Over the past week, I’ve been reading Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream for my Women in the Civil Rights Memoir course and her debut novel Strange Fruit for a book club at the end of January. If memory serves, this is the third, maybe fourth, time I have read each of these books. However, I have never read them at the same time, moving back and forth between the narrative in Strange Fruit and the memoir style of Killers of the Dream. As I read them together, I am constantly thinking about the ways that Smith presents the same ideas and themes in different forms. I notice the descriptions of the South as both a comforting home and violent landscape; the psychological impact of white supremacy on whites and Blacks; and on the tangling together of sex-sin-segregation and the ways that these tangled threads impact the economy and power. It is this last aspect that i want to look at today.

Strange Fruit opens with a description of Nonnie as she stands at the gate waiting for Tracey to arrive. She is “[t]all and slim and white in the dusk.” We hear what the white community thinks about her and her college education, what her sister Bess thinks about her, and what Mrs. Brown, the woman she works for as a domestic, thinks about her. At the end of the opening description, we see Nonnie walking down the main street in Maxwell as “white boys whistled softly” at her.

The white boys would look at her, rub their hands on their mouths, and look at her twice because “Nonnie Anderson was something to look at twice, with her soft black hair blowing off her face, and her black eyes in a face that God knows by right should have belonged to a white girl.” The boys weren’t the only ones would would stare at Nonnie as she pushed Boysie Brown down the street in his carriage. Captain Rushton sat outside of Brown’s Hardware Store and stared at Nonnie just like the boys did.

Rusthon is a powerful, rich white man in Maxwell. At the end of the novel, as a mob gathers to lynch Henry, Same Perry goes to Tom Harris pleading with him and Rushton to stop the violence. Sam tells Tom, “you and Cap’n Rushton and some of the other good white folks can do something about it.” Tom and Rushton don’t do anything, and as the mob lynches Henry, Rushton “fixed the mosquito net tight around his bed and lay down,” feeling comfort in his bedroom.

Rusthon sits outside Brown’s Hardware Store and with the white boys stares lustfully at Nonnie. He “would rub his thick red hand over his chin slowly as he watched her wheeling . . . Boysie Brown in to see his papa, sit there watching the girl, rubbing his hand over his chin, watching her, until she had gone back across the railroad and turned down College Street.” Like so many before him, Rushton saw Nonnie as nothing more than a piece of meat for his enjoyment, and he would tread a path back to the quarters for her as he placed his own wife on the pedestal.

Rushton doesn’t care about what happens to Henry because the sowing of division between those who lynched Henry and the Black community was good for profits. Rushton is just as culpable in Henry’s murder as the men, women, and children who lynched him. He is one of the men Smith writes about in Killers of the Dream who didn’t condemn the murder, and would sit next to you “casually in the drugstore” one day as you drank a Coke together.

Nonnie’s “value” to Rushton and others rested on her physical use to their lecherous devices. Writing about the three ghosts that haunt the Southern psyche in Killers of the Dream, Smith points out that Nonnie, along with the white, virginal woman on the pedestal, all conflated with God and religion, had a lot to do with the economics of the community and nation. She writes, “I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick tears in hard eyes, sashaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals.”

Rushton embodies that face staring at the “brown girls,” and he also embodies the faces of those who say in offices, or churches, or libraries who “feared the ‘outbreak of violence’” even though it would profit him. The “sex-race-religion-economics tangle” wrapped tightly around everyone, and it benefitted Tom Harris, Rushton, and wealthy whites in the community. They stared at Nonnie, lusted after her, and they knew that if Nonnie’s brother Ed ever did the things they wanted to do to Nonnie to their wives, mothers, or daughters they would send a lynch mob after him, boosting their support from the mob. They fed the mob red meat, playing on the fears of Ed and Black men and on the exploitation of Black women.

They understood the ways that their words could whip a mob into a frothing mass and lead to violence. They made a bargain, as Smith lays out in “Two Men and a Bargain,” to allow the mob to do anything they want as long as they don’t touch the money. “Men hungry for political and economic power,” Smith writes, “could not resist exploiting this terrifying complex of guilt, anxiety, sex jealousy, and loneliness” for their own gains. They exploit the masses, leading them to their downfall and the downfall of those close to them in order to maintain power.

I did not, I know, delve into every aspect of the tangled triptych of the sex-sin-segregation that Smith lays out, but I hope that the above highlights, in a small way, how Smith deals with some of the things in both her novel and her memoir. I know as I finish up rereading these texts more will appear, and I will write about them in the near future. Until then, what are your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.