dead car, and teaches the deaf girl to say words.  The mother arranges Mr. Shiftlet’s marriage to the daughter, negotiating a price for the Shiftlet to take her daughter, throwing in the car and the farm.  After their marriage at the courthouse, Shiftlet abandons the girl at a diner on their alleged honeymoon in a strange, short story which reverberates with the male abandonment in “Good Country People.” 

Several stories make reference to the effects of war, particularly WWII.  In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” Ruby deal with her shiftless brother Rufus, back from but seemingly unchanged by the European Theater.  In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” Ruby, like Shiftlet, contemplates the possibility of life without a heart as she denies her actual state of pregnancy.  The two women in “A Circle in the Fire” cite the atrocities in Europe as things to be grateful for are happening at a distance.  “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” follows General Sash, 104-year-old veteran whose appearance in his military regalia makes him a symbol of “old traditions!  Dignity! Honor! Courage!” (253).  The General was not actually a general, but a soldier in the Civil War, and has no memory of that, losing a son in the Spanish-American War, or other history than receiving his uniform twelve years ago for the premiere of Gone with the Wind.  And in “The Displaced Person,” Mrs. McIntyre struggles to cope with the changes wrought by the arrival of refugees from Poland.  She is able to adapt only to a certain extent, however; while she tolerates the idea of locals marrying Polish people in order to bring them over, when the displaced people try to marry local black people, a line is crossed.  She watches Mr. Guizac, the Polish man who attempts to arrange this marriage, be run over by a tractor, and fails to alert anyone to the accident before it happens. 

“A Temple of the Holy Ghost” has an interesting vision of female ugliness:

All week end the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Tow, shaking with laughter and getting so read and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had spots on her face anyway.  They came in the brown convent uniforms they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they opened their suitcases, they took off the uniforms and put on red skirts and loud blouses.  They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look a their legs. (197)

These girls are described as boycrazy morons, so once again, ugliness is a marker of female sexuality.  Although this is the judgment of the twelve-year-old narrator, she, too, is described as ugly, though more in her behavior than in her appearance.  After the cook asks why she must be so ugly all of the time, she connects her ugliness to her being too smart for her own good (203).  In this story, the older girls ridicule the notion of their bodies as “temples of the holy ghost” as their convent teachers insist; the narrator, on the other hand, in her interest in becoming a saint, contemplates her own body’s abilities to be an actual temple in her pursuit of sainthood.

“The Artificial Nigger,” like many of the stories in this collection, depicts country people unable to handle modernity.  Mr. Head, from a rural area of Georgia where they’ve run all of the black people out, takes his grandson Nelson to Atlanta in an attempt to introduce Nelson to the wonders of the big city.  They are so out of their element, however, that they become lost and desperate.  Nelson’s life in the country has been so sheltered that he has never seen a person of color, and he is overwhelmed by the black people he encounters in Atlanta.  At the end of the story, they see what to the reader is an offensive stereotype statue of a black man eating watermelon.  However, to Mr. Head and Nelson, this statue is terrifying; as Mr. Head notes, “They ain’t got enough real ones here.  They got to have an artificial one” (230).

Throughout these stories, themes of rural people who have trouble adapting to a changing world repeat.  The cultural clashes are often race-based (as “The Displaced Person” reveals, such race-based conflicts are not always Caucasian versus African-American), and the conflicts usually have extreme, grotesque results.  Certainly, there is a strong threat of dark humor which runs throughout, but it is a usually tied to the grotesque in some way.

Richard Wright--Native Son (1940)

This novel is the story of Bigger Thomas, a Mississippi-born young black man living in the Black Belt of Chicago, who over the course of the novel kills a young white woman, rapes and kills a young black woman, stands trial for the murder of the white woman, and is sentenced to death.  It is divided into three sections: Fear, Flight, and Fate.  The “Fear” section opens with a long scene of a rat attack first thing in the morning.  Bigger is awakened by the alarm clock in the one room apartment that he shares with his mother, sister, and brother.  A giant rat is loose in the room, and his brother and he chase it and finally kill it with a frying pan, though not after being attacked by the monstrous creature.  Bigger then goes to the pool hall, where he and his friends have planned to assemble before robbing a white jewelry store; in keeping with this section’s theme, Bigger is able to talk his friends out of the heist, realizing that their plan was too dangerous.  He then goes to the home of the Dalton’s, a rich family (who, it is revealed, are the ultimate owners of the dilapidated building in which he lives) who are big supports of Negro uplift programs, who have offered to hire Bigger as their chauffeur, as Bigger’s family is about to lose their relief money for food. 

