Ghosts of Our Fathers: Rewriting the South in Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream

The realm of autobiography has long provided Southerners the distinct opportunity to assess and evaluate the peculiar complexity of their lives, as well as the factors endemic to the relationship between the South and America at large. In this chapter, Justin Mellette considers Smith’s Killers of the Dream as a rhetorical response to William Alexander Percy’s sentimental Lanterns on the Levee, as well as other Southern autobiographies of the time, illustrating how Smith’s autobiography worked intentionally to combat the pervasive racism of Southern culture. To that end, the study investigates Smith’s portrayal of the South as “hellscape,” considering especially her focus on “ghost stories” and other vehicles of racial and paternalistic control that enable perpetuation of Southern violence and terrorism.