preview

Southern View of Religion in Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream

Decent Essays

Southern View of Religion in Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream

“Our first lesson about God made the deepest impression on us. We were told that He loved us, and then we were told that He would burn us in everlasting flames of hell if we displeased Him. We were told we should love Him for He gives us everything good that we have, and then we were told that we should fear Him because He has the power to do evil to us whenever He cares to. We learned from this part of the lesson another: that “people,” like God and parents, can love you and hate you at the same time; and though they may love you, if you displease them they may do you great injury; hence being loved by them does not give you protection from being harmed by them. We …show more content…

The Negroes are expected to be grateful to the whites for “everything good that we have,” as satirized by Smith in her parable of Mr. Black Man knocking on Mr. Rich White Man’s back door and coming away with a trifling handout. At the same time, the whites are free to do evil to the blacks “whenever they care to,” as Smith later illustrates with the statistics of lynch mob convictions (approximately 300 individual convictions for over 3,000 incidents.) This sense of careless power is a prevalent theme throughout the book.

Smith also parallels another black-and-white societal phenomenon with this passage. She writes, “We learned from this part of the lesson another: that “people,” like God and parents, can love you and hate you at the same time; and though they may love you, if you displease them they may do you great injury; hence being loved by them does not give you protection from being harmed by them.” Smith’s use of “people” in hyphens not only references a more human (not humane) view of God, but could also be used to suggest that rarely do the “people” of the South act as humans when it comes to race relations. Despite the fact that a child’s first real love relationship is often with his black Mammy, society later teaches him to trivialize this relationship. In the chapter “Three Ghost Stories,” Smith illustrates that white Southerners tend to love black

Get Access