Frank Yerby and Lillian Smith: Challenging the Myths of Whiteness

When I read Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949), I saw how she was illuminating the triptych forces of sin, sex, and segregation that unleashed themselves amongst the masses. Just as I did with Yerby, I began to backtrack, reading what she had written from her mountain home in Clayton, Georgia. From 1936 to 1945, when public lynchings and Jim Crow law ruled the land, Smith and her partner, Paula Snelling, published an openly liberal quarterly journal, Pseudopodia, that had a circulation of 10,000, and included authors such as W.J. Cash, Pauli Murray, and artists such as Jacob Lawrence. 

“Even the children knew that the South was in trouble. No one had to tell them; no words said aloud. To them, it was a vague thing weaving in and out of their play, like a ghost haunting an old graveyard or whispers after the household sleeps—fleeting mystery, vague menace to which each responded in his own way.” 

These are the opening sentences of Lillian E. Smith’s Killers of the Dream, a book that reads, at every turn, as if she wrote it in our current moment, a moment where “the singsong voices of politicians who preached their demonic suggestions to us as if elected by Satan to do so” still exude from the mouths of politicians and pundits. She put these words on the page in 1949, four years removed from the end of World War II and five years before the Brown decision. Smith was involved with the Civil Rights movement, speaking to Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members on multiple occasions and having activists such as Lonnie King to her home. 

In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mentions Smith as one of the Southerners who has “grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it.” Upon her death in 1966, King wrote to Smith’s family, “We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of your sister and our dear friend, Lillian Smith. Her writings, her exemplary life, and her commitment to people and humanity inspired millions. She was one of the brightest stars in the human firmament.” Her star, though, faded among the brightening stars in the shifting sky.

Smith was born in Jasper, Florida, in 1897, the eighth of 10 children. In 1915, World War I caused her father’s lumber and naval stores to collapse, and the family moved north to their summer home in Clayton. She would go on to attend Piedmont College for a year then Peabody Conservatory. From 1922 to 1925, she worked at the Virginia School in China, teaching music. Her time in China opened her eyes to the world, and she drew connections between British colonialism and Jim Crow segregation in the South. 

Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1916; his father was of African American and Seminole descent and his mother was Scots-Irish. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Paine College in 1937 and his master’s from Fisk University in 1938. He lived in Chicago and rubbed shoulders with Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, and more luminaries of the Chicago Renaissance before heading back South to teach briefly at Southern University and Florida A&M. He won the O’Henry Award in 1944 for his short story “Health Card,” and in 1955 he moved to Spain, to escape the confines of American racism, where he resided until his death in 1991. Yerby’s wife, at his request, kept his death a secret for five weeks.

The consensus seems to be that Yerby has fallen to the wayside because he does not neatly fit into established literary categories. Yerby constantly pushed back against those who sought to label him. During an interview with James L. Hill in 1977, Yerby asked, “Is a black writer a writer who writes about black themes? … I reject adjectives. Adjectives, which are the enemy of nouns, don’t mean anything.”

Many criticized Yerby for writing pot-boilers and popular fiction, but what they didn’t recognize was the ways he used the historical romance genre and moonlight and magnolias setting to challenge and educate his readers. During an interview, James Hill asked Yerby about the ways he criticizes the mythological, idyll South. Yerby begins by mentioning that while some, like James Baldwin, “were preaching to the converted.” Yerby wanted to grab those who needed converting: “And I was trying to get to the bigots; I was trying to get to the n*****-haters. I got to some of them, and I actually received letters that indicated that I made some of that kind of people think, you know.” 

Yerby achieved this in various ways. For one, he conducted thorough research when writing his books. Some even contain lengthy footnotes. As well, he had his white protagonists hold mirrors up to themselves and their own whiteness. In Yerby’s 18th novel, Griffin’s Way (1962), Candace Trevor, a nurse from Vermont who comes to Mississippi in the 1850s, questions her own preconceived beliefs. 

