Southern Cassandra
LIKE ALL TRULY AGGRAVATING people, Lillian Smith refuses to go away. That is, the corporeal Lillian Smith may have died in 1966, but her words refuse to go away—words that described white privilege before that was a phrase, words that seem newly relevant in an era when cell-phone videos of police brutality perpetrated on black people are impossible to unsee.
With the publication of Strange Fruit, her reputation flourished outside the South, but southerners treated her to a staggering amount of vitriol.
Who is Lillian Smith? Unless you’re an academic or a women’s studies major, you’ve probably never heard of her. It’s understandable; she’s ancient history. We are nearly three-quarters of a century past Strange Fruit,her 1944 novel about a doomed interracial love affair in a small south Georgia town. The book sold three million copies worldwide and was made into a major Broadway play. Even international fame, it seems, is ephemeral. So let us review.
Smith was a bomb thrower—a writer, an educator, a social activist, and a native southerner who came from “the best people”—a phrase she used a lot—but who betrayed every value of her social class. From 1925 to 1948, she ran a summer camp in Clayton, Georgia, for the daughters of the South’s white elites, where, in the course of evening “creative conversations” about growing up, she led her young ladies to understand that pretty much everything they’d been told about race and sex was a lie—quietly planting subversive seeds in the bosom of well-bred white southern families who thought they had sent baby sister off to some vaguely progressive place to learn archery and such.
The publication of launched her career as an author and public intellectual. Yet while her reputation flourished outside the South, her fellow southerners treated her to a staggering amount of vitriol. Mississippi newspaper editor Hodding Carter, that journalistic icon of the civil rights era, called her “a sex-obsessed old maid”— and he was on her side, more or less. Former Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge called one of her books “a literary corncob.” Ralph McGill, the sainted journalist, called her “a modern, feminine counterpart of the ancient Hebrew prophets”—an unflattering comparison to hairy guys with bad personal hygiene that was, I am convinced, a thinly veiled mockery of Smith’s lesbianism. Because she
