Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Southern Literary Studies)

Bridging Southern Cultures

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Bridging Southern Cultures an interdisciplinary approach Edited by John Lowe

louisiana state university press baton rouge

Published by Louisiana State University Press “On the Issue of Africanisms in American Culture” copyright © 2005 by Daniel C. Littlefield All other material copyright © 2005 by Louisiana State University Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America lou isiana pape r bac k e di t ion , 2 0 11 d es ig n e r : Andrew Shurtz ty pe fac e : Minion ty p es e t t e r : G&S Typesetters, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bridging Southern Cultures: an interdisciplinary approach / edited by John Lowe. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8071-3031-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Regionalism—Southern States.2. Southern States— Civilization.I. Lowe, John, 1945 — F209.5.B75 2005 306'.0975 — dc22 2004015794 ISBN 978-0-8071-3867-0 (paper : alk. paper) The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. ∞

John Shelton Reed's essay "The South's Midlife Crisis" was first published in Southern Humanities Review 25 (Spring 1991) and is reprinted here with permission of the journal's editors.

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In memoriam henry shapiro Visionary teacher, pioneering scholar, and cherished friend

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Contents acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Constructing a Cultural Theory for the South John Lowe 1 Preamble: The Study of Region William Ferris 29

Part One southern lives, southern cultures In Search of a Common Identity: The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies William L. Andrews 39 Reclaiming the South Thadious M. Davis 57

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Part Two southern culture and the arts William Faulkner: Art, Alienation, and Alcohol Bertram Wyatt-Brown 77 The Spunky Little Woman—You Can’t Be One If You’re White: Race, Gender, and a Little Bit of Class in Depression Post Office Murals Sue Bridwell Beckham 100 “The Most Natural Expressions of Locality”: Ellsworth Woodward and the Newcomb Pottery Richard Megraw 133 “Working Both Sides of the Fence”: African American Quartets Enter the Realm of Popular Culture Joyce Marie Jackson 154 “The Tools of the Master”: Southernists in Theoryland Anne Goodwyn Jones 172

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Part Three the burdens and blessings of southern history On the Issue of Africanisms in American Culture Daniel C. Littlefield 199 Re-creating a Public for the Plantation: Reconstruction Myths of the Biracial Southern “Family” John Lowe 221 The South’s Midlife Crisis John Shelton Reed 254 How Region Changed Its Meaning and Appalachia Changed Its Standing in the Twentieth Century Henry D. Shapiro 265 The Burden of Southern Culture Charles Reagan Wilson 288

index 303

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Illustrations 1. Carson Davenport, design for Chatham, Virginia 101 2. Carson Davenport, final mural for Chatham, Virginia 105 3. Carl Nyquist, final mural for Bolivar, Tennessee 107 4. Arthur Covey, final mural for Anderson, South Carolina 108 5. Beulah Bettersworth, final mural for Columbus, Mississippi 108 6. Chester Tingler, final mural for Sylvester, Georgia 111 7. Louis Raynaud, cartoon for Bay St. Louis, Mississippi 113 8. Louis Raynaud, final mural for Bay St. Louis, Mississippi 114 9. Francis Speight, design for Gastonia, North Carolina 115 10. Francis Speight, final mural for Gastonia, North Carolina 116 11. Minetta Good, design for St. Martinville, Louisiana 117 12. Minetta Good, final mural for St. Martinville, Louisiana 119 13. Laura B. Lewis, design for Eunice, Louisiana 120 14. Laura B. Lewis, color sketch for Eunice, Louisiana 120 15. Sheffield Kagy, final mural for Walterboro, South Carolina 123 16. Julien Binford, final mural for Forest, Mississippi 125 17. Simka Simkavitch, final mural for Jackson, Mississippi 125 18. Joseph Pistey Jr., final mural for Haynesville, Louisiana 127 19. Ethel Magafan, final mural for Wynne, Arkansas 128 20. Hollis Holbrook, color sketch for Jeanerette, Louisiana 129 21. Louis Raynaud, final mural for Abbeville, Louisiana 129 22. Robert Purdy, mural for New Albany, Mississippi 130 23. Agnes Tait, mural for Laurinburg, North Carolina 131 24. Agnes Tait, cartoon for Laurinburg, North Carolina 131

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Acknowledgments

this volume took shape over the course of many years, and there are many people to thank. The core essays came out of an American Studies Association panel that featured Charles Reagan Wilson, Thadious Davis, Anne Goodwyn Jones, and William L. Andrews. The respondent was Eugene Genovese; while he isn’t one of our contributors, his initial critique of our papers was both provocative and helpful. Subsequently, other scholars and editors provided counterarguments, advice, and encouragement. Special thanks go to Lewis Simpson, Fred Hobson, Karen Hewitt, Charles Vincent, Seetha Srinivasan, Susan Donaldson, Judith McWillie, Ann Abadie, Sally Ann Ferguson, James Payne, Joseph Skerrett, Peggy Prenshaw, Kathleen Diffley, and Veronica Makowsky. At LSU Press, we were fortunate to have the support of Les Phillabaum, John Easterly, Maureen Hewitt, Sylvia Frank Rodrigue, MaryKatherine Callaway, and especially George Roupe, whose copyediting was attentive, tactful, and immensely helpful. This volume is dedicated to the memory of our superb colleague, mentor, and friend, Professor Henry Shapiro, longtime dean of Appalachian Studies, and a true pioneer in bridging the gaps between American, Southern, and Appalachian Studies. He believed in this project from its inception and was eagerly anticipating its fruition just before his untimely death. His long career as an outstanding teacher has inspired several generations, and now his final essay will extend a precious legacy. Oleh, Chief!

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Bridging Southern Cultures

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Introduction Constructing a Cultural Theory for the South john lowe

Culture is contested, temporal, and emergent. Representation and explanation— both by insiders and outsiders—is implicated in this emergence. —james clifford Every ideology . . . breeds its own opposition, every culture its own counter-culture. The same ideals that at one point sustain the system may later become the basis of a new revolutionary consensus, one that invokes those ideals on behalf of an entirely different way of life, moral and material. —sacvan bercovitch

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ome years ago, when I was teaching in Massachusetts, I got a call from the chair of English at Louisiana State University, offering me a job. My northern friends congratulated me, saying they knew I must be happy about going “back home” after thirteen years in the East and the Midwest. I was a bit bemused by this repeated response; hadn’t they heard about the Quentin Compson syndrome? Why was it they assumed that all southerners in the North feel exiled and are pining for the piney woods? Moreover, as I reminded them, I’m originally from Atlanta, which is hardly the same part of the South as Louisiana. Once I arrived in Baton Rouge, however, I did feel at home, even with the mysteries of Bayou Cajunland and Creole New Orleans. There was, I decided, something that connected my southern past with my southern present. I felt this immediately when I dutifully began my orientation to Cajun life by using Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen cookbook, a totem of Louisiana culture. His introduction begins, “I’m a Cajun.” He traces his ethnic, familial, and individual history (he was the youngest of thirteen children born to sharecroppers). His mother taught him how to cook while telling great stories about people and food. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized how important living close to the land 1

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was and how real it was—not only for me and my family, but for all the people who live close to the land” (Prudhomme, 13). This comes home to him as he travels the United States, learning his trade, and teaching others about the joy of cooking Cajun and Creole food. . . . At the same time, I would notice when I returned home for visits that my Cajun family and friends didn’t seem to recognize the uniqueness of their cooking. I felt it was one of those situations where if you see something every day, you don’t see it; you taste something every day, you don’t realize that it’s unique. . . . That’s one of the things that led me back to Louisiana. And I decided that Louisiana was the place to cook, not only because it was important to me to keep the Cajun culture alive, but because the most creative cooking in the nation was going on in Louisiana. (Prudhomme, 14) Chef Paul’s narrative is quintessentially southern, ethnic, and evangelical, too. New converts to southern culture are sought; personal, rural, and downhome narrative history is evoked; and we’re covertly led to believe that he’s made it in the big cities by being faithful to his origins. Also, like another great southern artist, Zora Neale Hurston, who claimed to be able to see her all-black Florida hometown as the great cultural resource it was only after she acquired the “spy-glass” of anthropology at Columbia, Prudhomme learns to “see” his culture only by separating from it, while simultaneously being singled out by outsiders as its representation and ambassador. What else is going on here? For one thing, although our chef claims to be a conservator of “traditional cooking,” he also praises the “creativity” of Cajun cooking, and in fact he has gone on to publish—sacré bleu!—a new cookbook that takes virtually every ounce of fat out of the old recipes, while adding new touches from other cultures. As Aristotle said many years ago, a culture must change if it is to remain the same. Moreover, we notice Chef Paul doesn’t begin, “I’m a southerner.” He’s trying to sell a Cajun cookbook, not Paul Prudhomme’s Gone with the Wind Old Time Southern Cookbook. So he conveniently draws in the boundaries of his ethnic identity, from American, to southern, to Cajun. Fredrik Barth and other social scientists have gone so far as to suggest that the boundary of an ethnic group is more important than its cultural content per se in determining ethnic identity. Seen in this light, cultural boundaries are con-

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stantly shifting, constantly being redefined. The exception to Barth’s formulation has always been race, a factor that tends to dictate more definite boundaries. But as Thadious Davis, John Shelton Reed, and Charles Reagan Wilson suggest in this volume, even race is yielding to new formulations today, and we may be moving ever closer to an all-embracing sense of southern ethnicity that is more culturally defined, in terms of boundaries, than otherwise. The term culture itself has meant different things to different groups. Certainly a key use it plays for us today is to refer to music, literature, painting, and other forms of artistic expression. As Clifford Geertz has remarked, the term culture has acquired an aura of ill repute because of the multiplicity of its meanings and the sloppy way the term is frequently used. His definition, therefore, that culture consists of “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” is meant to be corrective.

mapping the stream Although the South partly atoned for its defeat in the Civil War by commanding the nation’s attention through plantation narratives and local color fiction during Reconstruction and afterward, from 1916 to 1928 the South’s visibility in popular culture largely vanished; no book on a southern subject made the annual best seller lists, and the South failed to function as the subject of any major American film (Kirby, 44). Still, the monumental Library of Southern Literature appeared in 1907; the preface, written by Charles William Kent of the University of Virginia, modestly stated that the series is not intended to prove anything but to set forth much. It is to cover an imperial territory and, in sheer time, the total existence of our American people. Certainly no easy task confronts him; who would traverse this three hundred years and one, taking not of the men who have uttered the thought and feeling of this majestic domain. . . . Our aim is to represent the literary life of the South with all its inequalities, and not to create arbitrary standards to which all the selections must be se-

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lected. . . . [I]t would seem that these very irregularities may be recognized as a merit of the book. . . . In general . . . little has been made of state lines, for the South is a single, homogeneous people. (xv–xviii) Kent’s remarks are predictive of a massive industry that would take years to build up a head of steam. He also provides an early paradigm for speaking of a “single, homogeneous people,” even though the writers he represented in his multivolume, handsomely bound set were virtually all white men. H. L. Mencken’s complaint that the South’s claim to culture— even when posed in the form of the Library of Southern Literature—was really a boast about “the Sahara of the Bozart” was not far from the truth. The grounds for this charge began to shift and erode in the twenties, as the idea of the South began to rear its head again, prominently in Ulrich Phillips’s scholarship on slavery; the Virginia Quarterly Review was established in 1925, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 1928, the Southern Economic Association in 1929. Then the celebrated books of the Southern Renaissance began to appear, many resurrecting the old literary traditions, in particular the plantation narrative, but with a modernist difference. At the beginning of the decade, works by Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell began the Renaissance, a movement that expanded exponentially, culminating in the works of Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner, two of its most gifted writers (O’Brien, xiv). The explosion of Faulkner on the scene, followed by the appearance of Richard Wright in 1938, dramatically changed the perception of the field of southern letters and accelerated a critical examination of the region’s writing that shows no sign of slackening today, as we continue to experience a “second Renaissance,” or perhaps merely the continuing momentum of the original. Literary assays of southern character have been joined, however, by those of social scientists, economists, philosophers, and studies by scholars from virtually every other discipline. In many of these industries, however, and particularly in those emanating from literature and history departments, it is truly striking how the so-called modern attempt to define southern identity actually replicates the old discussions; Michael O’Brien’s The Idea of the American South, 1920 –1941, focuses on Howard Odum, John Wade, and the Agrarians, bringing the Nashville and Chapel Hill academic wings of the Southern Renaissance into dramatic confrontation, but it largely ignores other aspects of southern culture that could have enriched his study—particularly those of African American and 4

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women’s cultures. Nevertheless, O’Brien usefully reminds us of continuing questions originally posed in memorable terms by some of these older figures. In 1954, John Wade marveled to Donald Davidson that the South was “one of the really great abstractions of our race” (8 August 1954, cited in O’Brien, 215). Similarly, O’Brien points out that modern society’s need for organizational centers has ironically strengthened the southern idea—all sorts of associations, such as the Southern Governors’ Conference, the Southern Historical Society, SAMLA, and so on. We might add that the thrust of modern communication systems has been simultaneously to increase our sense of kinship with the nation and to heighten a sense of local community, culture, and heritage. Viewers watch both local and national news, and the local frequently bears reminders of southern identity, as do many commercials aired in the South. During the Civil War, being for the South meant being against America; today, one can be loyal to both at once: one can subscribe, as I do, to both Southern Living and The New Yorker, and indeed one is more likely to find a piece by Bobbie Anne Mason in the latter than in the former. Southern studies needs the firm interdisciplinary grounding that has been developed in recent years by American studies, black studies, and women’s studies programs. It needs a variety of courses in varied departments that work together to present a coherent, all-embracing view of the South, its peoples, and its cultures. Perhaps the most important need, however, is an explosion of the monopoly that white males have had on the terms “the South” and “the southerner.” Paradoxically, a way to transcend this may come from champions of the former mode of interpretation. Cleanth Brooks, for instance, identified the three most significant topics that he felt closely relate to the changeless aspect of southern culture: a sense of place, a special conception of time that takes account of the past and of the timeless, and an interest in and aptitude for narrative that includes the oral as well as the formal tradition of narration (Brooks, 5). One may usefully and easily extend this approach (as Brooks did not) to African Americans’ and women’s cultures. For these southerners, just as much as the figures Brooks focuses on, could also say along with him, “[W]e are products of the past. We have grown out of it, been formed, for good or ill, by its experiences, and willy-nilly, carry a portion of it within ourselves. We may be able to redeem the past—to make good come out of it— or we may perhaps be maimed by it, but it is foolish to believe that we can repudiate the past. . . . The south itself has to make the attempt to understand its past, and in doing so, it 5

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may come to a true knowledge of itself.” Elizabeth Hardwick, a writer who sometimes is considered southern because of her Kentucky background, is also someone who has lived for some time in the North and who has written on a variety of subjects in a voice that is rather regionless; she has remarked, in fact, that “Southernness is more a decision than a fate, since fine talents are not necessarily under any command of place or feeling” (Hardwick, 18). Brooks’s remarks on place complement those of Eudora Welty, who has also spoken about the term regional: “Regional,” I think, is a careless term, as well as a condescending one, because what it does is fail to differentiate between the localized raw material of life and its outcome as art. “Regional” is an outsider’s term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing, because as far as he knows he is simply writing about life. . . . It seems plain that the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood. It is through place that we put out roots, wherever birth, chance, or fate or our traveling selves set us down; but where those roots reach toward—whether in America, England or Timbuktu—is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding. (Welty, 132 –33) Welty’s provocative remarks, spoken by one of the region’s most notable native daughters find deeper resonance when juxtaposed with those of the eminent British Marxist Raymond Williams; in his musings on the various meanings of region, he notes “an evident tension within the word, as between a distinct area and a definite part. Each sense has survived, but it is the latter which carries an important history. Everything depends, in the latter sense, on the term of relation: a part of what?” (Williams, 264). Moreover, he finds that regional—as related to central— overlaps with the similarly value-freighted duality of metropolitan/provincial. Conversely, regional can have a positive sense in terms of “regionalism,” in terms of implicating a valuable and distinctive “way of life” (266). As Welty and Williams would seem to suggest, a novel about Atlanta—a metropolitan area currently approaching four million in population—would be considered at least “regional,” but certainly “southern.” A novel about New York or Detroit, however, probably would not be labeled, at least in terms of 6

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place, at all. Yet Atlanta, Scarlett O’Hara’s city, was even in her time dynamic, changing, ever reinventing not only itself but its southern characteristics. Nor is this true only of the “Yankeefied” big cities: Oxford, Mississippi, which would seem to be a perfect example of what Welty has in mind, now has its Holiday Inn and its franchise strip; it also, however, has a new respect for native son William Faulkner and its past. The square has been lovingly restored, and a wonderful book store, Square Books, presides over one corner, selling books by and about southern authors and about southern history, as well as the best of current writing worldwide. Smitty’s, alas, is no longer there to serve those terrific grits and sausage; but some of the tony yuppie establishments that would otherwise fit right in San Diego or Seattle offer “gourmet” dishes that feature grits. Architecture, supposedly a Greek revival staple of the South, has had to be refigured too. Some people like to talk about Atlanta and its dreadful new skyscrapers, which to some seem reminiscent of Las Vegas, but in fact many of “Hotlanta’s” new structures were designed, for better or worse, by native son John Portman, and his other new buildings all over the world speak to a new kind of southern influence. Clearly, “place”— especially when fastened to “style”— can be an unmoored signifier that nonetheless resonates with deep, if shifting, meanings. The problem of writing a new perspective on the South was posed quite succinctly, albeit in another time with very different imperatives, by Richard Wright: “To paint the picture of how we live on the tobacco, cane, rice, and cotton plantations is to compete with mighty artists: the movies, the radio, the newspapers, the magazines, and even the Church. They have painted one picture: charming, idyllic, romantic; but we live another: full of the fear of the Lords of the Land, bowing and grinning when we meet white faces, toiling from sun to sun, living in unpainted wooden shacks that sit casually and insecurely upon the red clay” (Wright, 35). Wright’s comments are still relevant today, but mainly in terms of the continuing oppression of black workers and nonworkers; labor abuses in Mississippi catfish farms staffed mainly by black women find their counterpart in the overwhelming despair of unemployed New Orleans, sweltering in the drug- and crime-infested projects that bear names like Desire. As Wright’s comments and my examples suggest, situations remain, although the specifics may change. Artists must find means of registering both aspects. Consider, for example, Martin Scorsese’s remake of the cinema classic 7

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Cape Fear; his North Carolina is a far cry, both in setting and in characterization, from that of the original Gregory Peck /Robert Mitchum thriller, although Robert De Niro’s murderous fundamentalism seems timeless. The high-class southerners he stalks (now played by Jessica Lange and Nick Nolte) are quite different in their yuppie-like manners and mores but seem no less a product of their region. Popular culture can often demonstrate modes of transition more readily than products of “high” culture. The work of finding new registers and symbols in southern art for old situations and new variations admits no generational advantage. New faces on the scene—Sheila Bosworth, John Ed Bradley, Dori Sanders—join other, older writers who may still jolt us with their talent, a group including such eminent writers as James Alan McPherson, David Madden, Elizabeth Spencer, Ellen Douglas, and Ernest Gaines. If there’s one thing these writers seem to agree on, it’s their thankful assessment that the “age of sentiment” in southern letters has finally ended. As if their own witty, mordant, existential, irreverent, shocking, vulgar—fill in the unsentimental blank—hadn’t already shown us that. The increasing trend of nonsouthern novelists writing books set in the South revives an old practice that used to require a stay “down home.” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, to cite only one prominent example, has to be considered at least an honorary southerner; more recently, Toni Morrison (Beloved), Gloria Naylor (Mama Day), Peter Matthiessen (Killing Mister Watson), and many others have demonstrated that Quentin Compson was wrong: you don’t have to be born in the South to “understand” it . Similarly, southern literary study and criticism need not be conducted primarily by those who think of themselves as “southern,” particularly now that that term has taken on so many new meanings and new avenues of communication have developed. Many of the chief critics of southern literature today are from elsewhere—Veronica Makowsky, for instance, hails from Connecticut, and who would deny that some of the region’s most perceptive critics recently haven’t even been American, let alone southern! Many “outsiders” have proved susceptible to the temptation to “tell about the South,” and have proved capable of doing so. V. S. Naipaul, of all people, fell captive to the old spell, producing A Turn in the South (1989), which fixated not only on key southern cities and towns—Atlanta, Charleston, Tallahassee, Tuskegee, Jackson, Nashville, Chapel Hill—but also on traditional literary and historical phrases: “down home,” “the religion of the past,” “the truce with irrationality,” “the frontier,” “sanctities.” Traditionalists may cry “carpetbag8

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ging,” and Naipaul’s observations will not please everyone, but they ceaselessly provoke, challenge, and tease and are most welcome. Michel Gresset, André Bleikasten, Michael O’Brien, Genevieve and Michel Fabre, Berndt Ostendorf, Augusto Lombardo, and Kumkum Sangari are only a few of the many other international critics of southern literature and culture we could name here. Often, new eyes are needed to accelerate the progress of intellectual endeavor. On the other hand, to write creatively about the South may well demand some kind of southern identity. Gloria Naylor, whose southern parents, she reports, conceived her in Mississippi before heading north, clearly has this kind of background, although she was not raised in the South. Any attempt to truly redefine southern culture must rethink old formulations about cultural boundaries such as these; further, our leading critics must be willing to deal with an expanded sense of aesthetics, a more catholic canon, and a more generous selection of critical tools, chosen at least in part from currently expanding resources in multicultural, feminist, and interdisciplinary research. Unfortunately, many of the most prominent male critics still focus on the old canon, a fact ironically noted by Michael O’Brien: “It [the canon] still fails to accommodate black writers, a fact noted uncomfortably in the prefaces to many of these works [by critics of southern literature]. Charles Johnson, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Mary McLeod Bethune, these are acknowledged, not assimilated in the analyses” (168). I say ironically, for O’Brien, like the critics he chastises, continues to focus his attention on the tried and true figures of the old canon. He and many other critics of his era have little commerce with new, integrative scholarly networks in southern, women’s, ethnic, and African American studies or their theoretical and methodological approaches. In fairness, it should be noted that prior to the past two decades, southern literature was mainly considered the writing of southern white men. The few graduate schools that offered a course on southern writers at all (few do even today outside the South) trained many of today’s senior professors. Now, however, the region’s writers and many scholars are all in one way or another products of the South’s truly heroic age, the Civil Rights movement. Many were direct participants; the rest have absorbed its lessons and often seek to renew its legacy in the conflicts they chart in their fiction, poetry, plays, and life stories. Perhaps because many of the best writers on the scene are either not male, not white, or neither, and because the nation as a whole seems finally ready to look at itself in toto, academicians are finally beginning to respond to these new factors, particularly as a 9

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younger generation of scholars has come forward from revamped graduate programs that have become vitally interested in issues of race, class, gender, and regional and ethnic identities. A new sense of the South’s constant engagement with Europe, Africa, and most tellingly, the Caribbean, has fostered a sense of a transnational South. Increasingly, the South’s rich cultural history has provided some of the most compelling texts and situations for developing new theoretical approaches to culture and cultural productions. This trend can only accelerate in the years to come, particularly as the South continues to function as a magnet for Americans from other regions, as well as for new immigrants. As I suggested above, the new acceptance of the South in the nation and the world has coincided with a newly born embrace of ethnicity. When The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups came out in 1981, more than a few eyebrows were raised upon discovering an entry entitled “Southerners,” written by the eminent south watcher John Shelton Reed. Harvard’s decision looks cannier by the day, as southerners in particular but Americans as a whole have rediscovered the cultural resources of the nation’s most distinctive region. Most of my remarks to this point have concerned southern writing; southern history, however, has also been revitalized by the publication of pathbreaking new books, such as Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana, which “firmly embraces a dynamic, developmental approach to culture formation,” one that “explicitly rejects a structuralist approach, avoiding a masculine vision of power and control, which assumes that culture is a static thing passed on and enforced from the top of the social hierarchy. Culture is a creation of the folk and is passed on to a great extent by parents, especially by biological mothers and women who played the role of mothers for whites as well as for AfroCreoles” (xiv). Joseph Roach, writing from the perspective of performance theory, has located a circum-Atlantic world vitally centered in New Orleans’s hybrid culture, which of course is also southern and Caribbean. Similarly, this group of essays seeks to build on new concepts of culture as a dynamic process and on the accompanying idea that cultures are rarely “lost,” or “gone with the wind”; specifically, these pieces demonstrate that such has not been the fate of southern culture. As James Clifford asks, “How many cultures pronounced dead or dying by anthropologists and other authorities have, like Curtis’s ‘vanishing race’ or Africa’s diverse Christians, found new ways to be different? Metaphors of continuity and ‘survival’ do not account for complex historical processes of appropriation, compromise, subversion, masking, inven10

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tion, and revival. These processes inform the activity of a people not living alone but ‘reckoning itself among the nations’” (Clifford, 338). This study devotes much attention to African American southern culture, for we increasingly see that aspect of southern society as a crucial repository of the larger tradition. Fred Hobson observed in The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World, “It is an irony a hidebound Agrarian like Donald Davidson would find difficult to accept, but black southerners now appear to be the leading exponents of a southern literature based in the concepts of community, place, and the past and its legacy . . . ground[ed] . . . in a rich traditional folk culture,” and they, now more than their white confreres, understand the old feeling of a “legacy of poverty [and] defeat,” an understanding based in an “immersion in history and what it has produced” (Hobson, 92, 101). And indeed, the dean of southern letters, Lewis Simpson, has gone farther to suggest not only that the African American southerner is perhaps the “quintessential southern writer,” but that African Americans will also instigate the next “southern Renascence,” one that will “in the next century do for black writing in America what the Harlem Renaissance did in the present century.” Even more tellingly, Simpson suggests that “the deepest truth about southern literary history may finally be discovered in the ‘intertextuality’ of white and black writing” (xviii). In melding these essays, it is my hope to demonstrate the usefulness of a new kind of cultural discourse in southern studies. If Bakhtin has taught us anything, it is of the value of “heteroglossia,” that is, attending to the ambiguous, multivocal world that all cultures generate. Bakhtin, rather than seeing discord, discovers possibilities, claiming that any culture’s various languages do not cancel out or exclude each other, but rather overlap, influence, and comment on others. Our discovery of Bakhtinian principles coincides with a new assay of southern “languages,” which I have addressed above. Our essays attempt to bridge the chasms of race, gender, class, divided locales, disciplines, art forms, and “high” and popular culture in an attempt to get at aspects of our southern heritage that previously “monovocal” or simply blindered approaches have obscured for too long. Finally, I hope that our essays, taken together, do more than simply suggest a new set of subjects that have previously been ignored. We care very deeply about the connections that exist between these subjects as well, for those relations and perspectives that link black and white, rich and poor, man and woman, farm and city, and so on are part and parcel of culture just as much as the 11

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people, places, and phenomena they connect. To uncover these heretofore obscured “dialogics” has been one of our principle aims. the university and the study of regional culture How might new theories of southern culture be developed? Three related developments in the field of literary studies offer instructive lessons: the reshaping of the American literary canon, the creation of new literary histories of the United States, and the ongoing raging battles between literary theorists and traditional literary scholars. The debate over the canon of American literature has been going on for some time now, and the battle lines of gender, race, and class are by now well defined. New anthologies of American literature incorporating many new selections by women and minorities have appeared as the first major fruits of this debate. A corollary benefit has been the increased willingness of educators and publishers to consider a wider definition of literature itself, one that includes essays, autobiography, travel memoirs, and various popular culture genres. In the larger arena of cultural studies, quilts made by slaves and shaker sideboards now merit the attention once afforded only to the old “high culture” artifacts. Defenders of the status quo, however, are still manning the ramparts of definition, and not all the old walls of separation have been breached. American historians, of course, began a similar battle about their aims, methods, and reading lists some time ago, prompted by the European rethinking of historicity and its methods. Similar new interdisciplinary approaches are even more urgently needed in the South, where social change seems to move at an accelerating pace. Those dueling banjos, the Columbia and Cambridge literary histories of the United States are following Emerson’s advice: “each age must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this” (Emerson, 227). Sacvan Bercovitch, the editor of the Cambridge volume, attributes part of the impulse for a new history to a breakdown of consensus about the terms literary, history, and American, and states that our task is to make a virtue of dissensus. This sounds suspiciously like our aforementioned difficulty in defining South, southerner, and southern, but it also suggests a way out of the impasse. On a related note, Gerald Graff has indicted some of literary criticism’s ef-

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fects on the academy. In doing so, he brings up a useful point about the perils of specialization, which is in so many ways here to stay: It would be less pessimistic to begin by assuming that, in the university realm at least, it is not specialization itself that occasions problems so much as the failure to bring specializations into relation with one another in any planned way. Specialization becomes self-enclosure only when there is no institutionalized correlation of specialities—which means not only no integration but not even any conflict of specialities. It is not inability to agree that is intellectually stultifying, as many analysts argue, but inability to disagree, for a dispersed set of independent fields can’t even add up to an instructive set of antagonisms. Graff goes on to expand his argument to the proliferation of fields, which has happened in a way that paralyzes conflict and community and terminates accountability to outsiders. In his view, once any movement wins the “aura of the new, the advanced, and the sophisticated, the battle is essentially over; the new team of rebels is pacified with a program which is ghettoized and thus taken out of sight and mind, with the additional salutary effect of providing old liners an excuse for not learning the new whatever; ‘oh, they do that in x studies.’” Graff calls this ingenious mapping of our new academic turf the result of a program of “divide-and-evade” (Graff, 65 – 67). My third academic parable concerns a megaconference on cultural studies, which was held some years ago at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Participants, who were laying the groundwork for what we now call “transnational” and “global” studies, considered virtually every new academic field and “praxis,” but nary a word was said about southern studies or southern culture, even in connection with race, an important theme of the conference, as shown in the hefty book (almost 800 pages) that resulted from it, Cultural Studies. And in fact, most “cultural studies” experts seem to have no notion of regionalism as part of their new formulations, which would seem to me to indicate a rather large blind spot. Surely the American South merits top billing in terms of the new issues being considered by this school of theorists. To be fair, however, how many theorists of southern literature and culture are investigating cultural studies? Clearly, a new dialogue should be, and probably will be, occurring.

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In any case, if scholars don’t act, others will. We need to consider the reshaping of the southern image that has been undertaken by the media. All of us are aware of the media construct of the “Sunbelt,” but few of us have probed the ways in which this coinage has in itself transformed our view of southern culture. Should we in the academy stand idly by while such sweeping reassessments are being rather glibly made? What are our responsibilities, if any, in the matter of defining southern culture? What are the problems involved in mounting a reassessment of the region’s nature and heritage, tinged as it is with a seemingly indelible imprint of an almost universally accepted stereotype of the “Old South”? Even if we object to the old scenarios of representation, should we passively permit media moguls to impose a new bland overlay on the old stereotypes? To do so would perhaps ironically extend an unfortunate pattern. Although scholarship in southern letters has often been excellent indeed, the academy’s failures in this arena have been multiple, and the generation that preceded ours had the prescience to at least identify some of them. The late Hugh Holman, in one of his last published pieces, sketched a devastating portrait of the search for unifying principles on the part of scholars of southern letters and culture. Although he names Michael O’Brien, Richard Gray, and J. V. Ridgely as three of the more recent culprits, he leads off with a mea culpa and a damning quotation from his own earlier work that summarizes the characteristics of southern writing. Perhaps more importantly, Holman also recommends three new approaches to literature that need to be harnessed to southern texts: structuralism and semiotics, feminist criticism, and those of the students of black culture. Holman indeed predicted that the new European approaches to literature “are certain to alter the general shape of southern literary culture” (xviii). He also recommended a cross-disciplinary approach to the works of C. Vann Woodward, U. B. Phillips, and Hinton Helper; the historical reception of The Birth of a Nation; and the study of black and white folklore and proposed that “we who are the students and to some degree the custodians of southern literature and culture, in addition to maintaining our critical and moral perspectives, try also to be more historical and descriptive in our treatment of the writing of our region. Let us not canonize our personal tastes and individual values by making them the cards of admission and the frames for analysis of southern writers either of the past or the present. I suppose I am saying, let us be less prescriptive and less proscriptive.”

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In many ways this could serve as the motto for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, which has played a critical role in recent years in the effort to redefine southern culture. The center’s changing cast of resident and visiting scholars of southern life and letters has made major contributions to the effort to redefine southern culture. Unique national and international conferences have been held there on such topics as “Richard Wright: Mississippi’s Native Son,” and “Covering Civil Rights,” while annual meetings are devoted to William Faulkner and his works, the Experiences of Black Mississippians, and the Southern Literary Festival. The center has also been instrumental in establishing a national blues archive on the Ole Miss campus and a magazine on gospel music. Some years ago the center became the recipient of a major grant from the Ford Foundation for a three-year program aimed at examining, developing, and disseminating new scholarship on minorities, women, and new topics in southern culture. The program utilized the talents of staff from the center, the Afro-American Studies and Women’s Studies programs, and the contributions of many members of the history and English departments at Ole Miss. Like the center’s agendas, the Ford program was interdisciplinary; it consisted of ten seminars spaced over the academic year, which were led by ten renowned scholars from varied disciplines. A few years ago, Ford sponsored a reunion of the fellows, which included a discussion of the future of southern studies. All agreed that further interdisciplinary study was necessary and that the original work of the seminars needed to be extended to cover the “other” ethnic histories and developing cultures of the contemporary South, to include the experiences of Native Americans, ethnic Chinese, Jews, and other long-term participants in southern culture, as well as the newer immigrants such as the Haitians in Miami, the Vietnamese in Louisiana, and the Chicanos in Texas, and the countries that produced them. Participants in the reunion also shared news of community outreach programs, such as the summer institutes the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities has sponsored over the past decade to acquaint high school teachers with new texts and methods. The center’s work has proved to be paradigmatic for a number of reasons. The creation of a new theory of southern culture demands new scholarship, and most of us believe that the best scholarship is generated by and effectively tested in the classroom. As long as we continue to offer traditional courses such as southern literature or southern history in our own departmental bailiwicks,

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however, without fertilizing interchange with colleagues from other disciplines (a syndrome particularly frequent at large state universities), we simply can’t explore new questions and issues effectively. At the center, courses are offered that might combine, say, fiction, history, and folklore. Classes that have been taught include “Women in the South,” “Southern Literature and the Oral Tradition,” “Experiences of Black Mississippians,” “Indians of Mississippi and the South,” “History of Southern Art and Decorative Arts,” “The Civil Rights Movement,” “The Development of Country Music,” “Major Issues in Southern Religion,” and “Leisure and Popular Culture.” Although courses like these may occasionally appear in traditional departments with cross-listing status, the key difference that a cultural studies program can make is that courses that might not win departmental or administrative approval find much easier going in a regional studies or cultural studies program because of the natural role they play in an interdisciplinary and dynamic structure. Ole Miss is not alone; other local centers exist on several southern campuses. The University of Texas has become a focal point for the study of that state’s particular cultural history, and more generally, for American Hispanic Studies. In my own state, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has mounted an ambitious program to study, preserve, and disseminate information about our state’s rich French heritage, particularly that of the Acadians. Such local centers could and should commemorate previously ignored ethnic groups; the new branch of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Vicksburg will no doubt do just that for the Delta Chinese, the Jews of Natchez, and so on. When William Ferris was director of the NEH, he initiated a program of ten regional centers that would generate scholarship on diverse cultures of the nation. After George W. Bush’s election in 2000, however, the NEH withdrew its backing for these fledgling programs, but if independent funding can be found, some of these new centers may well perform some of the vital and necessary work I have outlined above. As these preliminary remarks indicate, this volume seeks to alert readers to the possibilities ahead for the field of southern studies. Academics, unfortunately, are better at discovering what’s already there than at inventing something really new. Yet the South has so much waiting to be discovered through inventive new approaches to scholarship and teaching. We need to be open to considering day-to-day specifics of southern culture that have thus far escaped serious scholarly scrutiny— even though many such subjects such as southern 16

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humor, foodways, ethnic festivals, country music, gospel, zydeco, and just plain fads have enjoyed immense popular attention in recent years. Some of these subjects may be so immediate that they escape our scholarly attention or so “known” to us personally that we don’t understand how unfamiliar they are to other Americans. In my own work on ethnic humor and the process of Americanization, I have been increasingly led to the perception that southerners are indeed an ethnic group and that there is an overriding “ethnic humor” that proceeds out of a multicultural folklore. Structurally, southern humor is virtually identical to other forms of ethnic humor in that, like immigrants, blacks, Native Americans, and internally generated ethnic groups such as the Shakers and the Mormons, southerners have been the victims of an aggressive form of mainstream humor. American cultural history is rife with pejorative comic treatments of hillbillies, darkies, rednecks, good ole boys, southern belles, ole misses, colonels, coons, coonasses, peckerwoods, and crackers, to name only a few. Lenny Bruce featured a neo-Mencken takeoff on southerners that ironically began with a question that has always been at the heart of the Quentin Compson “I don’t hate it” syndrome: I wonder if we’ll ever see . . . the Southerner get any acceptance at all. I mean, it’s the fault of the motion pictures, that have made the Southerner a “shitkickuh.”. . . He can’t be sensitive, he can’t be liked, and he sounds disgusting. . . . But it’s just his sound. Cause we know in our culture that “people who tawk lahk thyat”—they may be bright, articulate, wonderful people—but “people who tawk lahk thyat are shitkickuhs.” As bright as any Southerner could be, if Albert Einstein “tawked lahk thyat, theah wouldn’t be no bomb.” “Folks, ah wanna tell ya bout new-clear fishin—” “Get outta here, schmuck!” (quoted in Kirby, 112) And in fact, as consumers of media-made myths, we southerners have all too often believed distorted views others have had of us and what is ours—all the more reason to inspect that particular history. All aspects of southern culture need examination, from the adaptation of an Alice Walker novel to film to the manufacturing of Cabbage Patch Dolls, from the continuing southern subjects of longtime expatriates Elizabeth Spencer and Tony Kushner to the particularly southern qualities of down-home corporations like Delta Airlines or Coca-Cola. These corporations are heavy advertisers in yet another medium that has 17

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plied a heavy trade in southern “cultures”; American television’s stereotyped version of southern life continues to influence national perceptions of the region, as well as some of the directions taken by southern letters. Although we’ve come a long way from The Beverly Hillbillies to shows like Designing Women, Hee-Haw continues to do well in syndication. Nonsoutherners who in an earlier age relished classics like White Trash on Moonshine Mountain may have refined their tastes, but they still find Mississippi Burning more in line with their concept of the South than Sex, Lies, and Videotape, ignoring the former’s ludicrous bypassing of African Americans in the process of claiming the FBI won the Civil Rights war for America. This leads to yet another overlap—the issue of the representation of southern African Americans, not only in the region’s literature and cultural productions, but also on national stages such as television. Many of the minstrel-like figures who populated national sitcoms early on had strongly southern accents and manners, many of them stereotypical, and many of them overlapping with similar put-downs of southerners of all types. This, however, leads into related, but different fields, and it must be up to African Americans to set the record straight as to their long sojourn in the South. As the late John O. Killens eloquently observed, “A people cannot transcend its history unless it first faces that history squarely and truthfully, which is the essence of what the black Southern literary tradition is all about. In the entire recognition of the American literary tradition there is a woeful vacuum based on the exclusion of the black Southern voice. No wonder. The black Southern literary tradition gives the lie to the American profession of freedom and humaneness and democracy” (Killens and Ward, 4). Jerry W. Ward Jr. adds, “If one will not hear the black Southern voices, richly textured and sonorous in the oral traditions and no less eloquent and compelling in the literate traditions, it is impossible to discern fully the beauty and values of Southern literature and imagination” (Killens and Ward, 5). In my own state of Louisiana, we have had God’s plenty of these voices lately, in the magnificent poetry of Brenda Marie Osbey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Quo Vadis Breaux. One of the more welcome manifestations of the increasing prominence of African American studies in southern studies may be seen in the topics of discussion listed in the programs of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, which have prominently featured African American topics, albeit usually discussed by white scholars. Since the society has lately been enriched by the in18

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creasing participation of women scholars, one hopes that it will succeed in its announced goal of attracting more African American, Native American, and other scholars in overlapping fields, who have much to contribute to the “new” southern studies. This includes the new gay and lesbian studies scholars, who have already contributed much to our understanding of writers such as Randall Kenan, Dorothy Allison, Tennessee Williams, and Carson McCullers. And what of the welcome presence of writers at such meetings, and of the clusters of dramatists, poets, and prose stylists resident in various academic locales? Chapel Hill has always been a base for writers, and now Oxford, Mississippi, is home for Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, John Grisham, Tom Franklin, sometimes Ellen Douglas, and many others. Some of them regularly pal around together, but they all know about each other. A doyenne of Oxford once said to me after Larry Brown emerged on the scene, “There must be something in the water. There’s even a fireman writing now!” the essays Partly in recognition of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s role in reshaping the academy’s approach to researching, preserving, and analyzing the region’s cultures, this collection’s preamble by William Ferris trumpets a clarion call for us to remember the true directives of modern regional studies. As founder of the center, Ferris knows whereof he speaks. His strong, clear pronouncements come as a tonic amid the confusing plethora of prescriptions and agendas that always attend the beginnings of things. For like most disciplines, southern studies is yet again being reinvented in the wake of the various forces that, for lack of a better word, we have taken to calling postmodernism. Indeed, the recent remodeling of the Barnard Observatory where the center is housed at Ole Miss, might serve as a metaphor for the work Ferris and his staff had already begun, especially with their landmark Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), which includes entries on “Hick Flicks” and Air Conditioning, Elvis and Research Triangle Park, alongside expected ones on Robert E. Lee, Faulkner, the Bible Belt, and Poverty. LSU Press’s recent Companion to Southern Literature offers a much-needed and complementary approach. By invoking “the anthropologist, the sociologist, the historian, and the literary critic” and by using the term artist in a multivalent way, Ferris sets the standard for our interdisciplinary, multicultural panoply of the South, and by 19

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equating regionalism with poetry he points the way to an overarching rainbow of approaches to regionalism, one much more reflective of our various Souths than of a strained attempt to discover cultural coherence. Ferris rightly connects our work here with new developments in American studies, which indeed some years ago provided a forum for some of the views expressed here, at the American Studies Association’s annual conference in New York. Our panel, “Redefining Southern Culture,” drew an audience of over seventy people, along with a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Anne Goodwyn Jones served as moderator; the respondents were William Andrews and Eugene Genovese. Thadious Davis, Charles Reagan Wilson, and I were the panelists. As the Chronicle’s reporter observed in an article wholly dedicated to our session, the panel offered public, vocal display of a new determination on the part of scholars of the American South to incorporate the experiences of blacks and members of other ethnic groups into the study of southern culture. In his remarks, Professor Genovese urged scholars to rethink the South’s intellectual history, particularly that of antebellum southern culture. White intellectuals of that time, he noted, included political theorists, historians, social commentators, and theologians, who fashioned “a world view that embraced one of the most searing criticisms of bourgeois society ever,” while simultaneously playing a leading role in popular culture. Genovese declared, “[I]t is necessary to demand that white southerners repudiate racism. It is wrong to ask them to repent, in sackcloth and ashes, for everything noble in their past because it was rooted in a slave society. Any definition of culture and racial reconciliation must be based on the tormented history that was actually lived” (“Scholars,” 8). Genovese’s observations find dramatic proof in the new field of southern autobiography. In his essay here, William L. Andrews provides an important point of entry with his study of the life stories of William Alexander Percy, Richard Wright, Willie Morris, and Anne Moody. Mapping as they do the turbulent years spanning World War I and the Civil Rights movement, these narratives cover an amazing sequence of events, but they are all shaped and given a common thread by being enacted in the Mississippi Delta and being told in a southern language that spans both races and genders and explicates class and exploding social issues succinctly and eloquently. Thadious Davis sees connections and meanings in the apparently disparate

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realms of patterns in southern literary history, new developments in African American drama, events in the contemporary publishing world, and shifting patterns of migration, all of which she links to a new sense of the South for African Americans as “a major grounding for identity” but also as a “new form of subversion.” In describing a black family’s reunion at Somerset plantation, she praises the newly emergent and “insistent regionality of black selves, a grassroots redefinition, and signs of a public claim to the South that cannot be ignored.” Davis speaks poignantly about black southerners coming to terms with “home.” For Davis, this represents a laying of claim to a culture and to a region, even though part of that process is inevitably fraught with pain and difficulty. Part 2 of this study concentrates on redefining the role of the “arts” in southern culture, by insisting on the importance and vitality of unusual art forms and interrogating the manner in which personal trauma can affect, for good and bad, great art. This latter concern finds chief expression in Bertram Wyatt Brown’s probing analysis of William Faulkner’s particularly southern brand of alcoholism and the important role it played in his creative life. Sue Bridwell Beckham concerns herself with southern post office murals executed during the New Deal; Richard Megraw offers a fascinating portrait of a New England transplant, Ellsworth Woodward, who nonetheless fathered a quintessentially southern art form in the Newcomb pottery of New Orleans. Joyce Marie Jackson delineates the subtleties and pleasures of the black southern gospel quartet tradition. All four of these studies annul artificial barriers constructed over the years between elite and popular culture while identifying and valorizing folk-inspired aesthetics that have always been the particular glory of southern culture. Anne Goodwyn Jones shows us that southern literature and critical theory have all too often seen each other as enemies. Her absorbing study of recent events in both southern literary study and critical theory— especially of those critics who have dared mix the two volatile elements—points to both the problems and prospects of an area of southern letters that cries out for innovative new approaches. Jones’s solid grounding in European theory, gender studies, and African American literature makes her observations authentic and persuasive at every level, while her criticism of contemporaries, though forceful, is always fair, just, and challenging. Jones provides a refreshingly personal and eloquent feminist perspective that devastates continuing “patriarchal” cultural

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readings, while yet offering these same readings sympathy and a chance for redemption. Her gender-focused perusal of southern canonical history makes for fascinating reading and reflection. Part 3 concerns the interconnections of history and culture. In the past decade, scholars have located numerous examples of Africanisms, also called African survivalisms, in southern and American culture. Joseph Holloway’s collection Africanisms in American Culture (1990) offers a representative selection. Along these lines, Daniel Littlefield explores the peculiar history of South Carolina’s Gullah population and demonstrates how ethnic stereotyping of Africans by European colonists led to unusual concentrations of particular African peoples in North American locales. My own essay attempts to make a slight adjustment in the most welcome reconfiguration of the southern literary canon. I applaud the inclusion of North Carolina’s literary master Charles W. Chesnutt, whose work signaled a new degree of professionalism in African American letters. His rise in esteem, however, alongside that of his contemporaries such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others, has come partly at the expense of forgotten writers such as Harry Stillwell Edwards and Thomas Nelson Page; their plantation narratives for many years barred the way for Chesnutt’s admission into the canon, but eclipsing their works with his may leave us somewhat impoverished, for such writers influenced the shaping of African American variations on the plantation thematic, as well as the work of white writers who, like Chesnutt, seethed over the falsity in the tradition. Accordingly, my essay is offered as a mechanism whereby we can reexamine the brilliant play of Chesnutt’s significations, as well as Faulkner’s much later transformations of the genre. Henry D. Shapiro, a master of Appalachian studies, brings his considerable expertise to bear on a consideration of the South’s mountain region in the 1990s. His probing analysis problematizes the categories of regionalism and pluralism and demonstrates how a region that seemingly had to “be explained” thus became ripe for economic exploitation and literary and ethnic stereotyping. John Shelton Reed, dean of south watchers, weighs in with “The South’s Midlife Crisis,” in which he wittily sends up all the prognosticators who preceded him, while moving relentlessly toward an announcement that young southerners of today are (perhaps a shade too blithely) unaware of the “burden” of southern history, although like their forebears, they seem overly reliant on a comparison with the North when forced to say what the South is. 22

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Charles Reagan Wilson brings all the preceding to a proper boil by focusing on an offshoot of what Reed discusses, namely, the problem of finding new symbols for the South now that the definition of “southerner” is more inclusive. His anecdote about the use of the Confederate flag at Ole Miss has of course been expanded exponentially recently; the most notorious cases, which I will address momentarily, are the debates over, first, the flying of the Confederate flag over the Alabama and South Carolina statehouses and, second, the continuing inclusion of the Confederate flag in the state flags of Georgia and Mississippi. Wilson’s essay is must reading for those of us who have been enthralled by this continuing and dramatic controversy, which was memorably treated in an entire 2001 issue of Callaloo by both white and black contributors. Struggles such as these over the semiotics of public art and gesture are hardly new in America’s cultural history. Vivian Green Fryd has provided a fascinating account of the removal of Horatio Greenough’s and Luigi Persico’s statuary from the United States capitol. The former’s Rescue and the latter’s Discovery of America depicted Native Americans in derogatory ways, renditions wholly in accord with public art of the time that was designed to endorse an expansionist nationalist agenda. The two sculptors had met in Florence, Italy, in 1839 for discussions and in 1840 to choose marble, and in fact, their groups of statues echoed each other; Persico depicts a triumphant, martial Columbus holding a globe aloft, over the head of a crouching, cringing, mostly nude Indian woman. Greenough, by contrast, depicts a nearly nude, tomahawk-brandishing warrior being overcome by a looming pioneer man swathed in classical drapery, defending his cowering wife and child huddled nearby. Fryd astutely illustrates how this latter tableau played on the popular captivity narrative, Cooper’s novels, and the implicit concept of salvation rescue thematized here. As she demonstrates, such motifs became quite common in nineteenth-century American art as manifest destiny blossomed. These statues were installed at different times on either side of the rotunda’s central portico by 1853. Fryd demonstrates how these icons were used by legislators as visual proof of the power of manifest destiny—art, in other words, legitimated legislation, including that of Indian removal. The inaugurations of presidents were held in the space between the two statues, as engravings of the time show. Beginning in 1939, however, Native Americans and congressmen began to lobby for the removal of the statues, and in 1958 they were placed in storage (Fryd, 103 –5). 23

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The iconology of art that is perceived as “public” or even just “representative” can rouse fervent emotions, pro and con. The conflict over the art of the United States capitol has found two recent parallels in southern culture. Charles Reagan Wilson shows quite dramatically that although many southern young people have dropped the “burdens” of southern history, some, like the students at Ole Miss, have been forced to carry them forward. Wilson usefully carries us back in time in search of the origins and symbols of southern identity. Our journey encompasses cultural movements and includes in that nomenclature the scholars and scholarly theories that developed to chart them. Wilson brilliantly parses the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. to demonstrate that traditional metaphors of white southern identity were transposed by King into symbols of the Civil Rights movement while retaining their specifically southern nonracial qualities. Wilson’s points took on more meaning when the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the African American members of the Ole Miss marching band had refused to play “Dixie” at Oxford football games— events largely boycotted by the university’s black students, who feel shut out by the sea of Confederate flags in the stands. The reporter for the Chronicle stated that black faculty and students at Ole Miss feel that “symbols . . . should unite, not divide, especially at a public institution in a state with a black population of 35 per cent” (Lederman, A51). Wilson, who was interviewed for the article, offered a succinct analysis that extends the argument of his essay here: “The trick for the university, he argues, is to remain relevant to all Mississippians, black and white, without losing its distinctive character.” The university’s chancellor at the time, R. Gerald Turner added, “We need to ferret out things that are Southern from those that are Confederate” (Lederman, A52). More local for me is the continuing controversy over a piece of statuary that previously stood at the foot of Canal Street in New Orleans; the four-sided obelisk commemorates the 1874 uprising of white Louisianians against the state’s Reconstruction government. The New Orleans Human Relations Advisory Committee voted in 1993 to relocate the monument from its prominent position near the French quarter; originally it was to be moved to a museum, but after a lawsuit in federal court moved the statue to a less visited spot. The monument has continued to draw demonstrators, pro and con, including David Duke and his fans, who arrive waving Confederate flags. Duke has stated, “The difference between us and those people over there is that we’re not trying to tear 24

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down the Martin Luther King monument. I would love to see it taken down. He doesn’t represent you and me. . . . We have the right to have our point of view heard and our history preserved” (“Duke Speech,” 4B). Indeed, southern studies, or more colloquially, “South watching,” always has been, and no doubt always will be, preeminently occupied with the issue of representation, a crossroads of power and regulation. As I hope my own essay in this volume indicates, we still must struggle against the powerful public myth of the South that was given forceful articulation and impetus after the Civil War and beyond by a combination of cultural arbiters—including writers and senators, social matrons and media princes, Civil Rights legends and former imperial wizards—an effect that lingers to this day. For in its distinctiveness and appeal, the South has continually offered the best and the worst; its anguish over its national disgrace and long persecution for both its sins and its best qualities made it expressive of twentieth-century America as a whole, as the sin of slavery spread its stain to include northern collusion and contemporary results in northern cities and states of mind. The concoction of the myth of the Old South during Reconstruction, culminating in Gone with the Wind, offered a gaudy facade with which to cloak ugly matters such as racism, elitism, sexism, and so on. One could even argue that the plantation school worked hand in glove with the extermination of the Indians by reviving, curiously, the old “Plimouth Plantation” mind-set in a gauzily romantic garb. God’s ordered hierarchy, so productive in its divinely sanctioned relation with Nature, dictated removal of barriers to proper fertility—be they jack pines or Native Americans. Surmounting all this, however, and implying a better aspect of southern culture, was the patrician creed. In Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling’s Aunt Emily, a patrician of the old order, lectures him: “more than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women—the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life” (224). Aunt Emily’s list is admirable, but vastly underestimates the “good things” of the South. Southern studies is here to add to that list and to alert us to ways in which we can preserve it. There are many other questions we should ask ourselves about southern culture. As its interpreters, and to some extent, perhaps, its shapers, what are our responsibilities in the matter of defining culture? What are the problems involved in mounting a reassessment of the region’s nature and heritage, tinged as 25

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it is with a seemingly indelible imprint of an almost universally accepted set of stereotypes, whether they be moonlit verandas and hoopskirts or police dogs attacking children in Birmingham or the vision of a homogenized, stretchedout-of-recognition Sunbelt? It is our hope that this volume contributes to a conversation about questions of this type and that it will lead to a widening consideration of what seems to us to be a timely and hopeful discussion of greater-than-regional importance. As we begin a reexamination of the South, it becomes a new country to us, where interdisciplinary flexibility becomes of paramount importance; after all, as one of our backwoods forebears, Simon Suggs, suggested, “it is best to be shifty in a new country.”

works consulted Bercovitch, Sacvan. Introduction to The Cambridge History of American Literature. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Brooks, Cleanth. “Southern Literature: The Past, History, and the Timeless.” In Castille and Osborne, Southern Literature in Transition, 3 –15. Castille, Philip, and William Osborne, eds. Southern Literature in Transition: Heritage and Promise. Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1983. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. “Duke Speech Supports Liberty Monument.” Baton Rouge Advocate, 12 September 1994, 4B. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Writings. Ed. William H. Gilman. New York: New American Library, 1965. Flora, Joseph M., and Lucinda H. MacKethan. The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. “The Front Porch.” Southern Cultures 1 (1994): 1. Fryd, Vivien Green. Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815 –1860. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Graff, Gerald. “The University and the Prevention of Culture.” In Criticism in 26

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the University, ed. Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons, 62 – 82. Northwestern University Press, 1985. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Hobson, Fred. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Hardwick, Elizabeth. “Southern Literature: The Cultural Assumptions of Regionalism.” In Castille and Osborne, Southern Literature in Transition, 17–28. Holloway, Joseph E., ed. Africanisms in American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Holman, C. Hugh. “No More Monoliths, Please: Continuities in the MultiSouths.” In Castille and Osborne, Southern Literature in Transition, xiii–xxiv. Holman, C. Hugh, and Louis D. Rubin Jr., eds. Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Kent, Charles William. Preface to The Library of Southern Literature, 17 vols., 1: xv–xviii. Atlanta: Martin and Hoyt, 1907. Killens, John Oliver, and Jerry W. Ward Jr., eds. Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays. New York: Meridian, 1992. King, Richard H. A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Kirby, Jack Temple. Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination. Rev. ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Lederman, Douglas. “Old Times Not Forgotten.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 October 1993, A51–52. Naipaul, V.S. A Turn in the South. New York: Knopf, 1989. O’Brien, Michael. The Idea of the American South, 1920 –1941. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Page, Thomas Nelson. The Old South: Essays Social and Political. 1892. Reprint, New York: Scribner’s, 1896. Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. 1961. Reprint, New York: Noonday, 1977. Prudhomme, Paul. Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen. New York: William Morrow, 1984. 27

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“Scholars Extend Definition of Southern Culture by Including History of Blacks, Ethnic Groups.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 January 1988, A8 –9. Simpson, Lewis P. The Fable of the Southern Writer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Singal, Daniel Joseph. The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919 –1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Welty, Eudora. The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. 1978. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990. Why the South Will Survive: Fifteen Southerners Look at Their Region a Half Century after “I’ll Take My Stand.” Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Wilson, Charles Reagan, and William Ferris, eds. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Wright, Richard. Twelve Million Black Voices. 1941. Reprint, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988.

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Preamble The Study of Region william ferris

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o study region is to explore the relation between people and the places in which they live. The study can be approached from without as anthropologists examine cultures and places foreign to their own experience or from inside as artists and writers have always done. The consummate ethnographer is the artist who describes the impressions he or she knows from childhood, including familiar smells, images, and sounds. James Joyce reveals a child’s discovery of his new world on the first page of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nice little boy named baby tuckoo. . . . His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. . . . His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. Whether we approach the study of region from the outside or from the inside implies an essential difference in our tools and perspectives. The anthropologist, the sociologist, the historian, and the literary critic view region and its culture through the lens of prevailing theories within their respective disciplines. Each raises a set of questions that yields a set of answers. Each establishes a “distance” between himself or herself and his or her subjects and through this distance establishes the focus necessary to raise and resolve scholarly questions. The artist, in contrast, dissolves distance and establishes a “oneness” with the subject. He or she becomes one with both character and place and thereby animates both through his or her imagination. In their respective roles, both the scholar and the artist study region and the relation of people and the places in 29

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which they live. Their approaches are essentially different and have been so as long as we can recall. In his Poetics, Aristotle comments on how clumsily the poet describes his own craft, while the critic, who does not write poetry, describes it eloquently. Each has a distinctive role, and together they complement one another as they create and study poetry. If we substitute region for poetry, the distinction between the approach of the scholar and that of the artist to the study of region is strikingly similar to the distinction Aristotle describes in their approaches to poetry. To compare region with poetry is a romantic notion, one that we make without apology. As we study region and its power over people, we acknowledge that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. While academic fields like geography, history, literature, and folklore studies offer important insights into region, our attachment to place is irrational, evoking the romantic vision of nature and man’s relation to it. The romantic seeks a oneness with nature, a union that Walt Whitman celebrated in Leaves of Grass: A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; ................................. I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord. . . . ................................. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death. . . . Whitman’s view of the inseparable union between man and nature is a central theme in American literature. The discovery of American place as literary setting signals the birth of American fiction. Twain appropriately chose the Mississippi River as his setting for Huckleberry Finn. The Mississippi River as place is as forceful a protagonist in the novel as are Huck and Jim. When Huck and Jim flee violent dramas on land, they retreat to the river’s shelter on their raft. By night and by day, they witness the river’s beauty and discover each other while floating down its waters. America’s oral tradition and her folklore parallel literary tradition and are often mined by writers as they create their fiction. At the opening of Huckleberry Finn, Twain reminds the reader that he has listened carefully to the regional di30

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alects of both white and black speakers and uses these dialects to distinguish characters in his novel. He also makes extensive use of superstition and folk belief throughout Huckleberry Finn. This use of place as totem or talisman is also present in William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner’s southern world elicits a complex mix of love and hatred from Quentin Compson, the Mississippi student who talks about the South with Shreve, his Canadian roommate at Harvard. Shreve insistently questions Quentin about the region: Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there? Why do they live at all? Why do you hate the South? To which Quentin replies: I don’t hate it, . . . I don’t hate it, . . . I don’t hate it. . . . I don’t. I don’t! Shreve’s questions probe, and Quentin answers from his heart. Together they offer both the questions and the answers that we must consider in the study of region. We must balance both inner and outer vision in our approach to region because if our heart is not in the work, the study will be incomplete. As we consider literature, history, folklore, and other areas in studying region, we must never forget how Quentin struggles with his love-hate relationship toward the South. Like Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, this struggle can never be resolved, and unless we confront it, our knowledge of region is incomplete. While we admire the powerful literary voices of Twain and Faulkner, scholars must also deal with the basic issue of how to define a region such as the American South. Then, having defined it, how do we shape an academic program that does its worlds justice? The work of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi provides food for thought in this discussion. To prepare our “meal,” we begin with a recipe, a three-part definition of the South. The first ingredient of the region is geographic. We can map the former Confederate states and show a clearly defined territory that we call “the South.” Within its border are a people and a landscape that are distinguished by history and memory from the rest of the nation. A second ingredient of the South is the southern “diaspora.” Throughout the twentieth century, white and black working-class southerners migrated from the region’s rural worlds and resettled in the nation’s northern and western 31

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cities. Mississippi Delta blacks relocated to the south and west sides of Chicago, while Appalachian whites moved to Cincinnati and Indianapolis. These transplanted communities preserved their southern roots through blues, country music, and white and black foodways. New York Times music critic Robert Palmer once interviewed Muddy Waters at his home in Chicago, and after the interview Waters invited Palmer to visit the garden in his backyard. There Palmer discovered okra, corn, and cotton that Waters had transplanted from the soil he knew growing up on Stovall’s plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Just as he re-created his little “postage stamp” of southern soil in Chicago, Waters also transplanted the powerful blues sound for which he is internationally known from the fields of the delta to Chicago. Muddy Waters’s journey from South to North and from country to city parallels the lives of southern expatriate writers such as Richard Wright and Tennessee Williams. Like James Joyce, these writers fled family, religion, and politics to affirm their calling as artists. From their respective homes in Paris and New York, Richard Wright and Tennessee Williams mined memories of their southern homeland to sustain their writings. These writers and many others like them—from Thomas Wolfe to Alice Walker—form an expatriate community that, like the northern neighborhoods of working-class white and black southerners, constitute a “South outside the South.” Whether for racial, economic, or artistic reasons, these artists chose not to “go home.” Through their art, these artists’ memories of their region burned brightly, and at their deaths many were brought home to a final resting place in rural churchyards throughout the South. The “South outside the South” becomes a diaspora, vividly extending the boundaries of the actual South. The third and perhaps most interesting ingredient of the region is the world of myths engendered by the American South. Virtually every nation in the world has been influenced by Roots, Gone with the Wind, blues, country music, rock and roll, and the writings of William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Eudora Welty. Through these disparate forces, the world has learned to celebrate the South and its diverse worlds. Interest in southern worlds intensifies as the geographic distance from them increases. In Russia, fifty thousand copies of a translated edition of William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished are bought in a week, while in Japan young musicians who have mastered blues and country music styles perform in local clubs. 32

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Through her artists, writers, and musicians, the region shapes the lives of people throughout the world. A geographic spread of land, a diaspora of working-class and expatriate artists, and mythic worlds around the globe all define the South as a region. Her study inspires a variety of activities in teaching, research, and public programs that draw on the full spectrum of academic disciplines and professional schools. Like the Great Books Program that Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler created at the University of Chicago, southern studies properly bridges academic disciplines through a holistic view of a single topic. Today a wide array of bibliographies, Web pages, and CD-ROMs that deal with the American South and other regional cultures are being developed for publication. In 1989, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture published its Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and over eight hundred scholars contributed to the volume. The twenty-four fields around which the volume was organized ranged from literature, history, religion, and music to women’s studies, ethnicity studies, science, medicine, and law. The encyclopedia’s holistic view of the American South presents a fascinating portrait of heroes ranging from Robert E. Lee to Martin Luther King Jr., of country roads, kudzu, barbecue, air conditioning, and moonshine. Like a patchwork quilt, its many entries reveal a colorful, dramatic view of the region’s diverse worlds. The volume is a scholarly comédie humaine of the region that offers a comprehensive statement about the American South and its people. Through conferences, films, records, radio programs, and publications such as Bridging Southern Cultures, today’s scholars of the South share their work with a broad, diverse audience. Through teaching and research, they effectively interpret and present the region to the general public. This public link to the study of regionalism is a significant dimension of the new southern studies. As we study region, we open the academic doors and minds of the university to all southerners. In this way, southern studies develops a symbiotic relationship between the academy and the culture it documents. For too long, town and gown have been divided, as academic institutions were isolated from their local communities. Southern universities looked northeast to the Ivy League as the nation’s seat of learning and culture. The Ivy League in turn looked across the Atlantic to Oxford and Cambridge in England for their inspiration. What was lost in this model was American culture. Henry James once remarked that one could not find true culture outside ivy-covered 33

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walls. Such definitions skewed the American academic eye away from the cultural riches of both our regional and our national experience. To study region is to rediscover America through her regional worlds. This work is best understood within the context of American studies. From classic views of New England Yankee culture, southern antebellum worlds, and the western cowboy and Indian, a more complex understanding of our regions has steadily evolved. In the sixties Afro-American studies emerged as a field and reshaped our understanding of America and in particular the southern rural and northern urban worlds of which blacks are an intimate part. The veil of black “invisibility” about which Ralph Ellison wrote so eloquently in Invisible Man and Shadow and Act was dramatically lifted in every field of study related to the American experience. During the seventies the study of American culture further deepened through the new fields of women’s and ethnic studies. Each staked out new territory and significantly expanded our understanding of the nation. The decade of the eighties was the moment when regional studies emerged as a catalyst for expanding our definition of American culture. Accompanying this change is an equally dramatic shift in our view of the educational institution. Through regional studies the university can open to the worlds around it. Today, regional studies scholars embrace a living library of human and natural resources. Their academic field bridges both inner and outer worlds and in so doing achieves a holistic vision of their subject. Rather than isolate their study within a single highly specialized discipline, the study of region explores learning in a multidisciplinary way. In her essay “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty suggests that the guardian angel of this process is the sense of place. The study of place unveils common themes that link literature, history, music, and art into a richly textured view of American culture. Central to this study is the ever-present issue of race. In each generation, the southern experience pivots around the relation of the region’s black and white people. No student of William Faulkner or Richard Wright, of the Civil War, of religion, or of policies can understand these topics apart from the complex web of Afro- and Euro-American cultures that have shaped the region so deeply. Because the Deep South with its rich agricultural lands was home first for the slave and later for the free black community and the upland South was predominantly white, we can map both a racial and cultural “fall line” between upland and lowland South. The saga of Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen in Absalom! Ab34

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salom! traces how a poor white born in the upland South eventually realizes his dream to own slaves and a plantation in the Deep South. Class also offers a fascinating window on how both the elite and workingclass worlds of black and white peoples shaped the South. Upper- and lowerclass lives were interwoven within the region, and together they shaped the South’s rich trove of written and oral literature. Through class we unveil an important perspective on the region’s architecture. While elite families erected columned Georgian mansions as symbols of their power and wealth, white and black working-class people were associated with dogtrot and shotgun houses respectively. Celebrated in the fiction of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and photographed and described by Walker Evans and James Agee, the dogtrot house is closely associated with the white working-class family. Its sister house type, the shotgun home, ranges from the modest examples in the Mississippi Delta to elegant structures in New Orleans. Symbolic of black working-class culture, the shotgun house evolved from similar African and Afro-Caribbean house types. As the southern literary renaissance came of age in the twentieth century, working-class white and black musicians created jazz, country music, blues, gospel, and rock and roll sounds that defined America’s folk and popular musical legacy. The South’s rich folk culture heavily influenced its literary tradition as writers from Mark Twain to Alice Walker mined folktales, sermons, and music for use in their fiction. Both southern writers and storytellers celebrated their region’s sense of place in fascinating ways. Yoknapatawpha County, the Tallahatchie River Bridge, Highway 61, and Beale Street are but a few of the icons of place that southern artists have shared with the world through their fiction and folklore. Finally, class shapes our understanding of southern art as well. While white and black elites commissioned portraits of themselves and their ancestors to adorn the walls of their fine homes, their working-class counterparts developed a rich folk art tradition within which visionary, dreamlike images were painted on wood, sculpted into wooden walking canes, and stitched into quilts that decorate their homes. In a region where, as Cleanth Brooks once noted, so many read Latin and Greek and so few can read at all, class helps us understand both the black and white elite and their working-class counterparts. Gender further deepens our understanding of place. Just as Eudora Welty and Alice Walker create hauntingly beautiful female characters like Phoenix 35

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Jackson and Shug Avery, Richard Wright and William Faulkner offer us male protagonists like Bigger Thomas and Thomas Sutpen. Similarly Bessie Smith and Dolly Parton lament their “no-good men,” while B. B. King and Hank Williams struggle with women in their blues and honky-tonk music. When we study region, we see a darkly mirrored image of ourselves and begin to understand the places in which we live. Artists have long understood that this is the fire through which they must walk to be whole, to be true to their craft. We must follow a similar path as we explore place and its relation to our lives. The study of region demands that we bridge the inner and outer vision of our culture and become one with its places and people. We must merge the dancer with the dance, the anger with the song, the painter with the canvas.

