Sherry Chandler » Dark is the night
Dark is the night
Here is a little sampling of Lillian Smith’s writing at its most romantic. This passage is from pages 159 and 160 of Killers of the Dream, a chapter entitled “Distance and Darkness.”
While I have no doubt that what she is saying here has truth, I also feel as though we’ve strayed deep into the territory of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane or possibly a West Virginia holler movie (though they do have Yayho sightings on Droopr Mountain). Nobody is allowed beyond the confines of their stereotype:
ONLY A MAN or woman who has traveled in childhood the old sand or day roads of the South in buggy or wagon, who has stayed in the country after nightfall, can know what distance and darkness meant in the making of the rural mind of the South.
Distance was not a word but a force pushing a man hard against his memories and fears, isolating him from a world to which he had never felt securely tied. When the sun set, the night began. There were no lights; only a kerosene lamp or a pine knot burning. And always the swamp back of you or the dark hills, or empty fields stretching on, on. . . . Far off, the Negroes singing in dim lantern-lit churches, moaning their misery and shouting their joy. Sudden sharp laughter from nowhere.
City people, townspeople, have little idea what this meant and still means in parts of the lonely South. During the war they felt the wear on nerves of the blackout, but country folks have lived in a blackout since time began. Darkness comes. Sounds creep out: whippoorwill, tree-frogs, roar of alligator back in the pond, rustle of palmetto, restless, never-ending, as if an unseen hand brushes over it and it cannot let go . . . the scream of a cat in the swamp. Sounds like these weave in and out of lonely fantasies, pulling in hearsay tales, making a tight mat of facts and feelings and fancies and fears until one no longer knows the real from the unreal, and sometimes one no longer cares. The sweet things too: jessamine crawling on fences and trees, giving out a wonder of yellow fragrance, bays blooming white and delicate down in the swamp, and water lilies fattening on green pond water, making you love the loneliness you hate; making you want to stay even as you feel you must leave or die.
The chapter closes with this paragraph, which again is both insightful and patronizing (matronizing?), the paragraph stands with the “wool-hat boys and girls” but nevertheless keeps them a safely distant “they.”
Having lived my early life in a Deep South town and much of my recent life in the mountains, I have a bond with rural people which I cherish. The stereotypes built of them by those who are trying to manipulate them, are partly true, of course; but partly false. They do have little learning and can be stubborn as mules; but they have conscience. And they are close to nature and therefore close to the variables of life. They are less aware of large aggregates and samenesses than are urbanites; and more aware of differences and the unpredictability of things that breathe. They are also religious: primitively so, sometimes; but they know and feel deeply the teachings of Jesus. There is also a rough humor, bone-deep. This cannot be disregarded when we are appraising a peoples ability to change. I fear the wool-hat boys and girls far less than I do the educated leaders who fear them and therefore desert them in their need—and the demagogic leaders who shoulder the people intimately but exploit them ruthlessly.
Sweeping generalizations are dangerous things so I think I’ll just go ahead and make one. As one who identifies working class/redneck, I think part of the problem may lie in the fact that it’s easier to recognize patronizing attitudes than it is to recognize populist demagoguery. Populists tell you what you want to hear. Patronizing reformers, though they may be right, tell you that you’re ignorant and evil.
Smith recognizes that the evils of racism hurt the poor whites of the South nearly as much as the blacks. I give her high marks for pointing out that the people who benefitted most from Southern racism were the rich landowners, industrialists, and politicians who were able to exploit the cheap labor force. She is also good at deflating self-righteousness in all concerned.
On balance, Killers of the Dream was and is an important book. I just wish I didn’t find it so difficult to read.
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