One of Bigger’s first duties is to drive the college-aged Mary Dalton allegedly to a university lecture, though once in the car she insists that he instead pick up her friend Jan Erlone, a member of the Communist party who, along with Mary, tries to show Bigger solidarity through sitting in the front of the car with him and insisting that he eat with them in a restaurant, “one of those places where colored people eat, not one of those show places” (69).  Mary’s and Jan’s behavior toward Bigger confuses and upsets him, as his conditioning of strict deference to white people has taught him to fear what they intend as human kindness as a possible trick.  Though their intentions are well-intended, they still come across as not only condescending but racist, in Jan’s request for “authenticity” and Mary’s claim that “[Negros] have so much emotion!” and her insistence on hearing Bigger sing.  Mary gets so drunk during their night out that Bigger has to carry her to her bedroom; once inside, her blind mother comes in to check on her before Bigger can escape.  In his attempt to keep Mary quiet with a pillow, he accidently smothers and kills her.  Bigger, in his terror at having killed Mary, covers up his murder by stuffing her in the furnace (which it is his job to tend), chopping off her head with an axe in the process in order to make her corpse fit.

In the “Flight” section, Bigger tries to capitalize on his situation by attempting to blackmail the family after they discover Mary’s absence.  Bigger tries to implicate Jan in her disappearance, as he knows Jan’s Communism is as damning as his own black skin.  Mary’s body is discovered, however, by reporters who find her bones and an earring in the furnace after it starts smoking, and Bigger escapes into the Black Belt section of town.  An enormous police and vigilante search for Bigger targets this part of the city, as thousands of white men harass, arrest, assault, and attack black men (and the black part of town more generally) as part of their search for Bigger.  Bigger hides out for an evening with his girl Bessie, and tries to include her as part of his extortion and escape plan.  However, at Bessie’s refusal to participate, Bigger rapes her and then kills her in her sleep by bludgeoning her to death with a brick.  He then drops her body down an air shaft, realizing too late that the money he had stolen from Mary’s purse was still with Bessie.  The rest of this section consists of Bigger’s attempt to flee as the captors move in tighter and tighter.

The final section, “Fate,” describes Bigger’s stay in jail and his trial.  Jan reappears and provides Bigger with his attorney, Max.  Max tries valiantly to portray Bigger as a victim of circumstance: in Max’s words, “I shall endeavor to show, through the discussion of evidence, the mental and emotional attitude of this boy and the degree of responsibility he had in these crimes” (371).  Max’s devotion to justice evokes just enough hope in Bigger as to make his inevitable sentencing more poignant and painful, as Max is the first person Bigger has ever felt has seen him as a man.

In the essay “How Bigger Was Born” included as an addendum of sorts to the novel, Wright explains his motive for writing Native Son in reaction to the response to his 1938 collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children.  Wright states,” I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good.  I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (454).  Indeed, Native Son is unflinching and “hard,” in that it forces the reader to identify with Bigger’s point of view.  Just a few pages before raping Bessie, for example, Bigger reflects on how being black in America is itself a form of rape: “But rape was not what one did to women.  Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one” (227-8).

John Pendleton Kennedy--Swallow Barn (1832/1851)

The proto-plantation novel, Swallow Barn combines the genre conventions of travel writing, in its depiction of picturesque, pleasing landscapes through the use of the language of the sublime, and comic sketches, in the tradition of Washington Irving.  Additionally, the novel serves as a defense of the South’s system of institutionalized slavery, as it presents the plantation as a sort of factory system, a money-making machine.  It illustrates the North versus South, Puritan versus Cavalier cultural conflicts, through the outsider perspective of New York native Mark Littleton, who visits his relatives at the Tidewater Virginia plantation Swallow Barn. 