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Part One southern lives, southern cultures

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In Search of a Common Identity The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies william l. andrews

“Your delta,” he had said, “was not mine.” —willie morris

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n article of faith among the first generation of southern literary modernists, writes Lewis Simpson, is “the truth that man’s essential nature lies in his possession of the moral community of memory and history.” Much has been written, of course, about what an obsession with the past has done to mold southern novelists into a recognizable and distinctive group. But if, as Hugh Holman has stated, “the southerner is not really interested in an abstract past; he is interested in his past,” and if, according to Faulkner, “it is himself that every Southerner writes about,” then it is important to notice that southerners, especially since the Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, have paid a substantial tribute to the past in autobiography as well as fiction. While much southern fiction since mid-century has recorded a depletion of the mythic resources of the southern past, contemporary southern autobiographers have inscribed in their localized images of a southern past a sense of identity that invites our attention because of its social and existential, if not mythic, import. I propose, therefore, to investigate the extent to which recent southern autobiography has sought or signified a peculiar kind of selfhood and community, whether fashioned from individual or collective memory. What follows in this essay is basically an intertextual reading of four wellknown autobiographies: William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee (1941), Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), Willie Morris’s North Toward Home (1967), and Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). These works emanate from a common geocultural region, the Deep South in general, and Mississippi specifically; indeed, they all originate in the world of the Mississippi Delta, the 39

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locus of John Dollard’s classic Caste and Class in a Southern Town. Even a cursory look reveals that the books may be compared in a variety of ways. Percy and Morris recount the tranquil growing-up experiences of two members of Mississippi’s dominant caste and upper (in Morris’s case upper-middle) classes. Wright and Moody record the bitter socialization of the children of those near the bottom class of the South’s subordinate caste. Putting caste and class distinctions in abeyance, however, one can also see some commonness of purpose between these two generations of autobiographers. Acutely sensitized by the Depression and the world wars to the ravages of history, both Percy and Wright gravitated toward autobiography as a means of psychic survival, as a way of giving form and meaning to a sense of selfhood that the incoherence of modernity threatened. Galvanized by the Civil Rights movement, Morris and Moody also came to autobiography at roughly the same time and with similar needs—to revaluate their personal histories in and evolving responsibilities to Mississippi in the throes of social upheaval. It is hard to imagine that Morris and Moody took up the form of first-person narrative ignorant of or indifferent to the example set by Percy and Wright, respectively. And yet, while one can easily point to thematic and stylistic echoes between the black- and white-authored autobiographies, the affinities between Morris and Wright and, to a lesser extent, between Moody and Percy, are probably more arresting because less expected. For instance, the aspirations of Wright and Morris take them out of Mississippi and, a bit later, the South itself on quests for intellectual fulfillment that eventually intersect in Paris in 1956. The narrators of Lanterns on the Levee and Coming of Age in Mississippi, by contrast, cannot abrogate the responsibility they feel to that sense of community that binds them to Mississippi. Percy and Moody make temporary forays outside their native state, but they always return to struggle with Mississippi’s social problems and their own conflicting, sometimes desperate, feelings about the efficacy of their efforts. Clearly, none of the obvious caste, class, generational, and gender differences among these autobiographers prevents them from sharing experiences, perspectives, and literary motives in common. But if we want to avoid simply reshuffling the deck of southern literature before we play out the familiar hands of genre criticism, our investigation of the communal identifications of these autobiographers needs to go deeper than the question of who’s different from (or similar to) whom? We need to ask ourselves, foremost, what difference does difference make in the narrations of these writers and to a search for “a common 40

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identity” among black and white autobiographers of the modern South? What levels or modes of difference-making are fundamental to the process of Bildung that each of these autobiographers recounts and re-creates in his or her text? The concept of difference, of course, is crucial to southern notions of corporate identity. The feudal South fought the Civil War out of a conviction that it was a social, economic, and cultural entity different from the North and ought to be granted its political independence from Yankeedom as well. After that debacle, as Simpson has observed, southern white writers could be expected to make much of their region’s spiritual differences from the rest of the Union, portraying Dixie as “a special redemptive community fulfilling a divinely appointed role in the drama of history.” Black southerners inherited from their oppressed ancestors an image of themselves as a chosen people too, though it took a Martin Luther King Jr. to make temporally viable the traditional black belief in a corporate apotheosis in the hereafter. George Brown Tindall reminds us that during times of national crisis in the twentieth century, southern blacks and whites have vied with each other for the right to proclaim themselves alone the guardians of true Americanism. Caste and class difference has also been the key to southern social and economic structures throughout its history. The segregation system that evolved after the Civil War was founded on the assumption of essential genetic differences between whites and blacks and ineradicable social gradations among whites. The idea of Jim Crow was to regulate all dealings between the races so that the difference between white status and black status would be consistently attested and publicly confirmed. Caste solidarity was enforced among both whites and blacks, ostensibly out of each community’s desire for self-preservation, but also because of fear and distrust of the racial other, into which each caste could project its fantasies and/or its repressed negative imagery of itself. Each caste tended to interpret any member’s deviations from prescribed behavior simply as a sign of caste disloyalty: thus, white individualists could be impugned as “nigger lovers” for a wide range of social infractions, while individualistic blacks were condemned, often by both castes, for “trying to be white.” Southern behavior exhibited many characteristics of what Erik Erikson has called the “ideological mind,” typical of a people preoccupied, as an adolescent is, by peer approval and confirmation of one’s worth by creeds and rituals that simultaneously furnish assurance that what is different is alien and inimical. The autobiographies of Percy, Wright, Morris, and Moody suggest that in 41

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the mid-twentieth-century Deep South, neither the black nor the white caste could sanction traditional American individualism, if by that we mean the attempt to differentiate oneself from others according to what Emerson would have called one’s subjective “genius.” Mississippi recognized selfhood not as a function of the subject but of the object, namely the racial other, whose looming presence dictated the need for self-differentiation according to the strictures of law and custom rather than in creative opposition to them. What happens, however, when the southern youth discovers that the law is not a single but a double standard? This introduces the problem, among black southerners especially, of how to identify with half a society without feeling oneself to be but half a person. Among modern white southern autobiographers, the problem of identity is similarly one of incompleteness, symbolized by a sense of unresolved conflict within the self over one’s attitude toward blacks. What Thadious Davis has termed a “preoccupation with wholeness” and a need to achieve a “unified vision” of the self and the South do not characterize Faulkner alone. To a large extent these desires manifest the legacy of caste consciousness in white and black southern autobiography as well. The fundamental difference that the southern system of social difference makes in much modern autobiography from the South is this: it makes the notion of individuation—the achievement of personal indivisibility—a persistent, though not always recognized or acknowledged, ideal. Robert Penn Warren’s definition of selfhood (in Democracy and Poetry)—“in individuation, the felt principle of significant unity”—represents the ideal to which people like Percy, Wright, Morris, and Moody all aspire. All four of their autobiographies record quests, both physical and intellectual, for a mode of coherent selfhood that is comprised of at least three desiderata: identity, community, and history. All four must contend with a parodic model of selfhood, engendered by caste consciousness, that valorizes image, society, and myth as substitutes for identity, community, and history, respectively. Thus, instead of seeking an identity to and for which one can feel responsible, the southerner (black or white) is socialized to accept an image, an imitation of something assigned to him or her by another. Instead of asserting his existential worth in communitas, the southerner must demonstrate his functional value to society by playing a prescribed socioeconomic role. Instead of viewing himself or herself as a part of historical continuity and change, the southerner is encouraged to subscribe to a static world view of ahistorical myths. 42

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Percy, Wright, Morris, and Moody articulate fairly clearly their goals of coherent selfhood and the place, outside and/or beyond the Mississippi Way of Life, where they hoped to realize their goals. Through the mists of ancient history, Percy descried his ideal in the stoic nobility of Marcus Aurelius and tried to serve as a mediator between his hero and alienated southern youth. In an idealized “place where everything was possible,” located somewhere in “the North” in the hazy future, young Wright, only “part of a man” in the South, imagined the fulfillment of his hunger for an unbounded selfhood. To Morris, New York was the only place where he could engage “in a subtle interior struggle with himself ” and emerge, once tested, an integrated self, liberated from fear and bigotry yet neither ashamed of nor alienated from the distinctively southern traditions that had shaped him. Moody hoped to find in the marginal, integrated community of the Civil Rights movement an alternative to the role and destiny of the powerless, choiceless black woman that her mother symbolized to her. All four of these autobiographers share a common goal, therefore. Individualists all, they may be thought of as southern aristocrats—if we accept Percy’s philosophical definition of the term, not one based on caste or class privilege, but rather on a sense of moral commitment: “Their distinguishing characteristic probably is that their hearts are set, not on the virtues which make surviving possible, but on those which make it worth while.” The key differences among these four autobiographers arise when we consider each one’s understanding of the route that he or she must take to achieve psychological and moral coherence as a self, rather than settling for the image, role, and myths of a caste system fixated on mere survival. Each autobiographer conceived of his or her route to achieved selfhood differently, of course, but there is at least one basis for comparison of all four. None of these routes can afford to bypass the racial other. If Sander L. Gilman is right, the other is the projected image of the anxieties that a person or a group develops when their senses of internal order and external control are threatened. Thus to recover or attain coherence as a self, a person must confront the other. It is certainly possible to argue, as Percy, Wright, Morris, and Moody testify, that whites and blacks confronted each other daily under the Mississippi caste system. But if confrontation means literally a coming together face-to-face, how often did the etiquette of caste behavior permit someone to show his face to or look into the face of a member of the opposite caste? Narrated instances of this etiquette in action as well as examples of its circumvention or suspension can give us a sense of the 43

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quality and consequences of confrontation between castes in the experiences of these Mississippians. Regardless of race or generation, all four autobiographers recall a time early in life when each viewed the racial other through the undifferentiated perspective of childhood. But only the two white Mississippians were privileged to grow up with a myth of a homogeneous past in which, insofar as a child could tell, there were no racial barriers to their access to the pleasures of life. Morris speaks for both whites in recalling the complacent, quasi-proprietary attitude towards blacks that he grew up with: “The Negroes in the town . . . were ours, to do with as we wished.” To a nostalgic Will Percy, the memory of the black companions of his childhood was a balm to be savored in his last weary years. During the carefree summers he spent among them in Virginia, the children of his Aunt Nana’s cook introduced him to a wealth of rural sensual delights. But Skillet and Ligey and Friday, like “small satyrs and fauns,” belong completely to the world of childhood summers and natural innocence. Of them in adulthood, Percy knows nothing. With all the other blacks of his youth, they are ensconced in a chapter entitled “Playmates,” denoting the role that Percy considered most blacks best suited for in the caste-conscious South of his memory. When Percy confronted blacks in his adulthood, he consistently assumed the role of benevolent paternalist. “The black man is our brother,” he announces to the white reader of his autobiography—but not our equal, “a younger brother, not adult, not disciplined, but tragic, pitiful, and lovable; act as his brother and be patient.” Percy could not see in black people more than the potential (in the distant future) for mature relationships with whites. His everyday dealings with blacks left him worrying, “Is the inner life of the Negro utterly different from ours?” Given Percy’s aristocratic self-image, the reader of his autobiography is not surprised to find that his one sustained personal relationship with a Negro was structured by the traditional lord-and-vassal arrangement. In a chapter entitled “Fode,” Percy recounts what he learned from a lengthy association with his young retainer, Ford. From the outset, he claims that “every [southern] white man worth calling white or a man is owned by some Negro, whom he thinks he owns, his weakness and solace and incubus.” The pride and ruefulness of an aristocrat facing obsolescence in a modernizing society are apparent in this statement. Ford, Percy admits, owns him because of his weakness for the kind of solace that this bond to a dependent black man gives him. More 44

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than once in his autobiography, and particularly in his chapter on the flood of 1927, Percy acknowledges his failure to convince blacks as a group to follow his leadership. That Ford needs him helps to counterbalance the sense of impotence and irrelevance that dogs Percy’s adulthood. In keeping with his penchant for irony, however, the emphasis in “Fode” is not on what Percy teaches Ford but on the “bitter tutelage” the patron receives from his underling. Ford makes it possible for Percy to see himself as others, the other, see him, underneath the image, role, and myths that he wears like psychosocial armor. It is Ford who translates for Percy a statement he hears some of his sharecroppers make when he arrives in his car on settlement day at his plantation, “the lord of the manor among his faithful retainers.” “Whose car is dat?” one black asks another; “Dat’s us car,” is the reply. Percy thinks it odd that these men don’t recognize his car, but “Ford elucidated: ‘He meant that’s the car you has bought with us money. They [the sharecroppers] all knew what he meant, but you didn’t and they knew you didn’t. They wuz laughing to theyselves.’” Percy admits, “I laughed too, but not inside.” This is not the only instance when Ford lets Percy see the gap between his self-image (in this case, the beloved lord among his tenants) and the image he projects to the other (the crass and selfish rich man lording it over the poor). As Percy reconstructs such incidents in his autobiography, he pictures himself as the naïf unprepared for and sometimes genuinely hurt by Ford’s revelations. In this way, the narrator suggests that the other-perception that Ford gave him access to taught him a little salutary humility. But at the same time, there is little indication in Lanterns on the Levee that Percy felt that gaps between self- and other-perception in the South could be bridged. How could he defend himself, he asks rhetorically, against the image his black cook had of him as a man who wanted to return blacks to slavery? The woman’s grotesque appearance, religious beliefs, and morality, as Percy indites them, rendered absurd any attempt to reason with her. And so throughout his discussion of race relations, Percy pictures himself frustrated and disempowered by a “bewildering” barrier, as “of glass,” that alienates the races and seems inevitably to produce black misperceptions of himself and the caste system he stands for. However, one need not read Du Bois’s use of the same plate-glass metaphor while analyzing the psychology of segregation in Dusk of Dawn (1940) to conclude that this barrier was as much Percy’s protection as his vexation. “That I have any dignity and self-respect is not because of but in spite of 45

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Ford,” Percy remarks only half tongue-in-cheek. To show the extent to which Ford enjoyed undermining that self-respect, Percy recounts an episode in the bathroom when, discovering his master in the shower, Ford “observed dreamily: ‘You ain’t nothing but a little old fat man.’” Since he was “not in a position of dignity” and it was “no use attempting to be haughty,” the best Percy could manage in riposte was “you damn fool.” Narrating this episode, Percy grants Ford a certain victory of wit, but he also notes that as a result of this exchange he dismissed Ford from his service. The extent to which the emperor was genuinely offended by this observation about him unclothed is hard to measure, given Percy’s frequent self-effacing irony as a narrator. It is clear that Percy was not so vain as to deny the truth of Ford’s physical characterization of him. But could Percy accept the existential validity of Ford’s image of his bare humanity, stripped of the caste signifier, bereft of all the accouterments of his social dignity? And could Percy realize that Ford in this instance had played the fool no less aptly than Lear’s, when he urgently queried his master, “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” These are difficult questions to resolve, especially when so much of what Percy recalls about blacks underlines one conclusion: that despite the comfortable southern pretense of harmony and a shared way of life between the races, “the sober fact is we understand one another not at all.” If Percy believed he could not understand Ford, it is highly unlikely that he thought that Ford could comprehend him. And so, even though Percy recounts opportunities when he could have confronted his selfhood through the agency of the other, his autobiography leaves it to his reader to decide whether what he saw in these instances was an image reflected in, or an identity revealed through, the eyes of Ford. As testimony to his reverence for his father, Percy subtitled his autobiography “Reflections of a Planter’s Son.” Had it not been for his father, Willie Morris’s autobiography might well have been entitled “Recollections of a Planter’s Son-in-Law.” As a high school senior in Yazoo City a decade after Percy’s death, Morris “had his heart set,” he admits, “on entering Mississippi’s educated landed gentry” by marriage to a majorette whose father was a plantation owner. But Morris’s father (unlike Percy’s) was determined that his son would not become a reflection, either of the planter class (from which Willie’s mother came) or the yeomanry (from which he had sprung). He sent Willie west in search of “opportunity” at the University of Texas. This was the first of many “sharp breaks with the past” that Morris was to make on his way to precocious fame. 46

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But by the mid-1960s, like many thoughtful white southerners of his generation, he felt compelled by the social revolutions of that time to reassess himself in light of his past. Living in New York taught him, he writes, that “one’s life, one’s spanning of years and places, could never be of a piece, but rather were like scattered fragments of glass.” Yet Morris was too much a southerner to accept being wholly alienated from his roots— or ashamed of them. He wrote North Toward Home, at least in part, out of a desire “to understand [his] origins, to discover what was distinctive and meaningful in them, to compare them with the origins of others, to give shape to them for the sake of some broader understanding of place and experience.” It was particularly important to him to compare his origins to those of black southerners and to find bases for common understanding across the chasm of difference. In this way he could redeem his past and some of the most important qualities of southern distinctiveness that he had always identified with. Morris’s portrait of small-town Mississippi in the 1940s provides little evidence of commonality among blacks and whites. He acknowledges his own profound ambivalence toward blacks while he was growing up and pictures in brief vignettes acts of violence against blacks “as senseless and unpatterned later as they had been for me when they happened.” But what Morris remembers best and what he concentrates on most in the racial sphere of his past are the moments in chance encounters when blacks and whites found a common ground of interest, if not understanding. A personal illustration of this appears in his description of a phase of his early teens when he and most of his white buddies in Yazoo City “went Negro”—i.e., aped black styles of speech and gesture—as a kind of unconscious tribute to the exotic other. It was all right for white boys to walk and talk black, and even to get together in sandlot football teams to compete against young blacks. But when the teams started to intermingle in these impromptu games, “the cops ordered us to break it up.” Maybe the police sensed that the white youths, without being aware of it, were forgetting difference and experimenting with sameness. At any rate, Morris’s mentioning it suggests that in “going Negro” he and his peers were acting out an unconscious resistance to the pervasive doubleness of their world. Southern whites, one might conclude from this and other evidence in Morris’s picture of Mississippi, were not disposed by nature, as Percy believed, to differentiate themselves from blacks. Morris carried with him to New York a rosy image of the delta of his boy47

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hood, one that partially compensated for his lack of a sense of place in “the Big Cave,” as he called it. But talking with black and white Civil Rights activists from his home state left him feeling “threatened and unsure” about nothing less than the validity of his cherished sense of the past. He could not reconcile the Mississippi he had known, or thought he knew, with the Mississippi the SNCC volunteers had experienced. Thus his myth of his homeland fissured, and in so doing, created a conflict within Morris between his loyalty to his sense of home and his need to be intellectually honest with himself. How he worked out this conflict is not made explicit in North Toward Home, but in the narrative’s progression from this conflict to Morris’s relationships with Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, we gain some insight, perhaps, into the way that the white man salvaged something of his myth of the southern past. Morris met Wright in Paris in 1957, while the younger man was in Europe as a Rhodes Scholar; he met Ellison in New York City at a Paris Review cocktail party in 1965. Despite the fact that Wright had once lived on a tenant farm not far from his hometown, Morris had a hard time talking to Wright. Wright, though admirable, “was so different from me in temperament and loyalty and experience that we had almost nothing in common.” On the other hand, in conversation with William Styron and Ellison, Morris felt at once that he “probably had more in common” with these two southerners than with any other writer or intellectual at the party. It took Morris only one evening with Ellison to identify in the Oklahoman’s social and storytelling manner, sense of the past, love of the tactile, and suspicion of the abstract a “distinctive Southernness” that was very similar to his own. “It would have been naive to ignore the differences” between the black man and the white, Morris notes, but it was the similarities—“temperamental, intellectual, imaginative—which interested me.” They interested Morris so much, one suspects, because they confirmed an ideal that he very much needed confirmed—and which only a southern Negro could confirm— that beneath or beyond the racial differences, there is a core of southern experience and a fundamental southern view of life and of what is valuable in living that is shared by all raised in that milieu. This ideal of southern wholeness, virtually antithetical to Percy’s myth of a South alienated against itself by racial difference, is crucial to Morris’s politics as a southern liberal and his strategy as a modern southern autobiographer. He is committed to integration, in the social fabric, in his personal life, and in the narrative persona he creates in North Toward Home. When Wright told Morris in 48

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Paris that he did not expect to return to the United States because “I want my children to grow up as human beings,” the black Mississippian severely challenged the efficacy, in the American present and near future, of the white liberal’s integrationist ideal. Not surprisingly then, Morris could see in Wright only difference. Even though the black man suggested they correspond, the young white man shied away. It is equally unsurprising that Morris found later in the congruence between Ellison and himself the confirmation he sought for his belief that an integrated, yet still “distinctively southern,” identity could be reconstructed, transcending racial difference, out of the fundamental wholeness of what he and Ellison shared. But did Morris achieve that self-confirming sense of unity with Ellison by repressing the significance of that troubling otherness that he felt with Wright? If so, and it is hard to think differently, then we may conclude that the integrative ideal that Morris felt he shared with Ellison was probably less important to his realization of “distinctive Southernness” than the disintegrative skepticism that Morris associated with Wright. In any case, Morris’s reactions to Ellison and Wright serve to warn white readers about the dangers of identifying as truly southern only those aspects of black experience that buttress, rather than destabilize, the totalizing tendencies of white integrative ideals. In the quests for selfhood narrated by Wright and Moody, the discovery of difference comes early in childhood, creating a sense of disjunctiveness and unexplained mystery in the black child’s most intimate world. As boys Percy and Morris perceived the world of blackness as different but not other, not outside the white boys’ sphere of comprehension and control. By contrast, when Wright and Moody discover the difference that whiteness makes, the structure and order of all their relationships, with their families as well as their communities, are undermined. On a train ride to Arkansas, young Richard tries to understand what gives white people their special status in the railroad station and on the cars. The problem leads him to probe the significance of whiteness itself. He asks his mother whether his grandmother, who looks white to him, is a white woman. If so, then why does she associate with colored people like himself ? Did she “become colored when she married Grandpa?” Is whiteness acquired or innate? Receiving no clear answers from his evasive, increasingly defensive mother, the boy tries to penetrate the mystery by tracing his grandmother’s origins, but this only leads him to a blank, an unnamed and unknown white greatgrandfather. Why does whiteness signify absence for some white people while 49

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conferring status on others? Who makes the decision, and why will “they” call him “a colored man” when he grows up, regardless of the whiteness in his own heritage? Concluding that his mother is trying to “shut [him] out of the secret,” Richard, already troubled by a sense of alienation from his family, feels all the more alone and powerless. Without answers to the secret of the world’s arbitrary, capricious, and repressive power over him, he barricades himself in the world of his own imagination and sustains himself on fantasies of violent reprisal against the motiveless malignity of whiteness. As narrator, Wright observes that the “emotional integrity” he developed as a child was an outgrowth of these fantasies. Eventually, though “I had never in my life been abused by whites,” “at the mere mention of whites,” “a vast complex of emotions, involving the whole of my personality, would be aroused,” out of which young Richard created “a culture, a creed, a religion.” In one sense Black Boy is the story of Wright’s progress from his boyish fantasies of a desperate integrity based on rebellion against the terrible other to an ideal of selfhood liberated from an opposition to otherness as its negative raison d’être. In Black Boy whiteness alone does not comprise the totality of repressive forces that Richard must resist. The first half of the book emphasizes the conformity that black authority, whether familial or institutional, demands from the black boy. Wright says he rejected the black males on whom he might have modeled himself because they seemed obsessed with forcing him to accept a place in a pecking order, rather than encouraging him to discover who he was. As a boy the only way Wright could express his desire for authenticity was through acts of verbal aggression, in which he persistently offended his elders’ sense of dignity and propriety by speaking and writing “dirty words.” As a teenager Wright encoded his resistance to white authority in speech acts that seemed to him unprovocative but were in fact just as much a profanation of the rituals of caste intercourse as the boy’s obscenities were of his black elders’ dignity. This is what his friend Griggs recognizes when he warns Wright, “You act around white people as if you didn’t know that they were white. And they see it.” Motivating all this offensive behavior toward others, Wright explains, was a fundamental need throughout his youth to view his world wholly, as a community, and to negotiate his world not through images and roles but as an authentic personality. “It was simply utterly impossible for me to calculate, to scheme, to act. . . . I would remember to dissemble for short periods, then I would forget and act straight and human again, not with the desire to harm anybody, but 50

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merely forgetting the artificial status of race and class. It was the same with whites as with blacks; it was my way with everybody.” It would be more accurate, in light of what is narrated in Black Boy, to say that this was Wright’s preferred way with everybody. Very little in his description of his dealings with whites and blacks during his crucial last two years in the South suggests that he had any real hope of finding an alternative to the image and role of “non-man” that the caste system expected of him. The extreme hostility and humiliation that he suffers while trying to “work his way up” in a Jackson, Mississippi, optical shop leave him feeling profoundly “violated,” “slapped out of the human race.” Even though his boss, Mr. Crane, apparently sympathetic to the black youth, asks Wright to tell him what happened, Wright refuses. “There’s no use of my saying anything.” Gradually the youth whose principal weapon against the world had been words begins to fall silent, the ultimate sign, in Wright’s case, of his alienation from his southern environment. The last chapters of Black Boy record his consistent refusal to talk to any whites, even to a solicitous Yankee like Falk, the bookish Irishman, “hated by the white Southerners,” who might have shared much with Wright. While the black youth accepts the white man’s library card, which gives him illicit access to the Memphis library, he spurns his benefactor’s invitation to discuss with him his reactions to the works of Mencken, Dreiser, and other American realist novelists. “It would have meant talking about myself and that would have been too painful.” There is no more despairing depiction of the inhibition of other-confrontation and self-revelation in modern southern autobiography than this. Nevertheless, out of this seeming ratification of unbridgeable difference emerges, in the climax of Black Boy, the alienated black youth’s discovery of new, potentially liberating ways of identifying himself as a writer, a southerner, and an American. The loss of the hope of community within the narrow boundaries of caste relationships, where so little can be spoken safely, provokes and actually facilitates Wright’s search for “a world elsewhere” (to use Richard Poirier’s phrase), not just in the magical land of “the North,” but in the idealized unboundedness of the written word. Thus when young Wright encounters the combative literary style of Prejudices, he imagines himself, however doubtfully, as another Mencken, “using words as a weapon” against injustice. Through Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber and Jennie Gerhardt, he recovers from the past “a vivid sense of my mother’s suffering.” After finishing Main Street and Babbitt, he no longer views his pretentious white boss, Mr. Gerald, as quite the implacable and 51

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inexplicable other. “I felt that I knew him” and could “identify him as an American type.” In short, Wright’s retreat into the world of literature does not seal his alienation; it liberates him from it by enhancing his powers of imaginative identification. He begins to recognize himself in and through others, even the once terrible other, by way of their common Americanness as revealed in the national perspective of the American realist novel. What he had been rebelling against in the South he understands as part of a larger “straitened American environment” that writers, indeed white writers, were trying to reshape “nearer to the hearts of those who lived in it.” In this community the black man from the South believes he can become a self-wrighter. Richard Wright acknowledges in the last paragraphs of Black Boy that he did not go north with an integral sense of the self he wanted to become. He went to Chicago “running more away from something than toward something.” Anyone who reads American Hunger (1977), the posthumously published sequel to Black Boy, knows that Wright did not find the community, in personal, political, or artistic terms, that he vaguely imagined lay beyond his southern horizons in 1927. Wright’s autobiographies testify eloquently to his hunger for an identity realized in community, but they do not picture his achievement of a communal identity in a historically locatable place and time. Wright’s autobiographies send a double message, therefore, of optimism and skepticism about the possibility of the black southerner’s achieving a fulfilling sense of identity and community in America. The experience of Richard Wright within history, as history is reconstructed in his autobiographies, justifies the skepticism that Morris reported in Wright’s conversation with him—namely, that black children could not expect to grow up in America “as human beings.” Yet the voice of Richard Wright as narrator in the timeless world of his text engages his American reader in a community of intimate discourse that is plainly intended to defy history, the very history that Wright claims to have personally experienced, in which all such efforts to engage the other in community are frustrated. As a result of the dialectical relationship of the voice of community and the experience of history in Black Boy, the reader is forced to make a choice of identification between one of two Richard Wrights. Although Wright’s southern experience places community and history at perpetual odds, it is important to notice that Anne Moody’s does not. Unlike Black Boy, Coming of Age in Mississippi is punctuated by experiences of interracial community within history and within some of the most racially polarized 52

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sections of Mississippi. Like her famous literary predecessor, however, Moody begins her story by thrusting her reader abruptly into a black child’s earliest impressions of a profoundly dislocated world, one characterized by dread and devoid of that “sense of place” that has been traditionally regarded as a hallmark of southern literary consciousness. Percy and Morris, by contrast, usher their readers hospitably into childhood worlds that are easily locatable both spatiotemporally (note the well-developed family trees and thoroughly-mapped geographies) and psychologically (note the evocation of the past as a “paradise lost,” consistent with many autobiographies of childhood). “We were always moving,” Moody says of her childhood, “to a house on some white man’s place.” Living in close proximity to whites because her mother was a rural domestic, Moody, though fatherless and rootless like Wright, did not grow up viewing whites with the urban impersonality that characterized the young Wright’s perspective. By the time she was seven she had been initiated into the reality of differences between whites and blacks, but at about the same time that her access to her white playmates was being restricted, her chance to associate with white adults expanded. She finds in Ola Johnson, the mother-in-law of Elmira Moody’s employer, a kindly maternal figure who nurtures her physically and intellectually, a stark contrast to the forbidding behavior of the grandmother in Black Boy. Mrs. Johnson is no white fairy godmother; Anne does “a hundred chores” for her and concludes from being around her that white women and black women differ in that the former need the latter to compensate for their laziness and incompetence in the kitchen. Still, despite all that the black girl sees that separates her status from that of the whites, she is not afflicted by the anxieties about her own worth, the persistent need to “redeem” herself, that haunt Wright throughout his growing up. White people like the Johnsons and later the Claibornes, for whom Moody worked in her late childhood, are singled out for praise in her autobiography because they treated her “like their equal,” “always giving me things and encouraging me to study hard and learn as much as I could.” This is not to say that Moody does not credit her mother with encouraging her too, but her mother’s support tends to be more selfish and less consistent than that which white women give her. Elmira Moody sees her daughter’s success in school as a way to elevate her status in the eyes of her prospective motherin-law, whose color-consciousness causes her to treat the dark-skinned Moodys with contempt. Moody associates her mother with powerlessness and depen53

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dency, the result of having too many mouths to feed and too little reliable male support. As she enters adolescence she refuses to identify with her mother’s church, changes her name regardless of her mother’s disapproval, and rejects the farm woman’s life her mother leads. “Mrs. Claiborne had told me how smart I was and how much I could do if I just had a chance. I knew if I got involved in farming, I’d be just like Mama and the rest of them, and that I would never have that chance.” Through her childhood and adolescence Moody studies diligently in school, proudly making straight A’s, in the expectation of earning for herself a chance to escape the restrictions of the traditional black woman’s role. A week before she enters high school, Moody is violently initiated into history. The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 wrenches her out of her self-circumscribed world of schoolwork and housework and forces her to confront the reality of caste oppression in Mississippi. Her mother advises her to “just do your work like you don’t know nothing,” but Anne asks questions of her bigoted employer, Mrs. Burke, and of a teacher at her school. The ugly truths that she learns about white hate and black fear intensify her desire to flee her situation in Centreville. In the summers she goes to Baton Rouge in search of better-paying work; during the academic years she immerses herself in everything school has to offer, obsessively “keeping busy” so that she “won’t have time to think” about the mounting violence against blacks throughout Mississippi in the late 1950s. Although Anne does not understand it at the time, the narrator of Coming of Age in Mississippi interprets this behavior as an attempt to “escape within myself,” to separate herself from changes within and around her, thus reifying her image of herself as an individual in control of her own circumstances. What Moody is forced to recognize is that there can be no escape for her from the imperative of history and no refuge in an idea of individualism that feeds on the myth of selfsufficiency. Only when she becomes involved as a high school senior in the Civil Rights movement does she find “something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.” Her growing dedication to the movement in her college years forces Moody to move beyond the ideas of fulfilled selfhood that had been fixed in her mind for so long. Civil rights work gives a larger sense of purpose to her life than she had ever had, and it shows her that communality with whites is possible, but it does not provide coherence to her world or fulfillment of many of her personal needs. Her activism alienates her from most of her family, causes her almost to 54

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flunk out of college, puts her life in imminent peril, leads her to blaspheme the God of her childhood, and takes her to the brink of several nervous breakdowns. For every successful effort against the caste system, she can see a corresponding failure, often a humiliation, followed by doubts about the movement, its leadership, its nonviolent methods, and the likelihood of its ever achieving its goals. In the last chapter of the book, Moody surveys the situation in Canton, Mississippi, the scene of so much of her effort apparently for naught, and declares, “I felt worse about everything than I had ever felt before.” She boards a bus bound for Washington, D.C., where some of her fellow workers intend to testify before Congress as to “what Mississippi is all about.” What a dispirited black community leader has told her, “We ain’t big enough to do it by ourselves,” vies with the song of a hopeful black youth on the bus, “We shall overcome,” for Moody’s anguished mind—and for the conclusion of her book. But she cannot foresee the fate of her community in history; she can only “wonder.” Moody’s inconclusiveness at the end of her autobiography stems from her acknowledgment of the uncertain status of the community with which she has so unreservedly identified herself. Shall “we”—the oppressed blacks of Mississippi and their coworkers in freedom— ever overcome, she wonders, “by ourselves”? Or do the people of America, represented in and by the federal powers in Washington, have to identify themselves with this community to form a “we” that is “big enough” to achieve justice? Moody’s wondering is as much about the disposition of her American reader to join this community and thereby determine history as it is about the ultimate outcome of the Civil Rights struggle. Having experienced and believed in the potential of interracial community to create, not just endure, history, Moody confronts her reader, particularly her white nonsouthern reader, with the opportunity to identify with her and thus fulfill in common their American destiny as a free and indivisible people. The emphasis on unresolved (though by no means irresolute) selfhood in the conclusions of Black Boy and Coming of Age in Mississippi marks a striking contrast to the impression of defined or confirmed selfhood with which Percy’s and Morris’s memoirs are designed to end. The last chapter of Lanterns on the Levee, entitled “Home,” pictures Percy in the Greenville cemetery, pondering the significance of the deeds of the dead and assuaging his sense of “failure” with a deep assurance that he has lived “the good life” and has been faithful, to a fault perhaps, to himself. In the final scene of his autobiography, Morris, in the company of his son, surveys from the window of a departing jet the land of his birth 55

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and youth and feels the “easing of some great burden” as he is lifted “north toward home.” Just before leaving Mississippi, he has gone with his mother and grandmother to the town cemetery in search of the graves of his illustrious Harper forebears. Significantly, he can find none of them. Although he does not say so, it is not hard to conclude that he felt more kinship with the Harper’s of New York, of which he had become editor-in-chief, than with the dust of the Mississippi Harpers. At any rate, Morris, like Percy, closes his book with a distinct sense of the home where each belongs, the locus of coherence for, and confirmation of, the sense of selfhood that both men claim at the end of their autobiographies. For Wright and Moody, however, this sense of home remains on the horizon, potential but not realized. Their autobiographies end in scenes of transit in which both subjects are suspended somewhere between the South and the North, between an identity existentially affirmed and a sense of selfhood communally and historically confirmed. As rebels against the self-image that the black and white South would impress upon them, they affirm an alternative identity based on responsibility to the ideal of an individuated life and an indivisible people. The problem for them both, of course, is that the caste-conscious South (home for Percy) refuses to confirm this ideal, and the faraway North (Morris’s home), or America in a larger sense, remains unaccounted for. Neither Wright nor Moody can be satisfied with realizing this ideal on an existential basis alone, which is why, ultimately, they must confront, through an autobiographical act, the otherness of the reader. Their open-ended stories call on the American reader to identify with the narrator in a national community of moral commitment so that together they can seize the pen of history and write the future in common.

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Reclaiming the South thadious m. davis

I

n discussing the origins of his classic study From Slavery to Freedom (1947) John Hope Franklin, professor emeritus at Duke University and former chairman of President Bill Clinton’s advisory board on race, talked about the need for the text in the 1940s and his writing it while teaching five classes at Durham’s segregated North Carolina College. While pointing to the phenomenal success of the paperback edition in the 1960s, after the surge of Civil Rights activism created a larger demand for a comprehensive history of black people in the United States, Franklin remarked, “I haven’t taught [black history] in thirty years. . . . I teach history of the South.” 1 That casual but pointed remark, to use a cliché, “leaped from the page” and into the notes for my own work on race and region. Like a found poem, it said without embellishment what I had been laboring to say. The process of redefining southern culture is, I believe, much like Franklin’s description of writing his book: “There was no original research. . . . It was a matter of organizing, reconstructing and conceptualizing.” 2 This essay is, in a sense, descriptive; it identifies vital contemporary activity, suggests some underlying causes, and explains the activity as a response to particular needs: the recognition of the exclusion of a major aspect of self from the conception of identity and the determination to achieve a redress by communal positionality within the landscape of the South. It also begins and contextualizes my larger project on race, region, and writing. Though the historical presence of blacks in the actual or imagined landscape of the South has put forward more than one idea of the region, that presence is 1. John Hope Franklin, quoted in David Newton, “Publisher’s Pushing Made Franklin Write Best-Selling History of Blacks,” Durham Morning Herald, 8 October 1987, p. 2B. 2. Newton, “Publisher’s Pushing Made Franklin Write,” 1.

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perhaps more problematic today, when there is an ongoing attempt to link the region to concepts more in keeping with the slick media image of the Sun Belt. Downplaying the presence of blacks and of racial and ethnic minorities generally may be a way of simultaneously asserting changed conditions in the region and denying one significant catalyst for those changes. Though there are sociologists of the South who choose to write only about white southerners in isolation from matters of race by referring to them as an “ethnic group,” or ethnic entity, that tendency implies a fresh attempt to define the region and its culture without one of the major components. The matter of race is undermined, dismissed as somehow applicable only to blacks and inapplicable to new considerations of the region. A white racial identity becomes normative—but, even more significant, whiteness elides all else, so that there is no need to refer to difference. In fact, the idea of race in defining the region has not merely meant the historical presence of blacks in the American South, or of Native Americans in the region, but the presence of whites, particularly Anglo-Saxons, in much of the region, who defined race in terms of difference from their majority group rather than as a self-defining factor. “Not white” or “nonwhite,” or even distinctions based on polar opposites such as “colored” or “black,” did not directly address the matter of “white.” More important, these “not” definitions achieved an acceptance of self-definition and selfindividuation based on exclusion. They also helped to perpetuate a binary mode of thinking and writing about the South as a region so that, despite advances in race relations in the South and the arrival in numbers of different groups of people from Mexico and Latin America, from Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the notion of two exclusive and oppositional groups permeates discourses on the southern region and southern writing, even when “the black other” is not mentioned directly. The normative stance was perhaps most transparent in the 1980s when there was a resurgence of interest in discourses on the South and new regionalisms in general. The tendency toward exclusion, then, did not remain applicable only to individuals but became one of the primary ways of defining the region and its culture, not only for cultural insiders but for outsiders as well. (“Slavery” and a “slave-based economy” historically provided one primary means for cultural outsiders to define the region and for cultural insiders to justify both selfperception and social order.) There was a presumption of racial affinity, com-

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monality, in the dominant views of the South as a region. Diversity was not an issue, but difference was. The result has been curious: whites in the South became simply “southerners” without a racial designation, but blacks in the South became simply “blacks” without a regional designation. There are still manifestations of this phenomenon today, as suggested by John Hope Franklin’s reference to teaching the history of the South as opposed to the history of blacks—labeling scholars who study the slaves as working in the field of black history and culture, whereas those who study the owners are working in the field of southern history and culture; those who study the roots of blues and jazz are seen as working in black musicology, while those who study the roots of country and bluegrass are working in southern musicology. More invidious was the carefully reasoned, nonpartisan scholarly work that appeared after the Civil Rights movement and reexamined the idea of the South by emphasizing memory and the process of remembering as crucial to understanding the region, but which suffered itself from a severe lapse of memory. Appearing primarily throughout the 1980s, such scholarship offered new insights but failed to look broadly at recent southern history as more than the history of great men who were, as a matter of course, white. For example, Richard Gray in Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (1986) states: “The main aim of this book is to make some small contribution to this study of the Southern argument, the various ways in which people from below the Mason-Dixon line have tried to forge the uncreated conscience of their region.” 3 He then adds, “it [meaning his three-hundred-plus-page book] offers no more than a series of notes towards a definition of the Southern idea” (xii). Perhaps that statement anticipates questions about the study; if not, it ought to, because in the entire book there is only one mention of a black writer, as far as I can determine, and that is simply a listing of Charles Chesnutt’s name along with George Washington Cable’s as examples of an interest in “the idea of the ‘tragic mulatto’” that predates William Faulkner’s.4 3. See Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), xii. Gray is not alone, however, in his lack of recognition of or his inattention to southern writers of color. 4. See Gray, Writing the South, 198, for a passing mention of Charles Chesnutt. See also Richard King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1935 –1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 8 –9.

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Although Gray does make a few perfunctory nods to “the institution of slavery” and “the image of the Negro in Southern writing,” he is included here as an example not only of the continued omission of black southerners but of the more serious misreading of the culture and its artifacts that explains the omission. Gray ends his discussion of Walker Percy thus: “Perhaps the last word should be given to Percy’s black characters, however; since blacks occupy the margins of his stories, just as they do in traditional Southern writing” (267). I will not belabor the point made by citing this assertion; my intent is not to take issue with it here but rather to present it as one of the persistent conceptions that still necessitate the descriptive work of this essay or, to quote Franklin again, of the “matter of organizing, reconstructing and conceptualizing.” And lest the assumption be made that only white men have been exclusionary in their thinking and writing about the South, I should point out that Anne Goodwyn Jones in Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859 –1936 (1980) does not even address the problem of her construction of “the woman writer” as white and her total exclusion of black women writers. Jones, like Gray and Richard King, excludes women of color and any attention to gender that would include race. Fortunately, Jones and an ever enlarging contingent of white scholars writing about the South have—since the beginning of the 1990s saw the emergence of a widespread acceptance of African American literary topics and the mainstreaming of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker—turned their attention to black writers as part of the southern panoply. Linda Tate, for example, in A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South (1994) understands that since the 1980s a new generation of women writers—black and white, concerned with race and class and gender—has reconfigured the representational landscape of the South and transformed the world of southern literature. But my concern here is less with white critics taking up black subjects than with what has been gradually occurring in the region and in the literature in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. By the end of the 1980s, however, it became increasingly problematic and difficult to conceptualize and analyze southern culture as “White Only.” What has occurred is an expansion of the definition of southern culture based upon an insistence that race and region are inextricable in defining a southern self, society, or culture. And this change includes an understanding of how whites are

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not “raceless” despite the naturalization of whiteness in their majority world view. There has been change — or, perhaps more accurately, augmentation and amalgamation—which, in several of its less detected forms, is the focus of my remarks. (It may even be that the former notice of blacks on the margins of southern writing is in a very small way an implicit suggestion of measured inclusion, which in itself is a slight change from exclusion and perhaps begins a gesture toward inclusion.) In his last essay before his death, “No More Monoliths, Please: Continuities in the Multi-Souths,” C. Hugh Holman called for a greater recognition of “a profoundly pluralistic world”; he remarked upon the work of critical theory, feminist studies, and black studies for “casting fresh illumination on southern literary culture.” 5 Observing the change brought about by including black writers in assessments of southern culture, Holman welcomed “these new and vital forces”: It is not merely that we are at last looking at slave narratives, giving Frederick Douglass his long overdue place in southern letters, and examining Charles Chesnutt as an artist rather than a curiosity. A number of writers of great importance are entering the canon—such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, Ishmael Reed. When they enter, they greatly increase the meaning of southern culture, enrich the themes of southern writing, introduce new experiences of their own, and give new perspectives by which to judge the old.6 Despite its seeming suggestion that all black writers are men, Holman’s call for recognizing variety in southern culture, for a change in attitudes, was not an isolated position in the 1980s when women’s studies, black studies, and emergent theoretical and cultural studies were compiling scholarly records and research to challenge and subvert old paradigms about “the South.” The more pronounced evidence of a change from practices or ideologies of 5. C. Hugh Holman, “No More Monoliths, Please: Continuities in the Multi-Souths,” in Southern Literature in Transition: Heritage and Promise, ed. Philip Castille and William Osborne (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1983), xviii. 6. Holman, “No More Monoliths,” xix. Holman’s listing of Ellison, Wright, Gaines, and Reed is a progressive step forward, but his inclusion of four black men recalls the ideology that inspired But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. The first full title was: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.

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exclusion has appeared in the work of numerous historians, beginning especially in the late 1970s and the 1980s with texts such as Joel Williamson’s Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (1984), John Blassingame’s Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (1977), Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), and Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race, and Class (1983). “To provide a soul to legitimate the presence of our bodies upon this American earth is what we ‘thinking’ southerners are all about and have been since 1865,” Williamson concludes metaphorically about the assimilative intent of his own work and that of those he calls the “numerous rest.” 7 Additional evidence of a scholarly movement toward a more expansive reading of “southern” culture in the 1980s can be found in The History of Southern Literature (1986), edited by Louis D. Rubin Jr. and an impressive group of senior editors, who filled the vacant space left by relegating black writers to places outside of southern literature by including black southern writers in the literary landscape of the region. The work contains six essays specifically on black writers and incorporates southern black writers into other essays, all of which caused at least one reviewer discomfort about this new “over-emphasis.” In popular culture, one enterprise worth observing as a short-lived development in the 1980s is Southern Magazine. The premier issue “The South and Welcome to It” (October 1986) featured essays by Willie Morris (“Yes, the South Exists”), Harry Crews (“Mourns for Mules”), Al Green (“The Southern Soul”), Rosemary Daniell (“The Southern Body”), and so on. The inclusion of black soul singer Green certainly helped to establish Southern Magazine’s larger vision of the culture; the cover announcement of “Live Ghosts: A Tear-Out Performance from a Southern Storyteller” was even more revelatory, because the article, William Hedgepeth’s “Art of the Southern Storyteller,” featured black and white storytellers; and the tear-out performance was a recording by a black woman, Jackie Torrence, telling “The Bell Witch.” The editors did not feel compelled to label Torrence anything other than “southern” on the cover. Each subsequent issue of Southern continued this expansive view of the region and its 7. Joel Williamson, “The Soul Is Fled,” in New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America, ed. Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 185.

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people right up to its demise in 1989, so that by the 1990s Southern had become a collector’s item. Less prominent but highly visible, however, during the period between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s is the claiming of a regional identity in addition to a racial one in the work of a number of creative artists who are black and southern. For example, Samm-Art Williams staked his claim to regional identity in his play Home (1979), which chronicles the return migration of a black North Carolinian from the urban North to the rural South. While anthropologists and sociologists may see the increasingly frequent pattern of black return migration as flight from the hardships of urban life, I suggest that it is also a way of laying claim to a culture and a region that, though fraught with pain and difficulty, provide a major grounding for identity. I like to think, too, that this return to the South is a new form of subversion—a preconscious political activity or a subconscious counteraction to the racially and culturally homogenous Sun Belt. The claim was particularly evident in the publication of new journals with such titles as Black Arts South and Callaloo: A Tri-Annual Black South Journal that emanated from the region, and also in the counterdistinction of names for more longstanding cultural organizations such as “Free Southern Theater” that assumed race while specifying region. Even when institutions fold, new ones taking their places represent a general assumption of diversity and the existence of differences within the South. Another form of counterbalancing homogenous appeals to a new white southern Sun Belt is in the prominent turning to historical fiction as a primary and dominant form by a number of black writers. One type of historical fiction is the novel of blacks in the nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century South. This is no nostalgic turning back to the “good old days”; it is a gut-wrenching revision of specifics long obscured by synoptic cultural patterning. A major example is Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987); in citing this example, however, I do not mean to suggest, as one of my students did, that all black people in the United States are “southerners.” Morrison is a midwesterner who until 1998 had never even visited her father’s southern birthplace, Cartersville, Georgia; yet she reaches backward in time and into the South to claim a history, to explain a legacy, and to understand what I call “the regionality of the black self.” In a radio interview, she called it the process of “appropriating and reclaiming.” Her effort is not an isolated one; it is similar to that of Californian Sherley Anne

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Williams in Dessa Rose (1986); of another midwesterner, the Illinois-born Leon Forrest, in Two Wings to Veil My Face (1983); of Pennsylvanian David Bradley in The Chaneysville Incident (1981); of Gloria Naylor (a New Yorker with roots in Mississippi) in Mama Day (1988); and of J. California Cooper in The Wake of the Wind (1998). These works are by black outsiders to the region, who are nonetheless intimately involved in the process of revising not personal or individual history but communal and public history. Much like the social scientists and humanists who, though not natives, take the region as their subject matter, these creative writers are in the vanguard of revaluative work. The conclusions of these works all emphasize the recognition of place (the South and all of its meanings for blacks) as a major aspect of identity and the reunion of blacks positioned communally to face a new day. The last words of Williams’s epilogue are: “Mother, brother, sister, husband, friends . . . my own girlhood all I ever had was the remembrance of a daddy’s smile. Oh, we have paid for our children’s place in the world, again and again . . . ” 8 At the end of Morrison’s narrative, Paul D thinks: “Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers.” Touching her face and holding her fingers, he says, “‘Sethe . . . me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.’” 9 Forrest concludes with Nathaniel “unleash[ing] his soul” at Great-Momma Sweetie Reed’s “bedside altar”: “Commanding him to silence, cursing, praying, denouncing, rendering up counter-memoirs, phrases from scriptures, spirituals, then only gestures; the gestures of sign language, and homemade ones spun up from the grievousness of her soul’s captivity in a windstorm . . . . Only grief-stricken gestures, as her soul chased and chastened his words, long and deep into the night and unto the dawning light of the new day.” 10 These endings all utilize the cathartic power of telling about the black experience in the South and the healing power of uniting with another’s story in order to weave a necessary future. What these writers are doing in the historical-fiction form is related to and perhaps an outgrowth of the racially and culturally necessary work undertaken 8. Sherley Ann Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 236. The italics and open ellipsis are in the original. 9. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 273. 10. Leon Forrest, Two Wings to Veil My Face (New York: Random House, 1983), 295ff.

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by Arna Bontemps, who pioneered race- and region-specific historical fiction in the 1930s at the same time that black writer Frank Yerby, following conventional exclusionary historical forms, mined a regional but raceless fiction. Since the 1960s, black southerners such as Margaret Walker in Jubilee (1966), Ernest Gaines in a spate of novels including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), and Alice Walker in The Color Purple (1982), have all claimed the region as their own. Though they choose a particular individual as a vehicle for grounding their narrative, they actually envision a public acknowledgment of a communal history woven together in a landscape of interconnected lives. Walker’s Celie says at the very end of The Color Purple: “I feel a little peculiar round the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don’t know much what going on. But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.” 11 The litany of names reiterates the reunion of the black southern family and community and their stories, as well as their rejuvenation for a new era. Walker’s Color Purple reminds me that the intentional connection of race and region, which is resulting in an expanded definition of southern culture, is not merely reflex. It is, I believe, an initiative that was insufficiently observed in the flurry of criticism over Walker’s novel and the film version and in the ensuing debate between black males and females over the right to determine how the race should be portrayed in fiction. (That question, by the way, was the subject of a symposium proposed by W. E. B. Du Bois in the Crisis in February 1926, and it was posed again by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Black American Literature Forum, spring–summer 1987 and fall 1987.) In her 1996 The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, Walker rehearses her responses to the controversies surrounding her novel and Steven Spielberg’s film of it. Overlooked too often in the Walker criticism is her fictional examination of racial and regional identity along with gender identity, and her portrayal of a contemporary need to reinstate a black southern experience into cultural and historical contexts despite the pain that a truthful reinstatement necessarily bears. As a means of redressing the exclusionary practices that have resulted in a limited notion of southern culture, Walker has insisted in The Color Purple 11. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 251.

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and two of her earlier novels—The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and Meridian (1976)—as well as in her poems and stories, particularly the muchanthologized “Everyday Use,” and in her essays, especially “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” on writing blacks back into the shaping of an idea of southern culture, on situating blacks in the regionality of the South. “No one,” Walker has concluded, “could wish for a more advantageous heritage than that bequeathed to the black writer in the South: a compassion for the earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of evil, an abiding love of justice. We inherit a great responsibility . . . for we must give voice to centuries not only of silent bitterness and hate but also of neighborly kindness and sustaining love.” 12 This manifestation of regionality of self in public forums among black writers is occurring at the same time that white southern creative writers mine the contemporary South, the Sun Belt, of changed landscapes—McDonald’s, Burger Kings, shopping malls, drive-through funeral homes, and high-tech industries. Their attempt in today’s fish-bowl public world may be aimed at recapturing a privacy of self in the southern tradition of individualism. While such contemporary white southern writers as Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Reynolds Price, and Gail Godwin are receiving much-deserved praise for their well-textured visions of the modern South, black southerners are both literally and imaginatively returning to the region and its past, assuming regional identification for self and group definition. And they seem intent upon ensuring that their effort to reclaim and restore is known. Perhaps at no other time has there been such visible evidence or manifestation of historical imagination in a specified cultural context among black creative writers—and their critics as well. Beginning in the 1980s, retrieval projects directed our attention to historical texts that had been lost: Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s collection The Classic Slave Narratives (1987), Jean Fagin Yellin’s edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1986), William Andrews’s collection Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (1986), and Mary Helen Washington’s critical anthology Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860 –1960 (1987). The 1990s witnessed a continuation and expansion of this trend. Is this general activity evidence of a perverse love affair be12. Alice Walker, “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience,” New South 25 (fall 1970): 26.

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tween blacks and the old South? I think not; it suggests that something else is afoot. One fascinating example involves Alex Haley, but not in terms of his historical reconstruction in Roots (1976). Several years before his death in 1992, Haley bought and refurbished a 120-acre antebellum farm in East Tennessee, where he staked his claim not merely as a black man but as a southerner. Perhaps Roots and its television spinoffs Roots: The Second Generation and Henning, Tennessee took hold of him to the extent that he could no longer resist the pull of region in shaping an identity. But Haley’s was not a quiet, unpublicized relocation; he announced his move to Norris, Tennessee, and the opening of his manor house and “gentleman’s farm,” with a weeklong party to which he invited 250 guests from around the world.13 And he opened the fête to newspaper and magazine reporters. Here was the private black self functioning in concert with a very sophisticated public self. Here is, I think, new history in the making: a redefinition of identity and meaning that hinges upon the intersection of race and region, upon the inversion of traditional paradigms of power, and upon the determination that the activity not go unnoticed. Haley’s creation of a new plantation as an extension of his black southern identity forms a corollary to the activity of a family of North Carolina blacks who trace their ancestry back to one plantation, Somerset Place, and who in 1986 held a reunion at the plantation their ancestors built in the 1830s. The genealogist of the family, Dorothy Spruill Redford, inspired by Haley’s Roots, discovered twenty-one families all descended from the slaves of Somerset Place. Though they lacked a sophisticated mechanism for explaining the necessity of returning to, of all places, the white plantation or of the meaning of that particular return, they were nonetheless affirming unequivocally their sense of connection to the public image of the region and of themselves as black southerners with a share in the monuments of white southerners. As with Haley, their private need functioned along with their concerted manipulation of public images and a measured media campaign to attract attention. Historian Nell Irvin Painter, covering the first Somerset homecoming for a local newspaper, pointed out that the participants concentrated on family not slavery, but “slavery was obviously the ghost of the feast” and “the central pub13. See Hans J. Massaquoi, “Alex Haley’s Hideaway,” Ebony 42 (September 1987): 52 – 60.

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lic theme.” 14 The organizer Redford, as family spokesperson, said: “For me this homecoming is a healing . . . and I will leave feeling whole and more complete as a human being, as will all who attend.” 15 Although Redford and her kin found it necessary in their spoken comments to obliterate the more painful reality of their common racial and regional past in favor of their celebratory homecoming, current successes, and material acquisitions, they were moved by an unarticulated belief that their presence made a statement about their conjoined participation in restructuring and reconceptualizing a southern culture that could no longer omit their existence and significance. The highly publicized reunion at Somerset was not the families’ only homecoming or their first reunion—they have met for generations—but it is interesting that Dorothy Spruill Redford published a book documenting that first publicized homecoming. Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage (1988), written with Michael D’Orso, included an introduction by Alex Haley in which he said of Redford’s narrative, “It is all our stories.” 16 In 1998, the North Carolina Humanities Council honored Redford for “work that goes to the very heart and soul of understanding slavery, work in words and in organizing and in preservation that enhance our nation’s sense of self-understanding”; in his keynote address on the occasion, Randall Kenan, himself a writer raised in North Carolina, said, “By honoring Ms. Spruill Redford’s extraordinary work, the North Carolina Humanities Council joins in this exciting time of recovery and remembrance, where, step by step, by fits and starts, we grapple more seriously and honestly and completely with the obscured and forgotten history of African Americans and of Americans of all hues.” 17 Painter reported that for the organizers, the “reunion represented a nonjudgmental acknowledgment of the historical attachment of several generations 14. Nell Irvin Painter, “Slaves with Volvos: Reflections on the Meaning of the Somerset Reunion,” The North Carolina Independent, 26 September–9 October 1986. 15. Painter, “Slaves with Volvos.” 16. Alex Haley, introduction to Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage, by Dorothy Spruill Redford with Michael D’Orso (New York: Doubleday, 1988), xviii. 17. Randall Kenan, “Dorothy Spruill Redford,” North Carolina Humanities: Weaving Cultures and Communities (winter 1999): 6. Kenan was the speaker at the Caldwell awards banquet held on 24 October 1998 to honor Redford, who is now the manager of the Somerset Place Historic Site, where she continues to organize biannual Somerset homecomings.

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to a certain place,” but she wondered whether they were encouraging a “fantasy” that collapses time and people’s lives historically and “reduces every black person into no more than a descendant of slaves, and . . . elevates every white person into a descendant of planters,” particularly “in these days of rampant backward-glancing and pining after the good old days when the South’s lower classes stayed in their places.” 18 Perhaps instead it is more like Julius Lester’s affirmation in Do Lord Remember Me (1984), which opens with a character’s writing himself into a time and place (“The Reverend Joshua Smith, Sr. was born November 5, 1900, in Ouchitta, Mississippi”) and ends with his gathering all of his past and future together “at the very edge of that moment coming on like the morning star giving a benediction to the night, he began.” 19 The issue is important in terms of the black families’ seeking so openly to validate their “homeplace,” to authenticate their ancestors’ lives and labor at Somerset, and thereby to transform plantation myth and ideology that would deny the roles of the “Baums, Bennetts, Blunts, Cabarruses, Dickensons, Honeyblues, Lees, Sawyers, Spruills, Treadwells, and Trotters” 20 in building Somerset plantation and would insert in their places the white Josiah Collins family which owned the land, the slaves, and the house. However, it is also important in terms of the other related activities I have described here: the prominence of the historical-novel form among black writers; the purchase of an old Tennessee estate by Alex Haley; and so on. These developments are important, despite all of the implicit convolutions of historical, psychological, and familial baggage, because they are manifestations of an insistent regionality of black selves, a grass-roots redefinition, and signs of a public claim to the South that cannot be ignored. The latter may be the key to why these activities may make a larger difference in expanding conceptions and perceptions of the region. It is based upon an intrinsic awareness that cultural products are manufactured and upon a determination to manipulate that reality at long last for their own private and public benefit. During the Civil Rights era, few observers of race and region would have 18. Painter, “Slaves with Volvos.” 19. Julius Lester, Do Lord Remember Me (New York: Washington Square, 1984), 3, 210. (Italics in original.) 20. Painter’s list of black builders of Somerset Place.

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predicted this grass-roots effort to validate and authenticate identity by claiming and reconstituting the recalcitrant region. It has, of course, antecedents, not merely in the ritual of hundreds of black family reunions and homecomings held annually from Virginia to Texas, or in the group political activism of the 1960s, but also in the individual self-assertions of other black southerners, some of whom are prominent and others not. The well-known Mississippian Richard Wright may have become a black expatriate in France, while the less-well-known Georgian Frank Yerby removed himself to Spain, but these two early modern writers provide another extension of my point. At the end of his life, after thirteen years in France, Wright returned in The Long Dream (1958) to the South as the shaping factor in the maturation of his black protagonist, Fishbelly, and concomitantly returned to his own relationship with the South, which he reiterated in 1958, two years before his death, by labeling himself a “Southerner,” who “knew what the subject matter down there was” and “accepted that subject matter as valid.” 21 Yerby, the most prolific of black novelists from the South, returned to his early racial explorations after decades of writing popular historical fiction mainly set in the South but almost totally excluding major black characters. Taking its impetus from the Civil Rights movement and the reemphasis on the past history of black southerners, his fiction in the 1970s and 1980s finds redirection in considerations of blacks in the context of region. Toward the end of his life, he donated his papers to Paine College, a small black institution in his hometown, Augusta, Georgia. Before the 1980s, that gesture would have been most uncharacteristic for Yerby; in 1959, Carl Van Vechten had observed, in counseling a black woman about contacts for her permanent relocation to Spain, “you will be unlikely to run into him unless he is hungry for racial companionship which I doubt.” 22 In the preface to Call to Home: African-Americans Reclaim the Rural South, Carol Stack remarks that the phenomenon of return migration caught scholars by surprise: “We had been led to believe that the great migrations that formed the modern states were one-way, permanent movements. People’s footsteps, it 21. Richard Wright to Paul Reynolds, 6 November 1958. 22. Carl Van Vechten to Dorothy Peterson, 30 October 1959, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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seemed, were facing one way, as if they had stopped cold in their tracks somewhere out there in the urban diaspora. We had also assumed that people in the modern world, once torn from their roots, never look back.” 23 Stack suggests that “the resolve to return home is not primarily an economic decision but rather a powerful blend of motives; bad times back home can pull as well as push. People feel an obligation to their kin or even a sense of mission to redeem a lost community . . . Or simply a breathing space, a refuge from the maelstrom. For all of us, in good times and bad, the image of home is multilayered, and the notion of returning is unsettling” (xv). Call to Home is brilliantly evocative. It “takes seriously the imaginative, performative, and political aspects of a process that social scientists usually see as a one-dimensional response to economic [conditions],” as Jacqueline Dowd Hall observes. “The stories told by these return migrants contribute to a powerful literary tradition, a tradition of writing about the South as a longed for—yet vexed and dangerous—home. Such stories are actions. They send people moving across the country, confounding our expectations about migration and modernity. They influence not just individual lives but the unfolding of entire communities.” 24 And they open up new discourses. Return migration has become a “hot” topic in recent years. On Sunday, April 5, 1998, The Nashville Tennessean carried five related stories on America’s changing race picture. In one story, “Links to the Past Draw Blacks Back to the South,” University of Michigan demographer William Frey observed that although “reverse migration is part of a broader movement of people from the North to the South and western Sunbelt states,” the population shift of black people specifically involves a move to the South. “African Americans are moving to the South and not to states such as Arizona or New Mexico. California actually is losing blacks, with more than half those leaving the state each year moving to the South,” David Judson reports. One return migrant to historic Selma, Alabama, put it simply: “We’re all coming home.” Michael Hayes, born in Tuscaloosa and raised in Chicago, is but one of the African American returnees

23. Carol Stack, Call to Home: African-Americans Reclaim the Rural South (New York: Basic Books, 1996), xiv. 24. Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “Open Secrets,” 110.

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from the North and West, whose numbers, the U.S. Census showed, had reached 3.5 million by 2000.25 In the next century, Judson concludes, the United States “is expected to be increasingly Hispanic in the Southwest, Asian in the West, and African American in the South, and less white everywhere.” But the South will continue to attract residents from all racial groups and is currently experiencing a growth in both Asian and Hispanic populations. Tennessee is also accounting for an increase in Native Americans, some of whom are reversing the flow of the Trail of Tears, with western Cherokees returning to join groups of the eastern band of Cherokee people. Another reporter, Deborah Mathis, tracking the census figures and observing the flow of people to the South, concludes: “By all accounts the American South will be the nation’s most populous region.” Return migration already accounts for a large part of that growth. Between the mid1970s and 1990, the South regained half a million African Americans from the urban belts in the North and West.26 The cover story of the April 6, 1998, issue of Jet magazine was “Why Blacks Are Returning to the South.” That story suggested that after nearly fifty years of “Great Migration” movement in which they left the South in search of better lives free from racial hostility and economic deprivation, “Blacks are returning to the South at an accelerated pace. Between 1990 and 1996, 65% of the nation’s black population growth took place in the South, according to a recent study based on census data. Better economic opportunities, highly visible Black leaders and family are a few of the reasons why Blacks are returning to the South.” The former mayor of Atlanta, Bill Campbell, points out the two-pronged appeal of the South: “Most African-Americans have roots in the South. . . . There we’ve always had a connection, either our fathers, mothers, grandparents, aunts or 25. The 2000 census also showed that 55 percent of African Americans in the United States now reside outside the South. See William H. Frey, Census Shows Large Black Return to the South, Reinforcing Regions ‘White-Black’ Demographic Profile, Research Report 01-473 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Population Studies Center, 2001). See also William H. Frey, “Migration to the South Brings U.S. Blacks Full Circle,” Population Today, May/ June 2001. 26. See William H. Frey, “The Rise of the New Sunbelt,” The World & I, May 2001, and Larry Long, Migration and Residential Mobility in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987).

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uncles. So it’s natural to have an affinity for the region.” He continues with the second point, “now African-Americans see more opportunities available in the South politically, economically and spiritually—all a part of the new South, and Atlanta is the capital of the new South.” He concludes, “If you’re an AfricanAmerican looking to start a business, go to college or find a place to raise a family, it’s very difficult not to return to the South, Atlanta in particular” (“Why Blacks,” Jet, 15). Discounting Campbell’s promotion of his city, his rationale is precisely what is being voiced by return migrants themselves. But I suspect there are other stories silenced in the rush to articulate a political narrative. There is a specific aspect of return migration that I believe is being slighted in favor of the more political and entrepreneurial: Women are coming home. There are now two generations of Janies returning to home and to the South, and despite the claim and pull of cities like Atlanta, the rural South is just as strong a magnet for returning women as the urban areas. The Promised Land in the industrial North has become the Rust Belt, and the South, with all of its hardscrabble rural areas filled with kin and memories of privation and pain, has become the return destination. Women come home with their children, women return home alone, women lead and families follow. Not all is peace or prosperity. Grinding poverty can batter a family as much as an abusive parent. And, as Carol Stack puts it, “Obviously the new Old South isn’t the old Old South, but distrust, fear, and hostility persist.” Eula Grant, one of the return migrants to rural North Carolina in Call to Home, says, “You definitely can go home again. You can go back. But you don’t start from where you left. To fit in, you have to create another place in that place you left behind” (Call to Home, 199). Her words resonate with the unruly possibilities inherent in the call of home: “What people are seeking is not so much the place they left behind as a place they feel they can change, a place in which their lives and strivings will make a difference—a place in which to create a home” (Call to Home, 199). No matter how ill formed, incongruous, incompletely conceived, or inadequately understood, all of these gestures of bonding with region mean somehow that the choice of regional identity, along with a racial one, is being made (just as it has been made if not always acknowledged in the past). Perhaps more significant for the process of expanding the limits of definition, the choice is being proclaimed for public consumption. In words and in actions, a complex but felt truth about the necessary intersection of race and region is being articulated,

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and with skillful marketing strategies that could rival those of the old South. While proponents of the Black Arts Movement insisted that “the revolution will not be televised,” they were swimming against the tide. The result is that now too few know their names or their achievements. What grassroots people and creative writers know and tell us today is that any revolution had better be televised—recorded, transcribed, disseminated, played, and replayed. It seems to me that discussants of culture would do well to listen.

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Part Two southern culture and the arts

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William Faulkner Art, Alienation, and Alcohol bertram wyatt-brown

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n 1958, a state senator of Mississippi expressed the mixture of horror and affection for liquor that had long bedeviled many of his constituents. Back then Mississippi was an officially dry state, where bootleggers were taxed as if they ran legitimate businesses. “If you mean,” he pronounced, “the evil drink that topples the Christian man or woman from the pinnacles of righteous, graceful living into the bottomless pit of degradation . . . then certainly I am against it.” He continued more amiably, “But . . . if you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the stuff that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts songs in their hearts” and enables “a man to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies . . . then certainly I am in favor it.” 1 William Faulkner, son of Mississippi’s boisterous, guilt-haunted past, knew both of these sentiments with an intimacy that has puzzled and saddened his admirers ever since his death in 1962. Recipient of the Nobel and the Pulitzer prizes and one of America’s most accomplished writers, the southern novelist was an unredeemable alcoholic, dying at the relatively young age of sixty-four. For the literary scholar his texts, not his life, alone are what count. Like Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, and O’Neill, his brave achievement included an uncanny skill. In his Mississippi microcosm he demonstrated that modern tragedy can probe the collapse of old ideals and the difficulties of achieving some level of dignity and meaning in the modern void. Yet, like ancient tragedians Faulkner elicits a sense of pity and terror because his themes of familial loss, tattered verities, and self-destructiveness inspire deep empathy, catharsis, and fulfillment. What more can one ask of a writer? Yet given the long-acknowledged relevance of Freud’s theories to interpreting Faulkner’s 1. Quoted in Donald Goodwin, Is Alcoholism Hereditary? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 4.

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characters, a better comprehension of Faulkner’s own emotional struggles enhances an appreciation of the novels themselves with their narratives of familial and personal decline and ruin.2 Addiction to liquor, though, is not sufficient to explain Faulkner’s temperamental condition. Evidence exists to suggest chronic depression, signs of which appeared early in his life. Such an interpretation helps to illuminate his gothic inclinations and his compassion for wounded, alienated creatures, stricken with either open despair or futile repression of it. Faulkner was especially convincing in his portrayals of young men like Popeye, Joe Christmas, Charles Bon, Henry Sutpen, Jason, Quentin, and even the idiot Benjy. One way or another they are lost souls, or, like Quentin Compson, they might resemble “an empty hall echoing with sonorous” voices or, to change images, “a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts.” 3 Literary critic John Irwin shrewdly observes that Faulkner thought of fiction-writing as “a progressive dismemberment of the self in which parts of the living subject are cut off to become objectified in language, to become (from the writer’s point of view) detached and deadened, drained . . . of their obsessive emotional content.” 4 Irwin attributes this process to a fear of death. Faulkner’s dread of mortality was indeed very intense. Harry Wilbourne’s decision not to kill himself in The Wild Palms is accompanied by a statement perhaps autobiographical: “Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief.” Faulkner did not believe in an afterlife, and as Robert Hamblin observes, he often used the word oblivion in preference to the term death. When his mother lay dying at the Oxford hospital, he asked his brother Murry what he thought would happen on the other side. Murry’s answer elicited a studied reply: “Maybe each of us will become some sort of radio wave.” 5 2. John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest /Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). See also Bennett Simon, Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). Simon does not mention Faulkner, but his analysis of ancient and modern tragedies would seem applicable to Faulkner. 3. Quoted from Absalom, Absalom! in David Minter, William Faulkner: His Life and Work (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 13. 4. Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 158 –59. 5. William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (1939; New York: Random House, 1952), 324; Robert W. Hamblin, “‘Saying No to Death’: Toward William Faulkner’s Theory of Fiction,” in A

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Faulkner’s objective in creating art was to achieve some purchase on the anonymity of dissolution. Faulkner declared that he found writing a means for “saying No to death.” He continued, “So he who, from the isolation of cold impersonal print, can engender this excitement, himself partakes of the immortality which he has engendered.” One day the writer will die. Yet his words will still re-create “the old deathless excitement in hearts and glands whose owners and custodians are generations from even the air he breathed and anguished in; if it was capable once, he knows that it will be capable and potent still long after there remains of him only a dead and fading name.” 6 This kind of honorable immortality is little different from the glory that soldiers of other eras sought to win through valor. The artist likewise surmounts death, Faulkner insists, as if he were hoping to surpass the heroic stature of the warriors in Lee’s army about whom he wrote so movingly in young Chick Mallison’s famous reverie about Pickett’s charge in Intruder in the Dust. In fact, his insistent demand for an unattainable perfection as the ultimate criterion of art is connected to this notion. Few came even close, but along with Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Wolfe, he considered himself among the chosen. “The magnificence of failure,” as he called it, “the attempt to do the impossible within human experience,” closely resembled in its grandiose representation of the Confederate cause through the larger-than-life conflation of Colonel Sartoris, the hero of The Unvanquished, and Colonel William C. Falkner, the author’s greatgrandfather.7 The notion is not far fetched when one remembers how Faulkner acted out a battle career and even sported a fictitious game leg and metal plate under the scalp after returning home from a humdrum July-to-December Canadian sojourn in the Royal Air Force of Great Britain in 1918. In this instance of playacting, as in his many other self-promoting guises, Faulkner became

Cosmos of My Own: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), 8; Murry C. Falkner, The Falkners of Mississippi: A Memoir (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 189. 6. William Faulkner, foreword to The Faulkner Reader (New York: Modern Library, 1958), ix. 7. “1955: Interview with Harvey Breit,” in Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926 –1962, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), 82.

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“his own tale written by a self he distanced himself from,” as Frederick Karl explains.8 No less important than a preoccupation with the reality of death overturned by art was Faulkner’s dread of emotional castration, psychic emptiness, mordant pain. As T. S. Eliot once observed, human beings can stand only so much reality. In some sense, reality was what Faulkner sought to ward off and replace with a world of his own making—grander, more grotesque, more intense than ordinary, dullish living. His characters are thus given to every sort of extremity of temperament, behavior, and physique. The words outrage and despair are often invoked in Faulkner’s fiction as if southerners never felt only a little out of sorts or reacted in mild, never utter dismay. Instead, in Faulkner’s world some uncontrolled emotion ruled the characters’ actions, but their compulsiveness, he seemed to think, lent them an aura of tragic giganticism. For instance, when asked in 1959 to explain the Compsons and Sartorises, he replied that they were the kind who strove for the heroic but “failed through lack of character or absence of things in their character which [should] have been there but at least they tried.” 9 (My italics.) The South could not be really as monotonous and uninspiring as it appeared to be, Faulkner seemed to say. It was the writer’s obligation to discover the turbulence and grandeur underneath and bring them to the surface. Faulkner once put the matter in this way: “I myself am inclined to think it was because of the bareness of the Southerner’s life, that [the artist] had to resort to his own imagination, to create his own Carcassonne.” 10 By Carcassonne, a metaphor also used as the title of an early short story (1925 or so), Faulkner had in mind the realm of imagination of which the writer was sole ruler. The short story, or, more descriptively, prose poem, has a speaker converse with his own skeleton while looking down from a transcendent position. Imagination and Death are figuratively juxtaposed. Death, though, is not merely annihilation and 8. William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1966), 181– 82; Hamblin, “‘Saying No to Death,’” 9; Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner, American Writer: A Biography (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 17–18; Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1959), 204. 9. Gwynn and Blotner, Faulkner in the University, 204. 10. Ibid., 136.

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void but the consequence, the final outcome of life itself, an infinite space that the artist’s achievements can fill. “I want to perform something bold and tragical and austere,” says the first-person narrator in “Carcassonne.” It was a way to get free of the “very coffin walls” and to mount “a buckskin pony with eyes like blue electricity” and gallop skyward as if the pair were “a dying star upon the immensity of darkness and of silence within which . . . muses the dark and tragic figure of the Earth, his mother.” The conflation of an occupier of a threateningly confined space—tomb or cave—and the poet with the gift of imagination is scarcely unique. That romantic image can be located time and again in the work of such melancholy writers as Stendhal, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Scott, and Walker Percy among others.11 But Faulkner gave the idea his special intensity. So far as records show, Faulkner never attempted suicide. “Sometimes I think of doing what Rimbaud did,” he once remarked to a French interviewer, “yet, I will certainly keep on writing as long as I live.” 12 He resided in his own kingdom of the mind, which, though filled with gothic fancies, was too exciting to be killed at his own hands. Instead, writing freed the most destructive aspects of his despair, but it was a troubling exercise because of the urgency to strive for perfection. He said, “I don’t think any author can be satisfied with his work. If he were, there’d be nothing left for him to do but cut his throat.” 13 However seriously or lightly Faulkner thought of self-destruction, a promising insight into the relation of writing to depression in a writer like Faulkner comes from a glance at the process of suicide itself. Analyst Edwin Shneidman persuades us that the last written words of suicides are often arid, barren, cryptic, and preoccupied with the minutiae of the moment. They seldom reveal the real reasons for the step toward self11. William Faulkner, “Carcassonne,” in Collected Stories (1950; New York: Random House, 1976), 899 –900; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender, and the Southern Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 73 –75; Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 298 –300; Stendhal, The Red and the Black, ed. and trans. Robert N. Adams (1830; New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 55; Evelyn Scott, The Narrow House (1921; New York: W. W. Norton, n.d.). 12. Meriwether and Millgate, Lion in the Garden, 71. 13. “1955: Interview with Cynthia Grenier,” in Meriwether and Millgate, Lion in the Garden, 220.

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annihilation. When preparing to die, sufferers are most unlikely to “write a meaningful suicide note,” Shneidman proposes. Benumbed by the anxiety that has overtaken them, they are too constricted and inward to reach out that far. Like the victims of war and catastrophe, suicides, according to Bennett Simon, have become so paralyzed by trauma that ventilating their pain is impossible.14 By such reasoning, we could speculate that Faulkner’s novels are his way of shielding himself from that drastic step. He was pushed to write, he sometimes declared, by a “demon,” more so in his youth, but even as he aged in the 1950s, “the demon was still kind; only a little more severe and unpitying.” 15 Instead of suicide, he only gradually destroyed himself with liquor, a chemical which, in the end, did prove fatal. Both alcoholic enslavement and deep melancholy combined to dominate Faulkner’s inner life. By far the easier task is to chronicle alcoholism, the first of these illnesses. In all likelihood Faulkner’s craving for drink was partly genetic. As some neurogenetic studies show, biology may combine with family environment, the more traditional explanation, to account for habits of drinking from one generation of kinspeople to another. The work of Donald Goodwin and his staff in the United States and Denmark with the children of alcoholics points toward hereditary factors.16 The Washington Post has reported the discovery of a set of genes peculiar to alcoholics.17 William Clark Falkner of Ripley, Mississippi, Faulkner’s great-grandfather, colonel, novelist, and founder of the tribe, was known to be a very heavy drinker. John Wesley Thompson Falkner, the colonel’s son and the writer’s grandfather, was even more tempted by the bottle and periodically checked into the Keeley Institute near Memphis.18 At a very young age, Faulkner 14. Edwin Shneidman, Suicide as Psychache: A Clinical Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior (Northvale, N.J., and London: Jason Aronson, 1993), 99. 15. Faulkner, foreword to Faulkner Reader, viii. 16. Goodwin, Is Alcoholism Hereditary? 145. The control group consisted of seventy-eight, and the alcoholic cohort had fifty-five male participants. Alexander Tolor and John S. Tamerin challenged the validity of the study; see ibid., appendix, “The Question of a Genetic Basis for Alcoholism,” 139 – 44. 17. Rick Weiss, “Discovery May Be Brewing in Search for Genetic Link to Alcoholism,” Science Section, Washington Post, July 1, 1996; see also “Behavior,” Science News 121 (May 29, 1982): 360. 18. Joseph Blotner, William Faulkner, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1977), 1:56.

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once reminisced, the old Masonic officer used to give him “heeltaps,” that is, the drops of bourbon left in the bottom of the glass.19 Faulkner’s sometimes violent and somewhat rudderless father, Murry, was subject to the same disease. Heredity, however, may have been only one of several factors. Of course, a home in which a father or mother drinks is bound to create an environment that could subtly encourage offspring to do likewise, but worse is the experience of unpredictable moments of anxiety and uncertainty in a young child when a father is untrustworthy, unloving because he is out of control and potentially abusive. Murry Falkner’s ungovernable behavior doubtless contributed to his son’s early sense of loss.20 He could neither admire and respect nor please his antiintellectual father, whose favorite moments were spent at his livery stable boozing it up with other idlers. Father and son shared nothing in common except, later on, a love of alcohol, and even that failed to draw them together. Although without using any reference to biography, critic John Irwin argues that Faulkner’s sense of desperation appeared in much of his fiction as a repetitive representation of “the symbolic death struggle between father and son” that mirrored a “real death struggle.” 21 Faulkner recognized in himself a sense of desperation in his urgency to get his thoughts on paper. The writer, he told an interviewer, “knows that he has only a certain number of years to express the truth in, and so in my own case anyway, it’s the compulsion to say everything in one sentence because you may not live long enough to have two sentences.” 22 The source of Faulkner’s depressive character is harder to document than his need to drink. Any reconstruction of depressive factors is likely to begin in early childhood. Faulkner’s earliest recollection suggested a very grievous sense of having been forsaken, as if he had been a motherless child with only the beloved Callie Barr, his African American nurse and prototype for Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, and occasional visits from his grandmothers to relieve his sense of

19. Robert N. Linsott, “Faulkner without Fanfare,” Esquire 60 (July 1963): 36 –38. 20. On the issue of alcoholics’ children who are suffering from depression but are not equipped to recognize the name of their misery until fully grown—if then—see David A. Karp, Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meanings of Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 58; Karl, Faulkner, 19. 21. Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 157. 22. “Colloquies at Nagano,” in Meriwether and Millgate, Lion in the Garden, 14.

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apartness.23 In 1925 he remembered being greatly frightened at about age three during an overnight visit to his aunt Willie’s house in Ripley. He was suddenly “taken with one of those spells of loneliness and nameless sorrow that children suffer, for what or because of what they do not know.” At four he had a nearly fatal attack of scarlet fever, then a great killer. In his short story “Sepulture South: Gaslight,” a four-year-old boy watches a stately funeral procession in which “the black plumed hearse, the black closed hacks and surreys” pass by. That evening the child pitches headlong into night terrors. He cannot accept the idea that “Grandfather was gone.” Rather, he imagines being himself thrown into the grave, buried alive “to strain and thrash and cry in the airless dark, to no escape forever. So that night I had something very like hysterics, clinging to Sarah’s legs and panting: ‘I won’t die! I won’t! Never!’” 24 We do not know why Faulkner should have been preoccupied with death at such an early age. After all, it was much more common for kinspeople to die young than it is nowadays. Perhaps he was no different from other highly gifted children who have wondered why there had to be so threatening a thing as death. Yet Faulkner reacted with a special sense of morbidity. The writer has the little boy in “Sepulture South” return to the cemetery year after year, not just to gaze upon his grandparents’ graves but to look at the rows of stones, “all of them looming among the lush green of summer and the regal blaze of fall and the rain and the ruin of winter. . . . Still serene, impervious, remote. . . .” 25 One factor that heightened his sensibilities was his problematic relationship with his parents. For reasons that are not clear, he thought himself unloved and loveless, and early on he developed a sense of shame because of his longings for affection. No child, no boy especially, likes to look solely to his mother 23. See Faulkner to May Bell Barr [Callie’s daughter], February 7, 1940, and to Robert K. Haas, February 7, 1940, in Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York: Random House, 1977), 117–19. Of Callie, Faulkner wrote, “She was born and lived and served, and died and now is mourned; if there is a heaven, she’s gone there” (119). 24. William C. Falkner to Mrs. Walter B. McLean, September 10, 1925, in Blotner, Selected Letters, 20 (see also Jay Martin, “Faulkner’s ‘Male Commedia,’” in Faulkner and Psychology/Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1991, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994], 144); William Faulkner, “Sepulture South: Gaslight,” in Joseph Blotner, ed., Uncollected Short Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1979), 452. 25. Faulkner, “Sepulture South: Gaslight,” 455.

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for protection and admiration. In an honor-conscious society such as earlytwentieth-century Mississippi was, to be known as a “mama’s boy” was a mortification that seriously eroded a child’s self-esteem. Parents inculcated a fear of effeminacy early in a boy’s life. Faulkner’s most sensitive biographer, Frederick Karl, observes that his mother, Maud, was a woman whose force of personality might well have attracted and also frightened a youngster. She “was domineering, and dominant, a no-nonsense, nondrinking woman who followed the principle of reality.” Maud’s son was an acute observer, and as analyst and literary critic Jay Martin points out, the novelist was reared with many women around him. There were grandmothers (Sallie Falkner of Ripley and Maud’s mother, Leila Butler), aunts (most especially Bama), his own mother, and his most beloved female figure, Callie Barr, the indomitable nurse. Maud Falkner was dutiful but not warm in her childrearing practices. She often rocked William when he was an infant because he had colic, but always in a straight-back kitchen chair that made a harsh racket as if she were hacking away on a woodpile. She met her children’s needs but offered few signs of love. When Maud thought her teenage son was becoming stoop-shouldered, she laced him into a stiff brace in the morning and unlaced the device when she saw fit in the evening.26 In the kitchen she posted a sign that read in crimson letters, “Don’t complain— don’t explain,” to reinforce as powerfully as she could southern customs of reticence, a protective strategy to hide a sense of humiliation or vulnerability.27 Faulkner carried her notions into his later life. When he had become a celebrity, he deplored the inquisitiveness of a public that had once honored that sense of privacy which had been the nation’s “topless empyrean of freedom.” In 1955 he told an audience in Oregon that nowadays a “vast down-crowding pressure” was eliminating in America “the last vestige of privacy without which man cannot be an individual.” He had very good reasons, artistic and otherwise, to

26. John Falkner, My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Reminiscence (New York: Trident, 1963), 81– 82; Faulkner quoted in Jay Martin, Who Am I This Time?: Uncovering the Fictive Personality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 189; Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 184 (quoting Sally Murry), 185, 250; Tom Dardis, The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), 27. 27. Martin, Who Am I This Time? 192; Minter, Faulkner, 10.

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keep the press and public at a distance, but his astringency indicated origins in his mother’s core values.28 Maud Falkner’s strengths were many, but her legacy, while helpful, came at a price. She had brains and discipline. Early in her sons’ lives she began them on the road to reading, chiefly the classics. “Billy,” as he was called, took to the literary feast with relish, but however much reading aided his later creativity, it set him farther apart from other boys. Moreover, he inherited her artistic talent and developed a sophisticated approach to art that was a great intellectual resource. Yet his talent won him mockery from schoolmates. Maud Falkner was not to blame, of course. She was a strict Methodist and sought her son’s development of his potential. Yet the society in which the Falkners lived prized learning and artistic interests very little. As eldest son, Faulkner was perhaps more subject to the whims and insecurities of both his parents, which circumstance further implanted feelings of despair. By age twelve or so he was alert to the decline of his father’s financial status, a situation that alarmed his wife and may have led her to shift her primary attention to her favorite son and away from her unsteady spouse. That transfer would scarcely be welcome for a boy still seeking his path toward purely male identity. In fact, the writer was probably autobiographical in “Barn Burning,” a story about surly Ab Snopes’s boy, Sarty, whose family was constantly on the move from one sharecropping farm to another. In real life, Murry Falkner uprooted the family and moved the household from one rented place to the next until Murry obtained a big house in Oxford—later sold. When his various dabblings in business failed, Murry would insist that the family move West, but Maud Falkner invariably refused. Resentments simmered on both sides and adversely affected young William’s sense of security.29 Perhaps that is why Faulkner’s mode of writing revealed what Walter Slatoff has called “polar imagination,” that is, a tendency “to see life as composed essentially of pairs of warring entities.” The Sound and the Fury, Slatoff notes, has a cast that includes a ruined, cynical father; a neurotic mother; an idiot; a brother whose greed and malice is barely human; an emotionally tortured daughter; and a melancholy son who commits suicide. Light in August is also nearly bereft of anyone halfway 28. William Faulkner, “On Privacy: The American Dream; What Happened to It,” Harper’s 211 (July 1955): 37. 29. Karl, Faulkner, 30, 55.

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normal except Byron Bunch.30 Perhaps the stress upon these extremities is partially related to the Falkner family experience. Making matters worse was the teenager’s slight frame—five foot five or six. On that score, he took after his mother, whereas his beefy father not only failed to see him as a chip off the old block but thought him physically inferior to Faulkner’s three brothers who, though younger, shot up to over six feet in height. Just how jealous he was about their height and athleticism is a matter for speculation. Maud Falkner loved her eldest, but every two years another infant—John, Murry Junior, and Dean Swift—appeared. But much to his sorrow, Faulkner had no sister to guide, tease, and lord over. Such a situation can almost lead to a child’s deep mourning, a sense of irredeemable loss, and a hidden resentment of the new rivals for parental attention. Suppose he had had the sister he yearned for— one he might have been imagining when creating Caddy in The Sound and the Fury. Karl refers to Faulkner’s need to achieve a level of self-possession and confidence amidst “this welter of boys.” 31 Perhaps his outlook would have been less confused than it turned out to be, but the idea must remain a conjecture. In any event, by the fifth grade William Faulkner no longer tried to please his family with high grades at school. Instead he played hooky or sat through classes “quiet, withdrawn, inattentive.” One classmate recalled that on the playground Faulkner “stood around a great deal” and did not romp with the other children.32 As he underwent the stresses of adolescence, Faulkner may have felt like Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! whose very tone of speaking manifested hopelessness—“the flat, curiously dead voice, the downcast face, the relaxed body not stirring except to breathe.” 33 By his late teens Faulkner had become locally notorious for his drinking, idleness, and reclusive habits, all of which further alienated him from his sociable if incompetent father. William’s uncle John Falkner, a bluff banker, declared that “that damn Billy is not worth a Mississippi goddam—and never will be.” 34 Such pronouncements reinforced 30. Walter J. Slatoff, Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), 79 – 80. 31. Karl, Faulkner, 31. 32. Minter, Faulkner, 11–12. 33. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936; New York: Vintage, 1964), 258. 34. Susan Snell, Phil Stone of Oxford: A Vicarious Life (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 133.

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Faulkner’s own sense of self-disgust even as he was also developing the literary depressive’s contradictory sense of omnipotence—a nobody understands-mygenius sentiment. In addition to these alienating factors in Faulkner’s upbringing, the sensitive child and teenager had to contend with oppressive southern cultural attitudes and mores that gave the intellectually gifted young person so little space. Of course, twentieth- as well as nineteenth-century American writers have generally complained that their intellectual interests displeased the folks around them. In the North, those who read and wrote at the expense of more practical pursuits were thought idlers. In the South the young intellectual risked being called effeminate. Faulkner was once asked about Quentin Compson’s exclamation “I don’t hate it; I don’t hate it” and admitted that he felt similarly. In 1955 with a touch of bitterness that fame had not softened, he observed, “The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He’s supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn’t part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.” 35 His silences, of which biographer Karl writes, were not just moments of reverie and contemplation, as some have claimed, but a means to wall out others, to nurse wounds, to hide anger with little risk of exposure.36 Who can push aside a lifetime of local sneers? No doubt the imaginative lies he told about himself, the fiction he wrote, the bottles he drank were all partly designed as a means to escape these unpleasantries and the crises that arose in his life. When in 1930, for instance, his daughter Alabama was born prematurely and died a few days later, the young father was distraught. He claimed that Dr. Culley, the attending physician, had acted so indifferently to the baby and Faulkner’s suffering wife, Estelle, that he raced over to the doctor’s house. When the door opened, he said, he fired a pistol and the shot struck Culley through the shoulder. “The bastard deserved to die,” he told Ben Wasson. But the story was total fabrication. As Joel Williamson declares, Faulkner had to present himself as “a hero in his own eyes” even if the town held him in contempt.37 35. “1955: Interview with Harvey Breit,” 82; Faulkner quoted in Faulkner at Nagano, ed. Robert A. Jelliffe (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1956), 126 –27; Sally Wolff with Floyd C. Watkins, Talking about William Faulkner: Interviews with Jimmy Faulkner and Others (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 173n16. 36. Karl, Faulkner, 13, 55, 90, 114, 119, 228, 275n, 378; Ben Wasson, Count No ’Count: Flashbacks to Faulkner (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), 39. 37. Williamson, Faulkner and Southern History, 230; Wasson, Count No ’Count, 106 – 8.

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Years later, Al Bezzerides, a Hollywood screenwriter—Faulkner’s sometime occupation—had the objective distance to assess his colleague’s nature in a way that Oxford friends and Faulkner’s own family could not. About a visit to Faulkner’s home in the 1940s the screenwriter later reminisced, “I can recall my feeling of amazement that these people didn’t know who he was.” They treated him with almost undisguised scorn and mockery.38 For forty years the residents of Oxford had established their unflattering image of Faulkner and suspected him of being half effeminate, a queer duck who in his youth “painted pictures,” of all things, when the only proper things for real men to paint were fences, pig pens, and barns.39 In dealing with these issues, Faulkner adopted a common southern male habit. He found drink a ready solace to drown out the ugly voices of disapproval and gain a sense of camaraderie with the boys at the hunting camp but also to cover the underlying despair and self-loathing. As the Mississippi legislator observed in 1958, alcohol had an honored place in the southerner male’s world. Yet it was subject to obloquy in the female’s churchgoing one. To drink was to establish a claim to manhood, but given his mother’s intense disapproval, it was a guilt-ridden choice and placed him in the unwelcome company of a father who loved and respected him too little. Although episodes in his fiction depict the trials of shame and dread of dishonor, Faulkner was more mindful of these matters than even he acknowledged to himself. It might be conjectured that Faulkner drew from his dislike of his father the portrait of Jason in The Sound and the Fury. Even Faulkner’s mother reported that Jason talked and gestured just like her husband, Murry. Jason resembled him also in his gruff temper, unloving character, and resentment at not having a job that paid him handsomely.40 Much less obvious was his distress over his mother’s influence on his life. Ellen Douglas has noted a common attitude toward women that runs through all of Faulkner’s work. She cites Wayne Booth’s remark that an author “can choose his disguises, but he can never choose to disappear.” As a result, with so

38. Louis Daniel Brodsky, “Reflections on William Faulkner: An Interview with Albert I. Bezzerides,” Southern Review 21 (April 1985): 387. 39. Wasson, Count No ’Count, 39. 40. Judith Bryant Wittenberg, Faulkner: The Transfiguration of Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 84 – 85.

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many words from which to draw conclusions, one can recognize the fiction writer’s primary positions. The manipulator of the narrative, she notes, will expose his feelings, contradictory though they may be. Should women, Douglas asks, “be blamed both for living governed entirely by the mores of the community (respectability) and for having been born evil and sinful?” Yet Faulkner seems to entertain both these notions—some might say prejudices. Faulkner’s heroines, some of them drunkards, others fanatics or God-driven, are seldom admirable in most respects, unless they don’t count for much or are appropriately hard yet on some level submissive. Joe Christmas, Douglas argues, can fornicate as much as he likes without authorial comment, but Joanna Burden in the same novel, Light in August, enjoyed the “wild throes of nymphomania” and the hearing of dirty language. Joe Christmas is given the last word about her: “At least I have made a woman of her. . . . Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.” The most sexually tender scene in all of Faulkner’s work is not the sexual love of man and woman but man and cow—the retarded Ike Snopes’s passion for a cow standing in a stream.41 Women are dispensable unless, like Dilsey, they have an unshakable loyalty to the menfolk in their lives. So deep a mistrust of women had to stem from a fear of mother more than a dread of father. (Douglas is convincing that Faulkner’s men, none of them perfect, may be evil but their offenses are not seen as a function of their maleness but their individual weakness.) Part of the problem, of course, was the misogynistic features of southern culture itself.42 As Douglas notes, though, Faulkner never questioned the confinement of female power to one channel of activity—sexual appeal as a means to control men—whereas men had a variety of means to demand the attention or obedience of others, of both sexes. Faulkner’s marriage to Estelle Franklin exemplified his ambivalence about women. It turned out to be one of those fateful, foolish gestures that might be called cowardice but which Faulkner elevated to a question of honor. Although he and Estelle Oldham were high school sweethearts, she had married Cornell Franklin, her parents’ preference. Meanwhile bachelor Faulkner, free of marital responsibility, kept the torch of unrequited love aflame. Then Estelle and 41. Ellen Douglas, “Faulkner’s Women,” in Fowler and Abadie, Cosmos of My Own, 154 –56 (quotation), 157–58. 42. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 199 –225.

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Franklin returned to Oxford, where things heated up until she divorced her wayward husband. Even though the novelist recoiled from the prospect of marrying her and was more interested in Helen Baird, as well as other women he was pursuing at the time, Faulkner felt obliged to carry through. In late spring of 1929, he wrote Harrison Smith, his publisher in New York, a strange, confessional letter begging for a five-hundred-dollar advance because of his impending marriage. “this part is confidential, utterly,” he wrote. “For my honor and the sanity—I believe life— of a woman.” He intimated that neither was he the father of an illegitimate child compelled by rigid southern custom to salvage Estelle’s good name nor was there a threat of his being accused of a breach of promise. In fact, she was not pregnant, and they may not even have had sexual relations at all. Yet, he continued, “It’s a situation which I engendered and permitted to ripen which has become unbearable, and I am tired of running from devilment I bring about.” 43 The tangle of motives is almost indecipherable. Clearly he felt responsible for dallying with her feelings when she was safely married. His behavior was appropriate not for a thirty-year-old but rather for a teenager just embarking on a search for adulthood. (Walker Percy experimented in similar fashion.) 44 If he dropped Estelle after she had won her divorce, she would avenge his foolishness with bitter and public accounts of his dishonorable faithlessness. With a wretched local reputation already, could Faulkner imagine the calumny he would confront in Oxford and not shrink back? Not very trusting of women anyhow, he was the kind to fancy every sort of devilish outcome— and put them in his novels. Moreover, marriage would be a restorative; it would force him to some level of discipline and responsibility and maybe help his local esteem. Love apparently did not figure very much. Instead his submission to his own misguided promises was an act of neurotic miscalculation that ended in both parties’ being miserable much of their married life. Marital conflict was bound to encourage his drinking, deepen his sense of alienation, and yet provide material for his creative powers.

43. Faulkner to Harrison Smith as quoted in Noel Polk, “The Artist as Cuckold,” in his very interesting Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 147– 48. 44. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 305 – 6.

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A revealing story, “The Brooch” (ca. 1936; later adapted for television), was not one of his better efforts. Yet it offers a clue to his misogyny, an exasperation especially with his mother but also with his wife. Howard Boyd is a lonely, small-framed soul, reared by a dominating and tenaciously clinging mother after the absconding of his father within six months of his birth. Mrs. Boyd suffers a stroke, and Harry loyally waits upon her in her mansion. Though not very sexed, Harry gets up enough nerve to marry Amy, and they live above his mother and pass her door every day. Amy keeps insisting that they leave the old house and its painful memories and move out on their own. But Harry cruelly refuses, even after Amy has a baby who dies within the year. Suffocating and unable to come to terms with her grief, Amy goes out dancing and making love with other men until the early hours—with the full cooperation of her cuckolded, shriveled husband. Discovering Amy’s secret outings, Mrs. Boyd orders her to leave in the night. Amy realizes that it is all over: “‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She beat us. She lay there in that bed she will never move from until they come in and carry her out some day. . . .’ Then she began to cry. It was as quiet now as the way she had spoken. ‘My little baby,’ she said. ‘My dear little baby.’” Despite her pleas to join her at the town hotel, Harry refuses. The reader learns that, while Amy has been out partying, Harry has been resorting to a two-gallon jug that he has hidden in the bathroom. After she leaves by taxi, he returns to the bathroom, drinks steadily, and pulls out a pistol that he is just about to use on himself.45 Out of fear of his mother’s penetrating gaze and uncanny hearing, he stuffs the door jambs and apertures of the bathroom with towels to deaden the noise, not to save his mother distress but rather to hide his shame for losing his wife without regret, for giving up on life itself. In real life about the time of his writing the story, Faulkner and Estelle were extremely unhappy about the loss of their first child, Alabama, dead after only a few days of life. The nosy, censorious mother bears some resemblance to Faulkner’s mother, Maud. Like Harry Boyd, never did Faulkner miss a day visiting her when he was in residence in Oxford. His devotion exceeded that of the most dutiful sons in such a tightly knit community. Yet it may have left a hidden fear of dependence upon her, the same as that which afflicted Harry in the story.46 In an autobiographical fragment called “And Now What’s to Do” that Noel Polk has un45. William Faulkner, “The Brooch,” in Collected Stories, 647– 66. 46. Karl, Faulkner, 424.

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earthed, Faulkner expressed his puzzlement and dread of women who, he intimates, threaten a man’s sense of virility: “Having to back off, with webs clinging to you. Christ, you have to tell them so much. You cant think of it fast enough. And they never forget when you do and when you don’t. What do they want, anyway?” Polk comments that the novelist was dealing with “the sorts of problems that plague so many of his male characters: the fear and loathing of women, the shame and filth associated with sexuality, the immutability of desire, and the absolute inextricability of the desire and the shame.” Sensing Faulkner’s deepseated ambivalence and his lack of love for her, Estelle began to drink heavily herself. That created tensions with her mother-in-law, Maud, who worried that Estelle was beckoning Faulkner into the same alcoholic hell.47 In handling these problems, Faulkner had only two outlets, both evident in “The Brooch”: alcohol and writing. Both were ways to escape, although he only admitted that art served that Freudian function: “There’s the case of the sorry, shabby world that don’t quite please you, so you create one of your own.” 48 He was much more at home discussing the relation of art to reality than talking about anything more personal. As a result, he would not confront his attraction to hard liquor. No friend, not even Phil Stone, his Oxford buddy, could crack Faulkner’s mental carapace. Once when asked about the habit, he replied defensively, “I consider drinking a normal instinct, not a hobby. A normal and healthy instinct.” Perhaps he was right as a general rule, but the remark suggests blind denial with reference to himself. Seldom did he ever confide even the slightest sort of intimate revelation. “Never ask me why,” he once told a physician inquiring about his consumption of spirits. “I don’t know the answer. If I did I wouldn’t do it.” His inner need for self-expression was channeled solely into the many pairs of voices of love and hate, boldness and fear in his fiction.49 Unfortunately, Faulkner’s overindulgence in alcohol eventually eroded his creative gifts. Such was also the case with fellow southern novelist and depressive William Styron, but the differences in their approaches is significant. With reference to his forty-year devotion to hard liquor, the contemporary novelist

47. Polk, Children of the Dark House, 150 (quotations), 152. 48. Gwynn and Blotner, Faulkner in the University, 59. 49. Blotner, Faulkner, 2:1604; Williamson, Faulkner and Southern History, 249; Faulkner quoted in “1955, Interview of August 5 with the Press [Japan],” in Meriwether and Millgate, Lion in the Garden, 149.

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wrote, “I used alcohol as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria.” Later he realized that he drank primarily “to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that I had hidden away for so long somewhere in the dungeon of my spirit.” 50 He had greater insight than Faulkner did. But then Styron, a Virginian, was younger and less a child of the repressiveness and denial that Mississippians cultivated in Faulkner’s day. An exile from the South, Styron has lived in New York and Connecticut, where psychiatry, with its better understanding of depression and alcoholism, had become more acceptable than it would be until much later in the Deep South. Faulkner took the opposite road, away from self-knowledge, no doubt because he feared that any change in regimen or attitude might unravel the cords that bound him to the delicate muse of literary inspiration. His years in New Orleans under the influence of Sherwood Anderson, his return to Oxford with his ill-fated marriage to Estelle, and his time in Hollywood in the mid-1930s were filled with astonishing creativity—and weighty psychological strains. While Faulkner worked at screenplays in Hollywood, for instance, Meta Carpenter, a gorgeous functionary in the film industry, maintained an almost idyllic relationship with him. Away from home, he was free of any permanent commitment, and she had at her feet a man of literary powers exceeding any others in that cinematic desert. Nonetheless, in 1935 his very worst attack of delirium tremens occurred in her presence, not back in Oxford under the eyes of neighbors and a disapproving wife. He hallucinated that German pilots were assaulting him from the air like wasps in angry campaign. It was an echo of that self-aggrandizing fiction that he used to hide his less-than-thrilling experiences in the Royal Air Force during the Great War. After her marriage, an event that greatly agitated her former lover, Meta Carpenter found him sprawled naked on a New York hotel bathroom floor and arranged for his immediate hospitalization. In a drunken stupor he had fallen from the toilet and burned himself severely by lying against a hot radiator. The off-and-on relationship with her satisfied well his need for both sex and mothering while he was away from Oxford and his wife Estelle. This situation continued into the 1940s.51 50. William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House. 1990), 40. 51. Panthea Reid Broughton, “An Interview with Meta Carpenter,” Southern Review 18 (October 1982):776 – 801.

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No less traumatic than the nearly fatal burn was the death of his brother in an air crash on November 10, 1936, just when Faulkner was in the midst of writing Absalom, Absalom! Ironically the story concerns the brotherly rivalry between the characters Henry Sutpen and his mulatto half brother Charles Bon, whom Sutpen kills; the same theme resonates in the life of the young Quentin Compson, the suicidal discloser of their tragic fates. Upon learning the sad news of Dean’s death in nearby Pontotoc County, Faulkner felt especially guilty because he had encouraged his younger brother to fly and had even sold him the Waco in which Dean and three young farmers perished during an air show flight. As late as 1956 Faulkner mourned, “I taught my younger brother to fly, and he crashed and was killed. My mother wanted to see him, but he was so badly disfigured that I spent the whole night with the mortician at the side of a bathtub trying to put his face back in some shape. Since then I have never been able to get into a bathtub.” A pregnant wife and a sense of duty to the grieving mother, Maud, kept him working on Absalom, Absalom! and away from binge drinking for a while. But after completing the novel and returning to Hollywood, he felt released from responsibilities and fell to heavy indulgence in a growing addiction that a remorseful reaction to his brother’s death made worse. The effect of Dean’s death on Faulkner did not result in a nervous breakdown, but he was deeply stricken. The early novel Flags in the Dust deals with the almost suicidal death of Bayard Sartoris, a reckless driver and airman, who seeks to exorcize demons that haunt him for urging his twin brother John to risk his life in air duels over Germany in World War I. The novel (though long remaining unpublished) was written years before Dean’s accident, a fact that intimates an uncanny playing out in fiction of that later event. But such a reading of sibling rivalry as an imaginative constant in Faulkner’s work, says Karl, makes the author into little more “than a collection of anxieties, guilt feelings, hostilities, and aggressions, and denies he had the power to transcend them.” The point is well taken. Yet the fact remains that the parallel between fiction and reality does suggest how reliant Faulkner was upon his own most troubling emotions in his effort to create a remarkably enduring fictional world.52 When his always rocky marriage to Estelle Franklin nearly fell apart in the early 1950s, Faulkner had another alcoholic collapse at Princeton, where he was 52. Karl, Faulkner, 566 – 68, 299n (quotation); Blotner, Faulkner, 1:908 –9, 2:913 –17, 2:928, 2:1603 (quotation).

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trying to finish A Fable. Dr. Eric P. Mosse, the only psychoanalyst ever to see him professionally, specialized in the treatment of artists. One session alone convinced Mosse that his patient was suffering from a combination of “drinking and depression” and he prescribed electric shock treatments. Faulkner responded well to the therapy, as many do, but the novelist claimed outrage at the expense. His alarm, however, was undoubtedly a dread that any change in his habits or outlook would jeopardize his creative powers and challenge his lifelong image of himself as an artist and as a man. No one ever tried that experiment on him again.53 At this time, in the early 1950s, he showed an extraordinary irresponsibility when he induced his nephew, James Falkner, age fourteen, to swallow a tin cup of corn liquor. Learning how to drink was something Faulkner thought perhaps more salutary, certainly more manly, than doing something dutiful that a mother or aunt might wish for—going to church, for instance. “You are old enough now to have your first drink, and we want you to have your first drink with us,” he told his nephew. Sitting by a Mississippi barn belonging to the family, William Faulkner and his brother John Wesley Falkner III watched as the youth gulped it straight down. “I couldn’t breathe for a minute after that and it burned my stomach,” Jimmy Falkner recalled. Knowing as soon as she saw her son what had happened, his mother was horrified. It caused a family rupture that lasted a year. No wonder: the corn whiskey was two hundred proof. The nephew himself, like many of Faulkner’s Mississippi friends, was ambivalent about his uncle’s drinking and said in another interview, “Brother Bill did not drink as much as people said he did. He drank a lot but in spurts. He had a set time to drink and a set time to sober up.” But he admitted that Faulkner was drunk at least as often as he was sober.54 Even the honor of the Nobel Prize for Literature in November 1950 did little to alter his anxieties or his alcoholic consumption. Prior to his departure for Stockholm, he underwent what Richard Gray calls an “alcoholic hibernation as if the mere thought of the public spotlight, fame and fortune, were enough to 53. Blotner, Faulkner, 2:928, 2:1442, 2:1603; Richard Gray, The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography (Oxford, U.K., and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 82; Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsen, A Loving Gentleman: The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 143. 54. James Falkner to Sally Wolff in Wolff with Watkins, Talking about William Faulkner, 11–12, 170.

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drive him to drink.” His acceptance speech rang with phrases not to be forgotten—“the human heart in conflict with itself,” and “man will not only endure: he will prevail.” But his presentation at the podium was so rapid, so whispered, so nervously articulated that it seemed almost designed to alienate his listeners. Faulkner, Gray continues, was acting as if he “were trying to hide his fragile, private self here behind the bold periods of public declamation.” 55 Back in America, Faulkner felt even more isolated than ever. “What a commentary,” he later wrote a friend. “Sweden gave me the Nobel Prize. France gave me the Legion d’Honneur. All my native land did for me was to invade my privacy over my protest and my plea.” It was an “indignity” hard to endure.56 As his body deteriorated under the onslaught of too much moonshine and whiskey, Faulkner nonetheless felt his literary resources drying up.57 In August 1952 he complained that his back, made worse by a fall from his horse, was “not much better; probably impossible with my nature and occupation—natural nervousness, inability to be still, inactive. . . . Though probably the great trouble is unhappiness here, have lost heart for everything.” Having taken up with Joan Williams, an aspiring writer, Faulkner wrote her in 1953 about his difficulties in front of the typewriter: “The expected happened, it ran dry after about two days, I was miserable, kept at it, the stuff was no good. I would destroy it every night and still try again tomorrow, very bad two weeks.” To Jean Stein, the admiring daughter of the songwriter Jules Stein, he complained in 1956, “I still feel, as I did last year, that perhaps I have written myself out and all that remains now is the empty craftsmanship—no fire, force, passion anymore in the words and sentences.” 58 Yet after the tepid reception of Requiem for a Nun, he plugged away at A Fable, the “big book,” as he called it. The novel has its moments of drama and eloquence. Yet its overly complex structure, abstractions, and dominant and strident narrator’s voice diminish its effectiveness. 55. Gray, Faulkner, 309, 310. 56. Faulkner to Philip E. Mullen, October 7, 1953, in Blotner, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, 354; Faulkner to Donald S. Klopfer, June 19, 1954, ibid., 366. 57. Kay Redfield Jamison and Frederick K. Goodwin, Manic-Depressive Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 220, 225; Silvano Arieti and Jules Bemporad, Severe and Mild Depression: The Psychotherapeutic Approach (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 67. 58. Faulkner to Else Johnson, August 19, 1952, in Blotner, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, 339; to Joan Williams, July 3, 1953, ibid., 350; to Jean Stein, January 13, 1956, ibid., 391.

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As Joan Williams drew away from his inept sexual demands, he felt his artistic drive decline along with the lessening of sexual success as if these aspects of his life were interdependent. Although The Town followed A Fable, by March 1961, Faulkner had reached the conclusion that he no longer had the old magic. “Since I ran dry three years ago,” he told Muna Lee, “I am not even interested in writing anymore.” There followed The Reivers: A Reminiscence, a story of old-fashioned notions of honor and Faulkner family members long since dead. The novel gave the lie to his statement about his literary bankruptcy; it won a Pulitzer Prize. Yet this bildungsroman about an eleven-year-old boy learning the rules of honor and gentility belongs to an era of Edenic innocence, 1905. Cleanth Brooks praised its comic spirit, but with its sententious gentlemanly pronouncements, stock characters of blacks, antimodern modern crankiness, assumptions of white superiority, and misogynistic remarks, The Reivers lacks the power to engage the contemporary reader.59 Not long after the publication of his last novel, Faulkner took another tumble from his horse. Although not seriously hurt, he stanched the pain with heavy drinking, along with Demerol, Darvon, Seconal, and other drugs. Under these stimulations his physical decline accelerated swiftly. How long can liver, heart, and kidneys stand a “normal gait,” as he called it, of two bourbons for lunch, a couple more in the afternoon, followed by a Martini before dinner, several glasses of wine with the meal, and usually another whisky or so sipped leisurely until bed? 60 And that regimen was routine only when he was not engaged in binge drinking. Those occasions arose when some special stress, like Meta Carpenter’s wedding, prompted an unstoppable craving. In the face of this evidence, Michael Millgate, one of his most prominent literary critics, minimizes Faulkner’s alcoholic record and argues that when writing the novelist “drank only occasionally, or not at all.” 61 But recollecting youthful days in New Orleans, William Spratling, an early friend, recalled the novelist busily tapping at his typewriter on a tiny balcony with “an invariable glass of al59. Faulkner to Muna Lee, March 8, 1961, in Blotner, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, 452; Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 349 – 68; William Faulkner, The Reivers: A Reminiscence (1962; New York: Random House, 1966). 60. Linsott, “Faulkner without Fanfare,” 36. 61. Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (1966; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 31.

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cohol and water at hand.” When not drinking while writing, he grew restless until, New York reporter Robert Linsott wrote, “a drink and luncheon time came around.” 62 At the end of his life, yet another spill from a horse introduced a flagging of spirits, deeper than any before. In addition, repeated shocks to the spine from the series of falls, not unrelated to his alcoholic habits, led to indescribable back pain that induced still more drinking. On July 5, 1962, alarmed at his excesses, his wife Estelle and Jimmy Falkner, his nephew, took him to Byhalia for his customary sojourn at Wright’s Sanatorium. Not long after midnight, he awoke, sat up and then keeled over dead from a heart attack before a nurse or doctor could reach him.63 The remarkable factor in Faulkner’s unhappy pathology was how little it had affected his productivity. Unlike the seriously depressed Walker Percy, who wrote only six major novels, Faulkner produced seventeen. During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln was once advised that U. S. Grant was too much a drunkard to hold command. The president replied, “Find out what brand of whiskey he drinks and send a barrel to each of my other generals.” If there were a comparable authority directing American literary endeavors and a similar complaint had been made about a leading practitioner like William Faulkner, the same response might well be appropriate. More important, even if none of us becomes a towering general or a great novelist, we can examine the lives of geniuses like Faulkner for insights into our own attempts at creativity, constricted though the artistic gift may be relative to sobriety and unremarkable imaginations. 62. William Spratling, “Chronicle of a Friendship: William Faulkner in New Orleans,” Texas Quarterly 9 (Spring 1966): 35; Linsott, “Faulkner without Fanfare,” 36. 63. Williamson, Faulkner and Southern History, 349 –50.

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The Spunky Little Woman— You Can’t Be One If You’re White Race, Gender, and a Little Bit of Class in Depression Post Office Murals sue bridwell beckham

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adie burke, the executive secretary, prime mover, and sometime lover of Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, is a plucky little woman. So are Joanna Burden, the activist daughter of a transplanted Yankee in Light in August, and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. And so is the female farmer in Carson Davenport’s design for a Chatham, Virginia, post office mural (Fig. 1), who seems to dance across the surface as she literally “plucks” the corn in her abundantly producing field. In an age when plucky little women were a favorite of popular culture, all four of these women were rejected by Americans as unfit for southern living. Each of these women was created by a white southern artist as in some way representative of the “modern” South of the 1930s. All of their creators would undoubtedly have considered themselves somehow not susceptible to the assumptions inherent in southern culture. Each in one way or another stood apart from the society she or he wrote about or illustrated and created from outside. Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, and Margaret Mitchell have for decades been recognized for their critical insight and their ability to penetrate the veneer of the southern cultures they experienced (even while, some would argue, Mitchell glorified it). And yet, each fell prey to some of the very assumptions they sought to expose. White author Lillian Smith, whose depictions of black responses to Caucasian-dominated society are often recognized by African Americans as exceedingly perceptive for a white observer, was aware of that pitfall and used that awareness to criticize her society. Although she wrote her novel Strange Fruit, like her nonfiction work, to criticize the culture she observed, her characters reflected the accepted artistic view of black and white female gender behavior. Artist Carson Davenport was in a different situation from these artists of the written word; as a muralist for the government program to “embellish” new 100

the spunky little woman—you can’t be one if you’re white

fig. 1. Carson Davenport, design for Chatham, Virginia (National Archives).

federal buildings, he had more than the hegemony to deal with. His mural was not his creation alone, nor was it his initial reflection of the culture he painted. His work—and that of most of the other artists who painted murals for new federal buildings in the South during the Great Depression—was done in collaboration with a government agency and often with people of the community in which his art would be displayed as well.1 Once selected to paint a mural for a federal building, an artist was required to submit a design. It was only when the design was approved that a commission was official. The program responsible for the largest public art program in United States history and to which Davenport submitted his design was the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. It placed nearly twelve hundred murals and other works of art in new federal buildings between 1935 and 1942. This agency, unlike the more famous WPA Arts Project, sought to hire only excellent American artists to decorate federal building walls—usually small-town post offices; in so doing it hoped to edify and inspire

1. More information about the relationship between artists and the Section of Fine Arts can be found in several works from the 1980s and early 1990s: Karal Ann Marling, Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); and Barbara Milosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). For information about the particular relationship between artists who painted for the South, the agency which commissioned them, and the communities they painted for, see Sue Bridwell Beckham, Depression Post Office Murals and Southern Culture: A Gentle Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1989), on which much of the present work is based.

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the people of small-town America and if possible to please them as well. Those who created the Section and other New Deal agencies felt that art could uplift the people and help them through hard times.2 If, in the process, it also provided work for artists displaced by Depression reverses, that was all the better. To try to meet these disparate and sometimes incompatible goals, the Section set up a rigid series of hurdles that every artist was required to leap before a painting could grace a federal wall. These hurdles meant that, often, the desire to hire the best American artists was defeated before a project was begun: those artists didn’t apply. Those who did participate were required to enter a competition run by the Section. Usually after placing high in a competition for a wholly different venue, an artist was invited to “submit a design.” The first Chatham, Virginia, design (Fig. 1) was approved with reservations: the proportions needed work—at least that’s the way the government phrased its advice. It wasn’t clear, however, what proportions in particular the government was referring to. Proportion in the design? The design is formally balanced—perhaps too much so for some tastes: structures at one end balance those at the other; height in the center is offset by clouds and hills at the sides. While the central female figure is closer to the viewer, her form is roughly in proportion to the men working to her right and left. The corn, the tobacco, and the chickens are believably rendered, and the size of each is proportionate to the others. But Davenport had to do something to win the approval of Section officials, each of whom had a respectable background in art as well as in politics. The agrarian subject matter of the design was a favorite for southern government murals at this time. And showing corn, tobacco, and livestock in the same frame suggested that southern farmers were adapting to Farm Security Administration injunctions to diversify their crops. Depicting white men at work in the field suggested that there was no farm crisis in this democratic nation, where all could earn a good living through honest labor, and by implication promised that times would soon be better for the yeoman farmer. Finally, Davenport must have concluded, the problem was with the relationship between the figures. He was probably more accustomed to looking for proportion in the formal aspects of a painting than in the subject matter. Davenport was painting in a modern age. Neither he nor any of his colleagues had heard of postmodernism, but modernism they knew. While the 2. Park and Markowitz, 5.

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best-known American artists of the era— Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, and their colleagues—painted the “America Scene,” their work was more “modern” than the subject matter suggested. In the United States, and especially in the Section of Fine Arts, abstract painting, which had flourished for decades in Europe, was frowned on. The Section wanted representations of American enterprise for American people. Abstractions and overt symbolism were rejected out of hand; nevertheless, Wood, Curry, and Benton, as well as Carson Davenport, were modern. Underlying their “realistic” pictures was a scaffolding of pure design that was very nearly cubist. The geometric forms in Davenport’s design coupled with male figures on the right so arranged and so drawn that they could very well be representations of the same figure in motion suggested that their creator was indeed a child of the age of Nude Descending a Staircase and “streamlined” appliances. So Davenport apparently concluded that the problem with proportion was one of perspective; he submitted a new version with the central female figure enlarged so that, being closer to the viewer than the working men to the left and right, she was larger than those figures in the middleground. But the government wasn’t pleased with that; apparently, it wasn’t even really concerned with proportion. The critical element, it seems, was nothing the officials could put their fingers on—proportion was a convenient way of throwing the problem back to the artist. And Virginia artist Davenport, emanating from the same society, caught on. Once a design was at least provisionally approved, artists were required to submit a full-sized “cartoon,” usually a line drawing on wrapping paper that would show the proportions as they would appear on the post office wall—thus demonstrating that the artist could render his small figures large without losing perspective and giving the government a second chance to intervene in the design. In Davenport’s second rendition, his cartoon, not only is the woman in the foreground larger; she has also undergone a profound metamorphosis. The young woman gaily plucking corn from an abundantly producing field has become a rigid middle-aged matron standing stock still, carrying ears of corn and a basket that looks suspiciously like lunch for the men. The men are more fully developed than in the design, and they work assiduously to make sure that basket stays full. The southern family farm is so fruitful that the woman need not exert herself. Today, gender scholarship tells us that we live in a postmodern age, in which “essentialism” cannot survive. That is to say, no characteristic belongs essen103

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tially to one gender, to one sexual orientation, to one class or one race.3 But the years during which the Section of Fine Arts was embellishing the walls of new federal buildings with what it hoped was fine American art was an essentialist period. Few people were questioning gender assumptions—at least not openly—and certainly not on post office walls. Barbara Milosh begins Engendering Culture, her examination of gender in federal art and theater of the period, with the comment that “The New Deal stands as the single example of a liberal American reform movement not accompanied by a resurgence of feminism.” 4 While popular culture did embrace the plucky little woman—so long as she surrendered her independence to a worthy American male at the end— and while so much of the New Deal was zealously democratic, the greater culture did not in any way suggest that females should be permitted out of their traditional spheres: to nurture, to consume, and to care for the domicile. And in the South, a woman could rarely help her husband on the farm by doing light work that she enjoyed—and she certainly should not loom larger than her male counterparts. At a time when even the great American literary figures—traditionally the front line of offense when any cultural assumption undergoes stress—appear to have been slaves to certain assumptions about gender, race, and class, a government agency whose mission was to put the finest in American art in the purview of the lowliest citizen could not be expected to quibble with those assumptions. Thus, the Section’s response to the cartoon was to inform Davenport that the central figure was too large for the rest of the design but to comment not at all on the change in her demeanor.5 When the artist, a modernist, replied that the “figure of the farm woman was intentionally drawn large to give prominence to her and power to the center of the design,” his employers “did not concur” and 3. Two of the many sources that discuss the problems with essentialism and recent views on gender are Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992). 4. Milosh, 1. 5. Ed Rowan to Davenport, May 9, 1938. Correspondence and other documents related to the Treasury Section of Fine Arts operation are housed in the National Archives, Record Group 121, Series 133. Though they are not as accessible as they once were, these records are still available to all Americans.

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fig. 2. Carson Davenport, final mural for Chatham, Virginia (National Archives).

insisted that in his final design she be smaller.6 In the mural that appears on the post office wall in Chatham (Fig. 2), the woman is slightly smaller, but she is the 1930s ideal of a white farm woman. Gone is the crabbiness—and the strength— of the figure in the cartoon. Instead, goggle eyed, she appears almost overwhelmed by the industry about her. Four white men with muscular arms work so that she can stand idly holding their products. A fifth stands in the foreground with his back to us, holding an unidentifiable farm implement, in much the same position the viewer of the picture would occupy, watching the honest farm labor and protecting the flower of southern white womanhood from any threat postal patrons or the outside world might pose. And so it was with virtually all white women in 1930s and 1940s southern literature. Joanna Burden lives alone, runs her farm, befriends worthy black colleges, and generally acts as one would expect an independent woman of Yankee heritage to act. And what is the result? Is she a satisfied, strong citizen of the South? No: Burden is scorned by the town gossips, isolated from the community, and murdered in her late forties by her first and only lover. Worse still, she is judged and found wanting by her creator, William Faulkner. Such an independent female must, of necessity, be frustrated and mentally unsound, however worthy her endeavors. Joanna was not created as an object of admiration—that was reserved for the Lena Groves, the Dilseys, and the idle farm women on post office walls. Joanna Burden—who never stands idly displaying the products of her land, who never permits white men to do for her nor even

6. Davenport to Rowan, June 6, 1938.

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employs black servants—is an object of derision not only for characters in the book but for readers as well. Although those who ran the Section would have concurred with society’s view of Joanna Burden, they were in their own ways idealists. They were artists and they were activists hoping through their mission not only to spawn an American mural tradition that would reflect the great one in Mexico of which Diego Rivera and José Orozco were the best-known proponents. They were eager to see America depicted ideally as the greatest nation in the world would emerge from the depression; thus while they were creatures of their era in seeing no need for a feminist movement and in accepting the male dominated status quo, they did not usually envision women as second-class citizens. In Engendering Culture, Barbara Milosh has demonstrated that post office murals, spawned by idealist artists and politicians, depicted white women and men as separate but equal. In most of the Section murals and sculptures that feature white women and men, the women have different responsibilities from their male companions but not a separate mode of living. In an eastern or midAmerican mural featuring families, if the male is at work, so is the woman; if the woman is in repose, so is her male counterpart. Whether consciously or not, however, the Section and its artists condoned separate and unequal gender roles in the South. The pop-eyed idle woman in Chatham, Virginia, had sisters throughout the South but few outside the Southeast. When Carl Nyquist submitted a cotton picking design—a favorite mural subject throughout the South—for Bolivar, Tennessee, he was asked to find out if white women actually worked in the cotton fields.7 He was able to ascertain that indeed they did—most southern farm families had no money to hire help, white or black, and many whites, male and female, worked in the fields for those who did have money. On the wall, however, the prominent female in the cotton field joins her sister in Chatham, Virginia, in an unfocused gaze while everybody around her works industriously (Fig. 3). The field is peopled with five working white men; a second female picker, who does indeed seem to work beside the men; and the central female figure, who gazes listlessly into space as her hands and her cotton sack hang languidly at her side. The eighth figure is a girl child, in what appear to be school clothes, with no sack. She touches a cotton boll much as she would a flower. She may suggest to local viewers that Tennessee 7. Rowan to Nyquist, February 24, 1941.

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fig. 3. Carl Nyquist, final mural for Bolivar, Tennessee (National Archives).

children need not work in the fields, that Bolivar had nothing to do with the child labor that so often kept children out of school at cotton harvest time, and that her future has nothing to do with manual labor. Certainly the endless straight rows of cotton suggest a bountiful harvest, if deadly for the topsoil. Arthur Covey’s mural for Anderson, South Carolina (Fig. 4), is another scene of cotton harvest, although the family he depicts appears not to be completely dependent on cotton, as he, like Davenport, includes other foodstuffs— corn, poultry. Again the males outnumber the females; besides the two intent white males in the foreground, a group of white or black men can be discerned in the left background filling more baskets with the profit crop that will wear out the soil. More to the point, however, the men work, sinews rippling, to bring in the harvest, while their female companion gazes warily toward a mysterious middle distance at our left (never making eye contact with the voyeurs in the post office lobby), her arms so lax that she seems unaware that the hard-picked cotton is spilling from the sack at her side. In contrast, when Beulah Bettersworth painted another cotton harvest mural (Fig. 5) for the Columbus, Mississippi, post office featuring mostly black cotton pickers, her females were focused. Even though a white plowman dominates the foreground in this painting, he doesn’t command much interest. One suspects that he provides a design element, pulling the long narrow tableau together—painters for the Section faced particularly challenging design problems. The Section program itself came about after the architectural designs for the post offices were approved. All of the small-town post offices built during the years of the Section’s existence (1935 – 42) were from three very similar plans, and none of them was designed to accommodate a mural. The result was that, once the public art plan was set in motion, places had to be found for murals. 107

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fig. 4. Arthur Covey, final mural for Anderson, South Carolina (National Archives).

fig. 5. Beulah Bettersworth, final mural for Columbus, Mississippi (National Archives).

And the spaces that worked best in most post offices were above the door to the postmaster’s office—a long, narrow space that ranged from four feet by eleven feet to five and a half by fourteen. In any case, the white plowman in this mural does serve an important design function, as his rein, his mules, and his bent back pull the whole mural into focus. But he probably also served to reassure postal patrons—white and black—that the twenty-five to thirty African American figures in the picture were properly supervised. The really interesting figure, however, is the black 108

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woman in the center middleground. Most people don’t notice her today, as most didn’t pay much attention to females in the murals when they were new. But clearly Bettersworth took her seriously. Like the painted white women in Chatham, Bolivar, Anderson, and several dozen other southern towns, she is not working. But there is a difference: her arms are muscular, her position is anything but listless, and though we cannot see her eyes, if we can judge by her body language, she is focused on something—the future, her family, a breathtaking sunset. She takes a rest from her labor, but she is in control of her sack and it is not empty. We know from looking at her colleagues in the field that women are doing work— even though the crops belong to somebody else. This one seems to be an independent female, whereas the white women we’ve examined appear wholly dependent. A discussion of Beulah Bettersworth presents a good opportunity to comment on gender and the muralists. There is a book to be written taking full advantage of recent theoretical discourse on male and female muralists, the Section of Fine Arts, and their interpretations. While depictions of females in the murals themselves fall pretty neatly into a pattern, the attitudes and products of the artists are not so easily classifiable. But that is another subject. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that the Section hired many women, that it showed little bias in attitude toward the gender of the artists, and that, if the female artists were feminist at all, they rarely showed it in their work or in their correspondence. Still, in style and subject matter, there seem to be subtle variations worthy of study. Beulah Bettersworth is one example; her two Mississippi murals are a bit more difficult to interpret than the others considered thus far. Her figures fall less into definable categories; her pallette, like that of Laura B. Lewis and Agnes Tait, whom we will consider later, is gentler. Independent white females or even companionable and responsible white females were not welcome in the South. Like Joanna Burden, Sadie Burke, Robert Penn Warren’s capable and independent female, is presented as an object of pity. Although Jack Burden, the narrator of All the King’s Men, finds much to admire in Sadie’s style—she gets things done, she manages to whitewash Willie Stark’s less exemplary acts, she uses language that would make anybody outside of southern politics wince—he has only scorn for her personal side. That could be because she rejected the one pass he made at her, but it probably has more to do with the fact that she cannot attract and keep the man she wants—and does not keep her rejection a secret. Burke charges forcefully after her professional 109

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and personal targets, and for a time, it seems as if she will succeed, but when Willie Stark actually needs female reassurance, she is banished to near oblivion in favor of Willie’s much-admired wife, who has bided her time waiting for her man to see the error of his ways, all the time accepting his economic support and the respectful favors of several other men who surround her. Though cotton still claimed to be king, southern states produced fine fruit. When Chester Tingler submitted his design for the Sylvester, Georgia, post office (Fig. 6), he probably thought of the central figure, the woman, as a suggestion of human fruitfulness. None of the men and women who painted post office murals meant to demean women. They were as much creatures of the culture they inhabited as people today are of ours; however, looking back from outside, from a millennial nonessentialist perspective, we can understand something of their culture and, one hopes, something of ours. Tingler might even have seen his central figure as some sort of latter-day goddess of plenty. We weren’t so far at that time from the academic-style murals that grace so many early-twentieth-century halls of learning and justice—those in which allegorical figures were clad in flowing drapery and doing their damnedest to impart a symbolic message. While the style here in Tingler’s mural is “regionalist,” the triangular design certainly suggests an earlier mode. Here we have a woman sitting on top of a pile of melons, perhaps the fruitiest of all fruits—actually the artist has carefully delineated a box for her to sit on, but we have to look closely to see it. Like Willie Stark’s wife, she sits waiting for the men around her to bring her the fruits of their labor, to provide for her, to see that she is more worthy than any of them. The men, black and white, work hard— except for two: one elderly black man (to the right), the only black individual in the painting, seems to be taking a well-earned rest against the tree, while the mature white male in the center heightens the suggestion that the woman is a goddess by offering her a ripened half melon— except that he is higher than she is on the picture plane. Another unwritten and, undoubtedly, unrecognized rule of southern representation is that a female’s head must never rise above those of all the males in the picture. Notable in this painting are the three stylized black males in the middleground to the right of center. These three contrast with the “realism” of the rest of the picture. They balance the three men working independently on the opposite side, but their positions so reflect each other that they, like the fruit, become emblematic. Tingler was gratified when Ed Rowan, the Section represen110

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fig. 6. Chester Tingler, final mural for Sylvester, Georgia (Richard H. Beckham).

tative who had most correspondence with artists, congratulated him on the “charm of the presentation of the three negroes. . . . The implications are unusually beautiful and poignant.” The artist replied that he was “particularly happy that you felt what I tried to express in the three negroes.” 8 It is interesting that much discussion was exchanged about the depiction of “negroes” in the murals; artists and the Section alike were particularly sensitive to the responses of white postal patrons to blacks in the murals. But other than the occasional quibble regarding whether white women actually worked in cotton fields— or the oblique criticism of a figure that was too large—there was seldom any discussion of women as women in the correspondence between the Section, the artists, and the townspeople. One notable exception was the community’s response to the mural for the Aiken, South Carolina, federal courthouse, in which Stefan Hirsch rendered a depiction of Justice in modern dress and powerful mien flanked by vignettes of justice in action.9 The people of Aiken took great exception to every aspect of the painting—which remained on the wall anyway—but their greatest objection was to the complexion of the figure herself. They interpreted her dark complexion and features that might be construed as Latin to mean that she was a mulatto. Whether their fury resulted in part from the representation of a modern female in a position of power is not clear. Community reaction to murals on southern post office walls is particularly important. While only about a fourth of the post office murals created by the 8. Rowan to Tingler, October 18, 1938, and Tingler to Rowan, October 28, 1938. 9. A thorough examination of this controversy can be found in Marling, 62 –71.

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program are in the South, a disproportionate amount of correspondence collected in the National Archives is from citizens of southern towns. Southerners seem to have cared deeply about what was publically displayed in their communities. Possibly because many still carried the defeat in the “recent hostility” in their bosoms, possibly because the South was singled out time and again as being hardest hit by the Depression, possibly because, for the southern farmer, the Depression had begun years before it had elsewhere, people of the South were particularly sensitive to the content of the murals, and if it failed to please, the Section would hear one way or another. By inference, then, we can assume that when the Section heard nothing from the community about an element of a mural, it did not offend. Or we could go further and assume that the depiction was what was expected. Frequently, southerners protested when a crop or an agricultural procedure was not rendered accurately. Much was heard on the subject of race. The section always knew when an artist did not visit a southern town and offered a general representation of some southern subject rather than a decoration based on local observation, and so on. Ironically, while class was occasionally a concern of the Section’s, showing white people doing manual labor, or showing only the productive factory part of a town, these things seldom drew comment. But what drew the least comment of all was the representation of women on the post office walls. Once the Section had approved a mural design— except in the case of Aiken, South Carolina, where the concern was more race than gender—I cannot recall one instance in which a southern citizen, white or black, objected to the depiction of a woman, white or black. Another unwritten rule of the depiction of gender in southern post offices was that the number of women in a frame should never outnumber the number of men. Many Depression post office decorations feature landscapes, just as many feature men at work (work was an important subject at a time when “onethird of a nation” was unable to do it for pay), and some feature men and women in various occupations. Most of the relatively few murals of leisure are outside the South—a few barn dances in the West, a few picnics (one in the South), a few hunting parties, and a beach scene or two. But beaches in the South are different from those in the North. When Louis Raynaud was asked to submit a design for Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, he was aware that the small community had been a home to Native Americans before it was to Europeans, that its main industry was fishing, and that it was a resort where southerners gathered to enjoy the Gulf of Mexico. 112

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fig. 7. Louis Raynaud, cartoon for Bay St. Louis, Mississippi (National Archives).

Having had a sketchy design approved, Raynaud submitted a more detailed cartoon featuring the three salient points about Bay St. Louis (Fig. 7). Section officials were not at all happy. Quite appropriately, they objected on the grounds that the cartoon looked more like a travel poster than a dignified work of public art. Their particular objections, however, are very interesting: They found no problem with the Native Americans bearing corn that had never grown on the Gulf Coast. And apparently the center vignette, in which white men cast nets while a white woman mends one and an improbable outsized magnolia blossom decorates the boat, caused no concern. Instead Edward Rowan commented that “parts of [the cartoon] are very handsome but the figures of the two white women . . . [are objectionable]. It is suggested that you put a complete skirt on the central figure and . . . give her some function in the decoration. . . . The woman in the bathing suit is also objectionable. . . . Could you not reduce her in scale and have her standing on the shore to the left watching the child as he plays with his boat . . . [?]” 10 Raynaud complied and in so doing solved several implicit problems. He dressed the central female figure respectably and gave her something of a function in the decoration: she languidly holds a corner of the net another woman mends (Fig. 8). In her new position, the top of her head is also slightly lower than that of one of the white males and on a plane with that of the other. By completely dressing the mother to the left and putting her on shore, Raynaud has not only rendered her less seductive but further out of reach from her child 10. Rowan to Raynaud, December 2, 1937.

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fig. 8. Louis Raynaud, final mural for Bay St. Louis, Mississippi (Richard H. Beckham).

in the water. More important, however, is that she recedes into the background, and while white males still don’t outnumber white women, the boy and the two fishermen dominate the activity in the painting. As in the Bolivar and Anderson murals, the women’s arms are lax, their gazes unfocused, and any purposeful activity doubtful. What might be most southern about the revisions in this design is that Rowan wanted women at the beach in this mural fully clothed. In nonsouthern murals such as the one in Long Beach, New York—another beach scene—women and men in bathing attire were tolerated. Though generally southern white women could never outnumber the men in a frame, there was one exception. Northern artist Aldis Browne rendered a fine agricultural fresco for Oneonta, Alabama, which features three white females in the center, two African American females to the left, and two European men to the right; one wonders if that is why the artist was stranded in Oneonta eking out a living painting baptismal murals for several months while the Treasury Department bureaucracy tried to sort out his payment.11 Several times, for example in Francis Foy’s harvest mural for Dunkirk, Indiana, and one of Robert F. Gates’s panels for Bethesda, Maryland, women did outnumber men in murals outside the South. Also, in the South females never appeared in groups without males as they occasionally did in murals in the North such as in Saul Levine’s rendering of female students at Mt. Holyoke College for South Hadley, Massachusetts. 11. For a complete discussion of Browne’s experience see Beckham, 90 –92.

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fig. 9. Francis Speight, design for Gastonia, North Carolina (National Archives).

The one time such a design was introduced in the South, it was scotched with little explanation. For the cotton mill town of Gastonia, North Carolina, which called itself “the South’s City of Spindles,” Francis Speight proposed a historic scene of women spinning under an arbor at about the time of the American Revolution (Fig. 9). He probably was unaware that, in eighteenth-century Europe, unmarried daughters gifted at spinning—spinsters—were valued by their families for their earning power.12 More likely, he simply envisioned a charming and highly unusual scene that seemed appropriate for Gastonia. He submitted this design along with another one; both were offered to Gastonia community members for their consideration. Both they and the Section chose the modern industrial design over this one. No reasons were given for the choice, but as usual, one suspects gender depiction had something to do with it.13 The final mural for Gastonia (Fig. 10) shows a white man at the extreme right operating the complex spinning machine that would put many contemporary mill girls out of work, another white male entering the mill, and a group of black men and women picking cotton— one with her child in the field, presumably because no one was home to care for her, and in a distant middle ground to the right, the standard purposeless southern white female walking along the road. It seems that women in groups could not occupy an entire southern panel; occasionally, however, a southern mural woman could appear alone in a frame, as long as her demeanor was appropriate, her surroundings proper, and she threatened no man. Such was the case with the portrait of Evangeline in 12. Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), 111–12. 13. Rowan to Speight, January 11, 1938. For a more complete discussion of the Gastonia situation, see Beckham, 193 –97.

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fig. 10. Francis Speight, final mural for Gastonia, North Carolina (National Archives).

St. Martinville, Louisiana. Those who attended an American junior high or high school as late as the 1970s are familiar with the fictional Longfellow heroine Evangeline. They may even know that his poem about the search for a lost love is based on an actual Acadian who, after being expelled from Nova Scotia, made her home in St. Martinville. What most don’t know is that the story told in St. Martinville is somewhat different from Longfellow’s version. Emmeline Labiche, the reputed prototype for Evangeline, is buried in the St. Martinville churchyard, where there is also a statue of the actress who played Evangeline in the 1929 movie (the statue was donated by the production company, which shot the film on location in the area). Like Longfellow’s Evangeline, Labiche is reputed to have searched throughout the southern—and some midwestern— states for her fiancé, from whom she had been separated in the Acadian diaspora. Not so the Evangeline commemorated at the St. Martinville historic site. The southern Evangeline may have searched, but mostly she waited by the bayou for him to arrive. We know that because the “Evangeline Oak”—the tree she waited under—still grows by Bayou Teche at a tourist site where the mythic Evangeline serves as a reminder of the role of the southern woman. In Longfellow’s poem her fiancé, Gabriel, was dying when she found him in a convent hospital; in another version of the story he was married when she found him, and the discovery hastened her death of complications from a broken heart. In the St. Martinville version, the Acadian House Museum may once have been the home of Louis Arceneaux, the prototype for Gabriel.14 Minetta Good’s design featured the waiting Evangeline (Fig. 11). With the 14. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Longfellow-Evangeline State Commemorative Area,” http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu!50041, and “Saint Martinville,” http:// www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu!66601 (accessed 16 July 1999), and on-site research in St. Martinville.

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fig. 11. Minetta Good, design for St. Martinville, Louisiana (National Archives).

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rebuilt St. Martinville Church in the background (the original had burned many years before), a mature Evangeline waits in flowing garments under the Evangeline Oak (much smaller than it is now), hand clasped to her breast, book on her lap, and feverish color on her face. That would not do in the South of serene and unfocused women. Good was asked to revise her sketch to make Evangeline younger and her face less anguished.15 With the help of photos supplied by townspeople, Good made Evangeline younger, redressed her in traditional Acadian costume, manicured her fingernails, made up her face, and eliminated all traces of distress (Fig. 12). And so we have the image of the single southern woman, waiting placidly for a man to come. The only other southern mural with a woman alone was prepared by Laura B. Lewis for Eunice, Louisiana. In her design (Fig. 13), Lewis depicts a female figure alone in a stark agrarian landscape. The house and barn appear uninhabited, the lawn appears arid, and unplanted rows stretch endlessly to the horizon. The young woman leans on the fence apparently unconcerned. What we must not forget and what Rowan sometimes appears to have forgotten, is that the initial design was just that—a design. Undoubtedly, although Lewis assured the Section that she was refreshed by the “sweep and space . . . and wide skies” in west central Louisiana, she would on her own have rendered the place less barren in the mural itself.16 Even so, Rowan wanted to be sure. He asked her if she was sure she wanted the panel so stark, implying that he would be more comfortable if the landscape were relieved by some “plantings, shrubs, even chickens.” 17 Interestingly, in the critical letter, he makes no mention whatever of the woman. Apparently leaning on a fence gazing into empty space is just the situation for the southern woman alone—and sooner or later, we assume a sinewy white male will come along to help her seed that empty land. A third hurdle the Section muralist had to leap was to produce a “color sketch suitable for exhibition at a scale of one inch to the foot.” The color sketches served two purposes: they gave the Section another chance to criticize the design before it was actually rendered in its final form, and they provided an opportunity for positive publicity. From the color sketches, the Section orga15. Rowan to Good, January 3, 1941. 16. Lewis to Rowan, June 10, 1938. 17. Rowan to Lewis, May 28, 1938.

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fig. 12. Minetta Good, final mural for St. Martinville, Louisiana (National Archives).

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fig. 13. Laura B. Lewis, design for Eunice, Louisiana (National Archives).

fig. 14. Laura B. Lewis, color sketch for Eunice, Louisiana (National Archives).

nized one major Washington, D.C., exhibit and several smaller ones. Many of these sketches are stored in various Washington facilities; equally many are lost because when a government official wanted a souvenir of a public art project or when somebody could be pressed to support the program in the later years when it was dying, the sketches were often given away. Many were also returned to artists or their families. The Eunice mural has disappeared; fortunately, however, the National Archives has a photo of Lewis’s color sketch (Fig. 14), which is very similar to the final mural. From it, we can see that the artist did indeed add vegetation, farm implements, and a few chickens and cats. The finished product is a handsome wall decoration and does represent the small but not impoverished southern farm as it might have appeared in 1938. It also apparently satisfied all of the unwritten strictures about the role of southern women. 120

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Gone with the Wind was the most popular American book (1936) and the most popular movie (1939) of the Depression. Often criticized for its romanticism and glorification of the Old South, the book has more recently been recognized (in the context of the historical novel, admittedly), as an accurate portrayal of many southern realities in the decades surrounding the Civil War— especially attitudes and ideals. More important, it has been recognized as a feminist treatise despite Margaret Mitchell’s denials. Beyond questions of historical accuracy is the book’s creation of a usable past for readers in the 1930s. The first half of the book—the picture of the beautiful dying culture of gentry—is what stands out most in popular culture, but the story in the book’s midsection of triumph in the face of unbelievable economic adversity is undoubtedly the part that inspired Depression readers. Not only because she is its protagonist is Scarlett O’Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler the most interesting character in the book: she is its only hero. By dint of her strong will, her physical stamina, and her sheer refusal to capitulate, she saves Tara, her home. And when, after she has saved the house from burning, planted a crop with her own hands, and kept the family—black and white—together, when the fourteen people are faced with losing even that impoverished home to taxes (circumstances many Depression-era southerners and northerners alike could find to identify with), she makes the most heroic gesture of all. With fourteen people depending on her ingenuity not to end up homeless, she offers herself, without benefit of clergy, to Rhett Butler, whom she considers odious, in exchange for money for Tara. When he is repulsed by her calloused hands, she seduces her sister’s exceedingly unattractive but solvent fiancé into a tolerable marriage. In the book, if not in the movie, Mrs. Kennedy is a grateful wife to Frank Kennedy, but perhaps more important, she turns his frail economic ventures to profit. For that, for showing up a southern man, she cannot be forgiven. Though Melanie Wilkes is also heroic—she shoots the Yankee in the foyer—most of her heroism is traditional behind-the-scenes, gentle, languid-muscled, unfocused-eyed southern female heroism. Even the dead Yankee must be kept secret. And the book makes no bones about it: like Joanna Burden and Sadie Burke, the accomplished and successful Scarlett is seen both by her fictional peers and, outwardly at least, by American readers, as lacking and reprehensible. Men and women of the Depression years must have taken heart in Scarlett’s ability to use American capitalism to her advantage, to conquer in the face of ad121

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versity, always to be aware that another day is another opportunity. But Scarlett does not do it all alone. Several minor characters in the book—most of whom did not make it to the movie—help her. The most important is a yeoman farmer left homeless and with only one leg by the war, Will Benteen. He becomes the ideal plantation overseer; as a southerner and one-time small landowner, he understands white and black ways better than the stereotypical Yankee overseer of fiction. More to the point are two of Scarlett’s ex-slave servants: Mammy—she has no other name—and Dilsey (only in character does she bear any relationship to Faulkner’s Dilsey). Mammy, most will remember, triumphs in the house. Having been with the family for generations, she is familiar with them all, and her work as well as her wisdom is respected. She alone can say what she means to black and white alike; her advice is often heeded by whites and always by her fellow blacks, whom she outranks. The other character of color has a minor role, but she is very important as we examine the females in southern murals. Half Indian, Dilsey is tall, regal, quiet, and very useful on the plantation, especially after the war, when there are very few hands to make a crop. She is a hard worker, knows what needs to be done, is not at all servile but, in Scarlett’s eyes, the best helper on the place. We have already seen her type in the central figure of Beulah Bettersworth’s mural for Columbus, Mississippi, but she, or a composite of her and Mammy, appears in murals all over the South. For example, the mural by Sheffield Kagy in Walterboro, South Carolina, features a romantic plantation scene (Fig. 15). The foreground is occupied by African American women and men working with a variety of crops— cotton, melon, tobacco, poultry, and so forth; this is one of few southern murals in which black males are depicted actually at work. In the left background is a copse, and balancing it on the right is the standard columned southern plantation house. In the center on a horse, head and shoulders above every other figure so that he cannot be missed, is the white overseer. Both the house and the overseer are fixtures in such murals for public relations reasons. Several southern mural designs featured working-class scenes with small houses, barns, factories, fields, etc. And each of these designs was sent back to the artist with a suggestion similar to the one Francis Speight received for his Gastonia mural: “It might be well to include . . . [somewhere in the background] one representative great house so the region does not have the appearance of a poor settlement.” 18 18. Rowan to Speight, January 11, 1938.

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fig. 15. Sheffield Kagy, final mural for Walterboro, South Carolina (South Carolina State Museum).

The overseer seems to have been more of a concern for the artists than the Section. At least he was usually included before Rowan had a chance to comment. Section artists seem to have been enamored of traditional scene of blacks picking cotton, and more murals of that appear on southern post office walls than of any other topic. In fact Americans in general seem to have been enamored of that sort of scene. Reports are that David O. Selznick desperately wanted such a scene for the opening of Gone with the Wind. It took many experts and much persuasion to convince him that cotton just couldn’t be picked in April— it didn’t mature until September—and unfortunately, April was when Fort Sumter was attacked. Selznick finally settled for blacks hoeing the young plants, but he did not feature a white overseer in his rendition of this idyllic Old South scene. However, when artist Caroline Rohland proposed to do a cotton picking mural for Bunkie, Louisiana, she wrote Rowan that she wanted to paint “the darkie” picking cotton and that “it would not seem that the southerners could be offended if I [included] . . . a glorified white overseer.” 19 We have already seen Bettersworth’s cotton picking scene without an overseer but with a white plowman, his rig and his horse between the post office lobby viewer and the African American cotton pickers. Now we see Kagy’s overseer, and a wider investigation would reveal a white figure of authority in nearly all of the murals featuring African Americans. But more to our purposes here are the women in Kagy’s rendering. All of the black males in the panel are bent over, and their number is doubled by the black females. Three of the women do bend to their work, but three of them are erect, confident, and apparently in control of their situation. The white female is an19. Rohland to Rowen, August 27, 1938.

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other story; in the distance, on the porch of the great house is a white lady presumably meeting the Rural Federal Delivery man. She is probably too small for readers to see clearly in the illustration accompanying this essay, but at full size, what appears here to be a blur just to the left of the rightmost column can be more clearly interpreted as a representation of the lady of the house. And so it goes: white women in the mural South are insignificant either because of their function or because of their size and position on the picture plane. Black men always stoop or lean against trees or play banjos— or occupy, as in Sylvester, Georgia, a stylized, didactic place in the panel. There are two murals of black men alone doing manual labor in the South: In a dramatic painting by Paul L. Gill for Cairo, Georgia, entitled Products of Grady County, three handsome, muscular, very dark black men work with corn, cotton, timber, and turpentine against a backdrop of exaggeratedly large white flowers (probably meant to be magnolias). The men are smaller than the flowers and identified only by the work they do. In Forest, Mississippi, Julien Binford’s four black workers are identified at least as people, not products (Fig. 16). The handsome, not at all stylized mural is called “Forrest Loggers” (with a sort of pun on the place name: the town was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, but its name is spelled with a single r so that it reflects the forestry that has always been an important local industry). In the painting of four black men and two mules, the men exert themselves to move recently felled logs of greater girth than themselves or the mules out of the forest. While the 1941 design made it to the post office wall, that may have been because the Section was losing funding and its members had redoubled efforts to decorate as many buildings as possible before all extra tax money was channeled to a potential future war effort. The only recorded responses we have are reported by artist Binford: the postmistress, he said, commented positively on the forest scene but “expressed her disappointment that there should be negroes in the painting,” and officials of the lumber company were “naturally delighted with the subject matter but said that ‘those niggers wouldn’t be working that hard unless they were being watched by a white foreman.’” 20 Black women, on the other hand, have a greater dignity if not always a greater prominence when they appear in murals. Almost universally, they are, like Faulkner’s Dilsey and Margaret Mitchell’s Dilsey and Mammy, accorded at least the dignity of hard work and a bit of self-determination. 20. Binford to Rowan, April 30, 1941.

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fig. 16. Julien Binford, final mural for Forest, Mississippi (National Archives).

fig. 17. Simka Simkavitch, final mural for Jackson, Mississippi (National Archives).

The mural for the Jackson, Mississippi, courthouse (Fig. 17), painted by a New York immigrant from Russia, is emblematic of the roles of men and women in southern murals. The panel is a sort of segregated triptych. The lefthand side is for the blacks, the right for white men, and the center puts white women in their place. To the left are four black men, one black woman, and the inevitable white overseer, this time weighing the cotton presented by a black man. The other two faceless men work hard harvesting cotton, and the only black woman picks assiduously. The most prominent black man, however, the only one with 125

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a face, sits in the front of the panel playing a banjo— doing the one service black men were given credit for before they broke into major league sports— entertaining the folk from the great house. At the right, showing by their costumes that this is a contemporary rendering, not a romantic view of the past, white men do manual labor as well as the brain work implied by the map or blueprint on one of their laps. In the center, white women and children gather around a suit-clad white male, appearing to wait for him to tell them what to do. And, since this mural is in a courthouse, the robed judge stands a little apart assuring that all the activities follow accepted patterns. To the credit of Jackson, this mural was draped in the 1960s so that its content should not influence juries, but it remains a historic reminder of what was. Black women are accorded the dignity of work, the dignity of straight backs, the dignity of heartbreak, and, occasionally, like Faulkner’s Dilsey and Mitchell’s Mammy, the right to speak—much more dignity than the mural white woman. Joseph Pistey Jr.’s Haynesville, Louisiana, mural (Fig. 18) joins a small group in which a female black retainer takes prominence: In this mural, the right foreground is dominated by white men doing hard work requiring muscles. Behind them, we can discern a black male bent under a half-filled basket of— cotton? Surely the stuff cannot be that heavy. Just behind him a black woman picks cotton—her bent back at least has a reason. At the left, a young white man seems to examine an ear of corn; a white youth carries more freshly gathered ears, and a woman who appears to be their mother stands vacant-eyed holding a basket of corn, which appears about to fall from her drooping arms. In the center the white overseer weighs cotton for three black hands. The two men have baskets, one of which seems to be spilling on the ground; no doubt Pistey intended the fluffy stuff to meet a design need—remember these artists were modernists— any social message in most murals was unintentional and brought on by the artist’s subconscious acceptance of the status quo. Still the man seems to be dumping his precious cargo on the ground, while it is unclear what his muscular compatriot is doing. Directly in the center of the mural, just behind the standing black man, the black woman who has managed to keep her cotton in the sack confidently shakes her finger at the white weigher. Whether she is admonishing him not to give her short weight, lecturing him about how to do his job, or pointing to the results of her labor we cannot tell. What we can see is that this woman is focused and strong, and she has the right to make herself understood. 126

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fig. 18. Joseph Pistey Jr., final mural for Haynesville, Louisiana (National Archives).

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou laments the cotton picking environment of her childhood. Recalling watching her elders come home from the fields during her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, she reports, “The sounds of the new morning had been replaced with grumbles about cheating houses, weighted scales, snakes, skimpy cotton and dusty rows. In later years I was to confront the stereotyped picture of gay song singing cotton pickers with such inordinate rage that I was told even then that my paranoia was embarrassing. But I had witnessed the backs and shoulders and arms and legs resisting any further demands.” 21 Had she been able to cross the state to see the mural in Wynne, Arkansas (Fig. 19), she might have felt a little less unrepresented. Admittedly, the mural is by a white artist, Ethel Magafan, but perhaps as a southern woman, she was able to draw on her own experience of the frustration and strength of those out of power. A young couple walks in from the left, their sacks full, toward the man weighing their day’s work—not a white this time, but a black like themselves. Their backs and shoulders and arms and legs clearly resist “any further demands,” but the demands are there nevertheless. A child, presumably their daughter, greets them with her dog—both to welcome them and to remind them that they still have more responsibility to meet—and more important, to remind the postal patron that black cotton pickers had to leave their children to earn enough to feed them. In the background two others still pick, their day’s labor still not finished, and in the center middleground is a very interesting group: the white overseer is there, but he is almost invisible—not “glorified” as Caroline Rohland promised for another mural—but fading. He, 21. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Toronto, 1970), 7.

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fig. 19. Ethel Magafan, final mural for Wynne, Arkansas (Richard H. Beckham).

the white society, is not the subject of this picture—neither is some romanticized scene of “darkies picking cotton.” An apparent grannie bends to pick cotton between him and the black weighers—between him and the post office lobby as well. At the very front, the focal point is another aging woman. She has undoubtedly picked her share in her long life—her sack is full even now —but however tired her back and arms and legs may be, she bends to no one. When these murals were being installed in 1939 – 40, African American artist Jacob Lawrence painted a very moving picture of Harriet Tubman. In this wellknown painting, Tubman bends over a sawhorse to cut a log. We cannot see her face— only the top of her bandana-clad head, her brawny brown arms, her lyrical movement, her back breaking under the weight of her sense of responsibility for her compatriots. The image is one of hard work and determination; it is also very easily extended to encompass grief as well as prayer. The outline of the woman in Lawrence’s painting occurs several times on post office walls. It is a classic position of grief and hard work. And it expresses again the shoulders, back, legs, and arms aching from too much work and too little control. The mural for Jeanerette, Louisiana, might encourage Angelou to feel that some whites have some degree of compassion. In his virtually all African color sketch (Fig. 20), Hollis Holbrook has depicted the agony of grief. The men working with sugarcane feel their resisting muscles, but they persevere. The woman kneels, ready to pick up her next burden, but in her position we can read the exhaustion, the sense of responsibility, the strength, and the prayerfulness we find in Jacob Lawrence’s vision of Harriet Tubman. I’m sure that both Tubman in her era and Angelou in ours could not free themselves from the rage and the weariness until the African American children had been to art school, had painted art work for post office walls, but at least in a few public spaces in 128

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fig. 20. Hollis Holbrook, color sketch for Jeanerette, Louisiana (National Archives).

fig. 21. Louis Raynaud, final mural for Abbeville, Louisiana (National Archives).

the late 1930s, the travail of the South’s black women citizens is not treated romantically. In the essentialist world of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, white men ruled and judged, did the brain work and the brawn work. In that world white women stood or sat bewildered and without function, and black men usually entertained or stood around equally unfocused. A few worked, and when they did so without a white male to keep them at it, their audience was skeptical. Black women had character, had dignity, had our respect because apparently they had that of the artists. Occasionally, however, we get a glimpse into a world where nothing can be taken for granted, where men and women are not as they should be but as they are— or might be. Louis Raynaud, who painted the beach scene for Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, painted a less predictable mural for Abbeville, Louisiana (Fig. 21). Here in a cane field, next to a cotton field and beside a drying rack for muskrat skins, white men and women work. Children seem carefree as they 129

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fig. 22. Robert Purdy, mural for New Albany, Mississippi (National Archives).

should. Child labor was a Depression issue, and no post office wall would show children doing even the chores expected of them on a family farm for fear of condoning children’s work for pay. In the center a vigorous, energetic young woman picks up a load of cane the man behind her has cut. She provides quite a contrast with the listless women in the final Bay St. Louis mural. Her eyes are focused, her arms are muscular and flexed, and her demeanor tells us that she will work as long as it is satisfying and suggests that she will demand rest when that is needed. In New Albany, Mississippi, Robert Purdy represented another family farm, this time a dairy farm since Mississippi was trying during the Depression to overcome its one-crop rut by encouraging the dairy industry (Fig. 22). Here, in the center of the picture, in much the same location as Beulah Bettersworth’s black woman taking a rest in Columbus, Mississippi, is the farm wife working with her husband and her cows to make a good life. Like the woman in Columbus, she walks with her back to us, but we can tell from her back, her arms, and her hips that she is not exhausted from doing too much of someone else’s work for too little recompense. She is working for herself and her family and she will succeed. Agnes Tait in some ways departed far from essentialism in her mural for Laurinburg, North Carolina (Fig. 23). In other ways, she reflected the assumptions of the culture. In this mural of an active group of black people, the adults work with produce, and the children eat watermelon; melon and cotton harvested at the same time indicate plenty for the African American citizens. There is no sign of a white overseer. The most interesting feature of this mural is its organization. Tait, an accomplished muralist, used the large chinaberry tree in the 130

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fig. 23. Agnes Tait, mural for Laurinburg, North Carolina (National Archives).

fig. 24. Agnes Tait, cartoon for Laurinburg, North Carolina (National Archives).

middle to unify the panel and to direct the viewer’s eye. The curve of the line of cotton pickers in the background reinforces the circle of children and the sweep of the tree. The figure that has seldom been given attention is the woman under the tree. In the cartoon (Fig. 24), with the creases from its being folded for mailing to the Section clearly visible, this woman is also clearly visible—still seeming almost like a part of the tree but she has a face. As the design progresses through the stages required by the Section, her face recedes further into the tree. She becomes something other than a flesh and blood woman. She has been seen as black and as white. I suppose ideologically it makes a difference. As an emblem of nature, of spirituality, as a part of a tree, however, she could be any tree or no tree. Her build and the cut of her clothes reflect the way white women are usually depicted, but she is not listless—just invisible. She is neither working, 131

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visionary, nor defiant. Agnes Tait’s other work, in which she seems fascinated by the variety in people, in physiognomies, in skin color, suggests that the race or culture of this character is immaterial.22 It also suggests that the woman is African American because there is no reason to put a white woman in the picture— neither, of course, is there any reason other than design for an African American tree goddess. One suspects that this mural made it through the Section process with its ambivalence intact because it was one of the last murals to be finished. With war looming—months before Pearl Harbor, the Section and other government agencies deemed unnecessary were being cut back—Rowan and his colleagues who remained committed to their mission rushed to get as many decorations on federal walls as possible. There is much evidence that they accepted designs they might otherwise have wanted revised. Perhaps this is one of them. Whatever the reason, the South had one mural that prefigured the demise of essentialism. 22. Information about Tait and her career is drawn from Lydia M. Peña, The Life and Times of Agnes Tait: 1894 –1981 (Arvada, Colo.: Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 1983).

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“The Most Natural Expressions of Locality” Ellsworth Woodward and the Newcomb Pottery richard megraw

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erhaps no period in all the southern past witnessed more “redefinitions” than the half century following 1890. Industrial growth, national consolidation, global war, and modern assumptions—all prompted a profound reconsideration of the South—as region, as society, and as artistic subject. Once the embodiment of American localism, a place— either real or imagined— of isolated valleys, remote settlements, and self-contained plantations, the South grew steadily more accessible to southerners and Americans alike. Railroads penetrated and radios broadcast. Bridges spanned rivers and highways linked places as never before. All over the South, the world rushed in. All over America, the South rushed out. Meanwhile, within the region and without, Americans of all kinds engaged in the timeless struggle to square new realities with old assumptions, hoping to retain the best of a vanishing past as the bulwark of a promising future. Among them, none perhaps held higher hopes—and few, surely, showed greater earnestness—than a transplanted New England artist living in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. i. Ellsworth Woodward had not one career but three. Although they sometimes conflicted, more often they overlapped and intersected in ways that, by 1933, had made him the patriarch of the New Orleans art world. For fifty years he had been a tireless painter, as well as a promoter and teacher of art, a living embodiment of the Arts and Crafts ideal. Born half a continent away—in Massachusetts— three-quarters of a century earlier—two weeks before First Bull Run in 1861— he had first come south in 1885, fresh from the Rhode Island School of Design, to join his brother William on the faculty of Tulane University in New Orleans. Together the brothers developed one of the first collegiate art curricula of its 133

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kind. Then, in 1889, Ellsworth became the instructor of art at Sophie Newcomb College, a newly created women’s academy affiliated with Tulane. Two years later he became director of the Newcomb school of art, a position he held until his retirement in 1931. Somehow he managed not only to reconcile the demands of the classroom with his own artistic expression but also to devote countless hours to the institutional development and promotion of art in New Orleans and across the South.1 He was a study in New England rectitude, cool and erect, with a riveting gaze and a strong jawline ending in a goateed chin. An even temper ruled him, broken only rarely by the utterance of oaths no stronger than “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” He had elegant tastes and fastidious habits. He rose early and retired late. Even late in life he left his home on Pine Street in uptown New Orleans

1. As yet, Woodward has no scholarly biographer, though he is the subject of numerous articles and theses. See Estelle Barkmeyer, “Ellsworth Woodward: His Life and His Works” (master’s thesis, Tulane University, 1942); and Lillian Frances Boyer, “The Etchings of Ellsworth Woodward: A Catalogue Raisonné” (master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, 1982). See also, “Ellsworth Woodward,” Artists’ Files, Department of Curatorials, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans (hereinafter cited as “Ellsworth Woodward,” HNOC). This is a thick file full of assorted bits of biographical material such as chronologies, capsule biographies, exhibition catalogues, and photocopied newspaper articles. See also, Isaac Monroe Cline, “Contemporary Arts and Artists of New Orleans and Their Work” (reprinted from the Biennial Report of the Louisiana State Museum, 1924); Mary W. Mount, Some Notables of New Orleans: Biographical and Descriptive Sketches of the Artists and Their Work (New Orleans, 1896), 159 – 60; Lillian Norvell, “Ellsworth Woodward,” New Orleanian 1 (August 1931): 21–22; Frank Eugene Ford, “Artist in Stone,” New Orleanian 3 (March 1934): 14 –16; Ben Earl Looney, “Historical Sketch of Art in Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1924): 390; Anthony Radcliffe, “Some Artists of Louisiana,” The Southern Magazine 4 (June 1937): 11–12, 35; Ethel Hutson to S. A. Trufaut, May 15, 1934, Ellsworth Woodward Papers, Box 1, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans (hereinafter cited as Ellsworth Woodward Papers [with appropriate box number], TU); untitled biographical sketch, Ellsworth Woodward Papers, Box 4, TU; Bentley Nicholson, “Ellsworth Woodward and His Work,” in Newcomb Pottery, Department of the Registrar, New Orleans Museum of Art (hereinafter cited as Newcomb Pottery, NOMA). Woodward’s role in the establishment and evolution of the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, now the New Orleans Museum of Art, is discussed in Prescott N. Dunbar, The New Orleans Museum of Art: The First Seventy-Five Years (Baton Rouge, 1990), 42 –56.

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no later than 6:30 every morning, walked a few blocks to the Zimple Market, “made” the daily groceries, then returned for breakfast and the morning paper. At 7:30 he headed for the Newcomb campus; except for a thirty-minute lunch break, he remained in his classroom until four in the afternoon. Often he returned to Newcomb after dinner to teach various night classes.2 His outward dignity masked an energetic soul that awed his students. “God on roller skates,” one called him. Eyes flashing, he flitted birdlike among them. “Look here,” he often said, “and I will show you something worth seven dollars someday.” Most remembered his unflinching devotion to the highest standards, others his unflagging patience. None forgot his classroom presence. His energy filled the lecture hall. His enormous hands, corded muscles knotted around the knuckles, clutched fistfuls of air as he wrestled for words. His brow furrowed into an inverted “V” above the nose. The work absorbed him, and he attacked it with a zealot’s singleness of purpose, within the classroom and without. He was at once teacher, practitioner, and promoter of art, a man with no hobbies to speak of, no favored diversions. He joined the Round Table Club but attended its meetings infrequently. Instead, his one pastime seemed to be listening to the sound of his wife’s voice. Mary often read to him long into the evening, covering a wealth of subjects in various forms: biographies, romances, novels, and histories. “She is my theater,” he once asserted, “my opera and everything else rolled into one.” 3 Ellsworth Woodward held dominion over the local art scene in a benevolent suzerainty spanning four decades. The Woodwards had no children. Instead they drew his Newcomb students around them in a familial embrace, often inviting them to tea or to dinner or along on sketching trips in the hinterland, where the master divided his time among offering advice, criticism, and en2. “Ellsworth Woodward,” HNOC; Ellsworth Woodward Papers, Box 1, TU; untitled biographical sketch, Ellsworth Woodward Papers, Box 4, TU; “The Man Who Molded Newcomb Pottery,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 27 March 1987; New Orleans Item, 28 February–2 March 1939; New Orleans Tribune, 1 March 1939; New Orleans States, 28 February–2 March 1939; New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1 March 1939. 3. Ellsworth Woodward to Edwin L. Stephens, 1 April 1912, Edwin L. Stephens Papers, Box 1, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Tulane University, New Orleans (hereinafter cited as Stephens Papers [with appropriate box number], TU). “Ellsworth Woodward,” HNOC; New Orleans Item, 28 February 1939; New Orleans Item-Tribune, 5 June 1913; New Orleans Times-Picayune, 29 June 1913.

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couragement while refining his own craft. He painted, all his life, in the impressionist style; studied briefly abroad, in Munich, under the tutelage of Carl Marr and Richard Fehr; and did most of his work in water color. Some said the crush of his teaching duties and other art-related activities prevented his studying more painstaking media, though he did produce a substantial number of etchings. His work sold well, and critics applauded it, but Woodward never achieved distinction as a great artistic innovator. Instead he left his mark as a teacher and promoter of art—the zealous center of far-flung activities pursued with a missionary’s faith in the promise of art. Prophesying the dawn of a new epoch in American art and a new role in society for the American artist, he venerated beauty, revered locale, and remained an unyielding environmental determinist. But above all Ellsworth Woodward was a passionate idealist whose character traits and social thought were comprised in an aesthetic Bible he thumped for fifty years.4 ii. Woodward wrote within the conventions of his day, grounding an aesthetic vision and social outlook on widely held assumptions of beauty, environment, and education. He believed that every living soul craved the civilizing influence of beauty, a regenerative social force throughout history but especially in industrial America, since it offered a necessary alternative to “debasing materialism.” “It is therefore no light matter,” he often warned, “this gospel of the holiness of beauty.” 5 Influenced by John Ruskin and William Morris, he shared an anxiety deepened by the pace of machine-driven America. Industrialization, he believed, threatened nature, the source of all beauty, subverting both nature and beauty by creating cheaply made objects offensive to the eye and damaging to the spirit. The manufacturing process lowered artistic tastes, he believed, retarding the progress of civilization, permitting the machine to co-opt a place

4. William R. Cullison, Two Southern Impressionists: An Exhibition of the Work of the Woodward Brothers, William and Ellsworth (New Orleans, 1984), ix–xi; Boyer, “The Etchings of Ellsworth Woodward.” 5. Untitled biographical sketch, Ellsworth Woodward Papers, Box 4, TU; “What Has Art to Do with Practical Things?” Woodward Speeches, TU.

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once reserved for artisans and skilled craftsmen, and opening an unnatural breach between the lesser and higher arts.6 Yet, like so many Americans who wrote on the subject, Woodward would not follow the hard line taken by William Morris. He neither damned industrialization as an unregenerate evil nor embraced the socialist ideal that Morris championed as the alternative to a capitalist manufacturing order. Rather, sharing the pervasive American ambiguity about industrialization, Woodward regarded it as a misdirected force of great potential value. Industry, he explained, represented the necessary foundation of any great art center in the modern era. “Art is the child of busy industrial cities,” he reasoned, since “enlightened arts” thrived upon the rivalry among patrons competing to obtain objects of the highest artistic value. Wealth obtained through industrial progress would draw the best artists in America to its manufacturing centers where each, compelled by the unregulated marketplace, would produce his very best art. Schools would then develop to train lesser talents and to instruct the general public in art appreciation. Museums and galleries would be established for public viewing. Higher standards of art would evolve within the community, and beauty would flourish within the heart of the industrial beast. Made to lie down together, commerce and art, the lion and the lamb, would become the complementary forces of modern industrial life.7 The issue turned on the promise of industrial design. To refine the crudities of earlier years, Woodward planned to reconcile art and industry through the application of elegant design to the manufacturing process. “The struggle for industrial survival, not to mention national expression, is pitched not in the world of easel pictures,” he asserted, “but in the immeasurable field of art lending beauty to industry.” Working in tandem, the craftsman and the industrialist would forge an alliance that would put quality art within the grasp of every American citizen. Industrial designers would staunch the flow of ugly objects

6. E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York, 1977), especially 32 – 40 and 88 –107; Peter Stansky, William Morris (Oxford, 1983), 60 –73. Indeed, Woodward followed Ruskin and Morris so closely that he often addressed his close friend and longtime correspondent E. L. Stephens as “Ruskin” while signing his letters “E.W. Turner.” “Everyday Art,” Woodward Speeches, TU. 7. “The Lesser Arts”; “Art in Education,” Woodward Speeches, TU.

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into the national marketplace, salve wounds inflicted by ugliness upon the public spirit, and demolish the artificial barrier between practitioners of the lesser and higher arts. The craftsman would reclaim his traditional role in society as practitioner and promoter of art; better still, Woodward argued, industrial design promised to create a national environment conducive to an appreciation of beauty, an essential basis for social uplift.8 Here was the heart of the matter. Nothing in all of Woodward’s teachings ever surpassed the importance he placed on environment, the keystone of his aesthetic edifice. “Art begins at home,” he repeatedly insisted. “We are learning that the museum and the picture gallery are not the natural and exclusive home of art, but that civilized life demands it in its daily routine.” Nothing would do but decoration with finely woven draperies hung properly, silverware of the finest craftsmanship, harmony between the architectural structure of the house and the interior furnishings of the home. Here, he reasoned, citizens would take the first rudimentary steps along the path to a higher appreciation of art and the proper environs for beauty to flourish. For him it was reasonable “to conclude that when the interests of the community are largely embarked in artistic manufactures, that appreciation and sympathy with the art idea should be greatly expanded and prepared to understand that higher forms of art which find expression in painting, sculpture, and noble architecture.” This was a vital lesson. Woodward considered an appreciation for the lesser arts exhibited in the home to be far more than a modest axiom for better living. Nor did such appreciation simply represent a means toward understanding higher forms of art. It was instead a tenet of public virtue. “You as citizens may be indirectly responsible for the low standards of public taste if you patronize the ill-conditioned products of tasteless manufactures,” he charged. Such neglect depressed the public spirit. It also depressed Ellsworth Woodward. Few experiences saddened him more than “a contemplative walk through a neighborhood where well-to-do people live in total forgetfulness of the happiness that may be added to living through harmonious form, order, and a thrift [sic] regard for cleanly streets.” “Somehow,” he concluded, “moral health is more possible with fitting environment.” Once Americans began to appreciate art in the home, Woodward prophesied, there would blossom nationwide an all-encompassing public aesthetic of magisterial 8. “What Has Art to Do with Practical Things?”; “Art in Education”; “The Lesser Arts,” Woodward Speeches, TU.

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elegance, something on the order of the Chicago Public Library, whose elegance he praised: [S]implicity, permanency, dignity, beauty, national honor and power typified in couchant lions guarding the giant staircase, whose glowing marble is inscribed with the names and deeds of heroes. The walls pictured with mystic allegory where poets, sages, and artists, each through the agency of his genius[,] wait upon inspiration. Religion manifested in majesty more eloquent than words, upon walls which speak of the imagination as did those of the mother church. Vast rooms for the student every furnishing of which leads the mind away from the sordid and common. Rooms for children where entire freedom and association with the beautiful exert their benign influence[,] this treasure house which has sculptured upon its frontal: Built By the People and Dedicated to Learning.9 Woodward’s environmentalism also made him an implacable localist. Proper environment, he believed, not only led the citizen to a higher appreciation of the “art idea,” it also determined the character of an artist’s work. “The beginnings of all great and viril [sic] epochs of artistic expression have been at home and have dealt with life and environment as it [sic] lay at hand,” Woodward once wrote. He raised the subject often in gallery talks and speeches to organizations, and he made it a guiding tenet of classroom lectures and studio discussions. He called this environmental determinism the “genius loci,” a phrase borrowed from Violet Piaget, who wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Lee. Piaget defined the term as “a substance of the heart and mind, a spiritual reality” describing the attachment of a sensitive soul to a specific locale: “I have compared the feelings we can have for places with the feelings awakened in us by certain of our friends, feelings of love and gratitude—and have the effect of turning locality from a geographical expression into something of one’s very own.” 10

9. “What Has Art to Do with Practical Things?” Woodward Speeches, TU. 10. “Everyday Art”; “The Genius Loci,” Woodward Speeches, TU; Vernon Lee, Genius Loci: Notes on Places (London, 1899), 6. Woodward once joked about his intense devotion to the southern countryside by recalling the bitter cold of his boyhood winters: “No one forced by the rigors of the New England climate to pour a kettle of boiling water over the kitchen pump as the first move toward the family breakfast can look upon a palm tree

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Woodward not only treasured such assertions, he elevated the emotionalism of the genius loci into an aesthetic principle. Since artists were products of their own surroundings, he reasoned, they were best suited to interpret their immediate environment. Outsiders could appreciate the beauty of a place, but they could not render it artistically without exhibiting the severe limitations of alien sensibilities: “In a country as immense as ours in which climatic conditions and geographical place differences exert their influences, it is, or should be, manifest that art expression will assume a wide variety of application. Out of these conditions which background our lives, grows love and loyalty to locality—the genius loci which is the essence of art as well as patriotism. The land of the palm and orange, of arid plains and towering mountains must find their true expression through the hearts of their indwellers.” 11 While such beliefs made Woodward something of an artistic nationalist, insisting that American artists, products of the American environment, were superior interpreters of American subjects, his general theorem also included a sectional corollary.12 Speaking to a meeting of the Southern States Art League, he asserted the folly of artists working beyond their native region. “When you southerners go to Cape Cod, Providence, [and] Cape Gloucester, you can paint your heads off, but New England artists can paint these scenes better than you ever will.” Such logic also applied below the Mason–Dixon Line. “No Yankee artist, however skillful, can paint the South,” he continued. “He has never known the sights and sounds and scents in his childhood as you have.” This was a conviction that Woodward held so firmly he even applied it to himself: “I have spent fifty years in the South—I’m more southern than Jeff Davis in some respects—and when I make annual pilgrimages to various parts of the South . . . unmoved.” This statement is quoted in “The Man Who Molded Newcomb Pottery,” TimesPicayune, 27 March 1987. 11. “Art in Colleges,” Woodward Speeches, TU. 12. “What Has Art to Do with Practical Things?”; “The Lesser Arts,” Woodward Speeches, TU. Woodward repeatedly emphasized what a long evolutionary process lay ahead of the country in the struggle to raise art standards. See, for example, an untitled manuscript Woodward drafted in response to a letter requesting a summary of his aesthetic beliefs, in Ellsworth Woodward Papers, Box 2, TU. Also see Archie Palmer to Ellsworth Woodward, 21 November 1933, Ellsworth Woodward Papers, Box 1, TU. For a broader discussion of artistic nationalism during the period see Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century America (Bloomington, 1980), 7–27.

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and wake up in a Pullman in the morning and see the lovely Southern scene with its incomparable trees and flowers. . . . I think what masterpieces I could paint—if only I were a Southerner-born!” 13 iii. Ellsworth Woodward’s aesthetic assumptions allied him with the burgeoning turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts movement. Like Woodward, the movement championed the reconciliation of art and industry through tastefully designed objects of everyday use. It was an Atlantic phenomenon, begun in England, but one whose zeal quickly swept westward. Local crafts clubs soon appeared in most American cities, evangelizing on behalf of the movement, either through gallery talks or display rooms exhibiting the fruits of local labors. Woodward delighted in such places. In his estimation they were not merely dispensing centers for “hand-wrought articles” but essential places “where people of taste may find something of rare individual beauty,” places “where the artist may find the opportunity to escape the narrow convention-ridden demands of commercial manufacture,” places that Woodward himself sought to establish in Louisiana. In 1909, when his friend and frequent correspondent E. L. Stephens, founder and president of the Southwestern Training Institute in nearby Lafayette, dedicated an arts and crafts building at the school, Woodward could scarcely contain his enthusiasm. “Ho-o-o-rah for your noble ideal!” he rejoiced in a letter to Stephens. “The world is full of a number of things but none of them is more certain than that art and handicraft are Siamese twins.” 14 By then, Woodward himself had already made great strides for the movement in New Orleans. He had joined the Newcomb Committee on Public Grounds and, to create the proper atmosphere for artistic study, directed a 13. “Art in the South,” Woodward Speeches, TU. 14. Wendy Kaplan, The Art That Is Life: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875 –1920 (Boston, 1987), 77–100, 207–22; Isabelle Anscombe, Arts and Crafts in Britain and America (New York, 1978), 63 – 83, 168 – 88; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880 –1920 (New York, 1981), 60 –96. For a bibliographic treatment of the movement see Mary A. Vance, The Arts and Crafts Movement: Monographs (Monticello, 1984) and The Craftsmen 1–39 (October 1901–December 1916). See also “Everyday Art,” Woodward Speeches, Box 1, TU, and Woodward to Stephens, 2 April 1909, Stephens Papers, Box 1, TU.

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campus-beautification project. His classroom became a forum for the theory and practice of art appreciation and his studio a handicrafts center. He installed looms for weaving, presses and tools for bookbinding, and anvils and punches for metalworking and leather crafts. He engaged a silversmith with all the necessary accouterments. The Newcomb women went to work in the applied arts. They made vases and bowls, plates and inkwells, watch fobs and mugs, lampshades and stands of brass and glass. They made fire screens, candlesticks, threehandled loving cups, rose jars, chocolate and tea services, and calendars with fine calligraphy. They made all these and more—anything of domestic use— eventually gaining international renown for the quality and variety of Newcomb’s arts and crafts activities. Still, nothing drew more attention or wider acclaim than Woodward’s first foray into the practical arts in 1894, when he set out to revive earlier attempts to found a campus pottery.15 Given local circumstances and the larger context, a pottery was an ideal choice. New Orleans was already the home of commercial and amateur pottery projects. Two ceramic companies operated in the city, and there were already additional people nearby who shared with Woodward a common artistic vision as well as the specialized skills, space, and apparatus the medium demanded. Between 1885 and 1890, Woodward’s older brother William had headed the New Orleans Art Pottery Club, whose members worked in a small pottery on Baronne Street in the French Quarter. The members included at least two experienced craftsmen, one of whom had designed and built the kiln at the Baronne Street facility. Such practical considerations only complemented Woodward’s artistic values. Pottery was among the oldest of crafts, one whose ancient traditions and complex demands often produced mysterious results. No doubt the pottery process appealed to Woodward’s aesthetic idealism—his defense of artistic craftsmanship and his determination to elevate the quality of everyday life through handmade objects of unquestioned beauty. 15. “Ellsworth Woodward,” HNOC; New Orleans Item, 7 June 1931; Suzanne Ormond and Mary E. Irvine, Louisiana’s Art Nouveau: The Crafts of the Newcomb Style (Gretna, La., 1976), 3 –14; Jessie Poesch, Newcomb Pottery: An Enterprise for Southern Women, 1895 –1940 (Exton, Pa., 1984), 9 –16; Jerry Jack Mitchell, “An Analysis of the Decorative Styles of Newcomb Art Pottery” (master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, 1972); “The Newcomb Art School,” American Magazine of Art 10 (October 1919): 480; Anthea Gallen, Women Artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, 1870 –1914 (New York, 1979), 88 – 89; Kaplan, The Art That Is Life, 324 –25; Anscombe, Arts and Crafts in Britain and America, 153.

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Pottery even matched his aesthetic localism. Recipes for mixing clays varied according to the potter and had to be adjusted through painstaking trial and error to accommodate local climate and conditions. Similarly, the secrets of kiln construction, as jealously guarded and perpetually altered as clay recipes, had been handed down by generations of specialized builders. Nor could any machine impose its standardizing influence on such individualized pieces of artistic creation. Pots were thrown by hand, in a creative process virtually guaranteed to defy the cookie-cutter regularity of machine production. Fluctuations in kiln temperature, clay composition, and artistic glazes made each object distinctive, the result of a unique series of chemical interactions whose steps, even when repeated exactly, rarely produced identical results. The degree of experimental range and artistic license was limitless; the threat of an oppressive uniformity was nonexistent; and the availability of local designers and local subjects was virtually endless. “Newcomb pottery makes its first and perhaps its noteworthy appeal by its artistic quality: it is beautiful,” Woodward summarized. “[M]oreover, [it is] wholly indigenous. The clay is found in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. The designers are southern women educated in the School of Art of Newcomb College, New Orleans; the land of the orange and palm, the magnolia and jasmine, the bearded cypress, the noble oak, and the stately yellow pine.” 16 Such circumstances made pottery an attractive choice to Arts and Crafts movements nationwide; yet even from the start innovations within the medium, as well as Woodward’s institutional intentions for his pottery, created areas of potential conflict. For all its apparent traditionalism, pottery itself was in transition. Books of standardized mixing recipes would soon replace the “home-brewed” secrets of individual potters. The first courses on the technical aspects of pottery creation had begun to appear in American college curricula. Technological developments in kiln design and finishing processes would soon pit the innovations of trained specialists against tradition-directed craftsmen. Then, too, conflicting gender assumptions and relationships reflecting the larger tensions of Progressive America quickly surfaced at the pottery. As envisioned by one of its earliest members, the Newcomb experiment aspired not 16. “Newcomb Pottery: It Is Acquiring a Wide and Useful Fame,” in Newcomb Pottery, NOMA. Woodward is quoted in Sandra Draughn Freeman and William Lake Douglas, “Newcomb Pottery,” Garden Design (winter 1982): 56.

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only to aesthetic achievement but to an ideal of communal cohesion: “The life of a pottery is usually composed of many parts, many people contributing to its success or otherwise. All are mutually dependent upon one another, from the potters who prepare the crude clays, form the vases, [and] do the firing, perhaps, to the designers who work day after day solving new problems of color and design, and to the directors who determine its general policy. Each I say, dependent on the other, contributing to the success of the finished vase.” 17 Attaining this ideal, however, meant reconciling conflicting visions of gender and professionalism. Newcomb organized its division of labor according to nineteenth-century convention. Because “the general opinion among the students and the public was that the actual throwing of the ware on the wheel was not genteel enough,” explained a contemporary account of the pottery; thus such activities were reserved for men. This arrangement carried an additional, if more implicit, affirmation of prevailing gender standards. It reserved the mixing of clays and throwing of pots for men who had dedicated their lives to the craft—as opposed to women designers, for whom the work was presumably a mere prelude to the higher roles of spouse, mother, and guardian of domestic civility. What men made with sweat and mud, women were to cover with a decorative veneer. Put more bluntly by one observer, the division of labor operated on the premise that “life [is] so short and the craft so hard to learn.” Woodward only partially subscribed to such assumptions. “I would be the last man to put a profession in the way of what I think to be a woman’s mission—to make the right man happy,” he once said to his friend E. L. Stephens. But he was also concerned with finding a proper social sphere for women outside the home. If a single woman was left alone in the world “to fight for herself ” and measured up to his grueling aesthetic standards, then he considered her fully entitled not only to the social honors of a craftsman but to the economic rewards of a laborer.18 Woodward no doubt considered such roles complementary, but not everyone at the pottery agreed, especially the three people who played crucial roles in its establishment, early direction, and ultimate success. 17. Robert W. Blasberg, “Newcomb Pottery,” Antiques (July 1968): 74; M. C. Sheerer, “Newcomb Pottery Workers: An Appreciation,” in Newcomb Pottery, NOMA. 18. Kenneth E. Smith, “The Origin, Development, and Present Status of Newcomb Pottery,” Bulletin of the American Ceramic Society, 17, no. 6 (June 1938): 2; Ellsworth Woodward to Edwin L. Stephens, 18 May 1902, Stephens Papers, TU.

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Even before Newcomb was founded, Joseph Fortune Meyer was the preeminent figure in pottery circles along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Born in France, the son of a potter, he emigrated to America before he was ten. Though he had no formal education, he read voraciously and astonished most observers with the extent and range of his retention. He learned his father’s trade and went into business with him, selling their handmade wares in the boisterously commercial New Orleans street market. Eventually, using techniques and recipes passed down by generations of French peasants, he became a master craftsman—“the foundation,” according to one estimate, “for all that has been done in fine ceramics along the entire Gulf Coast.” He impressed observers with his “genuine appreciation for truly artistic things,” his technical acumen, his striking presence, and his forceful personality. Wrote one observer, “Meyer made an impressive appearance in the flowing beard that gave him the patriarchal mien traditional among older potters of his day.” “Voltaire could not have been more caustic,” wrote another. “Rabelais lived again in him, [and] Clemenceau is understandable when Meyer is remembered.” Meyer was Ellsworth Woodward’s first and most influential ceramist, throwing “every wheel piece that the girls at Newcomb decorated,” from the inception of the project until 1925 when illness forced Meyer into retirement.19 Two others made pivotal contributions to the pottery’s development. One was George Ohr, the “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” widely known for an unruly shock of hair he kept pinned in a bow on top of his head, an equally flowing beard, usually tucked into his shirt front, and a mustache he could stretch to full length and wrap around his ears like a pair of glasses. “An eccentric and accomplished man,” he was prone to fits of wanderlust and expressed his opinions with unsettling zeal; chief among them was the conviction that he was “a second Palissy and that his wares were worth their weight in gold.” His “non-conformity” provoked no end of turmoil among those around him (and no small amount of trouble for Woodward); nevertheless, despite their many differences, Joseph Meyer liked Ohr well enough to train him and to include him first in the Baronne Street venture and later at the Newcomb Pottery. They were joined there by Mary Sheerer, Woodward’s codirector, who first established and then maintained the pottery’s artistic standards. A graduate of the Cincinnati Art 19. Blasberg, “Newcomb Pottery,” 74; Paul E. Cox, “Potteries of the Gulf Coast,” Ceramic Age (April 1935): 18 –19, reprinted in Newcomb Pottery, NOMA.

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Academy, Sheerer was no novice to the form. Working as a decorator at the Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati, she had been exposed to the artistic ferment and innovative techniques that made it the preeminent institution of its day. Later, she had trained at the Art Student’s League and then come to Newcomb to teach in the art department and to assist in developing Woodward’s fledgling pottery. Like her codirector, Sheerer commenced a life’s work when she arrived in New Orleans in the spring of 1894. She made Newcomb her career and in the process made a lasting mark not only on the pottery but also in the field of American art. “The resourcefulness she displayed carried the project through the protracted discouragements of its beginning, and guided it ably through its later phases,” wrote Robert W. Blasberg. “She ranks among the many prominent women whose presence distinguished the American art pottery movement from its male-dominated European counterpart.” 20 Mary Sheerer’s “resourcefulness” may well have been born of necessity, just as her “presence” almost certainly was hard won. She came to New Orleans with an academic background, the temperament of an “individualist,” and a thorough knowledge of the pottery craft. She also came to begin a career in art education. Yet no sooner had she arrived than her duties required her to spend long hours in cramped spaces enduring frustrating setbacks at work. Joseph Meyer, the embodiment of the “male-dominated European counterpart” of the American pottery movement, was almost certainly opposed to the very presence of Sheerer, who was his boss. How deep the hostilities ran, and what effect they had, can only be inferred. Meyer obviously remained the master of his wheel, throwing every piece of ware decorated at the pottery in the first thirty years of its existence. Meanwhile Sheerer concentrated on innovations in decoration, experimenting with glazes— of which Meyer knew little—and developing the color palette that soon distinguished Newcomb craftsmanship. At least one of their colleagues observed the tensions implicit in the different training, temperament, and artistic focus of the two. “Professor Sheerer was an individualist and resented the need for the services of Joseph Meyer in production of ware by a college for women,” remembered Paul Cox, who suggested that her feelings may well have determined her role at Newcomb. “Therefore, she developed the work in modeled pottery, placing emphasis on this form of craft with her students.” 21 20. Cox, “Potteries of the Gulf Coast,” 119; Blasberg, “Newcomb Pottery,” 73 –74. 21. Cox, “Potteries of the Gulf Coast,” Ceramic Age (May 1935): 155 –56.

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Whatever tensions existed between Mary Sheerer and Joseph Meyer, it is clear that Cox’s arrival at Newcomb in 1910 caused additional complications. He was a ceramic chemist, among the very first of his kind, and his arrival in New Orleans is generally regarded as a pivotal moment in the pottery’s development. Cox had left his boyhood home in Indiana to fight in the Spanish-American War and then turned to art. He studied with Charles F. Binns at Alfred University’s New York College of Ceramics, where he became only the “second graduate of the second college of ceramics in America.” Cox, who had precisely the skills Ellsworth Woodward needed, helped refine the clay mixtures used at the pottery, resolving many of the quirks and inconsistencies of Meyer’s recipes, but his real contribution was a newly developed mat glaze popular among American potteries. The innovation, part of a “new professionalism” that transformed Newcomb wares in several fundamental ways, also provoked additional tension among the staff. George Ohr, particularly, disparaged Cox as a “pencil potter” and wrote doggerel verse ridiculing the chemist’s technical innovations and defending the craft’s traditions. Still, for all the bombast, Newcomb’s future was clear. “After Cox was hired,” writes one scholar, “all Newcomb technicians were drawn from the college at Alfred.” 22 Despite the conflicts of staff and intent, and despite a host of technical failures and frustrations in its early years, Ellsworth Woodward made good his ambition to establish a pottery at Newcomb College. Its first products, exhibited in 1896, met with immediate approval locally. Subsequent exhibitions in northern cities gained the pottery a wider audience. Critical approval followed, and awards and accolades began to accumulate. Eventually, Newcomb wares were exhibited in Europe, where in 1900 the pottery won the bronze medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle, a pivotal moment in its development. Since its inception, Woodward’s venture had supported itself through limited sales of its wares. After the Paris award, orders trebled, and to meet the demand Woodward reorganized the production process. Previously, a designer had labored in piecework fashion, paying for the costs of each pot before having it thrown and not realizing any return on her investment until the piece was sold. This might have produced award-winning art, but it made for risky speculation on the part of the artist. Pots often crumbled during the firing process, and even finished products 22. Blasberg, “Newcomb Pottery,” 75; Smith, “The Origin, Development, and Present Status of Newcomb Pottery,” 4.

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were subject to the buyer’s fancy. The new arrangement established a corporation within the college to underwrite the costs of production. “In other words,” announced Woodward in the next annual catalogue, “an effort has been made whereby the designs of the kiln will be placed on the market, the industry regulated, and the losses maintained in the future.” Production then moved forward in assembly-line fashion. Meyer threw pots according to one of several standard shapes chosen by the designer, who then executed her decoration and submitted the piece to the kiln master for firing. Woodward and Sheerer upheld the quality of production by enforcing exacting standards of technical skill. The new system worked. By 1908 sufficient profit had accrued to permit the hiring of a salaried employee to run the campus display and sales room. Soon technical innovation and a larger working space further expanded production. Still, orders continued to swamp the project. Between 1918 and 1930 the Newcomb Pottery produced nearly fifty thousand pieces, marketed by an ever-increasing sales staff. By 1931, the year Woodward retired, fifty-four agents working in twenty states directed the national and international distribution of Newcomb products.23 The pottery was the fullest institutional expression of Ellsworth Woodward’s artistic idealism. Ethel Hutson, a Newcomb alumna and later a professional colleague of Woodward, spoke for them both when she called the pottery “a new movement for greater beauty, simplicity, and freedom of design—a reaction against that slavery to the machine which was characteristic of the last century.” 24 In its evolution, the experiment also reflected Woodward’s guiding faith in environment. When the pottery expanded in 1901, it moved to a new location chosen by its master because it typified the local surroundings of New Orleans. The structure itself reflected Woodward’s close study of French Quarter architecture and repeated many of its forms. Inside, his artistic spirit abided. Spacious and neatly appointed, the workshop fostered a solemn atmosphere, a hushed reverence for beauty in the making. It also reflected Woodward’s aesthetic localism. Although he believed that artistic liberty governed his experiment, local surroundings were the unspoken rule of decorative design. “No special haste is felt to be needed in fixing upon the character that the wares shall 23. Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 17–32, 45 – 49. 24. Quoted in ibid., 52.

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assume,” he explained, since “the belief is entertained that if no formative pressure is employed, its development will proceed along lines of the least resistance, and arrive finally at the most natural expression of locality.” Here was the logic of the genius loci, a matching of design to material. Newcomb pots were made of mud from nearby bayous, and Woodward believed that the only suitable designs for local clays were studies of local nature: fleur-de-lis, crape myrtle, white Cherokee rose, chinaberries, wild iris, moss-draped cypress and live oak, dogwood, water lily, cotton plants, jonquils, and wild jasmine.25 Ideally, the designer, too, was locally born and bred. A young student once approached Woodward, concerned that her skills would not match his exacting standards. When he asked where she was from and was told “Louisiana,” he smiled gently and said that she was more qualified to decorate the pottery than he was. “There’s a good deal of bosh in that of course,” she wrote in a letter to her mother, “but I’m glad I was born in Baton Rouge.” 26 Here, then, was art for the American Century, the aesthetic counterpart to political Progressivism. Arts and Crafts experiments such as Woodward’s were urban and middle-class in character and composition, narrow in outlook if reformist in spirit, environmentalist in approach, and elitist in structure. Art would revolutionize American taste, elevating it from the bottom up through homes adhering to standards handed down from the top. There were additional conflicting impulses. The experimenters were zealous idealists devoted to Truth and practitioners of handicrafts that they considered imperiled by machines. Yet they retained a firm faith in the blessings of an industrialized future, either rejecting outright or refusing to acknowledge the basic conflict between art and commerce. Neither Woodward nor the movement reconciled the tension between local production and national reform. Each prophesied the elevation of American art standards. Each trumpeted the creation of indigenous forms of national expression, but neither overcame the attachment to locale. Arts and Crafts movements flourished in cities across America throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. The cities exchanged annual exhibitions and fraternal good wishes. 25. Andy Peter Antippas, “The Newcomb Pot Revolution of 1887,” New Orleans Magazine 10 (July 1975): 96, 98; Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 47–56. 26. Antippas, “The Newcomb Pot Revolution,” 102.

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They applauded each other’s efforts, yet none suggested a national coalition. Instead they arrayed themselves as constellations in the night sky with the Southern Cross flickering over uptown New Orleans. It was no accident that the Newcomb Pottery burst upon the international art scene from the heart of New Orleans’s Garden District. This was the geographical center of the Louisiana reform impulse in politics as well as in art. Several prominent members of the Good Government League lived near the Newcomb campus, among them John M. Parker, who would become governor of the state and the chief southern political adviser to Theodore Roosevelt. The cream of the New Orleans gentry, Woodward’s young women flocked to his classroom, from whence he led them to the moss-draped elegance of the campus to contemplate nature. Most, he reasoned, would benefit from the experience by going out into the world to establish homes and families guided by aesthetic principles taught in his classroom. The very best of them he hoped to employ in his pottery, where a small coterie of talented designers was given some means of earning an income suited to a woman of taste; they also played a vital role in society, bearing the respect and responsibility accorded a “professional.” 27 Guided by these faiths, Woodward’s “natural expressions of locality” earned wide praise. In 1907, an exhibit of Newcomb pottery won a gold medal at the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia. “You know this puts us in the front rank,” Woodward wrote jubilantly to his friend Stephens. “It is a real distinction taking us out of the provincial and amateur class and ranking us as a world power.” Greater honors were in store. At the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, Newcomb pottery won five awards, including two grand prizes. By then Newcomb ranked second only to Rookwood of Cincinnati as the largest American producer of individually decorated pottery. But its emergence as a “world power” brought additional burdens and unforeseen developments. Critical acclaim always stimulated demand, which stretched the facility’s productive capabilities; under the pressure, a fissure— first opened in 1901—widened into a fault line running between the artistic purpose of the project and its expanding commercial appeal.28 27. For discussions of political reform in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, see S. W. Taylor, The Citizens’ League: A History of the Great Reform Movement (Baton Rouge, 1965). 28. Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 61– 69; Ellsworth Woodward to E. L. Stephens, 29 December 1907, Stephens Papers, TU.

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Woodward insisted that business decisions should never overshadow the aesthetic concerns of the project. “It is never a question of ‘salability,’” he insisted; “death lies that way for the artist.” Instead he clung to the faith that art and commerce were complementary forces held in delicate equipoise by the pursuit of knowledge and the quest for beauty, a utilitarian creed he called “industrial commercialism”: Art has been transformed before the eyes of an indifferent public from a subject of ornamental trifling to one of serious economic meaning. And let me say to those who think that the college is no place for industrial commercialism that the test of all education lies in its application to the needs of life. Pure philosophy and pure theory are pure moonshine unless they square with the lives we have to live enabling us the better to perform the duties that we cannot and do not wish to escape. If we wish our subject to be repeated we must show that it is capable of doing the world’s work.29 Nevertheless, there were already clear indications that the considerations of the marketplace had gained ascendancy over issues of artistic integrity. When Paul Cox arrived in 1910 his mat glaze provoked a noticeable boost in sales. As Cox had intended—and for the first time in Newcomb’s history, he boasted— the designers earned more than a modest salary. Changing public tastes also hastened the transformation. Cox’s influence helped initiate a more conservative, highly romanticized, representational style of design. The decorations evoked images of the South similar in theme and spirit to those of popular film and fiction. Muted tones, further softened by Cox’s glazes, depicted moonlight through magnolias and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. They became the most popular designs ever created at Newcomb, repeated to the point of tedium by designers fully aware that the decorations were aesthetically unsuited to the angular shape of the pots. “The standard ware . . . has become more or less stereotyped in color, decorative treatment, and design,” wrote one contemporary observer. “This style is so entrenched on the buying public that it has become a ‘hall mark’ of Newcomb Pottery to the extent that when the decorators make a piece even in the same technique but using another color than the 29. Quoted in Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 69.

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traditional soft blue and greens, it will stay on the shelves unnoticed or unrecognized as real Newcomb pottery.” 30 The altered style allowed the pottery to outlive the Arts and Crafts movement, but only by adopting practices that contradicted Woodward’s idealism. The year 1915 marked the high tide for both the movement and the pottery. Unable to match the productivity of the manufacturing process, deeply divided over the relationship between art and commerce, the movement failed to overcome the momentum of the machine. Its leaders were dying and its practitioners were turning elsewhere. Fittingly, it slipped from the scene amidst the industrial carnage of the Great War. The 1915 San Francisco exhibit, the scene of Newcomb’s greatest triumph, was the last major showing of its kind. The pottery’s wares continued to sell well, but Woodward’s designers no longer shaped popular taste—indeed, they had become prisoners of it. Designers no longer handed down “glimpses of divine beauty” for the enlightenment and uplift of the general public. Instead, they filled orders to satisfy tastes that already existed, produced in new kilns designed to satisfy the demand. Nor were the wares used for their intended purpose. They did not become articles of household use, the stuff of everyday life. As awards accumulated so did value and price. Private collectors hoarded the pieces, making them coveted objects for display by the privileged, not items for popular use.31 The Newcomb Pottery never became exclusively a business enterprise. Woodward was too much of an idealist to permit that. Instead, it occupied a position somewhere between the lecture hall and the sales office, a situation whose awkwardness even the master recognized. “What shall a teacher do with a manufacturing business?” he asked a group of executives in 1930. “It doesn’t seem right, I was going to say almost indecent.” By then, Newcomb wares were fully standardized products, despite two late attempts to recapture the experimentalism of earlier days. The pottery had lost its envied reputation for innovative design. It had even left the Garden District when the college moved further up30. Ibid., 61– 85; Paul Cox, “Newcomb Pottery Active in New Orleans,” Bulletin of the American Ceramic Society 13 (May 1934): 13 –15; “The Newcomb Potteries, Where an Industrial Need Has Been Adjusted to Commercial Purpose,” Glass and Pottery 4 (January 1911): 11–12. For a more general discussion of the commercialization of the Arts and Crafts movement, see Anscombe, Arts and Crafts in Britain and America, 189 –207. 31. Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 75ff.

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town to its present location adjacent to Tulane. Worse, with the onset of the Depression, the pottery suffered the fate of all industrial America. When production outstripped consumption, sales began to slip, and they never recovered. A year after his address to the businessmen Woodward retired in a tearful farewell heightened, no doubt, by the sense that more than the man was leaving.32 Following his retirement from Newcomb, Woodward remained active in local art circles, painting, promoting, and organizing as always. Then in December 1933 he went to work for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the New Deal’s first attempt to ease the plight of American artists during the Great Depression. The experiment lasted six months, set all the precedents and revealed most of the conflicts that would characterize subsequent federal efforts to fund the arts, and gave Ellsworth Woodward one last chance to enact the ideals of the genius loci. He seized it. He worked at his usual exhausting pace, paid office expenses out of his own pocket, and agonized over his determination to maintain standards of artistic skill and his desire to help hungry people, some of them former pupils of marginal talent. He hoped to turn his artists loose, capturing “the dying scenes of the South” then yielding to regional modernization. But PWAP administrators determined otherwise. One by one, in a process eerily reminiscent of the Newcomb experiment, the modern concerns of production and consumption for a national market overwhelmed Woodward’s localized ideals of training, talent, and expression. Five years later, in February 1939, his boundless energy finally gave out. He caught a cold he could not shake and within two weeks had developed pneumonia. Woodward’s hands, which for sixty years had known no rest—flashing before classrooms and across countless canvases, shaping a vision of American art and society as alluring as any Newcomb ware, and as fragile—were finally stilled. 32. Quoted in ibid., 82; New Orleans Item, 7 June 1931.

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introduction

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h e t h e r t h e u r ban i z i ng South will remain southern is a question that now occupies the minds of countless scholars and journalists. Clearly, we see a region in the process of redefining its own image and character as it is buffeted by the forces of migration, immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. Elements of an older, more traditional culture remain, even though they are being increasingly overtaken by a host of competing influences. The result is a dynamic process of sociocultural change and transformation, the exact nature of which is still imperfectly understood. The New South, by its diversity alone, challenges that simpler South. But as southerners adapt to the new urban worlds growing up in their midst, they will probably discover that in their diversity of culture, interest, and power, they still have ample room for southern traditions as well. Southern musical culture is an excellent example of this. The South is the birthplace of American music forms including spirituals, blues, jazz, country and western, and rock and roll, as well as genres that originated from an amalgam of styles, such as Cajun and zydeco music, which are indigenous to Louisiana. Credit must be given to the confluence of people and cultures in the South for providing the creative impetus. It is difficult to imagine another region that has had more national and international influence musically. Indeed, music may be the region’s most obvious and most important cultural export. African Americans have been instrumental in the creation of the majority of the musical genres that first emerged from the South. Even today, we can still hear the traditional strains of the spiritual as it was heard during the antebellum period in the Baptist Easter Rock ritual of Winnsboro, Louisiana. We can hear 154

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these sounds emanating from elderly black women sitting on their front stoops in New Orleans or flowing from storefront churches similar to the one in which Mahalia Jackson in her early years listened to the music that subsequently influenced her style. Black musicians are performing the country blues today with the same raw originality and conviction that they possessed during the era of Reconstruction and the early twentieth century. We can here these sounds in Tougaloo, Mississippi, on the back porch of a black man who lost his job and his woman and decided to “pick a few” on his guitar to vent his frustrations. We can also hear the country blues at a Saturday night dance and fish fry at any of the local juke joints in the Black Belt of Alabama. Yes, in many locales of the South these identical sounds can still be heard in their original context. You just have to know who to talk to and where to go. Although we can still hear most of this music in its original form or a close facsimile, much of it has been redefined at different times and to varying degrees because of the changing aspects of southern culture. Producing music is a creative process that is reinterpreted over time to correspond to the natural process of adjusting to new conditions and environmental factors; in essence, music is a dynamic element of culture. In describing the changing nature of culture, Lawrence W. Levine contends: “Culture is not a fixed condition but a process: the product of interaction between the past and present. Its toughness and resiliency are determined not by a culture’s ability to withstand change, which indeed may be a sign of stagnation not life, but by its ability to react creatively and responsively to the realities of a new situation” (1977, 5). The music that is created and redefined results from interaction between the original tradition and the new environmental situations, cultural diversity, and musical influences that musicians encounter in their lives. In addition, redefinition is also brought about by radio broadcasting, commercial recordings, and concert tours. The present essay discusses how and why, for more than one hundred years, African American gospel quartet singers creatively redefined themselves and their music to selectively adjust to a cadre of new conditions in their lives. the case for african american quartets The African American quartet tradition is a distinctly twentieth-century musical and cultural phenomenon; however, it is clearly rooted in the traditional music of the post–Civil War decades. Over the course of its evolution, quartet 155

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music has come full circle: developing from its southern folk roots during Reconstruction and at the turn of the century, it was redefined by popular culture in the 1930s and 1940s and has now returned to folk culture as exemplified in those quartets that still perform in the traditional style. This essay examines the tradition and the factors that brought the African American quartet tradition into the realm of popular culture and those that caused its return to folk culture. The focus is mainly on quartets that have been established for several decades and are thus well-rooted in the tradition. However, before the participants can be discussed further, it is critical to clarify the definition of “quartet” as it is used in this tradition. In the classical tradition of European music, a “quartet” is usually considered to be a musical group consisting of four members or a musical composition for four voices or instruments. The term is used more loosely, however, by African American quartet musicians. As Reverend Samuel McCrary, leader of the Fairfield Four of Nashville, Tennessee, explains: “After we got six men, we just kept calling it a quartet because most of the time we sing with four parts. We need the extra one to sing lead—that’ll make five men. Sometime we probably need six, with four doing the harmony up and the other two leading” (1985). The voices of the practitioners, along with other criteria, have to be taken into consideration when defining an African American vocal quartet. Reflecting on their views and what has happened historically, a “quartet” can be defined as a vocal ensemble consisting of a minimum of four voices and a maximum of six voices singing four-part harmony arrangements in an a capella style or with limited instrumentation (i.e., guitar, bass, and drums). Therefore, it is important to note that an African American quartet is not by definition limited to a group of four musicians, as is the case in the Euro-American tradition. The present research focuses primarily on male quartets that were first organized between the late 1920s and the early 1940s. These quartets are unique in that they have existed for so long but are still singing in the close harmony a capella styles. In addition, two traditional female quartets and a young male quartet formed in 1972 were among the groups studied. All of the quartets are located in the southern United States, in the areas of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Jacksonville, Florida; Greenville, South Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. The nineteenth-century university and minstrel jubilee quartet gave birth to a musical style that provided the foundation of the twentieth-century quartet. 156

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The university quartets provided the model of close four-part harmony, a capella singing style, and sacred repertoire. The model for showmanship, humor, and entertainment came from the minstrel tradition. The communitybased quartets combined practices from both traditions, resulting in a set of aesthetic criteria that in many cases still applies to quartet singing today (Jackson 1996, 107). The organization of these independent, community-based quartets depended on familial, religious, occupational, and social affiliations. The factors that helped the development and popularization of these community-based groups outside of their own milieu also launched them into the world of popular culture. It was through radio broadcasts, commercial recordings, and touring that professional and amateur quartet singing was redefined and launched into a new era in the early twentieth century. Although Victor Record Company recorded the first black sacred quartet in 1902 (six single-sided discs of spirituals by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet), the record companies did not record sacred male quartets again until the early 1920s, which is when the “race” labels discovered their market potential (Dixon, Godrich, and Rye 1997, 215). Every race label featured one jubilee quartet or more by the late 1920s, and during the 1930s the majority of sacred race records produced featured quartets (Dixon, Godrich, and Rye 1997). Record companies encountered steep competition from radio in the 1930s because of the single-investment price and better fidelity of radios, and during this decade many radio stations began devoting a few hours a day to black programming (Rubman 1980, 36). The Southernaires, believed to be the first community-based African American religious quartet to broadcast on radio, performed on a Sunday morning National Broadcasting Company radio network show for over eleven years, starting in 1935 (Williams-Jones 1970, 251; Rubman 1980, 39; Funk 1985, 24).1 The Zion Travelers Spiritual Singers have been performing every Sunday morning for over forty years on WIBR in Baton Rouge (Offlee 1983).

1. There is disagreement on the year that the Southernaires quartet began performing for the National Broadcasting Company. See Williams-Jones 1970, Rubman 1980, and Funk 1985. The Utica Institute Jubilee Quartet was believed to be the first university-affiliated quartet to begin a live radio broadcast. They began broadcasting in 1927 on WJZ in New York, an NBC affiliate. See Seroff 1983, 3.

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Many other quartets, professional as well as amateur, have provided the radio stations and record companies an abundance of quartet talent. As a result, there has been a great popularization of the jubilee quartet tradition in America and Europe. As a matter of record, many African American performing artists found fame and fortune on the European continent long before America embraced them. The mid-1930s and early 1940s were transitional years for gospel quartets. Quartet singing was undergoing a personality change. It was during the early thirties that Thomas Dorsey began to popularize his gospel song compositions. Gospel songs began to replace spirituals as the most prevalent form of African American religious music. As a result, jubilee quartets began to transform themselves into gospel quartets. Local and regional networks of community-based folk artists, which were prominent during the first two decades of the twentieth century, were being overshadowed as jubilee quartet music entered the realm of gospel quartet music and popular culture. This period also witnessed the development of quartets as a professional unit, a business, in the entertainment industry. The rise of gospel radio programming and the commercial recording industry in the early twentieth century propelled amateur and professional quartet singing into this new era of popular culture. Along with church programs, radio broadcasts were the means by which quartets established credibility within their own community and advertised public appearances around town. The groups would normally choose a radio theme song and then proceed with a set pattern: “As might be expected, the Four Great Wonders quickly established the same patterns that were set in Porterfield’s work with the Duncan Brothers and Sandy Newell’s work with the Robinson Humming Four: a radio broadcast was secured on station WJBW, formal singing contests were arranged, and tours were made to churches and schools in the surrounding countryside” (Abbott 1983b, 35 –36). It also became common for radio sponsors to hire quartets to promote their products through fifteen-minute broadcasts. Reverend Sam McCrary, leader of the Fairfield Four, recalls: “We started on WLAC in Nashville in 1939. We stayed from 1939 up until 1955 or 1956. See, we worked for Sunway Vitamins at that time, and she had her product at [a] 37,000-watt station. And we had to come in every Tuesday and work all day to supply those other stations fifteen minutes transcribed. . . . We did all them live at WLAC, and they would ship them to other stations—Salt Lake City, Utah; Chicago; New Orleans; 158

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Birmingham; Philadelphia. . . . We were heard all over the country” (1985). In 1940 the Soproco Spiritual Singers signed a contract to sing in the interest of Soproco household cleanser on radio station WWL in New Orleans. The powerful broadcast made it possible for them to be heard in thirty-two states. Subsequently, they had numerous engagements and tours (Abbott 1983a, 65). The radio was a key factor in gospel quartet promotions and an important showcase for quartet talent. A great number of quartets began to make recordings during the period immediately following World War II. At the same time, a number of independent record companies targeted their product, the special “race series,” at the African American record purchaser (Oliver 1984, 8 –9). These commercial recordings and radio broadcasts were, and still are, media by which quartet singers sought to sell their product, talent, and artistry to the public. Using these media sometimes led to successful careers. Radio and record exposure expanded the quartets’ audiences beyond their immediate communities, which led to more lucrative out-of-town contracts. Touring, therefore, was a direct link to popular culture audiences and another significant means of developing, redefining, and popularizing quartets. Very few quartets toured on a full-time basis prior to 1940. The norm was for members to hold day jobs during the week and travel with the quartet on the weekends. Many members did not want to leave their families or give up employment security as full-time singing would have required. The 1940s, then, marked the first fertile decade of professional gospel quartet singing (Seroff 1981, 15; Seroff 1983, 23; Broughton 1985, 64). The professional quartet singer who earned a living solely by singing had to be on the road for long periods of time. Touring was made possible by what quartet members referred to as the “touring circuit.” This circuit or network consisted of a chain of quartets and individuals that formed a channel of communication in a particular circuit or territory. This network would assist quartets in arranging programs in different cities while on tour. There were three ways of networking a touring circuit for quartets. The first was by contacting relatives, friends, and other associates in various cities along a route that the quartet would travel. The associate would organize a program in a particular church, school, or community auditorium. Tickets might have been sold for this occasion, depending on where it was to take place. Usually if the event was in a church, the program would include a “love offering” or “good159

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will offering” to help the guest performers with their financial obligations while they were touring. Another means of forming a touring circuit was by way of quartet organizations or “unions.” Norman McQueen, formerly of Bessemer, Alabama, founded the Progressive Quartet Association in Chicago in 1931 (Seroff 1983, 20). In 1939, a similar group called the City Quartette Union was formed in Memphis. This organization was followed by the United Singing Union in the mid-1940s, along with various others (Lornell 1995, 111–13). New Orleans also had its quartet organizations. One of the earlier ones was the New Orleans Spiritual Quartette Association, Inc., founded in 1940 (Abbott 1983a, 60). A more recent organization is the New Orleans Gospel Coalition, formed in 1979. This nonprofit corporation consists of about eighteen quartets and other small gospel groups. Most of these singing organizations throughout the years have had the same purposes in mind, some to a greater extent than others. They existed to promote quartet and gospel singing, to book programs in and out of their respective cities, to enforce certain laws and regulations, and essentially to maintain a sense of organization among the various community-based quartets. These organizations consisted of the quartet members. They all operated under a set of formal regulations or bylaws to help manage their affairs. The governing board was elected by the members. The New Orleans Gospel Coalition has its own constitution with articles and amendments. There are also penalties for rule infractions, ranging from monetary fines to suspension or elimination from the union. These organizations were structured to serve the needs of the quartets, which included organizing programs and tours. The third means of networking a touring circuit was by employing a gospel promoter. In earlier years promoters booked full quartet programs, or “quartet package deals,” as they were sometimes called. John Ootsey, a Baton Rouge gospel promoter, recalled that he had booked the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Soul Stirrers of Chicago, the Bright Stars of Michigan, and the Brooklyn AllStars in one package some years ago. Today, he says, because quartets are less popular, he usually books them in “mixed packages” (1984). In February 1987, Ootsey booked a gospel extravaganza at Southern University’s F. G. Clark Activity Center consisting of several local church choirs, the Southern University Baptist Student Choir, the Lighthouse Gospel Singers (a Baton Rouge quartet), Bobbie Jones and the New Life Singers (a small contemporary ensemble) from

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Nashville, and Vanessa Bell Armstrong (a contemporary soloist) from Detroit. The quartet was clearly very popular with the audience. Although quartet tours are not as popular today, during the 1930s and 1940s they were prevalent, and gospel promoters were instrumental in keeping the touring circuit alive. As hundreds of quartets began traveling the South singing at churches, schools, public auditoriums, concert halls, fairs, and festivals, quartet singing was redefined dramatically. Since many quartets earned their income from tours and personal appearances, they had to compete among themselves and other gospel performers for the public’s attention. Versatility, therefore, became imperative. Performance styles and practices were modified drastically by many quartets and were geared to evoke maximum response and support from audiences. Quartets had to be proficient in the lively, rhythmic, and percussive jubilee numbers, the slow and precise harmony songs, and the emotional, hardshouting gospel tunes. Many groups felt compelled to make concessions and adapt popular musical trends, such as the use of electric guitar and bass accompaniment. Groups even began to perform in secular settings (just as they did in minstrel and vaudeville shows of the late nineteenth century), which led to still another linkage to popular culture. In these secular settings, which included concert halls, cafés, restaurants, night clubs, private house parties, summer resorts, and beachfront hotels, the quartets performed for sometimes mixed but usually Euro-American audiences. African American quartet singers fascinated and entertained Euro-American audiences in the 1940s just as the university and minstrel jubilee singers had done in the previous century. A 1941 Time magazine article gives an account of one occasion: “The gospel story, sung in a spiritual called ‘John the Revelator,’ has regularly worked pin-drop silence in both downtown and uptown branches of Barney Josephson’s Café Society [the white Manhattan showcase for black talent]. ‘John the Revelator’ is one of the hit songs of a Negro group named the Golden Gate Quartet” (“Golden Gate” 1941, 50). The same article goes on to point out just how much elite Euro-American audiences liked the Golden Gate Quartet despite the still-entrenched attitudes of racial prejudice they held: “Recently a Café Societarian, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., took his mother to hear the Golden Gate boys. Last week Mrs. Roosevelt deftly slipped the quartet into the program of the Inaugural Gala . . . in Washington’s Constitution Hall. That hall, owned by the D.A.R. [Daughters of

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the American Revolution] two years ago was forbidden to Negro contralto Marian Anderson. Last week the D.A.R. moodily approved the Golden Gate Quartet” (“Golden Gate” 1941, 50). This Euro-American elite class could not wholeheartedly accept a proud, stately African American woman, Marian Anderson, singing European classical music as well as arranged spirituals at Constitution Hall. The article suggests that the Golden Gates were such professional showmen and conscious musical stylists that many Euro-Americans would look beyond the fact that they were African American performers just to get a chance to hear and be entertained by them. These opinions, to be sure, were not the consensus of the entire audience, but because of the tenor of the times, one can safely assume that many EuroAmerican audience members held these attitudes very adamantly. Some quartets have expressed strong opinions concerning performing for audiences in secular formats and contexts. For example, the Dixie Hummingbirds, organized in 1928 in Greenville, South Carolina, attempt to distinguish themselves as singers of religious music by not using choreography in their performances. James Davis, founder and manager of the group, explains this practice in an article in Sepia magazine: “There is sometimes a very thin line . . . between blues and gospel music and rock and roll. They are really close together. The fact is that one little movement can make the difference in a person’s idea of thinking whether you are doing rock or gospel. That’s one of the reasons we didn’t pick up the choreography. If we were to try to make the moves that the [rock] singers usually make, most of our people [gospel audiences] would think that we were trying to sing rock” (Salvo and Salvo 1974, 62). The Dixie Hummingbirds also have views on playing nightclubs. As one member recalls, “We played our first night club at Number 2 Sheridan Square in New York in 1939” (Dixie Hummingbirds 1978, 65). They believe different formats and contexts can be used to entertain as long as you “never get off the spiritual track.” Davis admonishes, “You got to stay close enough to the Lord to not be named something else—like pop singers.” The Dixie Hummingbirds refer to themselves as “ambassadors for Jesus” (Salvo and Salvo 1974, 62). Similarly, First Revolution, a young quartet from New Orleans, also performs in secular contexts. Their venues range from churches, parks, cafés, and restaurants, to nightclubs and the streets. They have performed at Jackson Square (a park) in the French Quarter, at Storyville Jazz Hall (a nightclub), and literally on Bourbon Street. When asked his opinion concerning performing sa162

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cred music in secular settings, Larry Bell, lead vocalist and manager of the quartet, replied: “Well, I don’t have any regrets on it, because from reading the scripture, . . . the thing that sticks in my mind on this is when they had a controversy when Jesus visited Matthew at his home. The words came out that folks that are not sick don’t need the doctor. So I can’t work on a patient if he is already well. This is my thing so we have no problems with that” (Bell 1987).2 Many quartets that perform in sacred as well as secular contexts are functioning largely in the area of entertainment. Although they function within the religious domain, because of the nature of the repertoire, quartets are not an essential part of worship services. Quartet singers do not feel the necessity of singing religious music in a place designated for worship. Many of them feel that you should sing whenever you can and wherever you have an audience that is receptive to you. The more religious members claim that even in secular settings you can still bring the message of God to the people and it will be heard. They also feel that communicating their spiritual message may even “cause someone to come to Christ.” In addition, some quartets believe that a “variety and humor” format also facilitates the teaching of God’s word. This is demonstrated when the Dixie Hummingbirds perform a song that one of the members wrote called “Going Out to the Meeting.” In the performance of this song, which is very popular with the audiences, the Hummingbirds mimic other groups. This mimicry usually draws an ecstatic response from the audience. The Harps of Melody, a female quartet from Memphis, also uses the comic release format, not only when singing in secular settings but also in churches. Clara Anderson explains: “There are times when we sing for congregations and we sing spiritual songs and they don’t go for it; then we sing a comedy number. . . . In a way, [the comedy numbers] are not really sacred, but still they are. The words are pertaining to the church, but they are funny. . . . You sing a comedy number to change the style. If you can’t get them on one thing, turn around and make them laugh” (1985). The humor format, including comedy and novelty songs, can be traced back to the “quartet as entertainer” concept of the early university and minstrel jubilee quartets, who entertained Euro-American audiences for profit. The entertainment element in the earlier tradition carried over to the community2. The scriptures Bell refers to are Matthew 9:10 –13.

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based quartet performance practices. Community-based jubilee quartets, which later evolved into community-based gospel quartets, continue to include elements designed to entertain in their repertoire and performance practices. With the advent of radio broadcasts, commercial recordings, Thomas Dorsey’s new gospel music, the touring circuit, and performances in secular contexts, quartet singing clearly transcended its folk community roots in the South. Its popularity had surpassed the expectations held by performers and promoters when the groups first began touring. However, in spite of all their notoriety, success, and rise to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s, black quartets still fell from favor in the 1950s. return to the folk community: decline of quartets After the mid-1950s, gospel quartets, especially the full-time professional groups, became less active. Though many professional quartets made drastic stylistic and performance adjustments to keep pace and bridge the gap with contemporary trends, touring opportunities began to disappear quickly. As a result, many professional singers had to find alternative means of support and resort to part-time singing on a local basis, with only occasional touring. By the mid-1950s, quartets began moving back to the community, their foundation, where the tradition first began. The majority of quartets that survived did so because of support from their local communities. Quartet veterans and quartet researchers alike offer various explanations for the decline in popularity of quartets in the 1950s and 1960s. The crossover phenomenon was perhaps the single most significant factor. Individual singers as well as whole quartets crossed over to the commercially viable and gospelderived African American popular music—rhythm and blues. The rhythm and blues style was directly influenced by the sacred quartet style, which included such characteristics as call-and-response, lyrical ad-libs, melismatic passages, and falsetto leads. Therefore, most quartet singers did not need to make any adjustments in their singing styles in order to cross over. They just changed their words and continued to sing in the style to which they were accustomed. In an article in Sepia magazine, Ray Charles is quoted explaining the crossover phenomenon using Sam Cooke (former member of the Highway QCs and the Soul Stirrers) as an example: “Sam Cooke didn’t change anything. When he left the gospel field, he didn’t change the way he was trying to sing or anything. The only 164

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thing is that instead of saying ‘Jesus’ in his songs, he said ‘my baby’” (Salvo and Salvo 1974, 62). Although most of the quartet crossovers occurred in the 1950s, there had even been a few crossovers to popular music in the 1930s. For example, the famous Delta Rhythm Boys had previously been the Frederick Hall Jubilee Quartet of Dillard University in New Orleans. However, in the 1950s the opportunities for travel and financial gain in popular music were much greater, and rhythm and blues was just developing into a lucrative business. By the 1950s an African American consumer market for popular music had developed, and a sizeable Euro-American market existed as well. Most members of the first rhythm and blues vocal groups were gospel performers before shifting to its secular counterpart. Many of the young rhythm and blues singers had been former lead singers of established gospel quartet groups. Among the gospel artists who crossed over are Sam Cooke from the Highway QCs and the Soul Stirrers; Johnnie Taylor, also from the Soul Stirrers; Lou Rawls from the Pilgrim Travelers; Wilson Pickett from the Violinaires; Roscoe Robinson and Joe Henderson from the Fairfield Four; Brook Benton from the Bill Langford Quartet; David Ruffin from the Dixie Nightingales; and Joe Hinton and O. V. Wright from the Spirit of Memphis (Maultsby 1981b, 5; Seroff 1982, 20; Broughton 1985, 102). Ernie Kador of the Golden Chain Jubileers, Johnny Adams of the Consolators, and Chris Kenner of Noah’s Ark were among the more successful New Orleans gospel singers to cross over into the secular arena (Abbott 1983b, 142). In several cases entire quartets who started out in gospel music crossed over to the secular arena intact. A New Orleans quartet known as the Delta Southernaires was relatively successful as a rhythm and blues group called the Spiders. Even the twenty-five-year quartet veterans the Selah Jubilee Singers were persuaded to cross over as the Larks. Another group from New Orleans, the Humming Four, had been singing sacred quartet music for about twenty years. For a period of time, the quartet worked “both sides of the fence.” They sang sacred music as the Humming Four and secular music as the Hawks. As one member explained to Lynn Abbott, “We were two groups in one. . . . When we went for the saints, we were the Humming Four and when we went for the sinners, we were the Hawks” (Abbott 1983a, n.p.). This crossover from sacred to secular often came as a result of prompting by record promoters and other recording company personnel. Some promoters 165

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even insisted that a group make the transition in order to remain with a particular company or label. In addition, there were always the added incentives and attractions of greater financial gain and popularity. Dave Bartholomew of the Imperial Record Company in New Orleans convinced the Humming Four to sign a contract with his company. In 1952 the company released two sides by the group (“Twelve Gates to the City” and “I’m Satisfied”), which stand as the only gospel quartet recordings in Imperial’s catalogue (Abbott 1983a, n.p.). Later the same year, Bartholomew began looking for a rhythm and blues vocal group to put his label on the charts. Again, he approached the Humming Four. Albert Veal recalls: “Dave [Bartholomew] called us down and told us, said, ‘The spirituals don’t sell too much and the company wasn’t particular about making no more spirituals. But you have too good a group just to let you go.’ Said, ‘If you would switch over to rock ’n’ roll, you could get another contract. Maybe you could make it big!’” (Abbott 1983a, n.p.). Two of the members opposed the idea, but the other three consented. The two dissenting members were replaced, and the group made the transition. A repercussion evolving from the crossovers was opposition from the African American religious community. This dissatisfaction was verbalized, especially when quartets performed on “both sides of the fence,” as the Humming Four had done. After signing with Imperial Record Company, they took part in an “All-Star Show” at Lincoln Beach in New Orleans, which featured a gospel component and a rhythm and blues revue. The Humming Four had to perform in both segments. Veal describes the situation: There were about ten thousand people out there that night and we sang as the Humming Four, see. Then Dave started bringing his band out, said, “Well, church is out now. We’re going to rock a little while.” And the comical part, Veal laughs, we were the first ones they called up. Dave says, “Now, we’re [going] to bring up a group I know you all have heard, Fat Man Matthews and the Hawks!” and we came out there dancing around and all that stuff, and the people who had witnessed us [on the same program] as spiritual [singers] said, “Oh my God,” said, “You don’t mean to tell me that is you all,” said, “How can you do that?” (Abbott 1983a, n.p.) After this incident, Veal recalls that the Hawks’ reputation spread through the city, and “many local churches closed their doors to the Humming Four just 166

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like they did Sam Cooke and Rosetta Tharpe” (Abbott 1983a, n.p.). The African American religious community considered this incident and others similar to it appalling and disgraceful, not to mention sacrilegious. Some members of the African American community have great respect for notable gospel singers and view them with almost the same reverence as they do their ministers. Even though a large number of sacred quartets crossed over to the secular field, a significant number remained within the traditional sacred music. James Payne of the New Orleans Soproco Singers remembers an incident in the early 1940s when the owner of the Blue Room (an extravagant and exclusive white night club) tried to convince him to “work his club” by performing popular music. Payne describes the incident: [H]e told me he wanted us to change, and sing the Inkspots [sic] [a popular group] stuff. I said, “We don’t sing that style of singing. They’d turn me out my church if I do that.” He said, “You ain’t nothing but a damn fool! Let them turn you out of church!” I said, “No, I don’t see it like that.” He said, “I’m going to give you an independent living!” I said, “I’ll tell you what. Money, I don’t have, I don’t have clothes, but,” I said, “I’d rather sing gospel if I have to sing in overalls!” (Abbott 1983b, 141) Although many groups did adhere to the sacred music with conviction, sacred quartets declined nonetheless. The lifestyle of some quartet members was questionable, especially those who were heavily engaged in touring. Many interpersonal conflicts, indiscretions, and enticements on the road became public knowledge within their communities. This corroded the image that their followers had imposed on them. With their extensive travel commitments, the singers often had problems with their families. In addition, there was often dissension between group members as well as financial conflicts. Clara Anderson, leader of the Harps of Melody quartet in Memphis, voices her opinion: “I think there is a lot more groups now that don’t have the concept they used to have. . . . Sometimes they [quartets] will break up and start back over again. . . . Some of them, you know, don’t even deserve their anniversary. They can’t stand the storm, you know, through thick and thin through the years. . . . Congregations find out lots of stuff. . . . Some of them prove not to be pure. . . . It’s no play thing” (1985). Ms. Anderson’s comments suggest that gospel singers are expected to “live the life they sing about,” that they should be sincere, since they are under constant public scrutiny. Their 167

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undesirable actions bring about dissatisfaction among the African American religious communities, which certainly can be detrimental to the status and existence of a quartet. While radio broadcasting and commercial recording were in many respects assets to the quartet tradition, they were also perceived by some performers as factors that led to the decline of live performances. Ms. Anderson concludes: “Yes, what I am trying to say is cut your radio on and you can hear quite a few stations with gospel singing, gospel music for hours, so now you really don’t have to go to church to hear gospel singing anymore. . . . When they used to [not] have all these radio programs, [people] would go out more to hear [live performances]” (1985). Another factor in the decline of quartets was their failure or reluctance to bridge the gap and make the transition to current stylistic developments or a more contemporary sound. This unwillingness resulted in many quartet followers shifting over to the prevailing religious groups that began to flourish in the 1950s—female and mixed ensembles and choirs. Sherman Washington, leader of the Zion Harmonizers in New Orleans, speaks on this issue: [C]hoirs and ensemble groups have been taking over from quartets; unless you’re really outstanding, they really don’t come out to see you anymore. Now, if you get with an ensemble group, or a group [of ] like thirty [a choir], and they put you in a good spot where you can sing, and you can give the audience what they want, they’ll accept you. But just singing without them [choirs and ensembles] or going out unless they know you’re real good, the crowd is not there anymore for quartets. It’s [taking] a big chance. (1983) Female groups such as the Angelic Gospel Singers, the Davis Sisters, the Clara Ward Singers, and the Caravans used three-part harmony. They replaced the bass line with piano, organ, and sometimes drums. Many male a capella quartets switched to this style in an attempt to stay in competition with the current sacred music performers. These quartets that switched over to follow the current musical stylistic trends became known as the “hard gospel shouters.” They inspired a new generation of male groups, which are still referred to as quartets in most cases, even though they have more than four singers and they perform with instrumentation.

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Although traditional a capella quartets are no longer in vogue, there are still quartets that perform in this style. Some switch from unaccompanied to accompanied vocals when they deem it necessary, and some just remain steadfast to the traditional style. Most of the members in the older traditional quartets are elderly gentlemen who tend to act as trainers for the younger members. It is through these cultural trainers that the continuity of this traditional black musical expression will maintain itself. The university singing movement, the community milieu, the new gospel songs, radio broadcasts, commercial recordings, the touring circuit, and popular culture have all had a collective influence on the evolution of the African American sacred quartet as a significant cultural unit. The nineteenth-century university jubilee quartets not only established the foundation for a tradition that preserved the heritage of the black spiritual, but they also gave birth to a musical style that provided the essence of the twentieth-century quartets. The jubilee quartets paved the way for the widespread acceptance of gospel quartets, and both of these in turn preserved stylistic influences that survived the crossover to secular music. The evolution of the African American vocal quartet has taken place over a century of adapting to a multitude of influences. Varying musical influences along with sociocultural, historical, and other environmental factors have helped to mold and redefine the quartet into its present form. Quartets have reacted creatively as the multitude of new conditions changed the course and influenced the development of quartet style, while at the same time evolving as part of the unbroken cultural chain in the African American community. In the New South, we can always find elements of the Old South, sometimes in redefined forms. The music that emerged in the South serves as a mirror in which certain aspects of southern society can be examined. Indeed, the music offers a multiplicity of insights into how people view their situation, and it makes possible a much fuller understanding of why it had to change periodically. In essence, popular culture as manifested in the gospel quartet musical genre can tell much about the nature of life in the South, issues and conditions of the music industry, and the people who created the art form.

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references Abbott, Lynn. 1983a. “The Humming Four and the Hawks.” Whiskey, Women and . . . 11 (June): n.p. ———. 1983b. “The Soproco Spiritual Singers: New Orleans Quartet Family Tree.” Monograph. New Orleans: Jean Lafitte National Historical Park. Anderson, Clara (leader and tenor singer for the Harps of Melody quartet). 1985. Interview with the author. Memphis, July 20. Bell, Larry (leader of First Revolution Gospel Quartet and gospel disc jockey at radio station WWOZ in New Orleans). 1987. Interview with the author. New Orleans, April 8. Broughton, Viv. 1985. Black Gospel: An Illustrated History of the Gospel Sound. Poole, Dorset: Blandford. Dixie Hummingbirds. 1978. “We’re Celebrating Fifty Years of Gospel.” Black Stars (November): 64 – 65. Dixon, Robert M. W., John Godrich, and Howard Rye, comps. 1997. Blues and Gospel Records, 1890 –1943. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Funk, Ray. 1985. “The Imperial Quintet.” Blues and Rhythm 9 (May): 4 –5. “Golden Gate in Washington.” 1941. Time 37 (January 27): 50. Jackson, Joyce Marie. 1996. “The Cultural Evolution of the African American Sacred Quartet.” In Saints and Sinners: Religion, Blues, and (D)evil in African American Music and Literature, ed. Robert Sacré. Liège, Belgium: Société Liègeoise de Musicologie. Levine, Lawrence W. 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Lornell, Kip. 1995. Happy in the Service of the Lord: Afro-American Sacred Vocal Harmony Quartets in Memphis. 2nd ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Maultsby, Portia. 1981a. “Afro-American Religious Music: A Study in Diversity.” Papers of the Hymn Society of America 35: 2 –9. ———. 1981b. “Gospel Quartets: A Source for Rhythm and Blues Styles.” Paper presented at Black American Quartet Traditions colloquium, sponsored by the Program in Black American Culture, Smithsonian Performing Arts Division, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., November 21. McCrary, Rev. Samuel (leader and second tenor for the Fairfield Four quartet). 1985. Interview with the author. Nashville, July 18. 170

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Offlee, Rev. Burnell J. (leader and manager of the Zion Travelers Spiritual Singers). 1983. Interview with the author. Baton Rouge, September 18. Oliver, Paul. 1984. Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ootsey, John (gospel promoter and former lead singer of the East Feliciana Quartet). 1984. Interview with the author. Baton Rouge, January 11. Rubman, Kerill. 1980. “From ‘Jubilee’ to ‘Gospel’ in Black Male Quartet Singing.” Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Salvo, Patrick, and Barbara Salvo. 1974. “Forty-Five Years of Gospel Music.” Sepia 23: 60 – 63. Seroff, Doug. 1981. “Black American Quartet Traditions.” Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Performing Arts, Program in Black American Culture. ———. 1982. “The Continuity of the Black Gospel Quartet Tradition.” Paper presented at the Conference on Sacred Music in the Black Church at Sunday School Publishing Board, Nashville, December 9. ———. 1983. “One Hundred Years of Black Religious Quartet Singing.” Paper presented at the Association for Recorded Sound Collections convention. Washington, Sherman (leader of the Zion Harmonizers Gospel Quartet and director of the gospel tent at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival). 1983. Interview with the author. New Orleans, September 8. Williams-Jones, Pearl. 1970. “Afro-American Gospel Music.” In Developmental Materials for a One-Year Course in African Music for the General Undergraduate Student, edited by Vada E. Butcher, 201–19. Washington, D.C.: College of Fine Arts, Howard University, and U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare.

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“The Tools of the Master” Southernists in Theoryland anne goodwyn jones

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few years ago, an issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism featured an article whose title had a proclamatory tone. “The Inevitability of Theory in the South” bespoke at once the absence of theory, its desirability, and its irresistible advent. The argument lacked the viciousness and the fantastic nostalgia of H. L. Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozart” (1920) but came out of certain Menckenesque assumptions: culturally sterile, the South cannot generate its own writing; only the insemination of ideas (one supposes from Paris or New Haven) can enable a shift towards (re)productivity. The author, Jefferson Humphries (himself a Yale-trained southerner), acknowledged in a footnote that he had “never thought of ” what the South could offer to theory, only what theory could offer to the South (“Inevitability,” 186n4).1 This is a claim familiar to scholars of the American South, and it is worth thinking about again.2 There can be no doubt that southern academic institutions have not been hotbeds of theory. While English graduate students elsewhere were reading Barthes and Derrida, we graduate students in the 1970s South (I was at UNC–Chapel Hill) read New Criticism, old historicism, and 1. Another version of this essay constitutes the introduction to Humphries’s edited volume, Southern Literature and Literary Theory. 2. See also Jones, “Contemporary Literary Theory” (2002), a shorter and significantly revised version of this essay, which was written first in the early 1990s. Since then, southernists have in fact written exciting, challenging, provocative, and often persuasive theoretical or theory-inflected articles and books on southern literature and culture. They are too numerous to name here, and only a few are discussed in the text. But see, for example, the constantly updated bibliography at the Web site for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (http://www.uark.edu/ua/sssl /). A search in 2004 using the term “theory” produced nearly three hundred annotated entries.

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bibliography. The elevation of southern history to the position of centrality it has occupied for decades depended on scholars like C. Vann Woodward’s moving to northern institutions and training nonsouthern graduate students whose interest in slavery came in part out of support for the Civil Rights movement. The study of southern literature, on the other hand, in the early 1990s still remained—with the exception of those working on Faulkner, women, and African American writers—a large, regional, and generally atheoretical industry. A glance at the newsletter of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature might elicit some surprise at the sheer quantity of work on southern literature that even today is written by southern scholars and published by southern journals and presses but hardly ever cited in national publications. And the emergence of centers of theory in the South—at Duke, Emory, Florida—has depended almost entirely on the importation of scholars neither raised nor trained nor interested in the South or southern studies. Yet in another sense, the absence of theory from the South has been a historical preoccupation of southerners born and trained. In the twentieth century alone, the liberal and the conservative traditions can be distinguished by their response to the absence of what has usually been called, in the discourse of southern literary criticism, not theory but “abstraction.” The Agrarians in I’ll Take My Stand believed that abstraction was a destructive, capitalist, northern habit that derived from the cash nexus and would, if not resisted, destroy the concreteness and personalism of the South. Lillian Smith, on the other hand, believed that the southern resistance to abstraction emerged from conflicts between southern commitments to Christian values and the realities of sexual, racial, and class oppression. The solution to the coexistence of a Christian sense of identity and an oppressive set of behaviors was, she observed, simply to not think. But there is no doubt that at least the antebellum South produced an abundance of explicit theory. Proslavery ideology theorized southern society as a hierarchy built upon rigidly maintained oppositions between races, classes, genders. Thus it is difficult to accept on the face of it Humphries’s assertion of the absence of theory from the South. The work of southern intellectual historians like Houston Baker, Drew Gilpin Faust, Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth FoxGenovese, Richard Gray, Richard King, Michael Kreyling, Michael O’Brien, and Stephen Stowe, to name only a few widely respected scholars, counters that

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claim as well. In fact, Mencken could make his claim that the beaux arts had deserted the South only by ignoring southern women writers (notably Ellen Glasgow) and discrediting southern African American culture. To talk about resistance to theory or the absence of theory anywhere in the academy in the 1990s had an air of quaintness about it. Yet Humphries’s representation of the South as virgin territory offers an opportunity to rethink the uses of theory, both in the general sense and in the more particular sense Humphries intended. Humphries saw “various forms of post-structural [literary theory]” as the inevitable next step for southern literary studies. I believe this step incurs certain risks, which I hope to elaborate on here. The most immediate has to do with the risks of essentialism to which, ironically, poststructuralism itself alerts us, and which any appeal to a categorical identity entails—in this case, the categories “South” and “theory.” To call for theory in the South is rhetorically to construct the South (and theory) as unified, stable entities organized in and by binary oppositions. Yet binary thinking is a practice that has historically and explicitly characterized the most elitist and repressive forms of southern theory. The specific risk “theory” runs in “the South,” then, is to operate in a homologous rather than a critical relation to the southern tradition it hopes to question, repeating rather than exposing its problematics. Certainly on the face of it, the South seems likely to be a lively partner to contemporary critical theory (as does theory to the South), neither resisting the union nor merging into identity but making a “happy marriage of speaking and hearing” like Quentin’s and Shreve’s in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! The history of the region is marked by cultural practices that invite readings through various post-structural theory. Derrida might have invented the South: the logic of dichotomy and its rigidly bounded and hierarchically organized categories have quite overtly characterized the dominant public written discourse of the region at least since the early nineteenth century. Antebellum proslavery essays easily and unembarrassedly employed such thinking processes as they worked over and constructed species, gender, class, race, region. Faced with a palpable cultural instability—the proposed elimination of their peculiar institution, slavery—literate and privileged southerners deliberately constructed an ideology that effaced this instability by rationalizing slavery as a positive good, even the cornerstone of southern culture, and that produced an apparently orderly, coherent, hierarchical, dichotomous idea of the South in which every being had its proper place. The obsessive quality of this southern desire for sepa174

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rations and the fear of contamination should they fail is as apparent in Faulkner as it is in proslavery texts; its rejection is represented in Lillian Smith’s and Anne Braden’s resistance to “walls” and, again, in Faulkner’s ambivalent texts. Eugene Genovese has succinctly written, “[S]lavery and all class stratification derived from the prior divine command that women submit to men— racial subordination derived from class subordination, which derived from gender subordination” (Genovese, 127). True or not, certainly gender took a foundational place in the construction of slave-master ideology, and I will use it throughout this essay to exemplify both the Old South’s ideological exclusions and the surprising lacunae that appear in even the most contemporary southern cultural studies.3 Among the proslavery apologists, William Harper attributed to the system of slavery what he saw as one of the contingent benefits of rigid dichotomization: “[T]he tendency of our institution [slavery] is to elevate the female character, as well as that of the other sex, and for similar reasons. In other states of society there is no well defined limit to separate virtue and vice. . . . Here, there is that certain and marked line, above which there is no toleration or allowance for any approach to license of manners or conduct, and she who falls below it, will fall far below even the slave” (118 –19). George Fitzhugh at least in this instance spoke for many when he said that “slave society . . . is a series of subordinations. . . . [F]athers, masters, husbands, wives, children, and slaves, not being equals, rivals, competitors and antagonists, best promote each other[’]s selfish interests when they do most for those above or beneath them” (291).4 Thus would the South appear fruitful for feminist theoretical work as well: where else are class and race so palpably joined with gender? 3. Class or sexuality could serve the purpose equally well, because both categories of analysis have been used less than one might hope or expect; though race has received more attention, it has been seen in only two colors, black and white, with black carrying the weight of “race.” 4. The place of the proslavery arguments in southern ideology and experience is a heavily contested arena. As Louis D. Rubin points out in The Edge of the Swamp, southernists who differ as fundamentally as Lewis Simpson and Eugene Genovese nevertheless share an assumption as to the centrality of proslavery arguments to an understanding of southern culture; George Fitzhugh in particular has, for Rubin, received too much attention from Simpson, Genovese, C. Vann Woodward, and David Donald. Rubin’s position is that these writings were desperate, evanescent, occasional, and did not represent either the majority of southerners or the continuing thinking of a putative “Master Class.” For him, southern-

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If the South was so right for theory, why was the wedding postponed so long? Surely one explanatory route passes through the multiple and political uses of the term “South” itself. An effect of the totalizing word “South” has been to produce an imaginary unity, coherence, and identity for the region, an identity that, though contested (as between Wilbur J. Cash and C. Vann Woodward) remains implicitly white and male. Both southerners and nonsoutherners have historically constructed “the South” in dichotomous relation to the North, from the early-nineteenth-century abolitionists and apologists for slavery through Reconstruction, the reconstructed New South, the Agrarians on the verge of the 1930s, and even, some would say, to the present. Moreover, to ensure its stability over time, southerners with discursive control have gone about naturalizing and essentializing the South’s using, for example, the “natural” and “essential” qualities of southern womanhood to carry out the project of regional stabilization. Michael O’Brien concludes his study of the idea of the American South with the note that “ironically [given the fractures of the modern period from 1920 to 1941], a community was created, for men [sic] could talk about different things while imagining that they discussed the same entity [the South]. Thus, for those who made the effort of self-awareness, the center could hold” (O’Brien, 226 –27). Such an impulse appears throughout southern literary criticism. A representative example comes from Hugh Holman: “The southern talent has found its themes in a combination of regional tradition and the inner self and its subjects have come from the history and the soil of the South” (193, my italics); 5 a more famous example appears, of course, in W. J. Cash’s totalizing title, The Mind of the South. More recent southernists than Holman— O’Brien among them—have advanced the notion that the South as a cultural idea is a linguistic effect rather than (at least more interestingly than) a material and referential reality. Richard Gray uses Roland Barthes’s understanding of myth in ers were as bourgeois as any other Americans, but their dream of success took the form of a slave plantation. Larry Tise has argued that southern proslavery thinking had northern origins. My own impression is that the continuities of the particular kinds of dichotomous thinking apparent in the proslavery writings well into the twentieth century and on the part of writers from classes other than the “Master Class” suggests that the proslavery apologists were, though possibly extreme, not aberrant, but that southern culture became regionally distinct in its retention of these binaries. 5. Interestingly, although he concludes his book with this language, Holman begins the volume with a thesis about the South’s “instability.”

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order to develop the thesis that “generations of Southerners have . . . been engaged not so much in writing about the South as in writing the South” (xii). Gray locates two narratives— one patriarchal and one populist—that have generated the history of ideas of the South. Yet even in these more sophisticated remotivations of the term, “the South” continues to be seen as white and masculine, a view encouraged and enabled by reading almost exclusively the words and works of white men. Thus the term “the South” is still conventionally understood, even among southern historians, to mean the South of literate and frequently conservative white men, the South that lost the war. This has been true even when theory has found its way “South.” For, as I have suggested, even some of the most inventive and theoretically alert recent southern cultural studies—we will look at some momentarily—replicate certain assumptions of the culture they study: they repress the question of gender and frequently those of class, sexuality, and even race. Indeed, the very basis for the historically dominant southern organicist ideology—if Genovese is right, in gender and the family—runs the risk today of being reobscured as a critical and complex subject for study. Those who have chosen to use the term “South” or call themselves “southern,” then, have often enough been those who most resist a relationship with theory, in particular theory that addresses questions of power, gender, class, and race. But those who embrace “theory,” I am arguing, can be and have been hoist by the same petard.6 The principal risk of the marriage between contemporary critical theory and the South, as I see it, is that of homology. Audre Lorde has warned against using the “tools of the master”: one can begin to think like him (Lorde, 99). Such a warning takes on particular resonance for students of the American South, where the 6. To expose the ideological sources and continuing uses of the construction “the South” is not, however, to disclaim entirely its usefulness as a signifier, or even to disclaim its accuracy in representing (in some way) historical referent(s). That is, it is not to say that the South “exists exclusively as a mental construction” (my emphasis), as Bertram Wyatt-Brown charges (“The Real and Mythical Souths,” 229). It is rather to shift the focus of attention from “the South’s” putative referent(s) to its historical development as a linguistic construct and especially to the interests its deployment as a signifier has served and continues to serve, even in theoretical work that aims to deconstruct it. At the same time, those who have been excluded from the conventional understandings of “the South” are now reclaiming the term and redefining its meanings; an example is lesbian songwriter Meg Christian’s “My Southern Home.”

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word “master” has played so critical a part in the discourses of slavery, race, gender, and self-representation. Civil war has been brewing among southern literary scholars for some time. The initial salvos from the “old guard” (now spoken of, perhaps unfortunately, as the “Rubin generation”) came in the form not of direct assault but of a kind of social death: theory was simply not discussed. Later, the existence of “theory” was acknowledged, if not embraced, in the form of a parodic journal, Uneeda Review, edited by Louis D. Rubin Jr., William Harmon, and colleagues at Chapel Hill. Ripostes to these salvos now are coming from a self-named “younger generation” of theoretically inclined southernists who want to set a new agenda and new terms for the study of southern literature. Michael Kreyling’s version of these terms would “reopen the relational aspects of our work and admit the elements of dissensus (race, class, gender, ideology, history) that the orthodoxy has excluded” (“The Extra,” 94). Kreyling decries the absence of those elements—along with their theoretical base—from Rubin’s History of Southern Literature. Thus the appearance of Humphries’s Southern Literature and Literary Theory, with its momentous three-letter conjunction and the magisterial generality of its nouns, seemed to offer what has been absent. Yet if the direction of southern cultural studies follows the de Manian agenda now being generated in Humphries’s collection, the work of Kreyling’s “dissensus,” always at risk in the South, may remain silenced. The claims of Humphries’s title and introduction at first suggest an alliance with, rather than opposition to, the position of dissensus. Humphries writes that “for me, the fusion of southern studies with European modes of close reading represents the final stage of escape from the organic nationalism of the Old South” (xiii). For him, de Man’s “later work is clearly a reaction against the nationalistic organicism of [his] early reviews, and a monumental intellectual edifice against the destructive, delusional power of organicist ideologies of all kinds,” such as that of the American South. Humphries’s point is that whereas such ideologies depend on the assumption that language can reveal “unmediated Truth,” de Man’s mature project was to show that such claims are always “lies” (xiv). “Great” and “true” literature, for Humphries, if read closely, “erodes any such pretension, including, if necessary, its own, to reveal an unmediated truth” (xiv). However, “escape” from ideology is never entirely possible, though awareness and change are; indeed, Humphries’s recuperation of the terms “great” and “true” here exemplifies the failure to “escape ideology” 178

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during the very attempt to do so. Further, the homologous relation of deconstruction to the dominant southern discourse, which Humphries correctly perceives, does not free us but on the contrary sets up unnecessary obstacles to awareness and change, obstacles that need to be acknowledged and acted upon in order to effect any move towards dissensus in southern critical practice. It is disturbing, for example, that in order to set up a parallel to de Man’s experience with Nazism, Humphries chooses to name the dominant southern discourse “southern organic nationalism.” The phrase, though accurate, silences southern historians’ more familiar terms “patriarchy” and “paternalism” as descriptors of southern ideological practice. In doing this, Humphries’s choice repeats the repression of the question of gender (and all else that “patriarchy” implies) that served to found “the South.” Another term for Humphries’s bugbear, “revelation of unmediated truth,” is referentiality. For Humphries, deconstruction works against the power of “organicist ideologies” by exposing as lies all their claims to refer to truth and reality. But arguably, southern writing already has a sometimes lamentable history of preferring the self-conscious play of signification to the claims of referentiality. In the South, the story is what matters. One thinks, for example, of the verbal play of the southwest humorists and the “brag,” or of Katherine Anne Porter’s and William Faulkner’s deliberate and extensive self-fictionalizing. Addie Bundren sees the split between sign and referent when she thinks “how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other” (As I Lay Dying, 173). Indeed, as Addie’s words suggest, the tradition of the play of signification in the South—like the tradition of storytelling as a response to abstraction— arguably has served to distract from a “terrible” historical materiality. It is tempting in this vein to consider the South as the site of an anti-Puritanism whose “postmodern” insistence on the independence of sign and referent has a long and discouraging history. For as is apparent in the proslavery texts, “the South” has a history of making linguistic claims, particularly about race and gender, that become and remain, despite awareness of material counterevidence, the ruling discourse; the construction of a biracial society out of a racially diverse population is only one example. In “Dry September,” Faulkner’s story of a black man who is lynched after a white woman apparently accuses him of rape, a character asks, “Did [the rape] really happen?” The soldier McLendon replies, 179

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“Happen? What the hell difference does it make? Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?” (Collected Stories, 171–72).7 If there is a place in which the play of signification loses in the battle with the heavy weight of material history, it is the American South. When Southern Literature and Literary Theory is placed beside other recent works deploying theory in some relation to southern culture, its tokenism with regard to gender and race takes on more disturbingly familiar meanings. Indeed, the near-erasure of people of color and white women from theoretical work on the South constitutes a pattern in even the most innovative works in southern intellectual and cultural history of the past thirty years. The otherwise extraordinarily imaginative and intelligent—and theoretically informed— work of Richard King in A Southern Renaissance (1980) dismisses southern white women (with the exception of Lillian Smith) from consideration because they “were not concerned primarily with the larger cultural, racial, and political themes that I take as my focus” (9). King omits blacks entirely “because for them the Southern family romance [King’s paradigm] was hardly problematic. It could be and was rejected out of hand.” In The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919 –1945 (1982), Daniel Singal developed the thesis that southern modernism involved the overturning of hierarchical Victorian dichotomies such as civilized/savage, human/animal. In doing so he brilliantly crossed the boundaries separating literary from historical texts. But he did not consider man/woman, and the sole woman he discusses is Ellen Glasgow. Though my own contribution to that “turning point” in southern critical history, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859 –1936 (1981), considered southern women writers for the first time as a category of analysis, it left out all but white middle-class women. Such exclusions make sense only within definitions of literary and intellectual history that these writers elsewhere make it their project to reject. For their— our—innovations rested in part on the decision to move beyond generic definitions of intellectual appropriateness, and thus to read nonliterary texts as constitutive of the Southern Renaissance and to read literature as intellectual history. Yet their theoretical apparatuses generate these exclusionary 7. It was chilling, at least to me, to hear George W. Bush echo McLendon’s logic in his attempt to justify the “preemptive” war against Iraq. The logic has proved as brutally flawed in the real world of 2004 as it was in Faulkner’s 1931 fiction.

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choices because they are homologous at crucial moments with dominant southern ideological patterns. In the case of King, the choice of the Freudian family romance makes a nice fit with southern men’s writings because both suppress the role of the mother in the oedipal story (“at the center of the family romance, in its patriarchal expression, was the father. . . . The family romance thus pitted son against father, and often joined grandson and grandfather” [34 –35]). But such a theory cannot explain women’s writing, as it dictates the exclusion of women from the start, and it also excludes women writers on the doubtful basis of a supposed lack of concern in their work for “larger themes.” Because Singal’s theory of Victorian dichotomies omits the dichotomy of gender, neither the issue of gender nor a sample of actual women writers is available for analysis. More recent and quite brilliant work by Michael Kreyling (1998), Patricia Yaeger (2000), and Jon Smith (2004) suffers, where it does suffer, from failures of memory. Proclaiming a desire to “interrogate the positivist position” of earlier critics of the Rubin generation who “viewed southern literature as an untroubled rendition of the ‘facts’ of southern life” (Kreyling, Inventing, xii), to “dynamite the rails” of the official narrative in order to “desegregate southern literary studies” (Yaeger, 34), or to finally find a “way out of the dead-end binarism between Northern center and Southern margin” (Smith, 146), at key moments they forget rather than remembering the work of precursors, and thus, instead of building on that work, inevitably repeat some of the very “errors” they too hope to erase: Kreyling can’t avoid a certain positivism and white maleishness in his analysis; Yaeger repeats the black /white binarism of “the South” as the rails twist around the trees; Smith, like Yaeger, invents a literary critical past—anything written before the millennium, roughly—that is as blank and lifeless as Mencken’s imaginary Sahara. “To see all these new models for Southern literature and culture, after 70 years of largely agrarian cultural narcissism, is nothing less than intoxicating,” he writes (159). Indeed, it takes a long time, a willing memory, a bit of resistance to the intoxication of the idea of the new, and a lot of reading and thinking to find the continuities as well as the discontinuities of southern literary critical history. Jefferson Humphries’s introduction to the volume Southern Literature and Literary Theory demonstrates a similarly disabling homology between theory and object of analysis. As part of the southern tradition it claims to deconstruct, the introduction operates within a rhetoric of dichotomies and bellicosity, in a white and male universe that invents its own history. The Yale Journal of Criti181

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cism essay, apparently an earlier or differing version of the book’s introduction, alluded mysteriously to a senior southernist’s withdrawing his introduction to the forthcoming Southern Literature and Literary Theory, and to critics “lining up to denounce” the book. Those allusions were removed from later volumes, along with the invective calling members of the “Rubin generation” “shrilly ideological,” “overwrought and slightly hysterical” and foretelling an impending “battle royal” of sons against fathers (“Inevitability,” 175). But the arguments and the rhetorical strategies in the essay remain largely untouched in the introduction. Here Humphries establishes a plural persona, a “we” that he characterizes primarily in opposition to “our elders” of the “Rubin generation.” The introduction proceeds by making a number of claims and disclaimers on behalf of this “we,” which amount, predictably, to the large claim of a coup within southern literary study. “We” have a credo: we have a “different sense of history” from the Rubinites; for them, the Civil War was the predominant emotional fact, whereas for us it is the Civil Rights movement. (In fact, Humphries ignores the “immediate experience” of the Rubin generation, which was obviously not the “devastation of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”) “We” believe in theory but not in old-fashioned “history as literary study.” Lewis Simpson emerges alone among the Rubinites unscathed. Indeed, the essay begins with Simpson’s words and ends with a dedication to him: “he has identified himself as a member of the Rubin generation, but I will claim that in spirit, he is one of us” (Humphries, Southern Literature, xvii). In almost a parody of Bloomian anxiety of influence, Simpson’s understanding of southern literature and Woodward’s of southern history are (mis)read and then adopted by Humphries. Humphries paraphrases Simpson’s argument thus: “literature can thrive only on an immediate, a present sense of tension” (xii), which Humphries then casts in opposition to the “fainter, more ethereal, more purely intellectual” tensions that constitute the “historical” (xvii; de Man’s critique of immediacy seems to have been forgotten). Simpson actually wrote that “when the literary imagination of the South at last became openly responsive to [my emphasis] the tensions it experienced, it was capable of creating [two scenes from Faulkner novels]” (251). The difference between an “immediate, a present sense of tension” and a capacity to be “openly responsive to” that tension is the difference between the intoxication with feeling new and a capacity to respond to that feeling of newness in various ways, including emotional distance and analysis. C. Vann Woodward’s mediating voice remains unacknowledged throughout the 182

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introduction, but Humphries’s argument that southern and European minds “merge” because both are “grounded in loss and defeat” either has been reinvented here, in ignorance of the past, or comes from The Burden of Southern History. Finally, to continue to see “the South” as “grounded in loss and defeat” exposes a continuing commitment to yet another white idea of the South— southern slaves did not in general construct happy myths of the Old South, nor did most of them see its loss as a defeat. In these ways, then, Southern Literature and Literary Theory repeats southern ideology at the very moment of its claims to escape it. To set up an intellectual battleground, with good and evil arrayed on the appropriate sides; to construe the battle as intergenerational, one of sons against fathers; to exclude women and blacks in fact while claiming— chivalrously?—the opposite: all these smack less of the Rubin generation than of the “organicism” of the Old South—the tradition that Simpson and Rubin and others had spent their careers coming to terms with. Their terms may well be unsatisfactory, but Humphries’s terms, far from “crossing the threshold beyond ideology,” reimplant southern ideology under the name of theory. It has been argued to the point of cliché that southerners simply hate theory, which if true surely must give pause to hope of a happy marriage with it. In Tell about the South, Fred Hobson offers the “definition of the ‘representative’ Southerner. . . . he [sic] is conservative, religious, and suspicious of science and progress, he loves the land, has a sense of tradition and a sense of place, and he prefers the concrete to the abstract” (13, my italics). Such a notion is familiar from Cash as well: the southerner is grounded in place and time, in concretion, and distrusts theory and abstraction. A central and repeated opposition in Agrarianism is that between abstraction and concretion; abstraction is associated with heady theoretical notions about society (such as sociology produces, along with its political allies), notions that Agrarians claimed ignore the individual and the interpersonal relation in their preoccupation with the general and the mass. Yet Hobson notices, and I agree, that the South’s persistent historical rejection of the abstract contradicts its historical adulation of abstract notions like honor and duty, southern womanhood, or “the South” itself. Indeed, an ideology of hierarchies, dichotomies, categories of persons, and rigid definitional boundaries is obviously abstract; ideas of southern “concretion,” “particularism,” and “sense of place” are likewise abstract. I’ll Take My Stand famously begins with the statement that the distinction between “Southern” and “American” 183

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can best be represented in the phrase “Agrarian versus Industrial” (xxxvii). To show his ideal man’s hatred for theory, Donald Davidson once asked: “’What do such abstractions [as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] mean when he [sic; the “Southwesterner”] strides away from office or field, with the sun on his shoulders, and looks at the hills?” (Hobson, 224). Yet Davidson’s effort in this question to supplant the discourse of theory with that of concretion by using an image falls into narrative’s “abstractions,” its own obvious clichés of diction, metaphor, and plot. It is not possible, then, to claim in any simple way that “the South” hates or hated theory. Rather, it battled the abstractions it hated with those that pleased it. Indeed, the term “abstraction” seems to have been deployed in various ways in dominant southern texts. It seems usually to imply (and resist) a static rule or code, an ideological premise, an axiom, permanent, inflexible, and unbeatable— except by the subversive work of concretion or by a counteraxiom, producing a battle of categories, such as those between sectionalism and regionalism, Nashville and Chapel Hill, literature and sociology, a New Critical aesthetic and the aesthetic of a Kenneth Burke or Edmund Wilson.8 Yet “abstraction” can also mean a method of analytic practice that can question old truths and construct new knowledge. It is this sense—a meaning implied in the Agrarians’ distaste for the “abstractions” of sociology—that “the South” most feared. It knew how to fight within a rhetoric of bellicose dichotomies, or how to distract, confuse, and smother the enemy with concretion, but not how to engage in a form of thought whose method was based on process and dialogue, and whose outcome was not determined. Put differently (if repetitively), the preferred theoretical practice in “the South” has operated in a homologous relation to the objects of theory it has constructed: static, bounded, and fixed. The theory of the New Criticism (formal analysis) and its object (a carefully bounded work of art), for example, are homologous; New Criticism and Agrarianism are both homologous to organic social theory and to the ideology of Southern Womanhood. But that essentialized “South” of Humphries’s title has deconstructed itself already; “the South” is moving already into this second, more productive mode of abstraction. Although southern literary study may in the past have constituted a “literary secession” (Kreyling, 84), insurrection has broken out within the ranks. So strong is post-structuralist theory’s toehold in the South that even 8. See Tate, 50.

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the most innocuous single-author conference—such as a celebration at the University of Maryland of Katherine Anne Porter’s hundredth birthday in the early 1990s— can fall at some point into angry attacks on theory and chivalric defenses of the sacredness of authorship. Even— or especially—in the South, “the South” no longer holds. For meanwhile, within a national rather than a regional context, the study of southern literature occupies a disturbing position. It is the site of a silent ideological battle over the meaning and in fact the very existence of “southern literature” as a category of analysis. If Humphries’s work was an effort to resuscitate “the South” for the international literary critical scene, other commitments of contemporary critical theory threaten a de facto erasure both of specific texts of southern literature and of the organizing concept itself. Such an erasure was evident in new, progressive anthologies such as the first edition of Paul Lauter et al.’s Heath Anthology of American Literature and Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism. Both dealt with the problem of the South, in effect, by ignoring it. In The Gender of Modernism a large cobweb diagram representing literary relations among Anglo-American modernists includes no white southerners (even Faulkner) and places southern African Americans only in a Harlem context. In the sections of the first Heath anthology entitled “Issues and Visions in Pre–Civil War America”—“Indian Voices,” “The Literature of Abolition,” “Women’s Voices,” “Voices from the Southwest,” “A Concord Individualist”— not a whisper appeared from the fire-eating proslavery South. In the section in the same anthology called “The Modern Period,” the Harlem Renaissance was the category in which southerners like Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Anne Spencer appeared; the Southern Literary Renaissance did not exist, nor does the Fugitive-Agrarian–New Criticism axis. Subsequent editions of the Heath anthology, however, have included much southern material, including antebellum proslavery excerpts.9 Southern literature, qua southern literature, is largely ignored by contemporary critical discourse as well as anthologies. Though the Faulkner industry is 9. In response to a subsequent listserv query about texts for teaching southern women writers, Paul Lauter wrote this: “It’s worth thinking about whether one wants to do any of the ante-bellum, essentially racist novels like The Planter’s Northern Bride (of which there’s an excerpt in the Heath). I have mixed feelings myself, but there’s an argument to be made that it’s helpful for students to see what a writer like [Frances Ellen Watkins] Harper is writing in to.” Subsequent editions of the Heath Anthology have justified the inclusion of

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perhaps the New South of criticism, little Faulkner criticism addresses specifically regional questions and concerns; the same can be said of work on other nationalized texts like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, with the exception of the occasional piece such as Paul Bové’s Gramscian analysis of the Agrarians in Boundary 2. And as an academic course of study, southern literature is taught primarily at southern institutions. Such exclusions are entirely comprehensible. To reprint or to teach the arguments for slavery, or the rhetoric of racism, misogyny, and sectionalism, or even Mencken’s racist, sexist, classist, and eugenicist antisectionalism, is only to expose yet another generation to their pernicious influence. Moreover, even the very term “Southern Literature” carries historical baggage. Even naming a course, then, can be perceived as participation in, even ratification of, a bleak and violent history. For the region developed its strongest sense of identity as the South during the antebellum period when slavery was deeply contested; in a sense, the defense of slavery invented the South. The construction of the Southern Literary Renaissance as a phenomenon of literary history, too, came largely from the pens of those like Allen Tate, thought in terms, and wrote in defense, of a particular southern identity. Some courses in, and anthologies of, southern literature continue to bear the marks of this canon. The introduction to a frequently reprinted anthology, Stories of the Modern South, suggests the Vanderbilt Agrarians were the “single intellectual phenomenon” in the modern South, ignoring Howard Odum and the liberal sociologists in Chapel Hill. Interestingly, male and, later, female African American voices entered the southern canon before those of progressive white women and men. Southern white women who wrote about union organizing and the Communist party, who wrote of sexual (heterosexual or lesbian) experience or Civil Rights movement activism, or who combined stylistic with gender experimentation, have only recently received attention from southernists.10 And though other white women

“painful” and even “abhorrent” texts because ignoring them runs the risk of historical denial and because, through their similarities to contemporary racist arguments, they can teach us about ourselves (Lauter, Heath Anthology, 4th ed., 1:1370). 10. See, for example, the modernist work of Olive Tilford Dargan, Frances Newman, Myra Page, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Evelyn Scott, and the recent work of Minnie Bruce Pratt and Mab Segrest.

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writers like Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Flannery O’Connor, have received ample attention from southernists, in the past their texts were read formally and stylistically, rarely against the grain. More gloomily, the role of scapegoat for the nation that the stereotyped South and stereotypical southerners have played for so long has disappeared neither from the popular imagination nor from, were we to be honest, the unspoken premises of many in the academy. While southern literary study takes place within a regional disciplinary history whose New Critical theoretical assumptions, though now contested, have sustained the sense of difference and distinctiveness that makes southern literature so apparently distasteful to outsiders, the study of southern history does not. As a discipline, the practice of southern history does not have the provincial and conservative stamp that continues at times to mark the study, or at least the perception of the study, of southern literature. Key figures in southern history are located across the country. Southern history (qua southern) is standard fare for nonsouthern textbooks, publishing houses, and national journals. Major thinkers in southern history have come out of Marxist (Eugene Genovese) and liberal (C. Vann Woodward) as well as conservative (Genovese redivivus) traditions. The success of social history redefined and expanded the range of usable texts for historians. Yet while historians developed major theoretical studies of the South, literary scholars speculated on, for example, the “absence” of “good literature” before Faulkner, limiting the definition of texts by a New Critical norm. But most of these southern historians focused on the history of men—slave and free, black and white—and ignored questions of gender. Women’s history, meanwhile, developed—like women’s literature— out of a northeastern cradle. Southern women’s history, with the exception of the lone work of Anne Firor Scott and her predecessor Julia Cherry Spruill, remained unwritten. And when it came to be written, it would initially use theoretical models that worked best in the northeast, such as the assumption of a women’s culture developing out of the bourgeois assignment of women to domesticity. Yet, unlike the study of southern women’s literature, southern women’s history has by now established itself as a significant academic specialty. The Southern Association of Women Historians was organized and began holding major national conferences in the 1980s. No organization like SAWH exists yet for literary scholars, as far as I know, and the more visible challenges to the southern literary canon have come 187

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from white men, who tend at times to engage themselves in a battle of sons against fathers, thus repeating the exclusion of women. But other work to reclaim and redefine the South is being done by black, white, Hispanic, and American Indian scholars, and courses on southern women writers attract students at a number of institutions. Younger scholars especially—Barbara Ladd, Jon Smith, and Deborah Cohn, for example—have begun to place the South in postcolonial and Caribbean contexts, thus opening new understandings of power, race, and the very boundaries of the region. Both black and white women in the American South have historically offered a difficult and problematic site for resistance to the traditional cast of their region. Conflicting loyalties to gender and to race have frequently ended, for black southern women, in a choice for African American traditions at the cost of the always uncertain idea of a cross-racial women’s community. The pleasures of privilege, both material and ideological, have muted the desires of even the most potentially liberal white women to break out of historical constraints on thought and association. In a pinch, the risks of transgressing the profoundly effective boundaries first enunciated in the defense of slavery have appeared to weigh more heavily in the minds of most southern women than the benefits of breaking free. Margaret Mitchell spoke for a majority when she said that living in the South comes at the cost of following the rules, but that she was willing to pay the price. Yet the desire to find a discernible tradition of what might conceivably be called feminism in the South or, failing that, to understand its absence, has since the 1970s produced the context and motivation for much of the scholarship on white southern women; a stake in what Alice Walker called “womanism” has simultaneously differentiated, motivated, and provided the context for scholarship on black southern women. Inevitably—as the distinction between womanism and feminism suggests—this scholarship has been marked by the signs of the struggles it seeks to elucidate. In fact, of the South’s favorite dichotomies (South/North, white/black, aristocrat/poor white), the dichotomy constructing and naturalizing gender is complicated in the South by several factors. Bertram Wyatt-Brown has argued that the master class of dominant white men was shaped in a system of honor that depended not upon inner light or conscience but upon community approval and reputation. Historians still struggle to understand whether and, if so, how, the slaveholding South retained an economy (and a superstructure) that, 188

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though situated within developing bourgeois capitalism, was not significantly penetrated by it. C. Vann Woodward has argued that the South’s experience of loss and defeat distinguishes it from the rest of the country and aligns it with the rest of the world. If these various arguments (and others) for southern distinctiveness hold force, then clearly the South produced a subject position for its dominant white men that differed from that of the Puritan or the capitalist entrepreneur: “Self-Reliance” could not have been produced in the South, where particularism replaced individualism as a social ideology. And when southern white men were outvoted, invaded, defeated, dominated, and thus located in a position they saw as feminine, they responded by appropriating useful aspects of “the feminine” to themselves in order to consolidate and sustain their regional position as master. “The South’s” key representations of “Woman” have swerved away from realism into geographical and sculptural images, situating the (always white) Southern Woman in the discourses of nature and art. It is a cliché to represent the Southern Woman as a marble statue; in an often reported variation on the theme, Carl Carmer tells of the “Key-Ice” ceremony among southern college fraternity men: “[F]our acolytes attend a long cake of ice. Wheeled in on a cart, it glimmers in the torches’ flare. Then the leader . . . lifts a glass cup of water and begins a toast that runs: ‘To Woman, lovely Woman of the Southland, as pure and chaste as this sparkling water, as cold as this gleaming ice, we lift this cup, and we pledge our hearts and our lives to the protection of her virtue and chastity’” (quoted in Jones, Tomorrow, 12 –13). Faulkner gets to the basics in Mosquitoes when he has Gordon Fairchild sculpt a marble statue that is “motionless and passionately eternal—the virginal breastless torso of a girl, headless, armless, legless,” a piece that gives “you . . . untarnished and high and clean that sense of . . . space encompassed” (11). In Flags in the Dust and Light in August (and elsewhere) the Southern Woman appears as a (sometimes cracked) urn; 11 in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee shifts from a Keatsian urn to a salt shaker. Such literally monumental representations construct a “woman” who is self-contained, immobile, a lifeless object of beauty lacking desire and intention. Arguing for the essentially reverential internal analysis of the formal characteristics of an artifact that is clearly bounded, truth bearing (but inca11. See David Minter’s chapter “The Self ’s Own Lamp” for an excellent discussion of Faulkner’s urn and the feminine.

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pable of referentiality), dehistoricized, and mythologized, the New Criticism replicated in each respect “the Southern Woman.” Indeed, art, woman, and “the South” all demand the same chivalric attention, attention that constructs and ratifies a feeling of order and control on the part of the critic. John Crowe Ransom’s deployment of representations first of Woman and then of women in The World’s Body takes a more disturbing turn in this regard. The poet, he argues at first, “wants only to know the untechnical homely fulness of the world.” But moderns, “scarred veterans [must] . . . re-enter . . . [that world’s body] in the violence of return and regeneration.” This world’s body must still “impress [poets]” by its “thickness, stubbornness, and power” in order to earn “respect, and then, if then, love.” Apparently the Southern Woman’s “virtue and chastity” are now to be assaulted rather than protected (possibly as a sign of postchivalric virility or punishment for her thickness); nevertheless, she continues her historical function of meeting the needs of the (male) poet. In “The Poet as Woman,” Ransom claims that “man distinguishes himself from woman by intellect, but he should keep it feminized,” enjoining the appropriation of the feminine while for the rest of the essay attacking the writings of Edna St. Vincent Millay and a “woman critic, [who is] satisfied with the effects of a woman poet” (The World’s Body, 77, 79 – 80). Characterizing Millay’s poetry with words like overdone, pretty, weak, trifling, literary, Ransom concludes with an argument that “there need not be an incompatibility between the man of intellect and the man of imagination” (101) neatly rejecting the works of the woman poet as the worst of femininity, while claiming the best of the feminine (the “imagination”) for the male poet, who writes by, in effect, raping the body of the world. Equally clearly, the Southern Woman can be and has been used to further the ideological designs of her creators, such as white supremacy and the lynching of black men, for which her “virtue and chastity” are central. (The work of southern women to challenge these designs, as in the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, is still too little known.) 12 While “Woman” has thus occupied a crucial and very visible place in southern theoretical self-fashioning, and while the “feminine” has been strategically appropriated, “the South” has opened to actual women a very narrow window of op12. See Jacquelyn Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry.

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portunity. White women of privilege, when they have not acted out “the South’s” fantasies of traditional femininity, have mimicked (southern) male habits of command and control in limited (often domestic) arenas, in a context of ultimate deference to male power, and arguably at the cost of their sexuality. This privilege produced an anomalous and contradictory historical subject position for certain white women, as deauthorized authorities, and thus selfnamed as both slave mistresses and slaves. Class distinctions in the ideology of white southern womanhood relegated sexual desire to lower-class women and then blamed them for exercising it. Gender for African Americans in the South is complicated still further by the mutual insistence of dominant white gender patterns and surviving African gender patterns. But if the space for what Paul Bové calls “tracing the concrete history of the discourses and practices of our critical institutions” is narrow in “the South,” that for feminism or womanism is even narrower. In this essay I have argued so far that much of the current work framed by theory, despite its provocations and resistances to “the Rubin tradition,” continues to be deeply marred by its similarities to the South it critiques. An exclusive focus on the “fathers” and a tendency to use the occasional woman as a site of idealization (ignoring all others), for example, suggests the chivalry that plays such a critical part in the ideas and practices that constitute the tradition under question. Thus the canon revision that we are seeing thanks to these writers means including more texts by educated white men: the boundaries of literary genre breached, those of race, class, and gender remain. Feminist critics will argue that an understanding of the ideological and historical position of women and of men is essential to unraveling the nexus of mutually dependent ideas about race, class, and gender in the southern tradition. Students of a region whose dominant discourse has characterized its own identity as female (lovely, pure, vulnerable, in need of protection) and has historically been located in the position of the female (colonization, invasion, penetration, marginalization), and yet whose sexist practices and stake in male dominance are notorious, can hardly take seriously any analysis that repeats the historical mystification of or the simple absence of the question of women, men, and gender. The work of Kaja Silverman and Eve Sedgwick is particularly promising here. Is the state of southern literary (if not historical) scholarship (only) a sign of

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southern belatedness? To answer positively would suggest a single homogeneous, top-down, and smoothly progressive model of American critical practice, with the South in its familiar place at the end of the line. And such a model represses context, the local that calls national generalizations into question. Yet if the South is in fact on a distinctive course and not merely in the intellectual slow lane, what is that course? What has been, is, and could be theory’s relation to it? And what could southern studies in several disciplines, to answer Humphries, contribute to theory? When (and if ) traditional southernists enter theory, they do so out of a regional historical context that has made certain choices more likely than others. For reasons that I hope are clear, more traditional “southerners” are likely to prefer deconstructionist ideas like the play of signification and the denial of the reality of the referent. They might tend to join theorists who replace old claims for universality with a new totalizing “the” that, in the vocabulary of certain new formalism(s) and historicisms, sweeps across the differences within categories. If “the South” had invented a post-structuralist theory, it would have been deconstruction; if it had invented a feminist theory, it would have been a theory of the feminine as textual effect. For such theories, like the New Criticism, are homologous to “the South.” But “the South” is itself, of course, a form of theory. And if certain theories’ effects replicate historical southern repressions, other more historically based theoretical practices might be more liberating, for they offer a way of disrupting as well as repeating that totalizing construction of “the South.” The complexities of southern culture—its racial polydiversities, its gender contradictions, its cross-class collaborations, its odd notions of public and private, the literality of its discourse of mastery and master, the affinities it has shown with Marxist rejections of individualism and capitalism despite its rejection of class analysis and of revolutionary or even reformist commitment, in short its sometimes irritating differences from other regions— offer the chance to rethink and critique theory, in turn, as well. Theoretical constructions of American womanhood, for example, generated largely out of nonsouthern women’s records and texts, fail, at crucial points, to adequately explain or provide a convincing reading of white and black southern women. Research on southern women such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s enables a clearer reading of differences within gender and the relation of gender with other cultural designs

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such as race and class. Less has been done on southern manhood as a social construction. Yet the overriding fact for southern manhood, I would argue— even more than honor—is patriarchal power, derived from a system of slavery that became hegemonic and established links between paternalistic power and manhood for every male to desire. How does this translate into writing practices and how does writing re- or deconstruct male power? That is a question that remains to be answered. The exploration of the social construction of gender in the South, by taking its complexities into account, promises a literary critical practice that can address differences in a new and historically specific way. By deconstructing the oppositional thinking that creates gender, not abstractly, but within specific historical moments that hold within them the intersections of gender ideology with race, class, and the workings of power, southernists can offer much in the way of comprehending those intersections.13 Even the history of southern “resistance to theory” can, despite and because of its politics, have a salutary effect on theory from “outside.” For when theory acts hegemonically—when it makes universalist claims even as it claims the impossibility of the universal, when it assumes there are no aporia, no contradictions, no repressions except in texts other than itself—the southernists, you can be sure, will take notice, accustomed as they are both to totalizing rhetoric and to resistance. Much of this work on the American South remains to be done, for the South is an American symptom and phenomenon with which I suspect we are only beginning to come to terms. 13. The work of Peter Bardaglio on appellate decisions in cases of rape, for example, suggests that policing gender took precedence over policing race in the antebellum South.

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works cited Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Bové, Paul. “Agriculture and Academe: America’s Southern Question.” Boundary 2 14(3): 169 –95. Cash, Wilbur J. The Mind of the South. New York: Knopf, 1941. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. “Dry September.” In Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage, 1977. ———. Mosquitoes. 1927. Reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1985. Fitzhugh, George. “Southern Thought.” In The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830 –1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Forkner, Benjamin, and Patrick Samway, ed. Stories of the Modern South. New York: Bantam, 1978. Genovese, Eugene. “Toward a Kinder and Gentler America: The Southern Lady in the Greening of the Politics of the Old South.” In In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830 –1900, ed. Carol Bleser. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Gray, Richard. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Harper, William. “Memoir on Slavery.” In The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830 –1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Hobson, Fred. Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Holman, C. Hugh. The Roots of Southern Writing: Essays on the Literature of the American South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972. Humphries, Jefferson. “On the Inevitability of Theory in Southern Literary Study.” Yale Journal of Criticism 3(1) (1989): 175 – 86. ———, ed. Southern Literature and Literary Theory. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. 194

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Jones, Anne Goodwyn. “Contemporary Literary Theory,” in The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs, ed. Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda H. MacKethan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. ———. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859 –1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. King, Richard. A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930 –1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Kreyling, Michael. “The Extra: Southern Literature, Consensus and Dissensus,” American Literature 60(1) (March 1988): 83 –95. ———. Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Lauter, Paul. E-mail excerpted at http://asweb.unco.edu/latina/BOOKS/ books13.htm. ———, gen. ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Waterton, Mass.: Persephone, 1981. Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and Work. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 1997. O’Brien, Michael. The Idea of the American South, 1920 –1941. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Ransom, John Crowe. The World’s Body. 1938. Reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Simpson, Lewis P. “The State of Southern Literary Scholarship.” The Southern Review 24(2) (Spring 1988): 245 –52. Singal, Daniel Joseph. The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919 –1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Smith, Jon. “Postcolonial, Black, and Nobody’s Margin: The U.S. South and New World Studies.” American Literary History 16(1) (2004): 144 – 61. Tate, Allen, ed. A Southern Vanguard. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1947. Tise, Larry E. Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701– 1840. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. 195

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Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. 1930. Reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960; rev. ed., 1968; 3d ed., 1993. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “The Real and Mythical Souths.” Southern Review 24 (Winter 1988): 229 –35.

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On the Issue of Africanisms in American Culture daniel c. littlefield

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n december 18, 1996, the Oakland (California) Unified School District’s Board of Education adopted a resolution declaring that its black students were bilingual, speaking both standard and black English. Ebonics, a term derived from “ebony” and “phonics” is the name given to what some consider to be a distinct language, not a dialect of English. “African Americans have a different language system,” the school system’s superintendent argued, “and we want to recognize that and build on that.” 1 The roots of this variant language were to be found in “the cultural and historic bases of West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems,” the resolution proclaimed, and furthermore were “genetically based.” 2 The unfortunate and ill-considered last phrase was later, and unconvincingly, explained away as referring to “linguistic genesis, not racial DNA.” 3 Indeed, the whole resolution eventually was seriously modified.4 Whatever the linguistic or pedagogical merits of the case, many blacks rejected the school board’s decision as a disservice to black students, stigmatizing them as being unable to master the standard variety of a language they claimed as their own. If the resolution could be deemed “progress” in its recognition that blacks exhibited some vestiges of a valued African heritage, it was a progress that, some claimed, evaded the real educational issues involved and, ironically, was yet part of an old American tradition of regarding blacks as foreign and unassimilable. It was also part of a venerated American practice, extending from the time of the founding of the nation, to locate the sources of American institutions and culture in the Old World, a world usually denied to blacks. 1. New York Times, December 21, 1996, 5. 2. USA Today reprinted a portion of the text of the resolution, January 6, 1997, 12A. 3. Newsweek, January 13, 1997, 79. 4. New York Times, January 14, 1997, A8.

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A decade earlier, another series of newspaper articles also highlighted linguistic connections between Africans and African Americans, with less bombast and greater precision. “Africans See Their Culture Live in U.S. South” reported cultural linkages, including food and language, between lowland South Carolina and Georgia and Sierra Leone,5 and a group of local African Americans voyaged there to investigate this portion of their past.6 They had long been noted for cultural distinctiveness. So much greater credence had Gullah attained as a language in its own right that the Bible was being translated into it, a far cry from anything ever suggested for Ebonics.7 But the South Carolina region from which these people came was unique among England’s North American colonies because, among other reasons, it was the only one on the continent where the black population at one time outnumbered the white. Indeed, when the Swiss settler Samuel Dyssli visited the region in 1737, he commented that it looked “more like a negro country than a country settled by white people.” 8 It may have sounded that way too. One historian suggests that it was effectively bilingual, with the blacks speaking a patois that the whites could not understand.9 The disproportion of blacks to whites was not as great as on some of the West Indies islands, but it was sufficient to make white society in lowland South Carolina distinctive and to permit development of a divergent African American subculture that, on the sea islands along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, survived into the twentieth century. Blacks in lowland South Carolina, often called Gullah, were distinguished from other North American blacks, as well as from whites. For one thing, they had a much greater awareness of their Old Country backgrounds. For most black Americans their origins were generally obscured, not only by the tragic circumstances of their passage but likewise by the prevalent mythology, often racist but sometimes simply naïve, that nothing of their background 5. New York Times, October 25, 1987, 5. 6. New York Times, November 8, 1987, 28. 7. New York Times, March 1, 1987, 24. 8. “Letter from Samuel Dyssli, Charleston, South Carolina, to His Mother, Brothers, and Friends in Switzerland,” December 3, 1737, South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 23 (July 1922): 90; also quoted in Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 132. 9. Gerald W. Mullin, “Religion and Slave Resistance,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, New Orleans, December 1972.

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could be known. It was commonly conceded, if the notion was entertained at all, that most had come from someplace in West Africa, but, it was thought, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic groups had been so mixed and dispersed as to leave no identifiable evidence traceable to a particular geographical region. Nor in general were any useful records presumed to exist. Beyond their American and Western cultural heritage, black Americans were considered essentially rootless, and the normal assumptions made about Africa and Africans suggested that it was better that way. This view, one ought hasten to add, characterized North American opinion practically alone among the major areas of African importation. A more precise connection between Africa and Brazil or Africa and Cuba or Africa and the West Indies has long been recognized. Planters in these regions often specified particular ethnic groups from definite locales when they asked for slaves. Thus, for example, it is said of Jamaica that the planters early developed “a liking for particular tribal types, ‘choosing their Negroes from whence they come and their look.’” 10 More specifically, Jamaican planters had what was called a “perverse” preference for slaves from what was then called the Gold Coast (the region of the modern West African nation of Ghana), despite the fact that peoples from this region were prominent in slave revolts on the island. In eighteenth-century Brazil it was commonly remarked that “without sugar there is no Brazil and without Angola there is no sugar,” referring to the dependence of Brazilian sugar planters on labor from that African region.11 At one period during the century, a special relationship developed between Bahia, Brazil, and parts of the Dahomean coast (now Benin), and in modern Lagos, Nigeria, there is reputed to be a “Brazilian Quarter” composed partly of descendants of former slaves who returned from Brazil when they gained their freedom and who sometimes were active in slave trading.12 A similar quarter exists 10. Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969), 136. 11. James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 138 –39. 12. See Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nèegres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos du dix-septieme au dix-neuvieme siècle (Paris: La Haye, Mouton, 1968); Takiu Folami, A History of Lagos, Nigeria: The Shaping of an African City (Smithtown, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1982), 4, relates that the areas southeast of Tinubu Square, extending to Bamgbose, Igboserre, and Cow Lane were known as Portugese towns, settled by freed slaves

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in Ouidah, Benin, and perhaps in other locations along the coast between the two cities.13 Geography, politics, and trade governed these relationships, but they were also conditioned by emotional outlook. Europeans often hold stereotypic attitudes about one another. They ascribe national characteristics that they presume to typify a people, such as that Englishmen are phlegmatic, the French are romantic, Italians are musical, and the Swiss are thrifty. In the eighteenth century, at the height of the slave trade in America, Europeans, in the Old World and the New, ascribed similar characteristics to Africans. These attitudes influenced selection of the unwilling collaborators imported to labor in the mines, on the plantations, and in the homes of European settlers. People from the Gold Coast were assumed to be strong, good workers, honest, trustworthy, but also rebellious. Some people from Senegambia were considered to be physically attractive but untrustworthy. People from the Congo-Angola region were thought to have an acute mechanical ability. Because of these assumptions, a planter did not always simply ask for blacks but often for very specific blacks from particular African regions because he believed the people therefrom had the strength or capability, had mastered a craft or possessed a skill, that he needed on his plantation or in his business. The argument that Africans occasionally had sought-after skills that planters required and might even possess knowledge that planters lacked, endowing the slave with the status of teacher (and reducing the planter to pupil), has become increasingly common in modern scholarship, but it has not been an image everyone can accept. One critic called this position “politically ‘correct’” but “analytically absurd”—the absurdity arising out of what he perceived as a determination to overlook the oppression inherent in slavery in order to give African Americans a usable past. The intention, he thought, was to show blacks that “their ancestors not only built the pyramid, they also drew up the blue-

from Portugal between 1854 and 1859, but although Portugese traders came early to the coast, in this case he most certainly means settlers from Brazil. Antônio Olento, in Brasileiros Na Africa (Rio de Janeiro: Edições GRD, 1964), gives the same street locations (161) as Folami but emphasizes the Brazilian connection (as does Verger). Also see Abiola Dosumu Elegbede-Fernandez, Lagos: A Legacy of Honour, Dosumu (1861)–Babangida (1991) (Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum Books, 1992), 1–23. 13. New York Times, August 5, 1987, 4.

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prints for the design.” 14 He pointed to an underlying tension between the attempt to present slaves as human beings, possessed of some agency, capable of creativity, and having an ability, however slight, to make a life of their own, and the recognition that their options were severely constrained by the circumstances of their captivity. Both sides of the equation need to be taken into account for any balanced view of slavery and the people, black and white, who operated within it. It becomes a question of emphasis. If we stress the brutality of slavery, we often end up with a picture of the slave as nothing more than a victim; if we highlight the slave’s accomplishments, we sometimes seem to suggest that his enslavement did not matter. In either case we invite criticism. The simple fact is that at one level slavery is always and everywhere a system of exploitation and oppression; at another level it is much more complex than that, and in dealing with the complexities, it is easy to misstep or to be misunderstood. These possibilities exist more readily when arcane historical arguments become the subject of public controversy or, public or not, become the locus of political or ideological disagreements. In such cases, propositions advanced cautiously are sometimes exaggerated for effect, and subtle points are expressed crudely to strengthen a counterargument. When these opposing viewpoints become the basis of professional careers, they frequently are defended tenaciously, the laws of evidence and judgment of common sense to the contrary notwithstanding. The purpose of this essay is twofold: to recapitulate an argument I advanced in an earlier work about the African background and its relationship to Gullah, and to caution against too facile a use of undigested historical information with regard to the African sources of African American culture. It is not to suggest that educated guesses based on historical evidence should not be advanced but that these statements should be clearly qualified and supporting facts fully marshaled to permit the case a fair assessment. In South Carolina, the largest slave importer in British North America,

14. Laurence Shore, review of Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina, by Daniel C. Littlefield, Journal of Ethnicity Studies 12 (summer 1984): 121–27, quotations 121 and 124. The review is somewhat misguided because I was more concerned about white attitudes than black accomplishments. He does, however, make some statistical points worth considering.

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planters also were quite concerned about the geographical origins of their slaves. They had clear ideas about which Africans they desired and which they did not. The eminent Carolina merchant Henry Laurens wrote a British slave dealer: “The Slaves from the River Gambia are preferr’d to all others with us save the Gold Coast,” and, he added, “There must not be a Callabar among them.” On another occasion he wrote, “Gold Coast or Gambias are best; next to Them The Windward Coast are prefer’d to Angolas.” 15 So in South Carolina there existed a hierarchy of regional preferences. Slaves from Senegambia were desired above all others, though they were sometimes equated with peoples from the Gold Coast. After them, South Carolinians asked for peoples from the region of modern Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, called the Windward Coast. Peoples from Congo-Angola were acceptable, but peoples from the Niger Delta, called “Calabars,” or “Ibos,” or “Bonny” slaves were not favored. These preferences were based on various physical and moral attributes the slaves were presumed to possess. South Carolinians liked slaves who were tall, black, and strong, and Gambia slaves seemed to epitomize these ideals. Moreover, people there practiced rice cultivation, a valuable attribute in the view of Carolina planters who raised the crop themselves. On the other hand, peoples who were short, weak, and yellowish in color were not highly prized, and captives from the Niger Delta seemed to reflect these qualities. In addition, they had a deplorable reputation for committing suicide. Curiously enough, there seemed to be a consensus throughout the New World in the eighteenth century about the physical attributes of certain African groups although there were understandable differences concerning their moral character. European perception of the latter was often based on the extent to which Africans got along with the planters, and this varied with local circumstances. The regional or ethnic awareness indicated by the planters’ expression of preferences lingered for some time after the slave had arrived, and a slave’s origins were prominently noted if he ran away. For example, the South Carolina Gazette in 1738 printed advertisements such as the following: “run away . . . an Angola Negro Man called Hector, about 20 Years of Age, speaks English . . . and is branded on his right Shoulder”; or “run away . . . 3 Angola Negro Men . . . they 15. This section follows Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (1981; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 8 –32, where these ideas are developed more fully; quotations 8.

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have been in the Country three Years and speak little English . . . and a Gambia Negro Man named Ned”; or, in a later year, “A new Ebo born negro.” 16 Slave owners more often spoke in regional than in specific ethnic terms, but their sophistication with regard to African geography seemed to increase over the century. While in the 1730s merchants advertised sale of slave cargoes “directly from Africa,” “directly from the River Gambia,” or “directly from Angola,” in the 1770s they occasionally identified the cargo more precisely: “slaves (remarkably healthy) . . . from cape mount (a rice country on the windward coast)” or “from angola . . . slaves. . . . Mostly of the masse congo Country” or “slaves (Mostly of the Fantee Country) . . . from Cape Coast.” 17 Virginia planters appeared to be less concerned about the source of their slaves to the extent that they did not consistently specify regional preferences like South Carolinians. But they were no less aware of distinctions among the slave populace and also advertised runaways by ethnic or regional designation. Because planters had demands regarding the origins of their slaves, because slave traders tried to meet those demands, and because slave trading was a business that required record keeping, it is possible to get a fair idea about the source and composition of the African population in various New World areas. Historian Philip Curtin has calculated that about 43 percent of South Carolina imports came from Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast, regions these colonists favored, and 40 percent from Angola, whose slaves were acceptable, while only 4 percent came from the Niger Delta. In Virginia, by contrast, almost 40 percent came from the latter region.18 Although regional authorities subsequently have revised Curtin’s total figures upward, the proportions may not have changed significantly.19 Curtin suggests that there might be a functional relationship between the last two of his figures. That is, merchants may have sent so many Africans from the Niger Delta to Virginia because South Car16. Respectively, South Carolina Gazette, February 23 and March 23, 1738; November 20, 1755. 17. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 54. 18. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 156 –58. 19. See, for example, James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 327–29; and J. E. Inikori, introduction to Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (New York: Africana Publishing, 1982), 13 – 60, esp. 21. Other articles in the collection are also useful.

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olinians expressed a dislike for these peoples, while Virginians did not. Time was of the essence, and Virginia was the next closest market. Since, all else being equal, colonists were willing to pay more for the ethnic group they preferred, it made good sense to cater as much as possible to demand. This reasoning probably also helps to explain why there were relatively so few Gold Coast blacks in North America. In Jamaica they were highly favored, and since South Carolinians often equated Gold Coast and Gambian slaves, indicating a willingness to pay as much for one as the other, and since Virginians didn’t seem to care at all, traders took these slaves where they were likely to command the best price. Between 1750 and 1790, approximately 80 percent of British exports of these Akan peoples from the coast of Ghana went to Jamaica. Lest the slave trade appear to have been simpler than it was in fact, one ought to point out that the Akan comprised only 26 percent of Jamaica’s slave populace over the eighteenth century, while in South Carolina Angolas, who were not high on the list of preferences, amounted to almost as great a proportion as more favored groups. These facts highlight the limitations of trade and indicate that slaving as a business was often hazardous and unpredictable. First, the African coast was controlled by Africans, not Europeans. Africans, along with local circumstances of war, famine, and so forth, determined what people and how many would be traded, what European goods were acceptable, and how long and under what conditions the trade would go on. Second, the trade situation was not uniform over all the coast or over time. It varied in different periods and places, depending upon the number of slaves available for sale, the number of European ships in port, and the kind of political organization local Africans maintained. These considerations meant that perhaps as often as not European traders and planters had to accept what they could get. Accordingly, the ethnic composition of African imports into Jamaica, for example, is a reflection of the British slave trade as a whole rather than a divergence from it. In other words, Jamaican planters’ preferences are not immediately apparent from slave import figures. The African ethnic composition in North America, however, did diverge from the total British trade—in South Carolina this was probably a result of slave owners’ attention to ethnic origins, and in Virginia it was partly because of a lack of such attention. The association of South Carolina almost equally with the Gambian and adjacent coastal regions on the one hand and with the Angola region on the other (by preference in the one case and in the other not quite by chance) has com206

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plicated study of the cultural origins of the people and language called Gullah. Even the origin of the name itself is sometimes in dispute. Those who support the Gambian connection say that it comes from the Gola people of Liberia; those who support the Angola connection say that it comes from the Ngola of that region. But linguistic and other evidence seems strong for the Sierra Leone region, at least in the opinion of scholars recently involved in pursuing South Carolina’s connection with that part of the African coast, an issue to which I will return. But the problem has become bound up with another issue, the significance of which, from a North American point of view, is not always clear. Two American missionaries residing in Brazil reported in 1857 that they “had often thought that the slaves of the United States are descended not from the noblest African stock, or that more than a century of bondage has had upon them a most degenerating effect.” They admitted that in Brazil they had also come across Africans who were “inferior” and “spiritless” but had found “others of an almost untamable [and therefore quite admirable] disposition.” 20 Reasoning partly from that observation (and partly from the work of Nina Rodrigues), Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre has written that his country got the best Africans the continent had to offer, while North American planters got a lesser breed.21 He was particularly struck by the so-called Sudanese slaves from West Africa, the American missionaries having written, “The Mina negro [from the coast of modern Ghana] seldom makes a good house-servant, for he is not contented except in breathing the fresh air. The men become coffee-carriers, and the women quitandeiras, or street peddlers.” 22 The missionaries went on to relate the role of these Africans in the Bahia uprising of 1835 and clearly suggest a certain nobility and accomplishment as well as ferocity in the rebels. Freyre, developing an image of the Brazilian people and civilization as resulting from a mixture of peoples, including Africans, obviously subscribes to this characterization of Mina slaves, at least in some respects. He rejects the idea that they do not make good house servants (an illustration of just how elastic these characterizations can be, or, alternatively, and more likely, of the relative 20. D. P. Kidder and J. C. Fletcher, Brazil and the Brazilians, Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches (Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1857), 135. 21. See Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (1946; reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 299 –301 et passim. Also see Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brazil (Sao Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1945). 22. Kidder and Fletcher, Brazil and the Brazilians, 135 –36.

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ignorance of the American observers). Indeed, the term “Mina” was used colloquially in Bahia to refer to just such a servant, who might also be a mistress or even a wife.23 But Freyre latches onto the features of nobility, intelligence, and comeliness. If Brazilians were ever to measure up to advanced nations in Europe and North America, it clearly would not do that they were composed of inferior stock. However, he derides the notion of miscegenation as an evil, contributing to physical and moral degeneration, though he is obviously sensitive on the issue. He relates his discomfiture, for example, when, after several years’ residence in the United States, he came upon a group of Brazilian sailors, “mulattoes and cafusos [a mixture of black and Indian]— crossing Brooklyn Bridge.” They impressed him, he said, “as being the caricatures of men, and there came to mind a phrase from a book on Brazil written by an American traveler: ‘the fearfully mongrel aspect of the population.’” 24 While he evidently feels that the image these seamen project is one of degeneration, he denies that such deterioration is the fruit of miscegenation. Rather, he blames malnutrition and other external circumstances of their existence. He places a positive emphasis on race mixture but in the direction of branqueamento, or whitening, for in his preoccupation with Sudanese physical types, their approach to a European norm is implicitly valued. He elaborates an argument based on the presumed superior civilization of the Sudanese, whom he favors over Bantu-speaking peoples, and praises the Portuguese or Brazilian recognition of native African talents, particularly in mining (and, so far as physical attributes were concerned, in sexual attractiveness) that led them to better choose the people they took and to better appreciate the people they chose. North Americans, less perceptive, and desiring slaves chiefly for field work, were neither as discerning nor as particular in their choices, and their ill-judgment showed in the slaves they got.25 If one looks at importation figures, the differences in ethnic proportions between the United States and Brazil are perhaps striking, but not in the way that Freyre might wish. He does not give a statistical breakdown of these groups in his country but seems to think that they came in about equal numbers,26 though 23. Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil: A Study in Race Contact in Bahia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 145 – 46. 24. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, xxvi–xxvii. 25. Ibid., xxx–xxxi, 55 – 66, 285 –344. 26. Ibid., 300.

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because the trade from areas containing Bantu peoples went on for a longer period of time and was larger than that from other parts of the coast, the majority of Africans in Brazil were probably of Bantu origin. Indeed, in the period between 1701 and 1810, 70 percent of Brazilian imports were from Bantu-speaking regions.27 If one looks at what was originally British North America, one finds a similar situation, though the disproportion was not as great: 46 percent came from regions containing what Freyre would call Sudanese—that is, the Gold Coast, the Windward Coast, Senegambia, and Sierra Leone—and 54 percent came from the Niger Delta and the Congo-Angola-Mozambique regions, containing Bantu- or semi-Bantu-speaking peoples.28 By Freyre’s own standards, North America comes out ahead. The real differences in the importation data for Brazil and North America have to do with the length and volume of importation. The Brazilian trade was much larger and lasted for a longer period of time. Brazil received about 40 percent of the Africans imported into the New World, while the United States received about 5 percent. In 1857 when the American missionaries made their contrasts between the two nations, the slave trade into Brazil was just ending, while that into the United States had been over for forty years. There was little chance for the United States to receive a comparable Moslem influence brought by Yoruba and Hausa casualties of the nineteenth-century West African jihads, an influence that has exercised so significant and heralded an effect on the culture of Bahia. Moreover, there was a close and specific eighteenth-century connection between Bahia and the Bite of Benin. Finally, as noted, there are Brazilian quarters in various cities on the modern coasts of Benin and Nigeria, settled partly by returnees from servitude in Brazil and, in freedom, maintaining a trade relationship between the two regions. These circumstances make precise connections between Africa and Brazil more apparent. Consequently, a modern scholar can say with confidence: “[P]resent-day African culture in Bahia, which is heavily Yoruba in origin, dates from the late eighteenth century. Before that, other African traditions existed.” 29 Even though ethnic preferences sometimes differed by area and changed 27. Philip D. Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 211; Herbert Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 25. 28. Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 157. 29. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550 –1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 342.

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over time, the extent and character of slave importation into Brazil permitted the formation or reformation of distinctive ethnic groupings and the recognition of these groupings by local authorities. Much earlier than in the United States, Brazilian scholars were prepared to consider distinctive African ethnic contributions to Brazilian culture and character, even if they did not always view them in the most positive light. The African presence, and often discrete elements of an individual African ethnic presence, were too great to be easily ignored, and this was all the more true because it was occasionally the subject of negative comment by the country’s critics.30 Unlike those in Brazil, North American scholars for many years denied any distinguishable ethnic African input at all. North American racism was such that few seriously entertained the idea that Africans, in whole or in part, had much to contribute. Determined to deny even the miscegenation that occurred, they saw little reason to concede to Africans any justifying accomplishment whatsoever. A few people, like the American missionaries in Brazil, have been mildly intrigued, even titillated, by the African origins of North America’s black population, but seldom thought they had lasting influence worth considering. At an earlier date, blacks and southerners most often indicated concern. For example, historian Ulrich B. Phillips’s racism did not blind him to ethnic and other distinctions among the black population, and a white North Carolina businessman published at the turn of the century a kind of picture-book exhibition of various “Negro types.” 31 In 1940 a white South Carolinian even faced the prospect of mutual interchange between blacks and whites: “Negro entered into white 30. See, for example, John Codman, Ten Months in Brazil; with Notes on the Paraguayan War (1867; reprint, New York: D. Appleton, 1870), 81– 82, 131–32, who had a negative view of miscegenation. Joseph Burnichon, Le Bresil d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Perrin, 1910), 71–79, by contrast, had a more positive view of race mixture and even disputed some of Nina Rodrigues’s assumptions about the extent of African superstitions among the Brazilian population, which suggested a negative viewpoint. He quotes a Brazilian acquaintance as arguing that “Cette population de sang meld constitue la veritable race bresillienne, plus vigoureuse, plus resistante, parce que mieux adaptee au climat que les elements de race europeenne sans alliage” (75), anticipating some of the ideas of Freyre. 31. Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (1918; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966); idem, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929), 190; and Daniel A. Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil (Charlotte, 1901), 48.

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man as profoundly as white man entered into Negro”; W. J. Cash wrote in The Mind of the South, “subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude.” 32 This sounds very much like Freyre’s assertion in his 1933 publication The Masters and the Slaves that “[e]very Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired one, carries about with him on his soul, when not on soul and body alike . . . the shadow, or at least the birthmark, of the aborigine or the Negro. Along the seaboard, from Maranhao to Rio Grande do Sul, it is chiefly the Negro.” 33 But Freyre could then proceed to talk about African regional gifts, while Cash could not. As late as 1970 a quite sensitive North American anthropologist could nevertheless declare that “one of the most remarkable aspects of Afro-American culture in the United States is its relative lack of provable African content.” 34 In recent decades this situation has changed. American scholar Peter Wood’s Black Majority (1974) has, among historians, at least, led the way, indicating that, unique among Englishmen in North America, South Carolinians had an ethnic preference related to an African skill, albeit an agricultural one. They desired slaves familiar with rice cultivation, and the suggestion is strong that slaves imparted that knowledge to Englishmen and not vice versa. Judith Carney carries this argument further, highlights the role of women, and explains some of the problems of early South Carolina’s rice industry within a regional African gender division of labor. Wood also finds African contributions to early cattleraising in the colony, similar to what Freyre writes about in Brazil. Wood, Eugene Genovese, Charles Joyner, and other scholars likewise find black contributions to American cooking, language, religion, and outlooks that are comparable to, if not quite as extensive as, what Freyre finds in Brazil.35 But the distinct history of the United States presents special problems, all the 32. Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 49 –50. 33. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 278. 34. Sidney Mintz, foreword to Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. John F. Szwed and Norman E. Whitten Jr. (New York: Free Press, 1970), 12; and Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine, 1974), 12. 35. See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); and Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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more serious because the search for African cultural traits has now been embraced with unbridled enthusiasm. Melville Herskovits was most influential in pointing scholars toward the survival of African cultural attributes among the African American population at an earlier date, though in the 1930s, when he first wrote, many, even among blacks, dismissed his findings as irrelevant if not unsound.36 Scholars formerly rejected his theories as too broad and farreaching and more recently as too brittle and static. He was, they now say, insufficiently cognizant of the true meaning of black creativity.37 Nevertheless, scholarship has turned in his direction, and while he has thus triumphed over his critics, modern-day successors make far-reaching claims with nowhere near his breadth and depth of study. It is much more fashionable nowadays than in Herskovits’s time to make claims to an African connection— claims that are often made with little study and less evidence. Having become attuned to the possibilities, some proceed blindly with gleeful certitude into assertions where deeper knowledge would provoke more caution. Thus, for example, although Peter Wood has suggested and I have extended the argument that South Carolinians learned rice cultivation from Senegambians, others have taken that and related arguments in directions that I, for one, would not be prepared to go.38 What were advanced as strong probabilities have metamorphosed into unqualified assertions. These convictions are then applied without regard to geographical distinctions. So one person, after quoting an eighteenth-century advertisement extolling the virtues of newly imported slaves, explains: “Here we find the African place of origin identified with the type of labor task to be performed in America. Anamabo was a village of the Gold Coast, an area inhabited by the Fanti, a major Akan ethnic group. That the majority of this cargo would be assigned to the field was directly attributed to their acquaintance with the cultivation of rice, South Carolina’s principal crop during the colonial pe-

36. Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941). The most noted African American critic of Herskovits was sociologist E. Franklin Frazier; see, for example, The Negro in the United States (1949; rev. ed., New York: Macmillan, 1968), esp. 3 –21. 37. See, for example, the largely sympathetic critique in Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon, 1992). 38. Wood, Black Majority, 35 – 62; Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 74 –114.

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riod.” 39 But although some people in the region were familiar with rice, it was not the major staple of the so-called Gold Coast at this time and, where raised, was the preserve of women. The Bandama river, somewhat farther west, is traditionally taken as the coastal limit of rice cultivation. In fact, the ad specified the Africans’ suitability to field work in terms of their health.40 This issue of African rice cultivation is an important one, all the more so because it is one of the few cases in English North America where so crucial an African contribution to the making of a society is alleged. The case is a circumstantial one, but the more circumstances we learn, the stronger the case seems to become. This may be merely a function of changed perceptions, for when the possibility is granted, the case is imminently credible, and it is easy to see how such an event might occur. But making the case requires detailed observation of the sort undertaken by, among other scholars, geographer Judith Carney. The vagaries of African rice cultivation must be studied with some precision to consolidate the case. As Carney has summarized the traditional situation, “The ricegrowing area of West Africa . . . extends along the coast from Senegal to the Ivory Coast and into the interior through the savanna along river banks, inland swamps, and lake margins.” 41 Diagrams of West African rice cultivation sometimes show a solid area all along the western coast to Nigeria.42 But rice has not 39. Joseph E. Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 15. 40. See W. B. Morgan, “The Forest and Agriculture in West Africa,” Journal of African History 3(2) (1962): 237; Roland Porteres, “Primary Cradles of Agriculture in the African Continent,” in Papers in African Prehistory, ed. J. D. Fage and R. A. Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 40; Eva L. R. Meyerowitz, The Sacred State of the Akan (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 46 – 48; and South Carolina Gazette, July 23, 1785. 41. Judith Carney, “Landscapes of Technology Transfer: Rice Cultivation and African Continuities,” Technology and Culture 37 (January 1996): 8, 9. 42. See, for example, Carney, “Landscapes of Technology Transfer,” 6, and Judith Ann Carney and Richard Porcher, “Geographies of the Past: Rice, Slaves and Technological Transfer in South Carolina,” Southeastern Geographer 33 (November 1993): 129. See also A. J. Carpenter’s more precise diagram of rice cultivation in “The History of Rice in Africa,” in Rice in Africa: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria, 7–11 March 1977, ed. I. W. Buddenhagen and G. J. Persley (New York: Academic, 1978), 5. Also see the diagram in Paul Richards, “Upland and Swamp Rice Farming Systems in Sierra Leone: An Evolutionary Transition?” in Comparative Farming Systems, ed. B. L. Turner II and Stephen B. Brush (New York: Guilford, 1987), 147.

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had a continuous history in all of that area. In the region of modern Ghana, for example, tradition holds that the Akan switched from rice to yams as the basis of their diet in the seventeenth century, and the national dish of the modern nation is more often foofoo— composed of yams or cassava—rather than rice as in Senegal. Even if the Akan primarily ate rice now, that would not necessarily indicate what they ate earlier, for rice cultivation has been spreading in Africa since 1850 and at an accelerated rate since 1950.43 If local residents changed their diet once, they could do so again. These changes over time must be taken into account. Moreover, wild rice occurs at various locations all the way from Senegal on the West Coast to Tanzania in the East and is sometimes collected for food.44 The use of rice, therefore, does not necessarily mean the cultivation of rice. Eighteenth-century South Carolina slave-trade ads clearly indicate that planters there identified the Atlantic Coast with rice cultivation, not the leeward coast on the Gulf of Guinea. Africa is a large continent, and while there are certainly general concepts, attitudes, and practices that might, on one hand, unite Africans as a whole in contrast to other areas of the world and might, on the other hand, distinguish one African region from another, such generalizations should be based on extended reading and intense study. For example, Jack Goody’s study of the LoDagaa (his name for them, not theirs) in northern Ghana shows that they are separated among themselves by different inheritance practices and separate funeral customs. So he subdivided them based on their differences. People on one side of a dividing river followed one set of customs; people on the other followed another. Still, they had some things in common.45 Rather than making broad, general claims about African influence, the accretion of monographs and the growing collection of research materials make it now possible for scholars to push on toward more precise connections between Africa and the Americas. But these links must be firmly grounded in the evidence available. Over twenty-five years ago, Forrest McDonald, in a critique of Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, warned that to “un43. I. W. Buddenhagen, “Rice Ecosystems in Africa,” in Buddenhagen and Persley, Rice in Africa, 12. Also see R. Chabrolin, “Rice in West Africa,” in C. L. A. Leakey and J. B. Wills, Food Crops of the Lowland Tropics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 7–25. 44. Carpenter, “The History of Rice in Africa,” 4. 45. Jack Goody, Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 1–12.

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derstand the process by which Africans were encultured in America . . . we must learn, tribe by tribe, which blacks came to America, and what the behavioral patterns of those tribes were; for, culturally speaking, the terms ‘black’ and ‘African’ are so general as to be meaningless.” He was uncertain whether it would be possible to get that information and doubted that scholars had the patience to pursue it. “[A]nd yet without it,” he counseled, “both study and speculation about heritage are futile.” 46 Because of the larger and more immediate African presence, this is a process more easy to accomplish in Brazil than in the United States. A generation later, however, McDonald has been proved wrong about the patience and ability of North American scholars to unearth a great deal of the necessary information, though he is absolutely correct about the dangers of speculation without the requisite study. The latter acts to discredit rather than advance the enterprise. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana (1992) shows what can be accomplished, although she writes about an area initially settled by the French rather than the English. “The Louisiana experience,” Professor Hall comments, “calls into question the assumption that African slaves could not regroup themselves in language and social communities derived partly from the sending cultures.” Her study of the development of Afro-creole culture in the French colony shows the prominence of Senegambians there, particularly the Bambara, and when she studies Bambaran cosmology, therefore, it has a particular relevance. The Bambara, for example, organized a rebellion against the French in 1731 and tried to coordinate the uprising with an Indian attack. The revolt failed but the Bambara remained a distinctive cultural unit and a predominate influence. Thus a 1791 revolt, orchestrated by the Ewe, was doomed by their failure to secure Bambara support. French social attitudes facilitated African cultural survivals. The French practice of protecting slave families, for instance, meant that women had a high fertility rate, which, together with the fact that Africans who survived transport and seasoning tended to be long-lived, meant a generational structure to slave life that provided for the maintenance of cultural traditions and their transference to the young. Slaves often kept their African names. Runaways formed maroon communities, developing subcultures of their own with, of course, a significant African component. So while Africans became Americans in Louisiana, they maintained a sense of ethnic and 46. Forrest-MacDonald in the National Review 28 (December 24, 1976): 1418.

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cultural identity, even as they contributed to a new and developing creole culture. Importantly for our purpose, that influence can be traced with some precision.47 We have seen that in the South Carolina–Georgia low country Africans also had durable influence. As in Louisiana, an African-based creole developed whose precise sources have been the basis of contestation. The problem with analyzing the Gullah or Geechee language with a view to approaching African geographical specificity is that English North Americans did not have the same kind of interest in African ethnicity as did the French (or the Portuguese). They expressed ethnic preferences, and they frequently identified fugitives in ethnic or regional terms. But they dispensed with these identifiers as quickly as possible. Thus an 1807 correspondent wrote: “Jim is an Affican and has been about two years in this country. He is a very sensible handy fellow and can turn his hand to any work but is a most notorious thief and as I wanted him on the wharf I found he would not answer that employ. Sambo is a new negro. I have had him about four months. In that time he ran away three times. When at home he worked well. The wench Jenny I cannot say much for. She can speak for herself.” The correspondent describes Jim as an African but he does not go beyond that. Sambo, a “new negro,” who has presumably been in the country an even shorter time than Jim and is therefore also, African is not further identified either. Jenny is either “country-born” or has been in the country long enough, and was imported young enough, to be considered native.48 This inattention to ethnic detail makes research difficult for scholars interested in these facts. They are forced to rely on importation and runaway statistics, among other things, including linguistic analysis. The latter, however, has not proved conclusive. Consequently, scholars still differ about the provenience of the Gullah cultural complex. Winifred Vass argues for the primacy of Bantuspeakers—a useful but distressingly general term. Moreover she traces the term “Geechee,” which is essentially the same language as Gullah, to the Kisi of 47. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of AfroCreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), quotation xiv. 48. Daniel C. Littlefield, “‘Abundance of Negroes of That Nation’: The Significance of African Ethnicity in Colonial South Carolina,” in The Meaning of South Carolina History: Essays in Honor of George C. Rogers Jr., ed. David R. Chesnutt and Clyde N. Wilson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 19 –38.

