In the second paragraph of Killers of the Dream, Smith explains: While these moments of racial awareness may center on pivotal childhood experiences-Lumpkin witnessing her father abusing a black servant and Smith being told that white and colored children cannot play together-they are recounted by an adult who has fled the South and metaphorically returned through the writing of the memoir. Such memoirs by southern whites often come to terms with a moment of crisis centered on race. A pattern typified in Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin’s The Making of a Southerner and Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, southern memoirs often depict a writer who flees to find herself, only later to emerge as a more objective critic of the South. Southern memoirs often follow a conventional pattern: a writer grows up in the South, experiences a crisis of identity with the cultural values, and eventually overcomes this tension by migrating North, through education, or both.
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