Candace views herself as liberal and open-minded, living in Mississippi during Reconstruction. When she comes to Hector and Roberta Griffin’s house and sees their biracial children, though, the ghosts enter her thoughts. She becomes “[s]ick with shock” when she realizes that they “weren’t white.” She recalls her father telling her that “all men are created equal in God’s image,” but she cannot shake the “visceral feelings” that rise up within her when she sees Hector and Roberta’s children. She thinks, 

“Almighty, what good is knowledge against this--this revulsion? This repugnance? These children, now: my mind tells me they're beautiful; but the message doesn't get through to my heart. I can't see them because my brain is too busy painting shocking pictures: a man like Hector, a fine man like that, lying naked in a black woman's arms…” 

She continues by asking, “What good is intellect against these—visceral feelings?” The "visceral feelings" reside within the heart, even when the mind knows better. The "visceral feelings" are the fears that had been "implanted in the hairy thing that was our ancestor before he had become a man, or developed a mind." Candace becomes a stand-in for the reader as she works through her whiteness and the social constructions of race. 

Likewise, Smith calls upon whites to hold the mirror up and examine themselves, uprooting the disease that poisons their roots. In “The Chasm and the Bridge,” a chapter that Smith added for the 1961 edition of Killers of the Dream, she writes about the “visceral feelings” that plague Candace and others. She writes about the rational and the mythic mind. To the rational mind, the word “relationships” means “a kind of bridge, a dialogue, a question and answer.” To the mythic mind, “relationships” means “mongrelization, fusing, merging, melting.”

The mythic mind, like Candace’s heart, is not rational. Nothing restrains it. It does not listen to facts or logic. Instead, it draws from the myth, allows it to seep into the body, into the heart, and eat away at the very core of the rational mind. Through this, as Smith writes, “it can take one quality, such as whiteness and cover a neighborhood or a quarter of the earth with it, declaring that all beneath this great white sheet are the ‘same.’”  This white sheet allowed politicians to use the symbol of white supremacy to join poor and rich whites “in a mutual hostility against the Negro.” 

Smith remained hopeful that the myths and symbols could be crushed, and to counter them, she calls upon us to hold the mirror up to ourselves. She concludes by writing, “If only we could see the brokenness in each of us and the necessity for relationships; if we could realize our talent for bridging chasms that have always been and always will be.” How do we disentangle ourselves from the mythical tales we inherited? We examine ourselves. We bridge chasms. We form relationships. We listen. We connect. 

While Yerby’s influence has waned in critical circles, it is still felt in popular culture. In January 2017, Stephen King tweeted an observation about Thomas Mullen’s Darktown. He wrote, “Can’t help wondering if Lucius Boggs’s Uncle Percy was based on black historical novelist Frank Yerby.” Mullen replied that Uncle Percy is loosely based on Yerby. “Game of Thrones” writer George R.R. Martin names Yerby, along with other historical writers like Sir Walter Scott, as an influence in his work.  

Smith’s legacy continues as well, through activists, writers, and artists. Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley pointed out that during the production of “White Lies,” they read Killers of the Dream, which informed the podcast. Ibram X. Kendi, Ijeoma Oluo and more channel Smith in their discussions of the festering lesions that still inflict our existence. Robin Diangelo quotes  Killers of the Dream as an epigraph to White Fragility: “These ceremonials in honor of white supremacy, performed from babyhood, slip from the conscious mind down deep into muscles . . . and become difficult to tear out.” 

Smith and Yerby each exhort us as readers to tear out the poison lodged within our psyches. The uprooting of the history of racism and the social construction of race is an ongoing process that requires internal examination. As such, I take Smith, Yerby, and others with me everyday as I seek to eradicate the poisoned roots within myself. They travel with me into the classroom, online, and down main street, speaking to me in my daily interactions with those I encounter. For change to occur, we must first confront our own selves, In order to achieve this, we must, as Smith notes, recognize that sometimes “the killer of dreams is in us.”