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Senegambia.49 Margaret Washington-Creel argues for the primacy of Senegambia among the Gullah, a case presented in the film Family across the Sea and supported by African linguists from Sierra Leone.50 It is instructive, however, that South Carolinians referred to the Stono Rebellion, in which Angolans were undeniably the largest component, as the Gullah War.51 John Thornton has further elucidated the connection with Central Africa.52 There were, of course, successive waves of Africans coming into the region, and the major source of these Africans changed. I have tried to get a handle on the question by using the geographical distribution of ethnically identified fugitives as an index to total numbers. What these schemes suggest is a complex heterogeneity that might make it difficult to sort out precise lines of cultural devolution, a situation radically different from that in Brazil.53 Nevertheless, at least North American scholars now have some idea where to look. Certainly the kind of work accomplished by conscientious scholars makes it clear that we can go further in this regard than ever before but only at the cost of sustained effort. Historical archeologists, such as Leland Ferguson, and students of material culture, such as Michael Vlach, have indicated important lines of inquiry.54 At the same time, we need to resist facile analysis as deleterious. 49. Winifred Vass, The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1979), 31–32. 50. Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture among the Gullah (New York: New York University Press, 1988). The film Family across the Sea was produced in 1990 by South Carolina Educational Television and directed by Tim Carrier. (Distributed by California Newsreel, 149 Ninth Street, Suite 420, San Francisco, CA, 94103; 415 – 621– 6196.) See the series of essays in The Crucible of Carolina: Essays in the Development of Gullah Language and Culture, ed. Michael Montgomery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, ed. Salicaceae S. Mufwene (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), which discusses South Carolina within a larger context. 51. See Littlefield, “‘Abundance of Negroes of That Nation,’” 24. 52. John Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review 96 (October 1991): 1101–13. Also see his Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400 –1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 53. Littlefield, “‘Abundance of Negroes of That Nation,’” 28 –30. 54. Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650 –1800 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); Michael M. Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia

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In both the United States and Brazil the contributions of Bantu-speaking peoples to the cultures of those countries are being reexamined. In Brazil this is somewhat in the nature of a rehabilitation, pushing aside old notions of the inferiority of this segment of African culture, and the work of Nei Lopes (Bantos, malês e identidade negra, 1988) is an example of this approach.55 In the United States the process is one of discovery, with burial practices among low-country South Carolina and Georgia blacks, in particular, and belief systems associated with these practices having been traced most prominently by art historian Robert Farris Thompson (Flash of the Spirit, 1983) to Central Africa.56 Thompson has also isolated Central African elements in the verbal expressions of entertainers and the entertainment world, and likewise in music, leading some students to argue for the disproportionate influence of Bantu culture in the United States. Since there is so much less material evidence in the United States than in Brazil, one can well understand the enthusiasm of those who adopt this performance approach. However, I am always struck by how easy it is for scholars who champion either West or Central Africa to find evidence for their particular position, even when looking at the same phenomena, and in the North American context, the likelihood of a great degree of African mixture is highly probable. The growing recognition of African influences in African American culture and, through them, on the larger culture, should not be an excuse for unrigorous thinking, fuzzy formulations, and sloppy scholarship. Even where the goal is laudable, as was perhaps the intention in Oakland, faulty conceptualization can hamper equally the means, ends, and rationale of the enterprise. In a work that passes as history, one should exercise even greater discretion. Thus, for example, one author writes that “North Americans preferred Senegambians (Mandingos, Fulani, Bambaras, and Malinkes) as house servants—butlers, maids, nurses (nannies), chambermaids, and cooks” and that they “imported Africans from the Windward or Grain Coast (Mande and Mano River groups)

Press, 1990); Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 55. Nei Lopes, Bantos, malês e identidade negra (Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 1988). 56. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983).

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because of their familiarity with the cultivation of rice, indigo, and tobacco.” 57 But while there is some truth in the second statement, particularly regarding rice, there is little evidence to support the proposition regarding the last two crops, certainly in terms of any consistent pattern, and none is provided in the text. There is even less evidence for the first statement, and the table assembled to justify it is unconvincing.58 Scholars concerned about these issues should exercise as great care in sorting out the diverse lines of African influence in their particularity as those who seek to trace, dissect, or analyze the various African, European, and Native American features of African American life, acknowledging that clear distinctions cannot always be definitively established.59 The completion of slave trade

57. Holloway, Africanisms, 12. 58. Ibid. Holloway lists U. B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (1918; reprint, New York, 1940), 42; idem, Life and Labor in the Old South, 190; Littlefield, Rice and Slaves; and Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (without more specific identification for the last two) as sources for information in his Table 10. Phillips in Life and Labor, 190, does say “the Mandingoes, Foulahs and other stocks from the Senegambian region of the northwest . . . doubtless owed to an Arabic infusion the talents which made some of them esteemed for responsible functions; but many of these had a delicate physique which unfitted them for heavy labor,” and in his earlier work (42) is more specific, saying, among other things, that “The Senegalese . . . were especially esteemed for domestic service, the handicrafts and responsible positions.” But his comments are based on West Indian sources, “the chief ones of which were written in Jamaica.” In addition to what I have indicated in the text, Freyre argues that Mandingoes especially were valued as mistresses, but he was speaking of Brazil. I have suggested that some of the ethnic reputations that existed among the Spanish and Portuguese might also have existed among the English, and it may be reasonable for Holloway to suspect some transference of opinion between the West Indies and North America. But that is a far cry from saying flatly that “North Americans preferred Senegambians as house servants,” especially when there is evidence to the contrary; my argument was quite a bit different. Nor is it clear how Holloway’s table distinguishes between what he calls “rice cultivator” and “field hand.” 59. I have in mind, here, for example, the work of Mechal Sobel. See her Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (1979; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988) and The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in EighteenthCentury Virginia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). Other scholars could be mentioned here and elsewhere. This paper was completed several years before publication, and pressures of time did not permit the proper consideration of all new scholarly developments.

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and other databases in computer disc formats and the increasing use of DNA and other genetic evidence provide more information than ever about African sources.60 Intense and careful study can yield dividends, and we can expect much more of the African ethnic past to be revealed than we formerly thought possible. 60. David Eltis et al., eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699 –1860: Information from Original Manuscript Sources. Also see William S. Pollitzer, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999).

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Re-creating a Public for the Plantation Reconstruction Myths of the Biracial Southern “Family” john lowe

Commemoration is always the adaptation of memory to the needs of today. —todorov We are not a race to pass and leave no memorial on our time. We live with more than Grecian energy. We must either leave our history to be written by those who do not understand it, or we must write it ourselves. —thomas nelson page

I

n the decades following the Civil War, the United States was awash with the literature of reunion, as writers in both the North and the South sought an antidote to the wounds of national struggle in the myths of reconciliation. Most readers of the period were familiar with the standard romantic plot, which centered on a marriage between a northern man, preferably a Union soldier, and a southern belle. The pair always chooses to reside in the South, and the husband comes to see the wisdom of the region, especially in terms of its policies toward white womanhood and “childlike” blacks. What has not been so noticed (with the important exception of Scott Romine, who has analyzed this syndrome in Page’s short story collection In Ole Virginia) is that virtually all the narratives, in one form or another, also push the idea that the plantation “family” had to include African Americans as well. Many portraits and photographs of southern rural families, some as late as the Second World War, included black servants; in John Faulkner’s memoirs, for instance, we see such a picture, with an elderly black man on one side of his white employers and his wife on the other side. Thomas Nelson Page, the paradigmatic writer of the plantation school, invariably divided black characters into faithful retainers, who endorse the code of white superiority, and “uppity” blacks, who have been corrupted by 221

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Yankees. The former are portrayed as members of the family, often in typological and sacral terms. The dramatic changes in both racial relations and literary and cultural criticism in the United States during the twentieth century drastically altered our perception of the plantation school. Page and his literary brethren have been virtually written out of the canon of American literature, but we ignore them at our peril, for they have much to tell us about the South’s self-fashioning at a moment when it clearly viewed itself as a colonized nation. As many scholars have shown, these defeated southerners partly wrote their way out of this situation, creating what Nina Silber has termed a romance of reunion. The tradition they spawned led ultimately to the watershed novel and film Gone with the Wind, which in turn generated neo-plantation romances that are still popular today. African American writers, such as Langston Hughes, Frank Yerby, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison have seen fit to appropriate, question, or to parody the form, especially in so-called neo-slave narratives. This estimable tradition of literary subversion really started, however, with Charles Chesnutt. Aware of Page’s literary and financial success, but also conscious of the alternate history literature could provide, he fashioned a subversive variant of the tradition in his classic The Conjure Woman (1899), which is written both within and against the tradition. Because of this constant interplay between white and black writers who have usually been studied separately, it seems time to begin a necessary work of connection by simultaneously rereading the work of these writers who provided the first contemporaneous black and white “set” of plantation texts. Chesnutt (1858 –1932), who had roots in North Carolina, the locale for much of his fiction, was one of America’s first successful black American writers; his work in some ways is similar to, but more often sharply contrastive with, that of Page (1853 –1922), who was the most popular and prolific white plantation school writer. Page was descended from Virginia aristocracy, while Chesnutt was born to free black parents who had moved North before the Civil War only to return to North Carolina in 1866. Both authors saw Reconstruction firsthand, albeit in youth, and each came to writing from other, related realms, Page from law, Chesnutt from a successful court-reporting business. The merits of pairing their work may be seen in an examination of two texts set in Reconstruction that were published within a year of each other, Page’s best novel, Red Rock (1898), and Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899). I will seem to privilege Page in this 222

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discussion, but I do so partly because Chesnutt has received such excellent criticism in recent years (particularly in the work of William L. Andrews and Eric Sundquist), while Page has been forgotten, but also to suggest ways in which our knowledge of writers such as Chesnutt may be strengthened by close encounters with late enemies like Thomas Nelson Page. To buttress my case, I will mention that two other scholars have advocated taking a second look at ignored southern writers: Walter Benn Michaels recently began a fascinating discussion of the anti-imperialist aspects of the racist writer Thomas Dixon’s works—particularly The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905)—by discussing the similar configuration of Page’s Reconstruction novel Red Rock. He situates all these texts as types of postcolonial novels. Paul Lauter, introducing the second edition (1993) of the important and revisionary Heath Anthology of American Literature, noted that readers’ reaction to the first edition encouraged the inclusion of more white southern writers, especially from the antebellum period: “Their comments suggested that, while the often racist and sexist defenses of ‘peculiar’ southern institutions remain deeply disturbing, we would be misrepresenting a significant part of our national literature to omit them. Besides, as one commentator pointed out, the ‘rationalizations and self-justifications’ of the literary productions of the Old South are not, unfortunately, so different from those of our own time; reading and comprehending them may provide ways of understanding and possibly, changing racist ideologies deployed today” (xliii). As what follows demonstrates, benefits of a different kind may come from extending that kind of reading to postbellum and early twentieth-century white southern writers. We may begin to understand better how the plantation tradition’s fictions became tantamount to history and how courageous challenges to their authority, such as Charles Chesnutt’s, were effaced and forgotten. Thomas Nelson Page came to his preoccupation with history by descent, consent, lived experience, and literature. The once-wealthy Page and Nelson families each produced colonial Virginia governors. Thomas attended Washington College when Robert E. Lee was its president, and he always idolized the general. He worked as a tutor to secure the funds necessary for his University of Virginia law degree; later he set up practice in the state. Page became a writer only after his friends encouraged him to extend his skill as a raconteur into written form, especially the tales he told in black dialect. After writing a draft, Page would retell the tale, basing his revisions on reactions to oral renditions, a kind 223

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of ur-use of reader response methods. Thus two oral traditions support his work, as in Chesnutt’s similarly masked braiding of Ovid’s transformation fables and African American folktales in The Conjure Woman. Page intended his notion of black artistry to further his goals of reconciliation, the reestablishment of hierarchy, and increasingly, personal literary and financial success—he shared his magically lucrative writing formula with the discouraged New Orleans writer Grace King: “It is the easiest thing to do in the world. Get a pretty girl and name her Jeanne, that name always takes! make her fall in love with a Federal officer and your story will be printed at once. The publishers are right; the public wants love stories. Nothing easier than to write them” (quoted in E. Wilson, 606). This commercial interest was shared by Chesnutt; he wrote in his journal, “I want fame; I want money; I want to raise my children in a different rank of life from that I sprang from . . . literature pays” (Journals, 154). But Chesnutt had nobler ambitions too; he declared that he would write “for a purpose, a high, holy purpose, and this will inspire me to greater effort. The object of my writings would be not so much the elevation of the Colored people as the elevation of the Whites—for I consider the unjust spirit of caste . . . a barrier to the moral progress of the American people” (Journals, 139 – 40). The dialect both writers used was inspired by and somewhat modeled upon that used in the popular poetry of the white Mississippian Irwin Russell, whose supposedly “authentic” poems began appearing in Scribner’s Monthly in 1876. Indeed, Page’s first publication, the dialect poem “Uncle Gabe’s White Folks,” appeared in Scribner’s the following year, setting the pattern for what I shall call, following Werner Sollors’s terminology, ethnicity by consent, a device used in virtually all of Page’s frame narratives, such as “Gabe,” where a white narrator questions a black inside narrator about the days before the war, prompting a story about white folks and an endorsement of their values. Most of the stories in Page’s best collection, In Ole Virginia (1887) follow the pattern of “Gabe,” where the auditor is assured that “My folks warn’ none o’ yo’ po’ white trash; / Nor, suh, dey was of high degree— / Dis heah nigger am quality!” The slave couldn’t belong to the ethnic family by descent, but after emancipation he could belong by the fiction of his consent, and in scene after scene in Red Rock and many other southern tales of Reconstruction, slaves refuse freedom or ask to be taken back into the bosom of “marster’s family,” a kind of consensual “adoption” of surrogate whiteness. Page would eventually take this formulation to daring levels, even positing a surrogate father-daughter relationship between a 224

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former male slave and his young white mistress. In the 1887 story named for her, and told by her faithful black servant, Uncle Billy, “Meh’ Lady” nurses and ultimately loves a wounded Yankee soldier who has saved her plantation home from the torch. She is unable to marry the Enemy, however, even though it turns out he has Virginia relations and is a distant cousin. After he leaves she suffers the death of her mother and the ruin and near loss of the plantation through Reconstruction, despite the stalwart support of Uncle Billy. The Yankee lover returns in time to save her and the estate. During the marriage ceremony, the minister confusedly asks who gives this woman to this man, and after a moment, Uncle Billy steps forward and says, “Ole Billy.” We then learn that one of the children born to the pair is named Billy. As this brief synopsis demonstrates, in “Meh’ Lady” and most of Page’s other narratives, his pattern of enfolding blacks into a fictive biracial plantation “family” is echoed and complemented by the parallel conversion of transplanted Yankees into consensual southerners. Taken together, these plot devices function as a metaphor for the theme of the South rejoining the Union, for in Page’s fictions, the North, in accepting the southern “family,” in its indissoluble black /white union, would be in its turn also welcoming back a “prodigal” construct and thereby replicating both the South’s fiction and its implicit racial hierarchy, masked under benign paternalism. The actual North, in accepting the South back into the Union, acquiesced in this fiction, both implicitly, in myriad ways, and explicitly, especially in its agreement to abandon the ideal of Negro education; as Du Bois bitterly remarked in Black Reconstruction, he could never find a white man, however liberal he might otherwise be, who would endorse publicly funded schools for African Americans (Du Bois, 135 –36). But private northern money did build schools in the South, permitting a few talented students like Chesnutt to break out of the cycle of poverty and ignorance that consigned most blacks to the role of society’s “children.” 1

1. This pattern extended well up into the modern era. Ernest Gaines’s superb recent novel, A Lesson before Dying, set in 1948, has several scenes involving an educated young black schoolteacher and his employers on the plantation where he teaches. He must enter the house by the kitchen, wait till he is summoned, and avoid using “uppity” intonations, forms of address, or complicated diction, even when answering rather directly and specifically any given question.

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Reunion along these hierarchical and patriarchal racial lines was a goal the devout southerner Page fervently believed in: he said he had “never wittingly written a line” that he “did not hope might tend to bring about a better understanding between the North and the South, and finally lead to a more perfect Union” (Ole Virginia, xi). This theme of Reconstruction-era Unionists and Confederates bonding and, finally, marrying has been often remarked by literary critics, notably by Silber.2 What has not been so noticed is the concomitant “return” to the patriarchal white family of “wandering” blacks, even though this variant of the “reunion” plot often receives the stronger emphasis. Clearly, in many cases, African Americans had little choice in the matter. The North’s strategic and shameful retreat from the promises of Reconstruction has been well documented; we would do well, however, to further attend to the intricate renegotiation of black southerners’ terms of servitude and intimacy with their former masters. Page excels in limning the nature of these relationships from an idealized white perspective; Chesnutt, writing within the same tradition, and catering in many ways to the expectations of a white audience, subtly and brilliantly reveals the mask that African Americans agreed to wear, a mask not so different from those worn before the war; “ole times there” were not forgotten, indeed were not allowed to be forgotten. Moreover, Chesnutt himself, by “consenting” to join the “family” of regional, local-color and plantation writing in order to find a public and a pulpit, replicates the stance of The Conjure Woman’s “inside” black narrator, Uncle Julius, and that of other blacks of the time, who made the best of a bad situation. To facilitate further comparison of Page and Chesnutt, I would like to focus on a lesser-known writer, Harry Stillwell Edwards (1855 –1938), the son of a minor poet who migrated to Macon, Georgia, where Harry was born. Edwards practiced law but also wrote for the Macon Evening News and made African Americans the center of his dialect-driven stories. Later he wrote columns for the Atlanta Journal, as well as two novels, but he will always be best remembered for his Eneas Africanus (1919), which has sold over two million copies to date, mostly in the South. Edwards tells his tale entirely through letters, advertisements, and a concluding newspaper column that reports on the remarkable events at Major Tommey’s daughter’s wedding. The story opens with Major 2. This process has been traced by Edmund Wilson, Daniel Aaron, and others.

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Tommey’s advertisement circulated throughout the South in 1872 for the whereabouts of his family’s silver wedding cup, which was hastily given to a trusted slave when the family fled the Yankee invasion. Years pass; Eneas doesn’t return to the plantation, but he “was a faithful Negro, born and raised in the Tommey family,” so the Major assumes he is dead and the cup has been sold. Traditionally, however, the family’s brides drink from the cup on their wedding day, and the Major’s daughter is soon to be wed, so he begins to inquire throughout the South for Eneas. The first letter of response comes from a woman who encountered Eneas in 1864; she discloses that her son, who served in Tommey’s regiment, “married a Connecticut girl. Think of it, Major! But she proved to be a noble-hearted woman. . . . He travels this territory for a New York house. His wife is well connected, and one of her ancestors came over on the Mayflower” (14). Ensuing letters from other southerners chart Eneas’s progress; as he passes through seven states over the course of eight years, he marries, sires four children, preaches the gospel, and races his fabled horse, Chainlightning, the foal of the Major’s mare Lady Chain, winning money wherever he goes, but never spending it, as he views it as his master’s, a thematic thread that suggests the biblical parable of the servant who wisely invested his master’s talents (Matthew 25:14 –30). Along the way, Eneas writes a letter in dialect to the Major, begging for him to come find him, and signed “Yo’ ole nigger, Eneas.” Appropriately, the text Eneas most often chooses for his sermons concerns the wanderings of the Israelites. After seven years have passed, the Major’s daughter, who has the astonishing name of Beauregarde Forrest, marries Mirabeau Lamar Temple. Her name was legally changed to honor the heroes of the Confederacy; the groom’s names honor the families from Georgia who begot his Texas branch. The “family Negroes” provide “songs of exquisite harmony and pathos.” In the midst of this, Eneas arrives driving Chainlightning and proceeds to shout “about Moses and the Hebrew children being led out of Egypt into the promised land”; however, when he meets his former master, who is “choking with tears and laughter,” Eneas declares, “De projekin son am back ergin” (43), and then announces to the rest of the workers, “I’m home ergin!—You hyar me, Niggers?—home ergin!” He also tells the Major that the wagonload of “Yallerhama, Burningham Niggers” with him are his wife and children and adds, “Some folks tell me dey is free, but I know dey b’long ter Marse George Tommey, des like Lady Chain

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and her colt!” The cup, shining and resplendent after seven years in cotton batting, is produced and filled with clear well water by the groom, who reads aloud the “quaint inscription”: Ye bryde whose lippes kysse myne And taste ye water an no wyne Shall happy live an hersel see A happy grandchile on each knee. As the happy couple drink, Eneas produces all the racing earnings, which the Major tells him to keep, closing the story by saying, “[T]hat bunch of Burningham Yallerhama Niggers more than squares us” (47). After years of southern publication, the story was finally published in the North by Grosset and Dunlap in 1940, with new illustrations by Ernest Townsend and a sentimental letter from Edwards’s daughter Roxilane to “Dear Papa,” now dead two years, and a short biography of the author. Eneas has never gone out of print. Read today, the story seems cloyingly sentimental,3 overtly patriarchal and stereotypical, and hardly worth our attention. It has, however, some rather deep roots in mythic literature—particularly that of the Bible—and constitutes a heretofore unnoticed but important literary resource for one of William Faulkner’s masterworks, Go Down, Moses (1942), a book heavily indebted to the plantation tradition of Page. The lost silver cup appears in the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers. Sold into slavery in Egypt by his siblings, Joseph rises to a position of power; when his brothers, in time of 3. The sentimental component of southern literature has a long declension that predates the fiction of the Reconstruction era. For the antebellum antecedents, see Elizabeth Moss’s Domestic Novelists of the Old South, which provides an excellent bibliography of the relevant scholarship. The key study of Reconstruction sentimental novels by women is Anne Goodwyn Jones’s Tomorrow Is Another Day. Her skillful analysis of works by Augusta Jane Evans, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Mary Johnson, and their twentieth-century legatees Ellen Glasgow, Frances Newman, and Margaret Mitchell, usefully demonstrates a southern variant on a national model. But while Hawthorne complained about the “mob of scribbling women” who were ruining the market for his quite different volumes, many white male southern writers hitched a ride on the wings of female southern writers, who after all, were also vaunting the “Lost Cause” and resituating the “Plantation family,” while simultaneously dealing with domestic dramas and current fashion. Indeed, Page devotes quite a bit of space to the toilettes of his heroines, and many of his plots, as noted, were similarly lachrymose.

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famine, seek food in Egypt, he appears before them as Pharaoh’s minister and demands that they bring him their brother Benjamin as hostage. Subsequently, he releases all eleven but secretes his silver cup in Benjamin’s sack; the brothers are brought back to Egypt and accused of stealing, and Joseph proclaims, “[T]he man in whose hand the cup is found, he shall be my servant” (Genesis 44:17). Ultimately, however, this forces Judah to offer himself in Benjamin’s place for the sake of their father, who dotes on Benjamin and has never recovered from Joseph’s supposed death (these two were the only children borne to Jacob by Rachel, his most loved wife). Edwards, an astute student of the Bible, obviously plays upon its mythic resonances, which he knew his audience would share. The idea of slaves protecting their enslavers’ silver ran throughout romantic plantation school narratives; Edwards’s brilliance in fusing all those references into a ritualistic cup has several levels of meaning. First of all, it plays into the idea that the southern “family” must be reconstituted and strengthened through the reunion of whites and blacks, but only in terms of their original configuration of dominance and subservience, albeit in a parental mode. Secondly, Joseph’s biblical pronouncement subtly underscores the “predestined” concept of blacks as servants (always linked as well to the myths of Cain, Noah’s son Ham, Ishmael, and the New Testament injunction, “Servants, obey in all things your masters” [Colossians 3:22]). Whether he knew it or not, however, Edwards provided typological doubling of a highly revealing sort. Eneas, by his name, would be the patriarch, the founder of a new Rome, rather than the Major; furthermore, his assumption of Moses’s mantle precedes his humble (and crafty) sublimation of that Old Testament typology of deliverance, so closely associated with the northern armies and Lincoln, with the New Testament type of the prodigal son. The prodigal son allusions of course mask Eneas’s rash references to Moses and suggest both repentance and the patriarchy of the Major. The “prodigal” references also, however, significantly lay claim to the fatted calf and celebratory reinstallment as a “son” who has fulfilled his familial duty. When Eneas was finally published in the North in 1940, it accented, in a small but nevertheless important way, the triumphant culmination of the plantation tradition as America’s favorite mythology, in the form of Gone with the Wind, which in book (1936) and movie (1939) form had swept America off its feet. Eneas’s editors at Grosset and Dunlap affixed the following description to the endpaper: “This story of the devotion of 229

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a Southern darky to his ‘white folks’ is one of the great classics . . . a volume to cherish with great pride. . . . For . . . years [Eneas] wandered through the South—a veritable pilgrimage through the wilderness. . . . [H]e and the people he encounters emerge vivid and real. The whole brilliantly portrays an attitude and a way of life of a time not so long past, and does it with unforgettable charm, whimsy and brevity.” I quote this passage at length, for it tellingly demonstrates the staying power of Page’s tradition, even apart from the recent effect of Gone with the Wind. The editors obviously present the story as a “tale of truth,” in their claim that the story seems “vivid,” and “classic”; tellingly, they also note the conjunction between “real” content and a form that “charms.” Louis Mink has noted that historical narrative lays claim to truth, not just for its basic statements, but also for “the complex form of the narrative itself ” (144), and Page, Edwards, Chesnutt, and Mitchell understood this quite well.4 Furthermore, the “admirable” conduct of Eneas and of the trusted servants in Red Rock during the Civil War exemplifies an important myth of Lost Cause adherents, a category that included most white southerners in the 1890s and, indeed, as late as World War I. The Georgia Christian Index claimed that black southerners had been “quite as loyal to the Confederacy as their masters, and to them we are indebted for the fact that the war lasted four years.” As Charles Reagan Wilson has demonstrated, these encomiums ran parallel to equally prominent worries that freedom would unleash the powerful force of black sexuality; it was popularly believed that many former slaves had lost their religion too, which could only foster licentiousness (Wilson, 107ff.). While in the long run these arguments led directly into de jure segregation and the dark 4. Another aspect of Edwards’s relation to Chesnutt is quite fascinating; in 1887 Chesnutt published the story “How Dasdy Came Through” in Family Fiction; in 1890, Edwards’s very similar story, “How Sal Came Through,” came out in Century. Chesnutt initially detected plagiarism, and complained in a letter to George Washington Cable (cited in H. Chesnutt, 54 –55). Cable then wrote the editors at Century, who in turn contacted Edwards. He claimed coincidence, stating his wife, who knew the real “Sal,” provided the story. Chesnutt wrote Family Fiction’s editor that he had decided not to charge Edwards with plagiarism: “Mr. Edwards . . . has accounted for his story in a manner which I must accept as satisfactory” (H. Chesnutt, 56). The language of this letter seems freighted with irony and resignation and could well stand as a metaphor for Chesnutt’s eventual reaction to white colonization of African American culture in plantation school literature, a process that deepened throughout the rest of his life and beyond.

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years of what black southerners called the “Nadir,” ruled by the specter of lynching, in the waning decades of the nineteenth century, the familial myth was still being fostered, not only as antidote to new suspicions but also as buttress for the reassertion of social hierarchy and stability. So Eneas, though written later, replicates the method of Red Rock in particular and the plantation narrative in general in a usefully condensed and thus illustrative way. The words under the frontispiece portrait, “Eneas Africanus, the fast vanishing type,” seem to belie the longevity of the myth but at the same time betray the author’s yearning for this mythical “family” construct; nor was Edwards unusual: the myth continued to circulate for years afterward, in novels, films, memoirs, and later, on television. In 1951 Stark Young wrote of his childhood in Mississippi, surrounded by “Negroes . . . many of whom had once belonged to plantations in our family and still felt a claim on us, as we did on them. Indeed my Cousin Randolph Stewart used to say that every Negro had five white men working for him.” This passage is soon followed by Ours, when I was growing up, was a country peopled with ghosts, warm, close, and human; the dead were often as present as the living. Naked chimneys of burnt houses; ruined cemeteries where the dead had sometimes been kicked out of their graves . . . tombstones thrown down, smashed door panels and ripped-up portraits . . . aspects of war as war is. . . . [T]here was a certain elevation in many older people I knew then that came from suffering and loss, sorrow and humiliation, along with a sense of what had gone before, most of all a way of life now gone forever. (Young, 56 – 61) Young thus grafts his autobiography to the sturdy oak of southern mythology, which echoes Page’s Red Rock in making blacks childlike members of the family, recalls the war only in terms of white suffering, and remarks on how that agony has in fact elevated the white people of the South into a kind of pantheon that is very far from defeat. One could, in fact, locate a whole chain of stories such as this in southern letters, both before and after Young, which some might say is with us today in narratives such as Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Driving Miss Daisy (1987). Edwards published other illustrated books in which the patriarchal relation of aristocratic whites to their black “children” is presented in various ways; 1904’s Two Runaways had a dramatic version of this image as its frontispiece. 231

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Here and in virtually every other illustration that couples whites and blacks, the white figure appears in a dominant position. In one story, the white-clad aristocrat defends his former slave falsely accused of murder by revealing his heroism during the war, when he saved his Confederate “brother” at the risk of his own life, taking severe wounds in the process. Such portraits of black “family” members were notably more faithful to the actual appearances of African Americans than the more notorious simian or “Sambo” images that have been so copiously documented by Joseph Boskin and others. Positive renditions of these happy “family members” had been circulating well before the war, as the debate over the merits of slavery increased. The pages of Mrs. Mary H. Eastman’s notorious Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is (1852) sought to counter Mrs. Stowe’s more famous novel with images depicting well-dressed slaves dancing around substantial dwellings, one of them draped in the curling vines of Victorian sentimentality. As Page intoned in Social Life in Old Virginia before the War (1897), the plantation house itself presided over scenes such as these, “with outstretched wings under its spreading oaks, sheltering its children [a term that covers both races] like a great gray dove” (31). The same book details the maternal function of the Plantation Mistress over her slaves. Her lieutenant, the “mammy,” occupies a dual role. One of the “children,” she is nevertheless a second matriarch. Page situates the butler and carriage driver next to the mammy in importance: “The Butler was apt to be severe, and was feared. . . . Other servants too there were with special places and privileges. . . . They all formed one great family in the social structure now passed away” (63 – 64). What Eneas, Page’s faithful retainers, and others of their ilk represent as well is what was recognized as “classic,” i.e., an invented tradition. Part of the myth of the Lost Cause and the plantation idyll was the “tradition” of black fealty and familial feeling to and for white southerners. Eric Hobsbawm has observed that “invented” traditions are often responses to unexpected situations that take their forms through reference to prior situations or “establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition” and thus “give any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history” (Hobsbawm, 2; my emphasis). We may now turn to a considerably more complicated question: how does this ritualistic infolding of blacks and Yankees into the southern family create plot in Page’s greatest work, the novel Red Rock? At the outset of the story, we learn that the old Gray plantation takes its name from a red stain on a huge rock 232

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in the family’s burial grove. The legend attached to it is that the blood is from the Indian chief who murdered the first plantation mistress; he in turn was terminated by her husband, the “Indian-Killer,” whose portrait, like that of Hawthorne’s Judge Pyncheon, stares down sternly in a black frame from the present-day mantel. Supposedly, a secret compartment behind the picture houses the Indian’s scalp, and the bottom of the frame is bloodstained. Significantly, the story is believed by all the negroes and only some of the whites but as the author observes, “[I]f the negroes did not know, who did?” (1). The title thus becomes both an Aryan metaphor, an ethnic marker for the “rape of the South” during Reconstruction, and a sign of the value of property (the plantation) and tradition (the myth of its founding). The announcement that the blacks surely know the story discloses the author’s assumption that the tale is read as a cautionary parable by another subject people, but it also valorizes traditional notions of “primitive” wisdom, a knowledge that assumes priority only when it seems to suit white hierarchical values. Despite this violent genesis, antebellum life is paradisiacal: according to the preface, it is “the fashion nowadays to have only words of condemnation” for this lost Eden: “Every ass that passes by kicks at the dead lion. It was an Oligarchy, they say, which ruled and lorded it over all but those favored ones who belonged to it. But has one ever known the members of a Democracy to rule so justly?” Moreover, this innate nobility has been proven in defeat, which Page claims southerners “have borne . . . with splendid fortitude . . . everything . . . [was] lost to them [but] their dignity became grandeur. . . . They were subjected to the greatest humiliation of modern times: their slaves were put over them—they reconquered their section and preserved the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon” (viii). Most former slaves are loyal and do not want freedom, until the rabblerousing of the invading carpetbaggers, led by the predatory Jonathan Leech, takes place. Before Leech crawls out from his rock, however, we see life at Red Rock and the neighboring plantation, Birdwood, where the saintlike Dr. Cary resides with his family; daughter Blair provides much of the love interest for the two heroes at Red Rock, Jacquelin Gray, and his orphaned cousin Steve Allen. Dr. Cary opposes the war, but joins the cause after Sumter; still, he warns, “We are at war now—with the greatest power on earth: the power of universal progress. It is not the North that we shall have to fight, but the world” (41). The war itself is only alluded to; Blair’s brother is killed, Jacquelin is wounded, and the other men come home to a devastated region. The rest of the 233

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novel details the mounting reign of terror wrought by the carpetbagging government and courts, including the brief participation of the heroes in a quickly disavowed Ku Klux Klan. Concurrently, complicated love stories ultimately culminate in numerous marriages, including Blair’s to Jacquelin and Yankee Ruth’s to Steve. The culmination of the latter romance deserves close scrutiny. Steve, in jail for minimal Klan activities, can be indicted only through information he has given to Ruth, who, unknown to him, loves him. She comes to his cell and suggests they marry (a wife may not testify against her husband), thereby informing him of her love and setting up a spectacular courtroom scene where “justice” prevails. In fact, however, Steve, despite his love for Ruth, has to be persuaded to employ this stratagem by none other than Ruth’s Yankee mother, Mrs. Welch. The former Yankee soldier Reely Thurston’s marriage to the middle-class belle, Miss Dockett, is a lower-caste parallel to Ruth and Steve’s union; the comic nature of the former pair’s relationship suggests they play Papageno and Papagena to the other couple’s somber Tamino and Pamina from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. 5 The plot, as well as Dr. Cary’s announcement about the South’s fight being not with the North but the world, suggests that Page thought of himself as writing historical fiction in the tradition of Scott, a major influence; these characters, however, lack any individuality that truly derives from the historical peculiarities of their age. Still, Page was correct in his understanding that he was writing of a mass experience, one that nevertheless had precedent; two of Red Rock’s patriarchs, the elder Jacquelin Gray and Dr. Cary, are descended from ancestors who came to the New World after fighting in ultimately lost causes, the English Puritan Wars and the War of the Stuart Uprising, respectively. Moreover, Page’s depiction of the survivors of the war trying to return the South to an aristocratic, largely agrarian past rather than adopting the North’s program of transforming all things into commodities (a plan he deemed noble but futile, largely agreeing with Henry Grady’s New South creed) is in keeping with

5. The issue of North-South marriages, largely in the South, with the Yankee settling there, bears inspection as a parallel and possible influence on the structure of melting-pot romances; Mary Dearborn’s work on this subject, Pocahontas’s Daughters, includes an analysis of black Reconstruction novels but could be even better if linked to the plantation tradition’s variant.

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his chivalric sense, an aspect of Scott’s work he intensely admired (indeed, one of the key servants in Red Rock is named Waverly). Page’s plot, ending with two North-South marriages, amply fulfills the formula of the romance of reunion; it also, however, plays endlessly on the theme of the biracial southern family. As Lukács has demonstrated, European pseudohistorians of this reactionary type such as Sir Walter Scott created a falsely idyllic picture of the supposedly unsurpassed, harmonious society of the Middle Ages, just as Page attempted to reinscribe the history of both slave-driven antebellum society and the recently past Reconstruction. However, Scott’s heroes are always middle-of-the road figures, and his social conflicts are rarely easily divided into right and wrong factions. Page, to be sure, believes his heroes’ adherence to the old code of the gentleman needs to highlight the South’s industrial future, but in effect he ignores the deeper implications of emancipation and the onset of industrial and mercantile change, simplifying human categories and casting figures into family/ nonfamily, kin/ethnic categories. Page’s blueprint for southern historical literature worked well in his short stories but proved far more difficult to execute when he turned to the epic novel. The reading Page was doing of the so-called age of Negro Domination deepened his more negative views of African Americans but by no means effaced his sentimental, patriarchal stance toward them. Page’s doubled view of southern blacks of course developed from the ironic paradoxes of black /white relationships during slavery. Black poet Phillis Wheatley wrote in the eighteenth century, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain / May be refined, and join the angelic train” (Lauter, 1058). This stance, directed at achieving recognition and justice, was perversely accepted in part by the slave owners, for in the typologically determined world of the plantation, Master and Big Missy were father and mother of the extended family and exercised biblical dominion over their divinely sanctioned charges, both black and white. Thus both slavery itself and membership in the plantation family were determined by specifically Christian descent, albeit in radically differing ways. After emancipation, however, the attachment of slaves to former owners in particular and to the values of white southerners in general involved a myth of consent, the fiction that Page so excelled in mounting, namely the idea of the happy darkie, who still believed in his white folks, but also in the Edenic, biblically sanctioned days of slavery itself. If there are any lines in Page’s most famous short story, “Marse Chan” (1881), that stand out more than any others, they are the opening lines of the narrator’s dec235

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laration: “Dem wuz good ole times, marster— de bes’ Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac’! Niggers didn’ hed nothin’ ’t all to do—jes’ hed to ’ten’ to de feedin’ an’ cleanin’ de hosses, an’ doin’ what de marster tell ’em to do; an’ when dey wuz sick, dey had things sont ’em out de house, an’ de same doctor come to see ’em whar ’ten’ to de white folks when dey wuz po’ly. Dyar warn’ no trouble nor nothin’” (Ole Virginia, 10). Page’s prototypical plantation cast had its genesis in antebellum romances by George Tucker, James Pendleton Kennedy, James Kirke Paulding, and John Esten Cooke, whose cultural portraits were lent credence by Northern writers such as Sarah Hale and Harriet Beecher Stowe, even though, as Jay Hubbell claims, Red Rock was really Page’s belated reply to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had appeared forty-six years earlier (Hubbell, 801). Interestingly, northern readers like Stowe’s brother Henry Ward Beecher, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and many others who had earlier wept over Uncle Tom and Eva, now shed tears over “Marse Chan,” seemingly justifying the reader of Red Rock who wrote Page, “[Y]ou have done more to set the South right in the eyes of the world and to correct the misrepresentation of fanatics, fools & scoundrels than all the other stories put together” (quoted in H. Holman). Still, when the tide of favorable reviews for Red Rock rolled in, it was Higginson who demurred, protesting that Negro suffrage was necessary and that many carpetbaggers were honorable. Overall, however, the reviews indicated Page had succeeded in his goals, namely to further reconciliation and to honor southern virtues as generally American strengths, strengths that could be used in the future by the nation. On the other hand, he had helped push the memory of slavery into the periphery, replacing the agony of black southerners with that of whites. Indeed, historian Paul Buck asserts that “for better or for worse, Page, Harris, Allen, and their associates of the South, with the aid of Northern editors, critics, magazines, publishing houses, and theaters, had driven completely from the northern mind the unfriendly picture of the South implanted there in the days of strife . . . a land loyal to the best traditions of the nation . . . [full of ] noble sacrifices to great ideals, where Negroes loved ‘de white folks’” (Buck, 235). By conceptualizing this kind of identity for blacks, Page more easily crossed over into black identity himself; he often used a black voice/mask to narrate, thus paralleling whites in blackface on the minstrel stage. Why would Page, a man who had many reservations about blacks, so read-

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ily don this pose? We may find a partial answer in differentiating between his ideas of race and ethnicity. Werner Sollors has rehearsed the long-term debate over two schools of thought: One, expressed by Harold Abramson, states that although “race is the most salient ethnic factor, it is still only one of the dimensions of the larger cultural and historical phenomenon of ethnicity.” On the other side is Pierre van den Berghe and his followers, who consider race a special “objective” category that cannot be meaningfully discussed under the heading “ethnicity.” Today, many see Abramson’s view as more accurate, but whites in the antebellum South had it both ways, as Page’s works testify. Subsequently, however, Reconstruction brought a modification to a sliding scale of ethnicity, in the process redefining the term “southerner,” which was read as signifying “ethnic group” as distinct from race. Page’s Yankee-Rebel marriages never represent a compromise but rather the adoption of southern values by “educated” northerners. The emphasis on adoption in his stories and novels reminds us of the patriarchal nature of both ante- and post-bellum southern society and of the new “ethnicity” by consent that such marriages represent. However, these marriages always also entail the “adoption” of the plantation “darkies” by the new Yankee “massa/missie.” This theme begins in the antebellum “prehistory” of Page’s novel; two northern visitors, Mr. Welch and his cousin Middleton, appear the night of an elegant party at Red Rock. Despite their alien status, they are treated regally; Middleton feels “So completely . . . adopted by his hosts that he could scarcely believe that he had not been one of them all his life.” This theme of adoption becomes key to understanding the book’s complicated plot, for Yankees and loyal blacks are all eligible for adoption into the clan—a term natural to British descendants—if they exhibit the right qualities. This becomes evident in this same party sequence when the young Blair’s mother has to plead with her daughter’s Mammy Krenda (who also nursed her) to let Blair stay up later. “You all gwine ruin my chile’ looks, meckin’ her set up so late. How she gwine have any complexion, settin’ up all times o’night?” The ladies defer to her as she “carried her head as high as a princess.” Throughout the novel, “good blacks” like Mammy Krenda are “part of the family.” Page was quite explicit about this “adoptive” process in his essays. Throughout these pieces, which focus on the ethnic extended family of the white southern clan, the secular religion of the Lost Cause imbues his language, as he knits all into a kind of biblical family, one bred to

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noble deeds. During the war, Page declared, the women of the South for four long years bore it all stoically and bravely, “and still amid their tears encouraged the survivors to fight on. . . . It was in the blood” (Social Life, 58). And yet the slaves too could belong to the clan, if not by descent, then by the fiction of consent, especially figures like Page’s mammies. He asserted that the mammy’s authority was second only to the master and mistress’s and was accompanied by an extraordinary affection for the children she nursed, being often more marked than that between her and her own offspring. She may have been harsh to the latter; she was never anything but tender with the others. . . . The young masters and mistresses were her ‘children’ long after they had children of their own. When they parted from her or met with her again after separation, they embraced her with the same affection as when in childhood she “led them smiling into sleep.”. . . If she was a slave, she at least was not a servant, but was an honored member of the family, universally beloved, universally cared for—“the mammy.” (Social Life, 59 – 60; my emphasis) 6 In Red Rock, the young aristocrat Steve’s mammy, Aunt Peggy, has the same name as Chesnutt’s conjure woman and gives aid and comfort to whites in trouble with the Reconstruction government more than once. As we have seen, Page also claims that the butler and carriage driver are “with the Mammy . . . the aristocrats of the family. . . . Other servants too there were with special places and privileges. . . . They all formed one great family in the social structure now passed away” (Social Life, 61, 64; my emphasis). Red Rock extends this concept many times. As the excitement of the early days of the war builds, “Even the servants, for whom some on the other side were pledging their blood, were warmly interested, and were acting more like clansmen than slaves” (44). After the war, when Dr. Cary attempts to pay his servants, he includes Mammy Krenda despite his wife’s assurance that this will be offensive: “why, she is a member of the family . . . we can’t pay her wages” (90). Mammy does take the wages, but later she

6. The myth of the black servant loving her white charges more than her own children has a long history, detailed in Trudier Harris’s definitive From Mammies to Militants. For spirited counters to this myth, see Alice Childress’s hilarious sendup, Like One of the Family; the scenes concerning Sophia’s career as the Mayor’s maid in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; and white writer Ellen Douglas’s sensitive examination of this issue in Can’t Quit You, Baby.

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tellingly asks him how much he pays his wife, and next he finds her in his wife’s arms with Blair nearby, all three of them weeping: “The only words he heard were from the mammy. ‘Ef jest my ole marster could come back. He’d know I didn’t do it for no wages’” (92). Similarly, her male counterpart, Old Tarquin, is questioned by the evil Carpetbagger Leech as to Steve’s whereabouts: interestingly, his dignified reply, mouthing white dogma, is in much better English than is usual for blacks in the book, even for Tarquin: “I served with my master through the war. . . . [M]y master offered me my freedom before the war, and I wouldn’t take it. You may get some poor creatures to betray with such a bribe, but no gentleman will sell himself ” (492). Clearly we are meant to see loyal house servants such as Tarquin as gentlemen, and this lofty state creates a family kinship as well, and indeed lies at the core of the adoption syndrome, for a gentleman frequently is born, but sometimes made, thus linking into the theme of descent/consent, but also into the theme of shared patrimony. At least once, however, a less than perfect black, Steve’s comic alcoholic servant Jerry, brings in a sinister element. His wife comes to Steve to ask him to intercede with Mr. Spickit, the storekeeper, to record Jerry’s purchases of liquor as “merchandise”: “I is a member o’ de chutch, and I don’t want whiskey write all over my book— dat’s hit!” Steve asks her, “Has he threatened to beat you? . . . [H]e knows what he’ll get if he tries that again. . . .” and if Jerry tries to get the conjure man to “trick” her, he says, “[T]ell him ‘I’ll lick him.’ You come to me.” The family script gets dangerously close to the reality of white male intrusion into black marriages here (a powerful subject for Faulkner in Go Down, Moses), as the white “patriarch” protects a black woman from her black husband. Even more ominous, real history sometimes seeps into the southern family romance; describing a fox hunt, Page divulges that some mythical, impossible to catch foxes have names: “There was one . . . known as ‘Nat Turner,’ after the notorious leader of ‘Nat Turner’s Rebellion,’ who remained in hiding for weeks after all his followers were taken” (Social Life, 72). Page was well aware of the threat distinctly African American cultural forms posed to the fiction of the patriarchal plantation “family.” The relatively minor significance of his treatment of conjuring in the scene just discussed contrasts with his florid presentation elsewhere. The Welches, as northern outsiders, are ideal receptors for the ugly portrait Page paints through Moses, the “trickdoctor” (Page’s equivalent of the conjure man and, of course, an evil and ugly figure). The patrician Ruth and her father overhear Moses declare to a crowd of 239

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freedmen, “I’m jest as good as any white man, and I’m goin’ to sho ’em so. I’m goin’ to marry a white ’ooman and meck white folks wait on me. When I puts my mark agin a man he’s gone, whether he’s a man or a ’ooman, and I’se done set it now in a gum-tree.” As Moses voices this, he sees his white listeners and changes his act, pulling off his hat and saying cringingly, “My master; my mistis.” . . . He was a somewhat strongly built, dark mulatto. . . . Ruth thought she had never seen so grotesque a figure, and she took in by an instinct that this was the trick-doctor of whom Dr. Cary had spoken. His chin stuck so far forward that the lower teeth were much outside of the upper, or, at least, the lower jaw was; for the teeth looked as though they had been ground down, and his gums, as he grinned, showed as blue on the edges as if he had painted them. . . . [T]he nostrils were unusually wide . . . [and he had] little furtive eyes which looked in quite different directions. . . . (291–93) 7 This portrait of a nonfamily black is that of a simian, a mode of portraiture that was repeatedly used to mock not only blacks but also the Irish and other immigrant groups, especially in popular magazines such as Puck. These kinds of images were used by Edwards’s illustrators as well in 1899, in stories about comic darkies who were not specifically linked to a white family—they clearly look like grinning monkeys, unlike the rather noble images used to depict faithful “family” retainers in illustrations of Edwards’s other stories. Similarly, Page’s targets among the freedmen in Red Rock, Moses and Sherwood, are the prototypes for later attacks on black preachers and politicians, who as Joseph Boskin, James Dorman, and others have shown, were frequently targeted in the popular press as “uppity”; they too become simianized. 7. Here Page is using pejorative myths about “blue-gummed niggers” that persisted well into the twentieth century. Stark Young tells the story of his uncle who was directing a black man as he dismantled a staircase; thousands of gold coins fell out, and the worker tried to claim them, having seen them first; then he bit the uncle. Young comments, “He was a bluegummed Negro and their bite was generally believed to be poisonous. At any rate my cousin came near to losing his hand” (Young, 22). Moreover, simian characteristics are often ascribed to feared, supposedly inferior ethnic groups. This has been the case with the Irish, African Americans, Native Americans, and others in American cultural history, as documented by Dormon (1986).

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Despite his late interest in Christian socialism and other surprising developments, Page never really changed his attitudes toward “disloyal” blacks, and in a late story, “The Trick Doctor,” which was included in his last collection, The Land of the Fair (1913), he fuses Red Rock’s Moses into an evil “city Negro” named Simon Jambers, who pretends to be a conjure man in order to swindle ignorant rural blacks. Significantly, this figure has been educated, but that only makes him more predatory. He preys individually on the community’s “old time darkie” preacher, Moses (here the name is used for a “good darky”), whose daughter has malaria. Simon palms “trick” bags under her mattress, pretends someone has “tricked” (conjured) her, and demands that the old man sign over his home to him in order to lift the curse. On a broader front, he schemes to supplant the elder as minister. In this doubled plot, Page means to attack “Judas” blacks who have betrayed the patriarchal family, showing how they offer a threat both to individuals and the broader black community they compose. Interestingly, Page’s prejudice against higher education for blacks echoes in part Booker T. Washington’s emphasis on industrial training over “higher learning”; he claimed one of the saddest things he ever saw was a young man sitting in a shack in filthy clothing trying to read a French grammar (Washington, 123). Richard Brodhead has warned us against reading this and similar passages in Washington too reductively, for in fact many educated African Americans were indeed propelled away by their learning from productive assistance of their uneducated brethren (Brodhead, 185). Page, however, goes further; educated blacks could actually turn on these brethren. More seriously, in “The Trick Doctor” Page attacks the very system of conjuring that Chesnutt had presented as a great cultural resource in The Conjure Woman; old Moses triumphs over Simon only through the strong assistance of the white doctor and a detective and by a shrewd use of quotations from the Bible that punctuates a powerful sermon. Conjuring, reduced to mere “tricks,” becomes discredited by the very people it had sustained. The return of the flock to standard, white-inspired religion, devoid of the strongly Afrocentric focus that was actually there historically, enforces in more broadly cultural terms the “return” to the patriarchal family we have noted earlier. Amazingly, as Edwards would do in Eneas, Page inverts the typology of liberation to favor white patriarchy: old Moses models his sermon after the ninth and tenth chapters of Exo-

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dus, where God instructs Moses how to cause hail to fall on Egypt, but in Page’s transformation, Moses is leading his people out of imminent bondage to Simon, the false prophet, but also the exemplar of “tricks,” i.e., conjuring. The old white doctor understands Simon’s assumed last name, Jambers, to be a corruption of Jambres, one of the sorcerers who tried to compete with Moses in Egypt. As Page’s Moses is in reality leading his people to the “promised land” of the renewed patriarchal plantation family, signified in equal measure by the white doctor’s science and the Eurocentric interpretations of the Bible, the ironies could hardly be stronger. As the above indicates, Page employed creative typology to shape his sacral vision of the “saving remnant” of the old plantation family, which would lead the New South back to its sacral covenant with the land. His typological “reading,” “reporting,” and “interpreting” of African American Southern culture for a largely northern audience, however, replicated the errors of early generations of anthropologists. Like them, and the other plantation school writers who share this stance, he constructs himself and white southern society through the racial “other” he and his readers “study” and claim to represent. By separating postwar blacks into sheep and goats—“family” and “outsiders”—he was able to extend the typological patterning that is so fundamental to the literature of redemption that he represents. As Lewis Simpson, Gaines Foster, and Charles Reagan Wilson have all forcefully demonstrated, the Lost Cause more than redeemed the South; it gave it the form, in Simpson’s apt phrase, of “a sacramental nation” (Simpson, 222), one that would now, reunited with the North, show the way to return to the nation’s redeemer origins. In this reading of history, race, and “family,” “the South,” a construct that certainly contained African Americans, would perform like the biblical “saving remnant.” I also dwell at length on the evil Moses of Red Rock because his depiction brings in another aspect of Page’s ethnic sense of “southerner.” Although presumably the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and “bad” blacks all consent to operate outside the realm of true “southern” values, their physiognomies are virtually uniformly repellant. We recognize in this description of Moses all the simian, bestial characteristics of racial caricature, but compare this description of the carpetbagger Leech, the chief white villain of Red Rock: The new Provost was not pleasing to look on. He was a man spare in figure and with a slight stoop in his shoulders— consequent perhaps on

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a habit he had of keeping his gaze on the ground. He had mild blue eyes, and a long, sallow face, with a thin nose, bad teeth, and a chin that ended almost in a point. When he walked, it was with a peculiar, sinuous motion. The lines in his face gave him so sour an expression that . . . Allen . . . said that Leech, from his look, must be as great a stench in his own nostrils as in those of other people. (105) By contrast, Mammy Krenda, Tarquin, and other “good” blacks are described in favorable terms, and the images of blacks in the illustrations Page approved for his various works— especially for his nonfiction monograph, Social Life in Old Virginia—in many respects command admiration and convey dignity. “Bad” blacks are not illustrated at all, with the exception of “The Trick Doctor,” who looms Satanically over his victim. Inclusion in the “family” obviously conveys beauty and dignity as well. But such kinship must be earned, as Yankees go through an educational process that results in adoption. In the Welches’ case, this process is emphasized through the reactions of friends in the North to their letters; a Mrs. Bolton declares, “I never knew anyone go down there who did not at once abandon all principles and fall a victim to the influences of those people” (333). And in fact, people tell the Welches repeatedly that they’re different from Leech, and yet they say, “You aren’t like them. You are more like us” (339). D. W. Griffith’s powerful film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which President Wilson termed history “written in lightning,” in many ways represented the penultimate completion of the sentimental plantation tradition. Like Page’s book, the movie offers pseudohistory, wasting a genuine artistic sensibility in the service of racial dogma. Executed with cinematic brilliance but cruder in its pandering to sexual nightmares and racial phobias than its predecessors in the genre, this film represents and predicts the demon’s brood that hatched from the temporary victory of Page and his school over Chesnutt and other moral writers at the turn of the century. It in turn influenced the racist history of the Civil War and Reconstruction being written for the instruction of America’s schoolchildren, a scandal revealed in devastating detail by W. E. B. Du Bois in “The Propaganda of History,” which indicts in particular sixteen studies of this type turned out by Columbia University historians alone between 1895 and 1935. In an irony of history, Du Bois’s properly outraged rhetoric echoes Page’s in his 1892 essay “Necessity for a History of the South,” where he thundered,

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“[H]istory had been written by Northerners, and it rests with the South to correct the appalling portrait of an ignorant, illiterate, cruel, semi-barbarous section of the American people, sunk in brutality and vice, who have contributed nothing to the advancement of mankind” (Old South, 17). Page never understood the irony of his stance—he had used virtually the same words to indict black and African cultures in an attempt to prop up his own. The South needed a prophet and a spokesman, Page concluded: “He must know and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him, God!” Even more revealing are Page’s comments elsewhere on the shocking way southern history had been left out of the nation’s chronologies, a charge that still rings true, although not in the way Page meant it: “Up to the present more than half of the material for a history of this nation has been overlooked—the material contained in the life of the Southern people. The history that has been written is as an ancient palimpsest, in which the writing that is read is but a monkish legend, whilst underneath, unnoticed and effaced, lies the record of eternal truth” (Old South, 267). In an engaging study, Richard Brodhead has reminded us that regional literature of the nineteenth century constitutes a “work of ethnic imagining” that is also the site for literary opportunity; as he notes, Chesnutt mined it to achieve his goal, a literary career, which differentiated him from African American contemporaries such as Washington, Harper, or Douglass, all of whom saw writing as a means to a political end (Brodhead, 178). I have elsewhere extensively analyzed the intricate workings of humor in The Conjure Woman, which contribute so forcefully to its ultimate success,8 and Eric 8. This position, in fact, has other parallels outside the boundaries of race. In the wildly popular frontier humor tales of the Old Southwest, many of which were published in northern journals such as The Spirit of the Times in the decade before the war, writers such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, William Gilmore Simms, George Washington Harris, William Tappan Thompson, and Henry Clay Lewis used patrician narration and detachment while presenting raucous, violent, hilarious backwoods schemers like Sut Lovingood, Ransy Sniffles, and other ne’er-do-wells, who portrayed the exuberant anarchy of the frontier, while nonetheless finding implied “control” by their narrators, who in fact represent the patrician plantation order that, at least theoretically, finally did bring order to the frontier. These figures, too, were “children,” and we can see perhaps the best example of that in the way Papp Finn plays on this syndrome in Huckleberry Finn, where the new judge is all too eager to “tame” and “civilize” this seemingly childlike sinner. Huck himself, of course, an

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Sundquist has brilliantly and exhaustively attended to other key aspects of the book in his study To Wake the Nations. I will add here that Chesnutt, in studiously mastering a form already popular, sets a pattern for African American writers to follow, such as Frank Yerby, who specialized in romantic historical novels (including several set, like Chesnutt’s work, in the South of Reconstruction); Chester Himes (the detective novel); or Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler (science fiction). Moreover, there is much irony in the fact that Chesnutt, wearing the plantation mask that Page had helped fashion, reached the final layer of truth beneath the legend—the hard realities and searing contradictions of slavery. His subversion of Page’s pastoral romanticism began the following year with The Conjure Woman and extended into the militant novels that followed, laying a path for the blast of Du Bois’s call to judgment in 1935. As noted, Chesnutt wrote within the tradition but also against it. He studiously subtracted many of the key components of the tradition or transformed them. For instance, he remarked in a letter to George Washington Cable, “I notice that all of the many Negroes (excepting your own) whose virtues have been given to the world in the magazine press recently, have been blacks, fullblooded, and their chief virtues have been their dog-like fidelity to their old master, for whom they have been willing to sacrifice almost life itself. Such characters exist. . . . But I can’t write about those people, or rather I won’t write about them” (H. Chesnutt, 57–58). This comment reveals much. Chesnutt knew that other writers presented such characters as emblematic of all African Americans, whereas the truth of the culture was far more complicated. For that matter, Page’s assembly of southern “types” presented the same kind of simplistic shorthand for other areas of southern culture. As Mary Poovey has observed, to separate literacy and literary texts from other kinds of social activity is to “artificially rupture (or repress) the totality of which literacy and the literary text are integral parts” (Poovey, 617). Page and the plantation school do precisely that; Chesnutt, although inevitably

actual child, constantly flees the various would-be parents who want to enfold him in the southern extended family. The obverse is true in The Conjure Woman, where John, Annie, and Julius not only constantly negotiate narrative authority and credibility but also deal with each other materially and ideologically. Within the tales themselves, Julius cedes authority to a chorus of competing voices that provide in miniature the richly polyphonous text of African American history and culture.

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constrained by the literary format and his inevitable situation of writing for a white audience, aims at a more inclusive, culturally accurate mode of representation, for all its reliance on the folkloric and magical. But this courageous stance placed him at odds with most writers of his time, not just Old South aficionados. Chesnutt also altered the terms of the landscape and setting. As William Andrews has noted (42), the hilly and remote Cape Fear region that Chesnutt features in The Conjure Woman was not part of the stereotypical plantation South with its cotton/slave economy. Surely one reason Chesnutt features it is precisely that he wishes to downplay the plantation school pattern while using it as a hook to entice readers. Purging the text of long descriptions of the manor house, the gardens, the social system itself, and the quaint and chivalrous customs of the white folk, he could insert relatively unobtrusively Uncle Julius’s tales and the bitter truths their sugary coating enclosed. Moreover, most of Page’s black narrators, as we have seen, were house servants and, as such, are frequently counted as “members of the family.” Julius, as we learn in “Date’s Necklace,” “never indulged in any regrets for the Arcadian joyousness and irresponsibility which was a somewhat popular conception of slavery; his had not been the lot of the petted house-servant, but that of the toiling field hand” (Short Fiction, 133). Thus readers could logically expect Julius to be better informed about life in the quarters than in the big house. Julius’s manipulation of the narrator subverts the docile, harmless image of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. The absence of children in John and Annie’s household also abrogates the possibility of Julius serving as feminized nursemaid/storyteller. Furthermore, the fact that John and Annie, while representing white culture in the novel, know virtually nothing of local history, clears the way for Julius’s growing stature with the reader as cultural historian par excellence, a position far superior to the partial and “primitive” wisdom ascribed to ex-slaves in Page’s works. Nor did Chesnutt neglect to change how readers saw “ole marsters”; William Andrews has pointed out how Chesnutt’s plantation owners, unlike those depicted by Page, tend to be rather parsimonious Scots who “cheat each other, indulge their gambling vices, hunt down their runaways, argue with their wives, curse their slaves, and worry over their bankbooks” (Andrews, 56). In many ways, this makes them more believable, although they are necessarily briefly sketched (as are the slaves) due to the brevity of the genre. But they are very far 246

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removed indeed from the polite aristocrats of Kennedy, Pendleton, Page, Dixon, and Mitchell. More importantly, however, Chesnutt largely erases any extended portrait of contemporary white southern “marsters,” focusing instead on the recently transplanted primary narrator, the northerner John and his wife Annie. To be sure, using these two as characters echoed Page’s technique of having Yankees educated upon arrival in the South, utilizing minilectures, stories, and anecdotes from locals, along with dramatic incident. But there seems to be little social difficulty or ensuing indoctrination of Page’s type occurring here; indeed, if anything, John and Annie encounter much less antipathy from the locals than do the Welches, who in Red Rock quickly become embroiled in local political issues. These Northerners seem instead to offer new models rather than seeking to adopt southern mores. John’s new vineyard is described by the local press as “a striking illustration of the opportunities open to Northern capital in the development of Southern industries” (34). Racial problems are confined to the inner stories by Uncle Julius. Some readers might object that denying the term historical fiction to Page’s novel but awarding it to Chesnutt’s mythical and sometimes fantastic tales blurs the issue; but Lukács reminds us that what matters in historical writing “is not the re-telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events” (42). The characters in The Conjure Woman triumphantly pass that test, as evidenced by slave perceptions and by Annie’s reaction when her husband scoffs at the tale of “Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny,” which details the horrors of slave mothers and children being separated; Sis’ Becky and her child Mose, benefitting from magical transformations via conjuring, are reunited at the conclusion, and Mose as a grown man purchases first his mother’s and then his own freedom. John thanks Julius for an ingenious fairy tale, but Annie declares severely that “the story bears the stamp of truth,” seeing through the fantastical layer to the inner core, which she proclaims is “true to nature, and might have happened half a hundred times, and no doubt did happen, in those horrid days before the war” (159). This story epitomizes the thrust of Chesnutt’s project; objecting to the cosmetic ethnicity by consent Page and others rendered, Chesnutt peeled away false histories of Reconstruction to examine the darker history of slavery that was its foundation, forcing attention back to the destruction of civilization’s bedrock, as represented in the black family and personhood itself. At the same time, we read another level of meaning here, which we now deny to Page; i.e., the story is true to history. This sort of history— one 247

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true to nature and life, though not necessarily to feasible fact— can be found in fantastic postmodern novels as well, such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Gerald Vizenor’s Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart, or Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Moreover, Uncle Julius, as a hero who uses his wits to survive during a period of transition, may claim the tales he tells are that broad prehistory that we need in historical fiction, where the past opens up the fictional present and the actual future as well. Red Rock, by contrast, tends to make characters mere representatives of historical movements and ideas, whereas Chesnutt’s figures, briefly presented as they are, have a complex and vital relationship with the tragic age they inhabit; no matter how brief the story in The Conjure Woman, each has a special historical character, largely because of the grounding of the tales in folk life and culture. As in Ivanhoe, but unlike Red Rock, we find the true heroism in the “lower” ethnic group. To put it another way, Chesnutt’s “inside narrator,” Uncle Julius, uses the fantastic to mask the real; Page employs a counterfeit “real” to authenticate a mythic South that never was. Still, one must grant both Page and Chesnutt honors in demonstrating how historical pressures and crises can engender human greatness. Neither Chesnutt nor Page, however, can produce the sense of progress that is so marked in Scott— Chesnutt because of the ongoing oppression of African Americans, Page because of his mission to restore the values of the past rather than build a legacy for the future. We must be fair to Page, however; unlike several of his contemporaries, he always championed reunion with the North, praised Lincoln and Grant, and reviled slavery as the South’s greatest curse, particularly as it had isolated the region and made it culturally defensive and stagnant. On the other hand, he felt it had benefitted African Americans while degrading whites, particularly poor whites. This aspect of his work has been forgotten as critics have, perhaps understandably, relied overly much on more flowery tributes to southern culture that he wrote, such as Social Life in Old Virginia, where the complicating aspects of his other work— particularly his essays—are missing. Both writers understood very clearly the potential power of their words; indeed, Page remarked a few years before he wrote Red Rock that the South lost the war because it failed to develop a literary tradition, albeit for good reason, i.e., a lack of interest in capitalist modes of production. The North, by contrast, employed its writing to gain the world’s support. Page obviously was determined to rectify this situation in postbellum America; the South’s writers and historians, led by him, would write both history and historical fiction that would strip away 248

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false images of the South as a barbaric, cruel assembly of slaveholders. Words would do what bullets could not. And to a great degree, he and the writers who followed, from Thomas Dixon to Margaret Mitchell, succeeded in this effort. Their “truths,” however, were merely illusions of another type. It remained for Chesnutt and his heirs such as Du Bois, Arna Bontemps, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Margaret Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, Ernest Gaines, and Toni Morrison to truly revise and revitalize the record of historical fiction. They have had what we at least hope will be the last word; ironically, these compatriots have thus confirmed the merit of Page’s plan, while simultaneously debunking the “authenticity” of the works that carried it out. I will conclude by noting how the South’s greatest writer, William Faulkner, unknowingly replicated Chesnutt’s inventive and subversive appropriation of the Plantation School’s methods. He almost certainly signified on Eneas twice, in two uses of that tale’s presentation of the biblical tale of Joseph’s silver cup, first in The Unvanquished (1938) and then in Go Down, Moses (1942). In the former, the Sartoris’s rebellious slave Loosh tells the Yankees where the family silver is buried, while Ringo, his nephew, and a “member of the [Sartoris] family,” actively works with Granny and his virtual “brother” Bayard Sartoris not only to get the original silver back but to get whole trunkloads of it as well as uncounted mules by presenting forged orders from a northern officer. In Go Down, Moses, overt indebtedness to Eneas appears as Faulkner names a central character, a slave, “Tomey’s Turl.” This man belongs to the McCaslin brothers, Buck and Buddy; he is also their half brother. The McCaslins allow their slaves a good deal of freedom; Turl “escapes” repeatedly to court Tennie, a slave woman on a neighboring plantation, causing Buck and Buddy to give comic chase. Eventually Buck marries Sophonsiba Beauchamp and wins Turl’s beloved Tennie from Sophonsiba’s brother, Hubert, in a poker game. Hubert wills to Sophonsiba and Buck’s son, Ike (the central character of the novel), a silver cup filled with gold coins. After the war and Hubert’s death, the cup, which has been wrapped in burlap for years, has been replaced by a tin coffeepot full of IOUs made out to Ike. Faulkner here seems to be signifying on the tainted legacy of the plantation tradition, which proffers silver and gold but delivers tin; like Joseph’s cup, hidden in his brother’s luggage, it is a cheat and a pollution, inextricably entwined historically and typologically with slavery and deception. Tomey’s Turl’s picaresque roamings link him to wandering Eneas. Faulkner, however, apparently believed, as Page did, in the myth of the black 249

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servant loving her white charges more than her own children—where else did Dilsey come from but his own biased view of Mammie Caroline Barr, to whom he dedicated Go Down, Moses, and whose eulogy he wrote and delivered himself over her body laid out in state in his parlor? He even designed a family tombstone for her, which privileges the love of her white “children” over that of black kin. Faulkner’s family was not unique in their sincere belief in the myth that black servants were like “one of the family.” Many portraits of Southern families—traditionally taken on the front steps—included a black man and woman as “members of the family.” But one could belong to the “family,” of course, only through fiction, never through blood. Joel Williamson’s recent biography of Faulkner has revealed that the Old Colonel, for whom Faulkner was named, sired a black family. The white Faulkner family— even the racially crusading novelist—never “adopted” these embarrassingly real blood relatives of a darker hue, preferring Mammie Caroline and Uncle Ned, their “like one of the family” retainers.