The novel begins with the arrival of the narrator, Mark Littleton, who has left his native New York at the urging of his cousin, Ned Hazard, so that he might experience the aristocratic pleasures of Virginia country life. The once skeptical Littleton quickly adapts to the habits and traditions of life at Swallow Barn, delighting in his Virginia cousin's leisurely pace of life, bountiful mealtimes, and pastoral surroundings. He also enjoys the hospitality of Isaac Tracy's family, who live nearby at The Brakes, for Littleton often accompanies his cousin there as Ned attempts to woo Tracy's oldest daughter, Bel. A stereotypical southern belle, Bel Tracy continually rebuffs Ned's advances, claiming that his disposition is not dignified enough for her taste. As Ned's confidante, Littleton is privy to his cousin's mishaps and successes as he struggles to meet Bel's idealistic romantic expectations. Ned ultimately succeeds in his courtship, although not before embarking on a half-witted adventure to recapture Bel's escaped pet falcon. However, neither Ned nor Bel escapes Kennedy's ridicule; out of his humorous satirizing emerges a criticism of southern social customs.

Littleton also records the latest news of the ongoing lawsuit concerning one hundred acres of useless swampland separating Swallow Barn from The Brakes, which the two parties refer to as the "Apple-pie branch." The lawsuit has become Isaac Tracy's obsession in his old age, and he continues to review the matter with Swallow Barn's proprietor, Frank Meriwether, even though the court system repeatedly has denied Tracy's right to the Apple-pie branch. Meriwether entertains Tracy's eccentricity, for he realizes that it keeps the neighbors in frequent contact while providing the older Tracy with harmless entertainment.

Incorporating character sketches of enslaved African Americans throughout the novel, Kennedy also devotes a chapter entitled "The Quarter" to contemplating the problematic nature of slavery. He does so from the position of Frank Meriwether, who leads Mark Littleton on a tour of Swallow Barn's slave quarters before the narrator returns to New York. Although Meriwether emphasizes the slaves' good health and overall contentment, he acknowledges that the practice of slavery is unequivocally wrong. He laments that there is no immediate remedy for the evils of slavery; in his opinion, either emancipation or colonization would leave freed blacks still dependent on whites for survival.

Kennedy was never a supporter of slavery; however, his depiction of Meriwether's ambivalence regarding its dissolution suggests that the author was somewhat enchanted by his fictional version of plantation life. Yet Kennedy's complex portrait in subsequent chapters of the relationship between Abe and Lucy, an enslaved mother and son at Swallow Barn, is his strongest critique of the inherent flaws in slavery's patriarchal structure. When Abe's disruptive behavior draws the threat of local authorities, Meriwether decides to send Abe out to sea, thereby separating mother and son forever. Although Meriwether may have spared Abe's life, his decision devastates Lucy and leads to her senility. 

For my purposes, the descriptions of women in the novel are intriguing.  Unlike her husband, who “amuses himself with his quiddities, and floats through life upon the current of his humor, his dame, my excellent cousin Lucretia, takes charge of the household affairs, as one who has a reputation to stake upon her administration” (36).  However, she is not beautiful: though she “rises with the lark, and infuses an early vigor into the whole household[,]…she is a thin woman to look upon, and a feeble; with a sallow complexion, and a pair of animated black eyes which impart a portion of fire to a countenance otherwise demure from the paths worn across it, in the frequent travel of a low-country ague” (36-39).  Littleton describes her as “the very priestess of the American system, for, with her, the protection of manufactures is even more of a passion than a principle” (39).  To me, Lucretia’s appearance may reflect a sacrifice to industry, perhaps, or a sacrifice of her feminine beauty to material success.

In contrast is Bel Tracy, the quintessential southern belle.  Unlike her older sister Catherine, who “is a placid, circumspect, inaccessible kind of beauty,” Bel “is headlong and thoughtless, with quick impulses, that give her the charm of agreeable expression, although her features are irregular, and would not stand a critical examination.  Her skin is not altogether clear; her mouth is large, and her eyes of a dark gray hue” (78).  So even the ur-belle is not perfect!  I’m not quite sure what to make of her, at this point.