Southern Girl’s Introduction to Racism

LILLIAN SMITH, Killers of the Dream (1949)

Lillian Smith was a minority voice in the South during the early years of the civil rights movement: a white lesbian who openly challenged the South’s Jim Crow traditions. Known mostly for her novel Strange Fruit (1944) about an ill-fated interracial relationship set in 1920s Georgia, Smith also published Killers of the Dream, where she drew upon her childhood memories for a meditation on the meaning and consequences of segregation and racism.

A little white girl was found in the colored section of our town, living with a Negro family in a broken-down shack. This family had moved in only a few weeks before and little was known of them. One of the ladies in my mother’s club, while driving over to her washerwoman’s, saw the child swinging on a gate. The shack, as she said, was hardly more than a pigsty and this white child was living with ignorant and dirty and sick-looking colored folks. “They must have kidnapped her,” she told her friends. Genuinely shocked, the clubwomen busied themselves in an attempt to do something, for the child was very white indeed. The strange Negroes were subjected to a grueling questioning and finally grew frightened and evasive and refused to talk at all. This only increased the suspicion of the white group, and the next day the clubwomen, escorted by the town marshal, took the child from her adopted family despite their tears.

She was brought to our home. I do not know why my mother consented to this plan. Perhaps because she loved children and always showed tenderness and concern for them. It was easy for one more to fit into our ample household and Janie was soon at home there. She roomed with me, sat next to me at the table; I found Bible verses for her to say at breakfast; she wore my clothes, played with my dolls and followed me around from morning to night. She was dazed by her new comforts and by the interesting activities of this big lively family; and I was as happily dazed, for her adoration was a new thing to me; and as time passed a quick, childish, and deeply felt bond grew up between us.

But a day came when a telephone message was received from a colored orphanage. There was a meeting at our home, whispers, shocked exclamations. All afternoon the ladies went in and out of our house talking to Mother in tones too low for children to hear. And as they passed us at play, most of them looked quickly at Janie and quickly looked away again, though a few stopped and stared at her as if they could not tear their eyes from her face. When my father came home in the evening Mother closed her door against our young ears and talked a long time with him. I heard him laugh, heard Mother say, “But Papa, this is no laughing matter!” And then they were back in the living room with us and my mother was pale and my father was saying, “Well, work it out, honey, as best you can. After all, now that you know, it is pretty simple.”

In a little while my mother called my sister and me into her bedroom and told us that in the morning Janie would return to Colored Town. She said Janie was to have the dresses the ladies had given her and a few of my own, and the toys we had shared with her. She asked me if I would like to give Janie one of my dolls. She seemed hurried, though Janie was not to leave until next day. She said, “Why not select it now?” And in dreamlike stiffness I brought in my dolls and chose one for Janie. And then I found it possible to say, “Why? Why is she leaving? She likes us, she hardly knows them. She told me she had been with them only a month.”

“Because,” Mother said gently, “Janie is a little colored girl.”

“But she can’t be. She’s white!”

“We were mistaken. She is colored.”

“But she looks ——”

“She is colored. Please don’t argue!”

“What does it mean?” I whispered.

“It means,” Mother said slowly, “that she has to live in Colored Town with colored people.”

“But why? She lived here three weeks and she doesn’t belong to them, she told me she didn’t.”

“She is a little colored girl.”

“But you said yourself that she has nice manners. You said that,” I persisted.

“Yes, she is a nice child. But a colored child cannot live in our home.”

“Why?”

“You know, dear! You have always known that white and colored people do not live together.”

“Can she come over to play?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either,” my young sister quavered.

“You’re too young to understand. And don’t ask me again, ever again, about this!” Mother’s voice was sharp but her face was sad and there was no certainty left there. She hurried out and busied herself in the kitchen and I wandered through that room where I had been born, touching the old familiar things in it, looking at them, trying to find the answer to a question that moaned in my mind like a hurt thing.…

And then I went out to Janie, who was waiting, knowing things were happening that concerned her but waiting until they were spoken aloud.

I do not know quite how the words were said but I told her that she was to return in the morning to the little place where she had lived because she was colored and colored children could not live with white children.

“Are you white?” she said.

“I’m white,” I replied, “and my sister is white. And you’re colored. And white and colored can’t live together because my mother says so.”

“Why?” Janie whispered.

“Because they can’t,” I said. But I knew, though I said it firmly, that something was wrong. I knew my father and mother whom I passionately admired had done that which did not fit in with their teachings. I knew they had betrayed something which they held dear. And I was shamed by their failure and frightened, for I felt that they were no longer as powerful as I had thought. There was something Out There that was stronger than they and I could not bear to believe it. I could not confess that my father, who had always solved the family dilemmas easily and with laughter, could not solve this. I knew that my mother who was so good to children did not believe in her heart that she was being good to this child. There was not a word in my mind that said it but my body knew and my glands, and I was filled with anxiety.

But I felt compelled to believe they were right. It was the only way my world could be held together. And, like a slow poison, it began to seep through me: I was white. She was colored. We must not be together. It was bad to be together. Though you ate with your nurse when you were little, it was bad to eat with any colored person after that. It was bad just as other things were bad that your mother had told you. It was bad that she was to sleep in the room with me that night. It was bad.…

Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1949, reissued edition 1994), 26–29.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS