Early in my career, I became immersed in the work of Ernest Gaines because I worked at the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. This position allowed me to dig deep into Gaines’ work, utilizing the archives at the center as well as Gaines himself. I had the opportunity to sit down with Gaines, multiple times, and just talk. Some of these conversations would take place at his home on False River, and I recall, vividly, walking into his house and sitting in his home library. These conversations took us in many directions, but we’d always come back to literature, about the books on the shelves and the writers who inspired him.

Gaines cites Jean Toomer, Zora Neal Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Ivan Turgenev, Willa Cather, and countless others as influences on his own work. When I knew Gaines, I didn’t have any real knowledge about Lillian Smith. He never mentioned her, and no one else in my circles, which was African American and Southern literature, spoke her name. If they did, it went over my head completely because I never encountered her in my coursework of my research. My only connection to Smith was a copy of Strange Fruit I picked up at a library book sale and put on my shelf, without thinking I’d read it anytime soon.

When I started working at the Lillian E. Smith Center, I did the same thing I did with Gaines’ work. I dove right in, reading everything she wrote. Considering her voluminous writing, I sometimes feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface with her work because I keep finding essays here and there or introductions in pamphlets. As I read Smith, I kept asking myself, “Did Ernie ever read Lil?” I ask this because I see so many thematic similarities. This, of course, could be coincidenal since both write about issues of race, class, and gender in the South, but the more I read, the more I see.

As I reread Strange Fruit, I came across the scene where Tracy, after walking to the altar during the revival meeting and getting engaged to Dorothy Pusey, gets drunk before facing Nonnie and telling her that he is going “straight,” thus dumping her to the side because the “rules” of Souther tradition say that he can’t have an intimate relationship with a Black woman. Tracy attempts to rape Nonnie, claiming that he possesses, as he does over the course of the novel, her and that she is his. Nonnie tries to talk him down, telling him not to listen to others but to himself, but he continues to tell her he plans to get what he came there for, sex.

Assaulting her, Tracy leaves his body. He hovers over the action, as an uncanny spirit looking down on himself as he pushes and shoves Nonnie, forcing her to succumb to his violence. Nonnie pleads with him, but Tracy continues. Attacking her, “[h]e saw somebody pulling at her dress . . . Saw somebody tearing her blouse off.” Tracy cannot comprehend his actions, so he becomes disembodied from himself as a way to cope with what he is actually doing.

Continuing, Tracy begins to see another man, not himself, commiting the assault on Nonnie: “He saw a man — couldn’t see much, couldn’t see much — a man above her, saw him press her down against the floor — don’t do that! — saw him press her body hard — saw him try and fail, tray and fail, try and fail.” Tracy doesn’t see himself; he sees someone else commiting the act, but that other man is in fact Tracy himself. He does this because he cannot see himself committing this violence against the woman he loves. However, confronted with Southern Tradition and the “rules” that tell him their love is wrong, he results to violence against Nonnie and to cope with it, he disassociates himself from the act.

The sight of himself assaulting Nonnie causes Tracy to come back to his senses, but here Smith shifts the focus, turning the reader into the perpertrator of the assault. The narrator says that Tracy hears crying, but then the narrator shifts and states, “no, it’s you crying — it’s you — you couldn’t — you — couldn’t — couldn’t . . . you couldn’t — you couldn’t — you couldn’t.” This shift places the reader in Tracy’s position, causing the reader to become complicit in the violence against Nonnie, and it also continues the disembodiment from the opening of the scene where Tracy, outside of his body, sees his actions.

This scene always reminds me of the scene with Tee Bob, a white man, and Mary Agnes, a Creole schoolteacher, in Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman where Tee Bob attempts to sexually assault Mary Agnes because she, understanding the “rules,” won’t start a relationship with Tee Bob. When Mary Agnes tells Tee Bob they can’t be together, Tee Bob becomes angry and shoves her down, even though he rejected the “rules” and “thought love was much stronger than that one drop of African blood” that Southern Tradition said kept him and Mary Agnes apart.

Shoving Mary Agnes down, Tee Bob, like Tracy, leaves him body. He begins to see ancestral ghosts in place of himself and Mary Agnes. He sees his father assault Verda, which resulted in the birth of his half-brother Timmy. “The past and the present got all mixed up” for Tee Bob. Mary Agnes became the “past”; he became his father and she Verda. This moment draws upon the uncanny, the unconscious arising in the present, surfacing in this moment to confront him. They arise to keep change from happening. This moment brings the past to the present, arising from the depths to cause violence.

Both Tracy and Tee Bob leave themselves during their assaults on Nonnie and Mary Agnes. They leave themselves because they cannot see themselves committing these acts of violence against women they love or hope to love. They can’t see themselves as violent attackers. Yet, Souther Tradition, that past that arises in these moments, urges them on, causing them to become what they despise. To counter this, they leave themselves, standing outside of themselves as they enact violence on those they love. These moments highlight the specters that continue to tread the soil we inhabit. They highlight how these specters arise and sway us, causing us to ignore what we should do and instead do what we shouldn’t do.

I see other connections between Gaines and Smith in their works, but every time I read the above two scenes I ask whether or not Gaines read Smith. The scenes, while different, are extremely similar in the act of disassociation and the act of the past infiltrating the present. Each points to to the tight grip that the past, the “rules,” Southern Tradition, or whatever we choose to call it, has on us in the present.

What similarities do you see between Gaines and Smith? Let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.