What makes Lillian Smith’s work endure? What makes any writer’s work endure? The relationship between an author and their text, and a text and its audience, is a cooperative experience — they hold hands, speaking to one another in a circle. This “collaboration of the dream,” as Smith refers to it in “Trembling Earth,” encourages artist and audience to collaborate in the construction of meaning.

Writing in the 1961 reissue of her memoir Killers of the Dream, Smith states that she composed her memoir as a means of self-discovery: “I wrote it because I had to find out what life in a segregated culture had done to me, one person. I had to put down on paper these experiences so that I could see their meaning for me. I was in dialogue with myself as I wrote, as well as with my hometown and my childhood and history and the future, and the past.” Smith’s unflinching exploration of herself and the experiences that shaped her is what makes Killers of the Dream, Strange Fruit, and The Journey works of art that endure to this day. She infuses each of them with an honesty that allows her audience to follow her own exploration into herself while also exploring themselves.

In 1953, during her composition of The Journey, Smith was diagnosed with “a malignancy of the breast.” She told Lewis Gannett in December of that year, “Cancer is the only big fear I had ever had. Always I had felt I could take anything but that.” While Smith does not address her cancer directly in The Journey, it hovers over her words, casting a shadow over her search for that which could “fuse past and future, and art and science, and God and one’s self into a purposeful whole.” She went in search of the answers to questions about her very being, our very being. As she told Gannett, “I knew what I did not believe; I thought I even knew what was ‘wrong with things’ but I did not know what I believed nor did I know what is ‘right with things.’ So I journeyed forth to find out.”

During a 1962 television interview, Dick McCuthchen asked Smith if she had ever thought about leaving the South as so many others had done before her. Smith told him that if she moved to New York or Paris instead of remaining at home in the mountains of North Georgia that “all of it would begin to fade,” the memoires, the feelings, but most importantly the hurt. She acknowledged that remaining in the South hurt, but she continued by stating, “I wanted it to hurt, because I think a writer stops writing when the wound heals and we must keep the wound open.” In order to write, to conduct the journey, no matter what that journey may be, the artist must “hurt” and the wound must not heal, because when the wound remains open, Smith says, one becomes “aware of these deep injuries.” Through this manner, the artist conveys a balm for the cultural wounds, a medication for the wounds. The artist works to suture the wounds that impact us as a whole, but to convey those healing aspects, the artist must keep their own wound open, refusing to let it scab over and heal. They must constantly pick at it, reopening it and letting it bleed, spewing forth the pain, the hurt, and the suffering in order for society to heal.

Even though Smith bristled at critics and the public labeling her as a “race writer” because she wanted them to view her merely as an artist, she kept the wound open for all to see. She let it burst forth in her essays, her speeches, her latter books such as Our Faces, Our Words. She exposed herself to the wound to discover more about herself and in that discovery she exposed whites to white supremacy and its impact on them. She faced the hurt, as artists do, to make the world better. She used her home roots to fuel her imagination and writing but she wanted her ideas to span the world, to reach beyond region and into the psyches of those across the globe, and she did this.

Speaking with Studs Terkel in 1961 about the impact of Strange Fruit then the dismissal of Killers of the Dream, Smith says that both books “disturbed” readers and that people, in the early 1960s, have started to accept her and refer to her as “the sweet little lady who has done so much about race relations,” and as a result people don’t need to read her books anymore. To this, Smith says, “Now that is an acceptance I call death, you see. Death to the writer. Death comes to the writer when people stop reading her books.” Memory and the past hover over all of Smith’s work, the ways we remember those who came before and keep their stories alive, thus keeping the person alive. For Smith, when people stop reading her work, thinking about it and communicating with it, then she will die. Death will not end her life. No, the refusal to read her will do that.

A passage from The Journey is on Smith’s tombstone, and it reads, “Death can kill a man, that is all it can do to him. It cannot end his life because of memory.” The physical may pass on, but the memory remains, embedded in the hearts and minds of those who knew and loved the artist and their audience. Shakespeare died, physically, in April 1616, over 400 years ago, yet he is not dead. His memory remains. So does Smith’s memory. She died, physically, almost sixty years ago, but her memory remains, thus she is not dead. If, when we stop reading an author the author dies, then Smith remains alive, communicating with us to this very day. She is part of us as we are part of her, disconnected by the horizontal plane and the passage of time yet connected through the vertical plane and the spiritual.

While Smith saw the creative act as an exploration of the internal self in relation to the external self, she also understood that “[w]riting is,” as she put it in the 1961 reissue of Killers of the Dream, “both horizontal and vertical exploration.” She saw writing as a means of merging both the temporal and the eternal, the earthly and the spiritual. Art, no matter the form, serves as a way for us to explore the human condition, to link us both to things seen and unseen. Smith’s art endures because she imbued it with herself and everything that informed her identity, past and future. She endures because she confronts the difficult questions of our existence and calls upon us to step outside and follow her journey of discovery.