Hatred and Hope in the American South: Rhetorical Excavations in Lillian Smith’s Our Faces, Our Words

In this chapter, David Brauer considers the rhetorical navigations of Smith’s mixed-genre 1964 book, Our Faces Our Words, which balance critique with sympathy, personal with public, and pathos with logos. Brauer reveals that in this exploration of 1960s race dynamics, Smith’s writerly approach to life dominated her engagement with subject and reader. Focusing on the book’s resistance to genre classification, this chapter underscores the complex, layered purposes of Smith’s rhetoric. Smith uses conflated genres to attack white supremacy as the ideological base of segregation and to reveal the need for social disruption to effect real change in the American South. Bauer looks closely at the book’s rhetorical strategies, which establish a complex context, generate intimacy between author and audience, and compel the reader to interpret—effects Smith pursued diligently in an effort to promote justice and transform American society in the process.