Works Consulted Andrews, William. The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Bone, Robert. Down Home: Origins of the Afro-American Short Story. New York: 1975. Reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford, 1986. Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Buck, Paul. The Road to Reunion. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937. Cabell, James Branch. Let Me Lie. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1947. Cabell, James Branch. The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck. New York: Robert M. McBride, 1915. Chesnutt, Charles W. The Conjure Woman. 1899. Reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. ———. The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. Ed. Richard Brodhead. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. 250

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———. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. Reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961. ———. The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt. Ed. Sylvia Lyons Render. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Chesnutt, Helen. Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952. Childress, Alice. Like One of the Family. New York: Independence, 1956. Dearborn, Mary V. Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905. Dormon, James H. “Ethnic Stereotyping in American Popular Culture: The Depiction of American Ethnics in the Cartoon Periodicals of the Gilded Age.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 30 (1986): 489 –507. ———. “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age.” American Quarterly 40 (1988): 450 –71. Douglas, Ellen. Can’t Quit You, Baby. New York: Atheneum, 1988. Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860 –1880. 1935. Reprint, New York: S. A. Russell, 1956. Edwards, Harry Stillwell. Eneas Africanus. 1919. Reprint, Macon, Ga.: Eneas Africanus Press, 1954. Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Random House, 1942. ———. The Unvanquished. New York: Random House, 1938. Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Gillette, William. Retreat from Reconstruction: 1869 –1879. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Hampton, Wade. “What Negro Supremacy Means.” Forum 5 (1888): 383 – 95. Harris, Trudier. From Militants to Mammies: Domestics in Black American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 251

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Hobson, Fred. Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Holman, C. Hugh, and Louis D. Rubin, eds. Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Holman, Harriet. “The Literary Career of Thomas Nelson Page, 1884 –1910.” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1947. Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature, 1607–1900. Durham: Duke University Press, 1965. Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859 –1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Lauter, Paul, et al., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2nd ed. 2 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Heath, 1993. Lukács, György. The Historical Novel. 1936. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962. Michaels, Walter Benn. “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 655 – 85. Mink, Louis O. “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument.” In The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Moss, Elizabeth. Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Page, Thomas Nelson. In Ole Virginia. Rev. ed. New York: Scribner’s, 1912. ———. The Old South: Essays Social and Political. 1892; rpt. New York: Scribner’s, 1896. ———. Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction. New York: Scribner’s, 1898. ———. Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War. New York: Scribner’s, 1897. Poovey, Mary. “Cultural Criticism—Past and Present.” College English 52(6) (1990): 615 –25. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey. New York: Appleton-Century, 1936. Simpson, Lewis P. The Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essays on the History of the Literary Vocation in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square, 1982. Warren, Robert Penn. The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial. New York: Random House, 1961. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986. Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865 –1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1962. Young, Stark. The Pavilion. New York: Scribner’s, 1951.

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idlife crisis.” A cliché with its origins in Gail Sheehy’s outrageously successful book, Passages. Why bring up that piece of middle-brow pop psychology? What does that sort of bicoastal psychobabble have to do with the South, anyway? You might well ask. After all, one thing some of us like about the South is that southerners spend less time than other Americans reading Psychology Today and more watching Bill Dance Outdoors. Well, indulge me in a conceit. Reflect on the fact that what we now call “the Old South” was actually (some patches of Tidewater aside) a rather young South. Gawky, awkward, sometimes rambunctious. Testing the limits of its independence. After the Sturm und Drang of its adolescence, after the region went to war and came back sadder and wiser, the South’s concerns were those typical of young adulthood—making a living, principally. Now, after some decades of that effort have begun to pay off, the South, like many of Ms. Sheehy’s “cases” entering middle age, can finally afford to ask those potentially debilitating questions: What’s it all about? Is this it? Who am I? We need answers to those questions, and one way or another, we are going to get them. Clearly the old answers, the ones that were assumed while the South got about the business of making a living, will not do any more. Like some of the folks Gail Sheehy looked at, the South could cling to the old answers anyway, becoming in the process narrow, rigid, crabby, and socially isolated. Or, figuratively speaking, the South could get its hair styled and start wearing chains and hanging out in singles bars. Even suicide is an answer of sorts, and there is an analogous option open to the South. But I believe that southerners will continue to think of themselves as southerners, although what that means will change —indeed, it has already begun to change. The new identity will incorporate some elements of the old; it will not be an entirely new construction. Some of its outlines are already apparent, but 254

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others are still up for grabs. One of the pleasures of South-watching in the twenty-first century is speculating about how this story will turn out. But I am getting ahead of myself. I wanted only to say that I am not using the phrase “mid-life crisis” in any rigorous or technical sense (I am not sure it can be used that way) but just using it as a pretext for looking at regional identity. What are southerners, anyway— or, more precisely, what do southerners think they are? Talking about that question has been a favorite pastime of southerners for almost as long as there has been a South, and some nonsoutherners have been interested, too. “Tell about the South,” said Quentin Compson’s Canadian roommate at Harvard, provoking the telling of Absalom, Absalom! and providing Fred Hobson with a title for his book on southern self-examination. As often as not, those who have tried to tell about the South have sought some one defining characteristic, a single institution or peculiarity that has made the South what it is—in other words, a “central theme” in southern history. David Smiley wrote once that seeking a central theme in southern history has been the central theme of the history of southern history. David Potter, trying to convey just how puzzling the South is, called it “this sphinx on the American land.” (Ask it questions, he implied, and you get answers, but figuring out what the answers mean is another matter altogether.) If we are going to be classical about it, though, perhaps a better personification would be Proteus, that old man of the sea who could assume any shape. Again and again, people have looked at the South and seized what they thought was its essence. Again and again, they have been left empty-handed when the thing changed shape. And yet the thing itself remained. Naturally, antebellum Southerners were inclined to think the South was about slavery. On the eve of secession, one South Carolinian wrote: “The South is now in the formation of a Slave Republic [in which slavery] will make its stand, will build itself a home, and [will] erect for itself . . . a structure of imperial power and grandeur—a glorious Confederacy of States that will stand aloft and serene for ages.” Five years later, that vision of the South was—well, gone with the wind. Yet the South was still there, more “solid” and perhaps more distinctive without slavery than it had been with it. Sixty years later, Ulrich B. Phillips, a distinguished historian of the South, said that white supremacy was what the South was about. A devotion to that principle, he wrote, was “the central theme of Southern history and the cardinal test of a Southerner.” Many have agreed with him, but even as he wrote, Jim 255

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Crow was terminally ill— or so it seems in hindsight. Phillips would not recognize the South today. Proteus has changed shape again. A few years after that, seventy-odd years ago, the Agrarian authors of I’ll Take My Stand identified the South with agriculture and rural life. They did it eloquently, but it seems that they were wrong. Who would make that identification today, now that more than two-thirds of us live in cities, towns, and suburbs? Others have identified the South with one-party politics, one-crop agriculture, One-Way religion; with the legacy of Civil War and Reconstruction; with a Cavalier tradition from the English Civil War or, more plausibly, with a Celtic heritage from Great Britain’s geographical fringes. Many of these factors have been undeniably important in making the South what it is, but it is probably a mistake to make any one of them the sine qua non of southernness. One after another, these features have faded or been replaced, and their champions have written their epitaphs for Dixie. But Proteus is still kicking. Many of these efforts to define the South have had a despairing tone, echoing John C. Calhoun’s deathbed words: “The South—the poor South. What shall become of her?” The South was virtually identified with the problems of which it certainly had its share. As Erskine Caldwell summed it up: “The South has always been shoved around like a country cousin. It buys mill-ends and wears hand-me-downs. It sits at second-table and is fed short-rations. . . . It is that dogtown on the other side of the railroad tracks that smells so badly every time the wind changes. . . . The South has been taking a beating for a long time.” In the 1940s, I am told, a schoolbook called Contemporary Georgia drew such a sorry picture of the state that a generation of children knew it as “Contemptible Georgia.” When Yankees were doing the defining they often took the same tack: the South was where the problems were. In H. L. Mencken’s well-known phrase, it was the “Sahara of the Bozart,” a cultural wasteland populated by cretins whose long stretches of indolence were interrupted only by episodes of violence against animals or each other. Southerners, alas, have often responded with defenses that did not help much, replying in the terms laid down by our critics and bragging about having the first, the biggest, the newest, that fastest-growing . . . whatever. Mencken himself gleefully compiled some of the feeble responses to his “Sahara” essay:

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“The first Sunday-school in the world was opened in Savannah.” “The first to suggest putting to music Heber’s ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’ was Mrs. F. R. Goulding, of Savannah.” “Who does not recall with pleasure the writings of . . . Frank L. Stanton, Georgia’s brilliant poet.” And so forth. It all reminds me of nothing so much as a book published in Toronto in 1973 called 1001 Reasons to Be Proud of Being Canadian. (Number 38 is: “Because Canada’s shape is almost perfectly square.”) Perhaps you noticed that Mencken’s correspondents were from Georgia. Georgians seem always to have taken the lead in the first/biggest/newest defense of the South, maybe even outdoing Texans. A hundred years after Atlanta’s Henry Grady popularized the phrase “New South”—meaning a South as good as the North, in the North’s own terms—I saw an advertisement in Atlanta for Stone Mountain that billed it as “the world’s largest stone carving” without mentioning what it is a carving of. Outside Georgia, some southerners respond differently to criticism. “Come to Arkansas, Mr. Mencken,” one newspaper in that state growled. “Come to Arkansas . . . and get your liver drained.” This sectional psychological warfare, this continuation of the War between the States by other means, is not especially edifying, but it can help us understand what it means to be southern. Any single definition of that term is insufficient by itself, but notice that all of them rely on a comparison. The one constant is that southerners are different from northerners with respect to whatever is being discussed. Slavery takes on significance only when it exists side-byside with free society: otherwise it is just part of the human condition. Racism is highlighted and seems a good deal odder when it is found in part of a society that claims to be committed to assimilating the huddled masses of the Eastern Hemisphere. As C. Vann Woodward has pointed out, conquest and defeat, frustration and humiliation, poverty and hard times look to most of the world as just how things are: it takes a victorious, prosperous, and innocent North to make those things appear to be southern experiences. Lurking in the background of almost any statement about the South, if not stated outright, is a comparison to the nonsouthern United States. If someone says southerners are lazy, or violent, or religious, he means: compared to northerners. Not to Mexicans, to Martians, or to any absolute standard.

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Some years ago, Glenn Elder and I asked some of our students to list “typical southern traits,” “typical northern traits,” and (later) “typical American traits.” What we found was that the “southern traits” were virtually the mirror image of the “northern” ones: slow, not fast; generous, not greedy; religious, not materialistic; conservative, not progressive; and so forth. Leave aside whether these are accurate generalizations; the point is that when we asked these southern students to tell about the South, they did it by comparison to the North. In the jargon of my trade, “southerner” seems to be a reactive identity. It is almost as if we need northerners around to know who we are. Those students did another interesting thing. Their list of “American” traits had almost nothing in common with their list of “southern” traits; it was in fact very similar to their list of “northern” ones. This does not mean that they did not think of themselves as Americans, just that their standard for comparison had changed. Compared to other Americans, they were southerners: traditional, easygoing, polite, and so forth. But compared to foreigners, they were Americans—progressive, efficient, and all the rest. The late Edgar Thompson of Duke University knew as much about plantations as anyone living. He found it useful to think of the South as the Englishspeaking northern end of a plantation region that stretches down into the Caribbean and Latin America. But the reason this is such a useful way to think about the South is that we do not think that way ordinarily. No, we think of ourselves primarily as Americans, at least these days. But among Americans, we southerners believe ourselves to be different. Those differences are what define us as southerners. To the extent that W. J. Cash was right when he wrote that we can still speak of “one South” despite the region’s diversity, to the extent that the South is held together, southerners’ belief that they have distinctive things in common supplies the glue. The South has always been a messy assortment of landscapes, local societies, economic modes, peoples, and cultures. What do Georgia and Arkansas have in common, after all, or Kentucky and Louisiana? There certainly are a lot of differences, and it is tempting to dwell on them. But bring Massachusetts into the picture, or California, and then it is a different story. South Carolinians will allow of Tennessee that at least it is not populated by Yankees. And South Carolinians will believe that means something. But what it means has certainly changed, and especially in the recent past. In his book Journeys through the South, Fred Powledge tells about what happened 258

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when an undergraduate geography class at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte tried to define the South. The students talked about accents, about word choices, about preferences in food, about the South’s “slower pace”—but nobody mentioned slavery or secession or segregation. I have tried it myself, at Chapel Hill, with similar results. My students are apt to mention a more leisurely style of life, better manners, more conservative political and moral values, family pride and loyalty—a great many different things. But they produce a remarkably ahistorical list: nobody mentions that white southerners once owned slaves or that they lost a war or that they practiced segregation for some decades. Not even my black students mention these things, although that may just be their southern good manners. I was doubtful that this experiment would turn out the same in the Deep South, but a friend tried it in Alabama and got the same result. (No one has tried it with northern students as far as I know, but I am virtually certain that they would mention these unhappy facts.) What is going on? Are they teaching no-fault history in high schools these days? Are they teaching history at all? Well, one student did ask me during a test to remind her which side was the Union and which the Confederacy, but she was unusual. Most of my students turn out to know the facts of southern history and acknowledge them readily enough when asked about them. It is just that southern history is not what comes to mind spontaneously when they are asked what the South is about. The burden of southern history—to borrow Professor Woodward’s fine phrase— does not seem to weigh heavily on them; it has little to do with their sense of themselves as southerners. I am certain that is a change, and an important one. Whether it is a good one or not, I am not so sure. It may be that a happy historical amnesia will let us get on with our lives in this region, allow us to “forget the bad and keep the good” (as a country song by Tanya Tucker puts it). On the other hand, I am reminded of a conversation I had with some young Germans. I suggested that we had something in common: How did it feel to them, I asked, to have lost a war, to recognize that the world is a better place for it, but nevertheless to know that you lost? They simply did not understand the question. They seemed to have no sense that they had lost a war, no sense of identification with the generation that had happened to. For some reason, I found that disturbing. In any case, our survey research suggests that regional identification is still lively. For many southerners, “southerner” is still a significant part of the answer 259

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to the question “Who are you?” But what southerners now see themselves as having in common, whatever it may have been before, is less a tragic and un-American history— or, for that matter, a glorious and super-American history—than a shared culture in the present. That and some shared complaints about the rest of the country. People find the business of culture difficult to articulate, and I do, too, but Michael O’Brien, in his book The Idea of the American South, reminds us that the work of the political scientist Karl Deutsch is helpful. Deutsch is concerned with what makes a nation, and he equates “nation-ness” with ease of communication. A nation is a community within which people can communicate easily. As Deutsch points out, a common culture makes communication more efficient. In the extreme case, part of that common culture is a language that nobody else understands. Since a common dialect or even an accent is a step in that direction, making it easier for insiders to understand one another and harder for them to communicate with outsiders, perhaps it is no accident that the southern accent turns up near the top of many people’s list of what defines the South. But other aspects of culture also facilitate communication. Many assumptions are “programmed” into us as we grow up; many things “go without saying.” Common ground rules for interaction are mutually understood and do not have to be explained or negotiated. These understandings are often embodied in manners, another of the regional differences that often get mentioned when people are talking about the South. Manners prescribe, for instance, what it is appropriate to know about the person you are with. An article in U.S. News and World Report on northern migrants to the South mentioned the frequent “misunderstandings” that come up and told of a northern woman’s irritation at being asked by a neighbor where her husband was. What seems to southerners to be courteous concern for someone else’s relatives—you are supposed to ask about them even if you do not care— can apparently be seen by northerners as impolite, as nosiness—you should not ask even if you do care. Closely related are shared ethical understandings, about what is good; shared religious understandings, about what is true; shared aesthetic understandings, about what is beautiful. Shared understandings determine what is in good taste, what is funny, even what is edible. Most cultural groups have their distinctive dishes that outsiders find revolting but that insiders like, or profess 260

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to like, at least on ceremonial occasions. Probably the best example is the Scottish haggis: oatmeal and liver in a sheep’s stomach. Grady McWhiney once told me that “Reed” is 76 percent Celtic, but the other 24 percent find the idea repellent. If we are looking for the national dish of the South, fried chicken and country ham are not repulsive enough; chitterlings are probably too repulsive. Okra and the Moon Pie are possibilities, but if we must choose a single dish there is no question what it should be. Roy Blount wrote a poem about it one time that concludes: True grits, more grits, fish, grits, and collards; Life is good where grits are swallered. Shared understandings—about grits and other things—make communication easier, and these are the kinds of things people tend to mention these days when you ask them what makes the South what it is. Notice that whether people understand one another is a different question from whether they like each other. That is obviously related, but its answer depends on a great many other things. In particular, it may well depend on whether their interests are the same or opposed—that is, on whether what is good for one is good or bad for the other. But many southerners do seem to believe that they have common interests. Our survey research tells us that some believe that whatever is good for the South’s economy, whatever increases the South’s political power, whatever improves its image is good for them personally. Actually, these beliefs are most often expressed as grievances: people tell us that, as southerners, they are economically exploited, politically discriminated against, or—most common these days— denied the respect due them as Americans, or human beings. That perception of shared interest is the second of the bases for regional identification that seem to be persisting. But notice that these are grievances about how southerners are treated in the present. I do not deny that those southerners with a bone-deep sense of history will have a regional identity shaped and nourished by that history (and the results can be wonderful indeed, as southern literature continues to attest). But few southerners these days have a sense of themselves as southerners that grows from that soil. When we ask them what it means to be southern, they talk instead about what southerners have in common now: on the one hand, aspects of language and culture that make it easier for southerners to understand one an261

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other; on the other hand, a sense of shared ill-treatment at the hands of the rest of the country—in particular, these days, a sense of being looked down on by other Americans. In a book called Southerners: The Social Psychology of Sectionalism I have looked at the ways that modern conditions—urban life, expanded education, the mass media, more travel, and so forth— can actually heighten regional identification by producing greater awareness of these Southern “things in common.” Here, let me just point out a couple of implications of a quasi-ethnic identity that is based less on a shared history and the ancestry that transmits that history to the present than on a common cultural style and a shared set of grievances. One implication is that a group defined by this sort of identification can be extraordinarily open; its boundaries can be remarkably permeable. Anyone who adopts the cultural style and voices the appropriate grievances is a potential member. This is one of the weakest points in the argument some of us have been making that southerners can be regarded as an ethnic group, because whatever the other features of “genuine” ethnic groups, they are defined by a belief in a common ancestry, a set of shared experiences that happened in the past to members’ forebears, not to them directly. This puts limits on how open ethnic groups can be to outsiders. Perhaps there is some sense in which I could become, say, an Italian American, against all the known facts of my genealogy, but I would have to work at it pretty hard, and that sort of transformation cannot be expected to happen very often. As Horace Kallen put it in his famous essay on the “melting pot”: “Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent: they cannot change their grandfathers.” But if I am right about how southern identification works these days, outsiders need not change their grandfathers to become southerners. They do not even have to denounce them. If the current wave of migrants want to become southerners, they can probably do it. Whether they want it or not, many of their children will probably succumb. I know a family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina—a Boston Irish family with five children. The youngest was a student of mine at Chapel Hill. His mother hates Winston-Salem, hates North Carolina, hates the South, and she has felt that way ever since her husband got a job in Winston-Salem twenty-five years ago. She goes back to Boston every chance she gets and is looking forward 262

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to moving back when her husband retires. But right there in the bosom of her family is a boy, my student, who looks and sounds and appears to think very much like Bo Duke. He used to put his boots up on the trash can in my ofÞce and complain about his mother the Yankee and her unreasonable dislike for the South. He is staying. Joel Garreau of the Washington Post tells of an even more extreme example. In Jackson, Mississippi, he interviewed a German industrialist whose study was decorated with the ßags of the United States, West Germany, his hometown of RavensburgÑand the Confederate States of America. This man spoke in a thick German accent, but what he had to say was 100 percent Mississippi. He told Garreau that northerners put down the South without knowing what theyÕre talking about: ÒIÕm not saying theyÕre Yankees. IÕm saying theyÕre stupid.Ó They believe silly untruths about the South, Òlike some people still believe fairy tales, like the stork that brings babies.Ó This man was halfway there: he had the grievances but recognized he had to work on the style. He still spoke of the ÒNorseÓ and the ÒSouse,Ó and joked that he was not a good enough Mississippian yet to own a Luger. But Joel (who has an eye for these things) observed that his teenage daughter was a Òblow-dried blond heartbreaker in tight jeans and cinched shirttailsÓ who already looked and pretty much sounded like the Ole Miss sorority girl she probably became. The South, as George Tindall has observed, has always been able to absorb outsiders. ÒOver the years,Ó he wrote, Òall those Southerners with names like Kruttschnitt, Kolb, DeBardeleben, Huger, Lanneau, Toledano, Moise, Jastremski, or Cheros got melted down and poured back out in the mold of good old boys and girls, if not of the gentry. Who, for example, could be more WASPish than Scarlett OÕHara, in more ways than one?Ó When Choong Soon Kim studied the Choctaws of Mississippi, he observed that even they had been thoroughly assimilated to rural southern ways; a visiting Plains Indian noticed the same thing and grumbled that the Choctaws were not redskins at all, just rednecks. My favorite example of assimilation, though, is a country music disk jockey I once heard on a Georgia radio station; his nameÑI swear itÑwas John Wesley Cohen. The big exception to this happy cultural gumbo, of course, has been southern blacks, who have not by and large been inclined or encouraged to think of themselves as black southerners. But I do believe this is changing. It has already started to happen. Robert Botsch turned up a nice example when a black North

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Carolina furniture worker said he was planning to vote for Jimmy Carter because he was “tired of listening to all those slick Yankees who think they know everything and have all the answers.” It is hard to sound more southern than that. Let me wrap this up by summarizing. I am saying that if you want to know what southerners are, you could do worse than to ask them what they think they are. The answer, these days, for most, has little to do with ancestry, with the Civil War, with the Peculiar Institution of slavery, or with any of the South’s other peculiar institutions. Instead, what we hear is that southerners share some things in the present: first, what one anthropologist has called an ethnic style (not the same as an ethnic tradition); second, some mistreatment at the hands, or mouths, of the rest of the country. If that is correct, it has some implications that I, at least, find cheering. It means that migrants to the South, or their children, will probably prove to be assimilable, like earlier migrants. That is good news for those, like me, who like to have the South around. In addition, it opens up at least the possibility of a regional community that would cross the racial divide. It would be ironic indeed, but wholly delightful in my view, if a sense of regional identification that has been bound up in the past with the struggle to maintain white supremacy could serve to bind up the wounds that struggle has produced. We could surprise the cynics yet.

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How Region Changed Its Meaning and Appalachia Changed Its Standing in the Twentieth Century henry d. shapiro

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t the beginning of the twentieth century, the word region meant an area, geographic or other, defined exclusively by its location. But terms as well as times were changing. The Oxford English Dictionary, long in process and finally published in 1910, noticed that the new disciplines of zoogeography and climatology used region in a new way, as “a more or less defined portion of the earth’s surface, especially as distinguished by certain natural features, climatic conditions, a special fauna or flora, or the like.” No other dictionary followed the OED’s lead in acknowledging a specialist’s meaning for the word, however, and no dictionary at all included a general definition of region as an area characterized by its contents until much later. Indeed, so far as I have been able to ascertain, it was not until the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language in 1961 that our modern, regionalist definition of region received formal acknowledgment. Along with region as location now appeared region as “a broad geographical area containing a population whose members possess sufficient historical, cultural, economic, and social homogeneity to distinguish them from others.” 1 A first version of this essay was prepared for presentation at the Organization of American Historians meeting on April 12, 1973, under the title “Region or Nation: The Discovery of Appalachia and the Definition of American Culture, 1870 –1920.” Some of that appears in this. The narrative in this essay generally follows the story line in my Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870 –1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), where full documentation of all my generalizations will be found, but my analytical intent here, as well as much of the analysis, is quite different. 1. Oxford English Dictionary (1910), vol. 8, pt. 1, s.v. “region”; Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: G. and C. Merriam, 1961), s.v. “region.” Definitions of region as location appears in the following: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1913); Webster’s New

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So there it is, region as neologism; can regionalism as problematic be far behind? The conventions of American history and culture don’t much notice the new regionalism of the early twentieth century, much less the ways in which it has transformed our understanding of American history and culture—the ways in which we have transformed our understanding of American history and culture by imposing regionalist (and pluralist) concepts on the same old raw data of facts and events. Indeed, the government decentralizers and pluralizers of American culture of the mid-twentieth century argued that the regionalism they advocated was as American as apple pie, as old as the Quebec Act, in any case no innovation, and especially no European transplant to our native ground. Since they were the generation of our own teachers, and their ideological commitments not unlike our own, we have tended to—and wanted to— believe them.2 International Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed., unabridged (1940); The Century Dictionary and Encyclopedia, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1889); The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, Revised and Enlarged, 10 vols. (1914); and Funk and Wagnalls’ New Standard Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1928). The very English dictionary by H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (London: Oxford University Press, 1926 and subsequent eds.), long regarded as authoritative by teachers and editors in America, cautions against the use of “in the region of ” to mean “about” or “nearly” and otherwise proposes that region be treated as one of numerous synonyms for “field, in the sense of space proper to something” (op. cit. 179, 492). 2. Both the Quebec Act and its predecessor, the Proclamation of 1763, divided British North America along geographic lines and thus “anticipated” the “sectional” divisions used in the debates of the Continental Congresses and in the Constitutional Convention, and most notably in the first census and in the debates in the Congress of the United States. It amuses me to notice that these two best examples of the imposition of the British colonial consciousness are thus so easily linked to the origins of regionalism as a fundamental element of an American culture springing from American conditions and the American consciousness. Regionalism as a fundamental element of American culture is the presumption of all the essays in Regionalism in America, ed. Merrill Jensen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951); its historicity because of regionalism’s identity with sectionalism (conceived as a natural rather than as a divisive concept) is especially the argument of Fulmer Mood’s brilliant exposition of American geographical thinking before Turner went to Harvard, “The Origins, Evolution, and Application of the Sectional Concept, 1750 –1900,” in Regionalism in America, 5 –98.

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Changing meanings are historical events even more important than changing administrations in our nation’s capital. But when we look at meanings, as when we look at administrations, we find it easier to notice continuities than innovations. Instead of looking for that moment in the haystack of time when region escaped the discourse of zoogeography and entered the common consciousness as a division of space characterized by its contents, I propose to notice “regionalism” manifesting itself in the transformation of Appalachia from a strange land and peculiar people into one of the legitimately distinct regions and legitimately discrete peoples in a nation of regions and peoples. If, as all evidence suggests, the mountain region seemed different to Americans in the 1920s than in the 1880s, and we can account for this different seeming by no changes in climate or whatever, then it behooves us to acknowledge that something was going on and to look behind the explicit attitudes for a more general phenomenon that might contain the new, might explain the new. That more general phenomenon is the emergence of regionalism. A sketch of the process by which “regionalism” made Appalachia into a legitimately discrete area, and the southern mountaineers into a legitimately distinct people, will also suggest some of the implications of regionalism for our conceptions of place and people, and of the larger geographic, social, cultural whole of which Appalachia is and always has been a part—I mean the United States of America. It will also allow us to see the ways in which first the idea of region, and then the word, gained currency in response to the problem of diversity in America, of which the dilemma of Appalachian otherness was an archetype. Prior to the end of the nineteenth century, the Appalachia we now know as “a geographic area containing a population whose members possess sufficient historical, cultural, economic, and social homogeneity to distinguish them from others” was defined exclusively by location, as “the central South,” 3 or, more 3. Rev. J. M. Davies, “Scotch-Irish Stock in the Central South,” The Church at Home and Abroad (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1887), 2:128 –29; Frank E. Jenkins, “The Mountain Whites of the South,” in Evangelical Alliance, National Needs and Remedies (New York: Bayard and Taylor, 1890), 89; Joseph E. Roy, “Americans of the Midland Mountains,” pamphlet (New York: American Missionary Association, 1891). By 1895, “the central South” was well enough established as the name of a geographic region for W. G. Frost to use the term without further explanation in describing where “Appalachian America” was to be found (“The Last Log School House,” Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, Dec. 14, 1895).

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frequently, was not defined at all. It was backwoods, uplands, very much the fringes of things. Appalachia entered the American consciousness as an area distinct from both the South and the “upper South” during the 1870s and 1880s, “discovered”—that’s their word, not mine—by writers of travel sketches and short stories of local color. In their search for quaint and picturesque aspects of American life and landscape, the southern uplands appealed as terra incognita. Appalachia was a strange land inhabited by a peculiar people, as unfamiliar as the nomadic Scythians on the steppes of Central Asia, and writers exploited the fact of Appalachian otherness to provide an exotic background for, and thus add interest to, the conventional plots and hackneyed descriptions of their stories and sketches.4 What made Appalachia “other,” in their view, was the persistence of rude and primitive patterns of social and economic organization in the area. These conditions were more appropriate to the frontier status it once had than to its current location at the very heart of the oldest and most civilized portion of the nation. Unlike the other places and peoples described by the local colorists, moreover, the southern mountains and mountaineers were not separated from the familiar present of modern America by ethnic, geographic, or chronological distance. The very existence of Appalachia thus seemed to challenge the assumptions of American unity and homogeneity, in terms of which Appalachian otherness was defined. Were the mountaineers exceptions that proved the rule of American progress and prosperity? Or was the rule in fact not a rule! This is not to say that regionalism was nothing more than a direct response to the apparent dilemma posed by Appalachia’s existence. But the dilemma of Appalachian otherness was a type of problem that the social theory of the late nineteenth century could not explain and which the public philosophy of the late nineteenth century could not contain. Regionalism, by contrast, made room for the existence of Appalachia as a distinct place in a nation of distinct places (regions), and of the mountaineers as a discrete people in a nation of discrete peoples. 4. Appalachia being as unfamiliar as the Scythian steppes and so forth is from Louise Coffin Jones, “In the Highlands of North Carolina,” Lippincott’s Magazine 32 (October 1883): 378 – 86. A fuller discussion of local color writing, and of competition among writers for undiscovered and unexploited “fields for fiction,” appears in Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 8ff.

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While neither Appalachia nor the mountaineers were the only “strange land and peculiar people” visible to late-nineteenth-century Americans, the existence of Appalachia was said to be anomalous and did in fact create a dilemma of a kind that other lands and other peoples simply didn’t. It was also a problem that would not go away. Appalachian otherness would not become transformed into Appalachian non-otherness, the region and its people would not become “integrated into” or “a part of ” modern America, because of the way Appalachia and Appalachian otherness were defined—that is, as anomalous products of the normal processes of evolution and development, of modernization and national integration. Second, the problem posed by the fact of Appalachian otherness would not disappear from view because too many people had too much invested in the notion that Appalachia really was a strange land inhabited by a peculiar people, and they ought to do something about it. The literary folks, and the literate, the writers and journalists, editors, and readers, continued to find the southern mountains a suitable field for fiction, continued to employ mountain settings for stories and sketches, continued to use Appalachian otherness as the donnée of fiction, and continued to read about Appalachia thus defined. They still do. If Appalachia were just like America, where was the subject for their prose, where would be the interest of the piece, who would print it, who would buy it, who would read it? In much the same way, benevolent workers, home missionaries, teachers, settlement workers continued to find the southern mountains a suitable field for their work, and the mountaineers—unchurched by definition, needy by definition—a suitable client population to serve. But since they couldn’t serve the mountains if the region were already served, and couldn’t assert the “special claims” of mountain work if Appalachia were as American as Cleveland or Kalamazoo, they told their public—including potential donors, denominational and benevolent agency trustees, and ultimately themselves—that Appalachian otherness was a temporary condition suitable for remediation and that the mountaineers were an “exceptional” population whose “needs” could not or would not be met in the normal course of things, by the “normal” development of schools and churches and economic institutions, or by the “normal” agencies of public and private benevolence and development. And then there were the entrepreneurs and developers, the railroad promoters and later the concrete manufacturers proponents of “good roads,” the timber and coal company managers, the advocates of the “cotton mill cam269

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paign.” They also continued to find in Appalachia an unexploited treasure trove of natural resources, raw materials, cheap power, and cheap labor, as well as an absence of a modern infrastructure of transportation and markets, which they were happy to provide. But since they couldn’t “develop” Appalachia if it were already developed, they told their public—including the bankers, their own corporate leadership, and ultimately themselves—that Appalachia was quintessentially “unmodern,” as full of economic opportunity and as available for economic exploitation (and for the good news of progress and improvement) as any European colony in Africa or Asia. So the problem would not go away because too many people had too much at stake to let it go away, because a vast system of institutions, occupations, expectations, and assumptions had become a part both of American life and of American culture—including the assumption that Appalachia was “real,” that Appalachian otherness was “real,” and that the fact of Appalachia and the fact of Appalachian otherness were “problems.” At the turn of the century, moreover, just when the problem of Appalachia might have passed from view along with the generation of those who had “discovered” it, new men and women came into the field. The almost moribund literary tradition of local color was infused with new vitality and effectively transformed into “realism” by a new generation of writers (like John Fox Jr.) who told tales of high adventure set in the mountains of Appalachia rather than of Mexico or Montana.5 The almost moribund system of Appalachian (outside) benevolence was infused with new vitality by a new generation of leaders who lived in the region and identified themselves with its future—most notably William Goodell Frost and John C. Campbell—and by the emergence and rapid entree into the mountain field of new kinds of agencies practicing a new kind of benevolence. Now in addition to the home missionaries and college professors there were settlement workers and settlement houses, sociologically trained 5. On the emergence of “strenuous” prose at the turn of the century and its vogue in the work of Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Richard Harding Davis, see esp. Grant C. Knight, James Lane Allen and the Genteel Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), The Critical Period in American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), and The Strenuous Age in American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954). The “new” literature of Appalachia includes examples of all the literary tendencies of the early twentieth century, including Graustarkianism.

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school teachers committed to using “the school as community center,” government agencies and government agents investigating conditions in Appalachia with an eye to changing them, and of course the new philanthropic foundations and their representatives. The stagnating apparatus of economic development was infused with new vitality in this period also. The coal companies became active, replacing timber companies as the region’s biggest landowners and exporters of its natural resources. Promoters of roads and railroads announced plans to link the region with national markets and began to build. Local, regional, sectional, and national visionaries articulated an Appalachian version of the New South creed of industrialization and therefore of prosperity, which focused eventually on the employment opportunities for mountain folks in the cotton mills of the Piedmont. (Well, where was Appalachia anyway?) Even the agronomists and agricultural economists took a hand, advocating the introduction of new cash crops in the mountains—apples, nuts, timber in particular (Gifford Pinchot at Biltmore was not alone)—which would also serve the causes of soil conservation and enhance the region’s potential as a site for tourism by providing “views” and “a landscape.” To all of these members of the new generation, Appalachian otherness was a central assumption and a vital issue, and the “problem” of Appalachian otherness at least the implicit focus of their efforts at description, understanding, and remediation. As a result, they kept the assumption alive, and the problem vital, at least through the first two decades of the new century. In their efforts to “contain” the problem, however, and to find ways of managing it, they hit on the regionalist formula. Theirs was thus the seminal work, of reconceiving America as a nation of regions and peoples, of parts comprising a whole. The occasion for their articulation of this formula— of Appalachian otherness as legitimate because of Appalachia’s standing as a region and the mountaineers’ standing as a people—is clear. An outbreak of highly publicized feuds at the turn of the century, combined with new reports of moonshining in the mountains, provided a set of historical events that appeared to be real and that, more important, could be read as evidence that the region had a history like any place else and a culture from which that history derived—again, like anyplace else. Or maybe it was the other way around, that the culture derived from the history, but the two went together in any case, culture and history, so that Appalachia 271

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seemed “other” when compared to the American past or to the American present, to pioneer virtue or to the altruism of contemporary civilization. Feuding and moonshining put Appalachia in America’s newspapers and made it seem at once like other places (where “events” happened) and unlike other places (where these particular events did not happen). The writers and journalists, the agents of systematic benevolence, the economic developers then said that this was just the way it was in Appalachia and used the “fact” of feuding and moonshining as a subject for fiction, as an indication of the need for heightened efforts at improving the lot of the mountaineers and teaching them the usages of modern American culture, and as no obstacle to economic development and additional reason for economic development. In the process, however, they began to talk about the characteristics of Appalachia itself, its “own” patterns of culture, its “own” structures of social organization, thereby making Appalachia a place like other places but not the same place, and the mountaineers a people like other peoples, but not the same people. In the case of Appalachia and the mountaineers, that is, difference began to seem less like deviance, and diversity less a challenge to the possibility of American national unity. To this tendency, the discovery—again, around the turn of the century— of an apparently indigenous tradition of handicrafts production and an apparently indigenous “folk” culture of songs, stories, and superstitions also contributed, by providing additional proof of the existence of a distinct and identifiable Appalachian culture. For what was folk culture anyway, in the early twentieth century, if not the analogue among primitive peoples of the high culture of the modern populations of Europe and the United States and the actual origins of their more sophisticated art, literature, and music? 6 The discovery of an apparently indigenous folk tradition in Appalachia thus reinforced contemporary notions of Appalachia’s primitivism and therefore Appalachia’s appropriateness as a subject for literary treatment, its need for systematic benevolence, its availability for modernization. But the simultaneous discovery that the “folk tradi-

6. For contemporary notions about the relationship of “folk” and “high” culture, the seminal texts are by Francis B. Gummere, Old English Ballads (Boston: Ginn, 1894) and The Popular Ballad (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907). For the history of changing notions about this relationship, Donald K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1959), remains standard.

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tion” in contemporary Appalachia bore striking resemblance to the songs, stories, weaving styles, and agricultural technology of our pioneer ancestors on the American frontier of colonial days, or in their English, Scottish, and Welsh homes, established the essential Americanness of the region, its culture, and its people.7 The net effect was to legitimate Appalachian otherness in what may be the first but is certainly an early example of the use of the regionalist formula, soon applied to other places, other groups in the same period. Thus if regionalism did not emerge from the dialogue on Appalachian otherness, at least it emerged within that dialogue. And then, when it became itself a formula in American public philosophy and American social theory, replacing notions of national homogeneity with notions of national diversity, replacing systems of classification based on status and hierarchy with systems of classification based on culture and equivalence, Appalachia effectively disappeared from the American consciousness. The mountain folk were still “interesting” perhaps, still “needy” perhaps, still available to exploitation— or modernization—but so were other places and other peoples. As regionalism effectively resolved the “dilemma” of Appalachian otherness, the mountains and mountaineers lost their special status as a challenge to notions of the nature of America, its history, and the character of its civilization, and had to compete for our national attention with other places and other peoples.8 The discovery of Appalachia, as I have already suggested, was a product of the search for quaint and picturesque aspects of American life by the local color 7. It is surely no accident that at about this time, the conventions of early American history accepted the domestic manufacture of spirits (“moonshining”) as a natural and appropriate concomitant of pioneer agriculture—in the absence of good roads, it was cheaper to ship grains already distilled into alcohol than as bulk cargo—and identified the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s as analogous to colonial resistance to taxes on stamped paper and tea. 8. I begin to explore the disappearance of Appalachia from the American consciousness after 1940 in “John F. Day and the Disappearance of Appalachia from the American Consciousness,” Appalachian Journal 10 (winter 1983): 157– 64. For its rediscovery during the 1960s as a “pocket of poverty” in an otherwise affluent America, thus as the best bad example of the fundamental inequalities of pluralism, see especially David Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and Planning in Appalachia (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1980).

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writers of the 1870s and 1880s. In the hands of the local colorists themselves, the mountains and the mountaineers never became more than elements of scenery, literally splashes of “local color.” By establishing a vogue for sketches and stories set in the southern mountains, however, the local colorists created a market for a literature about Appalachia; they also established as conventional their image of Appalachia as a strange land inhabited by a peculiar people, continuous in its characteristics across the borders of eight or nine states.9 This became the donnée of the later literature on Appalachia and the rationale for those agencies of systematic benevolence that sought to eliminate Appalachian otherness by integrating the mountains and the mountaineers into “modern” American life. Well into the twentieth century, home missionaries prepared for the field by reading Mary Noailles Murfree’s 1885 collection of short stories, In the Tennessee Mountains, based on her recollections of the stories she overheard on hotel verandas during girlhood summers at Beersheba Springs immediately after the Civil War. So long as the local color writers maintained their monopoly on description of the Southern mountain region, the otherness of Appalachia remained merely “interesting.” The existence of Appalachia itself did not emerge as a fact requiring explanation. For the local colorists Appalachia was merely location, a conveniently isolated space. The growth of missionary interest in the southern Appalachian “field” during the late 1880s and 1890s did create a need for explanation, in defense of the mountaineers’ availability as objects of systematic benevolence and in assertion of the remediability of those very conditions separating Appalachia and America that made benevolent work necessary. But explanation also functioned as a means of resolving the tension generated by Appalachia’s existence in a nation conceived of as a (potentially) unified and 9. The continuousness of Appalachian otherness, thus the coherence of Appalachian culture, was an assumption often implicitly disregarded, by those who sought to divide the field, for example, as when the writer James Lane Allen claimed the Kentucky highlands for his special subject, and John Fox Jr. took the uplands of Tennessee for his. Nonetheless, except in the work of John C. Campbell, most notably The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921), where the noncoherence and nonhomogeneity of Appalachia is argued as a preliminary to the articulation of a program for the creation of coherence and homogeneity, the continuousness of Appalachian culture was—and remains—an unexamined but fundamental aspect of the assumption of regional identity.

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homogeneous entity and was structured in such a way as to resolve this tension. Put the other way, no explanations for the particularities of mountain life and culture were offered that did not address the dilemma of Appalachian otherness, and there would have been no dilemma of Appalachian otherness without the assumption of a “normal” American life and culture from which the Appalachian version deviated. The pattern that explanation took during these years began with the assumption that America was or ought to be a unified and homogeneous national entity, and that the visible tendency of historical process in America was in this direction, manifested most clearly in the recent triumph of nationalism over sectionalism during the period of Civil War and Reconstruction. It could thus be only as a result of a series of “accidents” that the mountaineers, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants, descended presumably from the Revolutionary Generation like the “best” of the American population, had been excluded from full participation in the processes of nationalization and modernization, and had thereby “fallen behind” the rest of the nation. It was not only the agents of systematic benevolence who sought to explain the disparity between Appalachia and America, moreover. By the end of the nineteenth century the existence of Appalachia conceived as a strange land inhabited by a peculiar people had come to represent a problem of general interest to students of American history and culture. As early as 1886, James Lane Allen had suggested that the peculiarities of mountain life might be explained as the persistence of the life of “English speaking men and women at the point it had reached a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago.” 10 Later commentators 10. James Lane Allen, “Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback,” Harper’s Monthly 73 (June 1886): 50 – 65. Allen thereby provided the chronological distance necessary to transform the anomaly of Appalachian otherness into an acceptable element of exoticism. Just at that time, however, the home missionaries came along and made Appalachian otherness unacceptable, both in terms of the absence in the mountains of northern denominational activity and in terms of the mountaineer’s existence as an apparently unacculturated (alien or “exceptional”—and therefore “in need” of home missionary attention) population. The anachronistic quality of mountain life was by this time a convention of local color literature, however, usually expressed by an introductory note of surprise, such as “Nothing could have surprised me more than to meet these people in this hut of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, in the Nineteenth Century. Twenty miles from them railway trains were speeding along freighted with well-dressed passengers reading the latest telegraphic

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on Appalachian otherness did little more than refine and explicate this perception. The geographer C. Willard Hayes, for example, pointed to the importance of communication networks in the processes of modernization and noted that the absence of railroads in Appalachia made the region “relatively more isolated” than “when the only means of travel between the different parts of the country were on horseback or by stage.” The sociologist George E. Vincent suggested that Appalachian otherness might best be understood if the southern mountains were recognized as “a retarded frontier.” 11 The novelist John Fox Jr. argued that the situation of the mountaineers was no different from that of other mountain-dwelling peoples whose isolation from the currents of modern life resulted in “an arrest of development.” As he explained, “Once imprisoned, a civilization, with its dress, speech, religion, customs, ideas, may be caught like the shapes of lower life in stone, and may tell the human story of a century as the rocks tell the story of an age.” 12 Such explanatory arguments functioned not only to resolve the dilemma posed by the existence of a strange land and peculiar people in a nation presumed to be unified and homogeneous, but also as the basis for action by the agents of systematic benevolence. If they knew what was missing, they could

dispatches, and here were two beings who, as I soon found, could neither read nor write and were destitute of all ideas beyond the wants of the human animal in the state of nature” (John Esten Cooke, “Owlet,” Harper’s Monthly 57 [July 1878]: 199 –211). Other examples of the “note of surprise” are [unsigned,] “Poor White Trash,” Cornhill Magazine (London) 45 (May 1882): 579 – 84, reprinted in The Living Age 153 (June 17, 1882): 688 –91 and The Eclectic 99 (July 1882): 129 –33; and Ellen Churchill Semple, “The AngloSaxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” Geographical Journal (London) 17 (June 1901): 588 – 623, reprinted in Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 42 (August 1910): 561–94. 11. C. Willard Hayes, “The Southern Appalachians,” National Geographic Society Monographs 1 (1895): 305 – 66; George E. Vincent, “A Retarded Frontier,” American Journal of Sociology 4 (July 1898): 1–20. 12. John Fox Jr., “The Southern Mountaineer,” Scribner’s 29 (April, May 1901): 387– 88. The same explanation was widely used at the turn of the century, e.g., W. G. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly 83 (March 1899): 311–19; J. Stoddard Johnston, “Romance and Tragedy of Kentucky Feuds,” Cosmopolitan 27 (September 1899): 551–58; S. S. MacClintock, “The Kentucky Mountains and their Feuds,” American Journal of Sociology 7 (July, September 1901): 1–28, 171– 87.

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figure out how to provide it— especially if what was missing in Appalachia were the cultural and economic values of urban, industrial life. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the essentially simplistic view that Appalachia, characterized by the apparent persistence of pioneer culture, was therefore a kind of incomplete version of America, began to give way before an alternative vision of Appalachia as a legitimately discrete region defined by its culture as well as by its location, inhabited by a legitimately discrete people, similarly defined by their participation in a particular culture as well as by the mere fact of residence in a particular area. William Goodell Frost’s coinage of the term “Appalachian America” facilitated the acceptance of Appalachian otherness by giving the region a name and thus a new kind of legitimacy. Frost first used the phrase in an address at the annual banquet of the Cincinnati Teachers’ Club on December 13, 1895, titled “The Last Log School House.” He had been invited to discuss his work as the new president of Berea College in Kentucky. After some remarks about the log school house as a symbol of American individualism and effort, he said: “I am here to announce to you the discovery of a new world, or at least a new grand division. We are familiar with North America and South America—have you ever heard of Appalachian America? Just as our western frontier has been lost in the Pacific Ocean we have discovered a new pioneer region in the mountains of the central south.” 13 13. W. G. Frost, “The Last Log School House,” Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, December 14, 1895. The term “Appalachian America” gained widespread currency only after the publication of his essay “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains” in Atlantic Monthly (March 1899), the title for which was chosen not by Frost but by the magazine’s editor, Walter Hines Page. Throughout the nineteenth century, geographers argued not only about how to classify the parts of the earth’s surface but also about what they were! Especially difficult were two questions: whether the conventionally distinct but physically connected continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa were one thing or three; and whether “continents” and “islands” were one kind of landform or two (Australia seemed to be “like” Africa, but what was Antarctica, what was Greenland?). The phrase and the concept of “grand divisions” was used as a way to avoid these problems, especially in school texts and in geographical discussion directed at nonspecialists, in newspapers and magazines, for example. The “grand divisions” were thus “those big things geographers talk about that everyone knows are real so let’s not worry about it,” i.e., Eura-

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Here were nice phrases, and timely ones, although there is no evidence that Frost intended any of them to be the tools by which American conceptions of Appalachian otherness would be reshaped. Indeed, he appears to have been quite innocent about Appalachian otherness as dilemma and to have approached the anachronistic quality of mountain life and the legitimacy of benevolent work among the mountaineers as facts with which one began to work, not problems that were one’s work. Frost’s commitment, in any case, was not so much to Appalachia as to the preservation of Berea as an economically and educationally viable institution, for its own sake but also because of Berea’s potential as a reformist enclave in the still-separate South. In light of the fact of Berea’s subsequent successes in mountain education, we have tended to forget that its original mission was not to the mountaineers of Appalachia at all, but rather to the cause of the coeducation of the races. Indeed, Berea was probably alone among educational institutions in the United States in maintaining equal enrollment of blacks and whites from 1870 until segregated education was mandated by the Kentucky legislature in 1904. By the early 1890s a depleted endowment, an aging and tired leadership cadre, and the growth of Jim Crow sentiment throughout the nation left Berea in financial difficulty, with its viability as a racially coeducational institution threatened by significant declines in white enrollment. It was in this context that Frost was called from antislavery Oberlin to assume the presidency of the college. Even before Frost took office, he had developed a strategy to meet this situation. As he outlined it in an address to his faculty in early 1894, it consisted of the recruitment of white students from the North; the “recovery” of Berea’s former clientele of white students from the mountains; and the creation of “an ensia, Africa, Australia, North America, South America. But “grand division” also implied something permanent and natural, unlike the “minor (political) subdivisions” of “provinces, counties and parishes, or analogous areas,” which were the product of human decision-making, therefore subject to change as a result of whim or war, Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1910), 11:637, s.v. “Geography: Political Geography,” by Hugh Robert Mill. In the United States an additional use of “grand division” provided a substitute for “section” as a way of acknowledging the existence of distinct geographic provinces without implying the necessity for divisiveness (“sectionalism”) and disunion. Frost used the phrase in this way also, calling the southern mountain region “one of the grand divisions of our continent” in his “Educational Pioneering in the Southern Mountains,” National Education Association, Addresses and Proceedings (1901), 556.

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thusiasm and missionary zeal among the students” for the cause of coeducation and the principle of racial equality, which would in time extend Berea’s influence throughout the South and thereby make the future recruitment of southern white students from nonmountain areas possible.14 In practice, to these three Frost added a fourth: in a series of speeches and articles published in the national magazines he focused public attention on Berea and its work. And while he never denied Berea’s commitment to the coeducation of the races, he gave this work significantly less attention than work among the mountaineers. As a result, he rapidly came to be seen as the principal advocate for and authority on the “misunderstood” mountain people, and Berea as the principal institution working to bring them into the modern age. In his attempt to direct public attention away from the issue of racial integration, moreover, Frost also directed public attention away from the fact of Appalachian otherness and began to look at the characteristics of mountain life itself. Because Frost’s initial interest in the mountaineers was as a client population whose needs Berea had to serve if the larger purposes of coeducation were to be accomplished, he was forced almost from the outset to accept not only the legitimacy of Appalachian otherness as an abstract issue but also the legitimacy of those very peculiarities by which Appalachian otherness was defined. By the last years of the century, moreover, he had come to see those peculiarities not so much as evidence of the absence of culture but as the particularities of a distinct Appalachian culture. Although mountain life bore striking resemblances to the life of our pioneer ancestors, it was not for this reason to be regarded only as an undesirable anachronism. Whatever its origins, mountain life was of the present and, as such, had to be recognized as one among many alternative patterns of culture that made up contemporary American civilization. The implications of this position for the conduct of benevolent work in Appalachia were of course enormous. As early as 1899, in the first of his major 14. “Berea College Problems: President’s Quarterly Report to the Faculty, Feb. 3, 1894,” MS. in W. G. Frost papers, Berea College Archives, DD-1. Frost’s own discovery of the availability of the mountaineers as a white component of the Berea student population appears (first?) in WGF to Mrs. Maria G. Frost (his mother), August 29, 1893: “I have seen the mountains and am encouraged. There is a vast population living in pioneer style—Arcadian simplicity—just ready for education. They followed me from place to place to hear the same lecture” (ALS in W. G. Frost papers, CC-2).

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articles on the southern mountain region, Frost argued that the aim of such work should be to make the mountaineers “intelligent without making them sophisticated”: As a matter of both taste and of common sense, we should not try to make them conform to the regulation type of Americans; they should be encouraged to retain all that is characteristic and wholesome in their present life. Let us not set them agog to rush into the competition of the cities, but show them how to get the blessings of culture where they are. Let them not be taught to despise the log cabin, but to adorn it.15 During these same years, Frost was working to alter the direction of the work conducted at Berea, away from the traditional commitment to the collegiate course as the more important and more prestigious part of the college’s offering and toward increased emphasis on secondary and industrial education for both blacks and whites. By 1900 he was describing Berea as really “a brevet college.” Instead of offering an impractical classical curriculum, Berea was “a kind of social settlement, Cooper Institution, and extension bureau of civilization” set down in the mountain region. In 1901 he reminded his trustees, “We are not here to help the prosperous, the enlightened, and the well-to-do. Our work is not to make nice people still nicer, and dispense gilded accomplishments to those who are able to pay for them. We are to help the poor, to deal with crude material, to lay foundations in character, intelligence, and thrift.” 16 Frost’s conviction of the legitimacy of Appalachian culture rested primarily on the fact that it was there. When he came to attempt a description of it, he simply used the generalizations then current concerning the persistence of pioneer conditions in the mountains—although he also acknowledged the appropriateness of pioneer institutions to the realities of mountain life. Ultimately, however, Appalachian culture was the culture of poverty and ignorance; his pluralism extended no farther than the explicit acceptance of class division, in the context of an assumption that Appalachian otherness was social but not cultural.

15. W. G. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” 319. 16. W. G. Frost, “The Southern Mountaineer: Our Kindred of the Boone and Lincoln Type,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 21 (March 1900): 303 –11, 307; “Report of President Frost to the Trustees, 1900 –1901,” typescript [copy? of MS draft], marked “not in printed reports,” W. G. Frost papers, FF-1.

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Between 1900 and 1915, however, a series of events conspired to force Frost and others to articulate a more positive definition of mountain culture and to transform their conviction of the legitimacy of Appalachian otherness into a commitment to maintain Appalachia as a discrete region and the mountaineers as a distinct people. Those events of the early twentieth century—the “outbreak” of feuds, the “news” of moonshining, the “reports” of a vital folk culture—all had the characteristic of “discoveries.” As such, they forced modification of existing views of the nature of Appalachian otherness and the relationship of Appalachia and America, and they yielded new patterns of explanation and new patterns of action to “resolve” the dissonance thus created. The discovery of feuding and moonshining as phenomena of Appalachian history, and perhaps also as characteristic patterns of mountain culture, created new subjects for literary treatment but also raised questions about the appropriateness of quaint and picturesque behaviors that so clearly violated public law.17 After 1900, benevolent workers, for example, were hard pressed to defend their continuing requests for financial support to aid a “needy” population so apparently able to care for itself, albeit in unconventional and undesirable ways, and to explain the apparent failure of their thirty years’ effort at modernizing and Americanizing the mountaineers through education and home missionary work. Was it their method

17. On the “crisis” precipitated by feuding and moonshining at the turn of the century, see my “Appalachia and the Idea of America: The Problem of the Persisting Frontier,” in An Appalachian Symposium: Essays Written in Honor of Cratis D. Williams, ed. J. W. Williamson (Boone, North Carolina, Appalachian State University Press, 1977), 43 –55, and Appalachia on Our Mind, passim. For the real history of feuding, its relationship to the “modernization” of Appalachia, and its analogue in contemporary race riots, see Gordon B. McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865 –1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), esp. 126ff.; Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860 –1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), and “Feuding in Appalachia: Evolution of a Cultural Stereotype,” in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 347–76. For the real history of moonshining, see Wilbur R. Miller, Revenuers and Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865 –1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

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perhaps, that was at fault? Or had they themselves profoundly misunderstood the “misunderstood” mountaineer? By 1910, both positions had gained currency. The “old” system of mountain benevolence, founded on denominational competition to establish schools and mission stations, and thereby at once to lay claim to a part of the “Southern field” and to promulgate their own version of the Gospels of salvation, ritual, and church polity, now seemed wasteful and, in an age of efficiency and organization, peculiarly old fashioned.18 But in addition, the old benevolent work had attempted to “uplift” individuals one at a time into the modern social order, to modernize the mountaineer. Its emphasis on individual responsibility and individual opportunity had thus reinforced precisely that individualism upon which feuding—the practice of “private justice”—and moonshining—the practice of “private economy”—were founded. What was needed instead, especially as a counter to the apparent prevalence of feuding and moonshining in the region, was the creation of community—both a community of values, which would establish standards of public and private behavior, and a community of exchange, which would establish the basis for a viable economy—as well as the institutional infrastructure necessary to maintain community. An “overdeveloped individualism” had resulted “where there is no cohesive community 18. Cf. Bruce R. Payne, “Waste in Mountain Settlement Work,” National Conference of Charities and Correction, Proceedings (1908), 91–95. John C. Campbell’s proposal to conduct a survey of benevolent work in Appalachia along the lines suggested by Payne’s remarks is summarized in John M. Glenn, Lilian Brandt, and F. Emerson Andrews, Russell Sage Foundation, 1907–1946, 2 vols. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1947), 1:62ff., based on John C. Campbell, “Statement for a Proposed Study Plan of the Southern Highland Section,” enclosed in JCC to Mrs. John Glenn, May 15, 1908, TLS, Russell Sage Foundation archives, 169-T, “Southern Highland Division, 1908 –1914,” and John C. Campbell, “Confidential Report of the Activities of the Southern Highland Division of the Russell Sage Foundation, Sept. 30, 1912 –Sept. 30, 1913,” typescript, ibid. Earlier suggestions of “waste” and “inefficiency” were directed at achieving denominational reorganization of existing home missionary activities in the southern mountains, particularly through the creation of a “Synod of Appalachia,” e.g., Robert F. Campbell, Mission Work among the Mountain Whites in Asheville Presbytery, North Carolina (Asheville, N.C.: Citizen, 1899); Classification of Mountain Whites (Hampton, Va.: Hampton Institute, 1901); and esp. “Proposal for the Synod of Appalachia,” November 1, 1914, stenographic transcript, typescript, in Russell Sage Foundation archives, Southern Highland Division papers.

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life . . . [and] where local agencies are non-existent and non-local agencies inoperative,” John Campbell noted in 1909. The historian Mary Verhoeff sounded the same theme: “Lack of good roads has caused an undue isolation, has prevented cooperative activity and the realization of the ideals of a modern community life.” 19 The discovery of feuding and moonshining around 1900 was one event. The discovery of an indigenous folk culture in Appalachia was another. William Goodell Frost himself seems to have been the first to notice the existence (or persistence) of a handicrafts tradition in the mountains when a student offered a (modern) hand-loomed coverlet as barter payment for a semester’s tuition at Berea. Initially Frost saw the coverlets only as potentially marketable items for a kind of regional bake sale. When he came to talk about them, however, his tales of the mountain students’ ingenuity in finding ways to pay their fees, and of their families’ commitment to Berea and the cause of education which the sale of coverlets implied, soon became a discussion of the characteristics of the coverlets themselves and their meaning as artifacts. The weaving patterns of these modern coverlets, Frost explained, were similar to those used in the “cherished heirlooms” owned by many of Berea’s supporters in New England and Ohio. Those who didn’t have cherished heirlooms of their own now could get ’em, and help a Berea student in the process. But in addition, didn’t the use of these patterns prove the legitimacy of mountain benevolent work, by demonstrating the continuity between our own New England 19. John C. Campbell, “Social Betterment in the Southern Mountains,” National Conference of Charities and Correction, Proceedings (1909), 130 –37; abstracted in Survey 22 (June 26, 1909): 464; Mary K. Verhoeff, The Kentucky Mountains, Transportation and Commerce, 1750 to 1911: A Study in the Economic History of a Coal Field, Filson Club Publications, No. 26 (Louisville: John P. Morton, 1911), 182 – 84. Earlier explanations of Appalachian otherness as a consequence of the mountaineers’ isolation from each other rather than from America appear in Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains” (1901 and 1910), cited above, and Henderson Daingerfield, “Social Settlement and Educational Work in the Kentucky Mountains,” Journal of Social Science 39 (November 1901): 176 – 89, both of which were the result of field experiences of a group of Louisville women at a “tent settlement” in Hindman, Kentucky, during the summer of 1898, about which see Appalachia on Our Mind, 143ff. and notes, and esp. Ellen Churchill Semple, “A New Departure in Social Settlements,” American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals 15 (March 1900): 301– 4.

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ancestors and these “contemporary ancestors” in the southern mountains? Wouldn’t we wish to extend a helping hand to our own ancestors if we could? And weren’t the mountaineers them? It was not long before the religious and secular settlements in the mountains, and Berea College itself through the establishment of the “Fireside Industries,” adopted handicrafts instruction as a means of teaching “cooperation” to the individualistic mountaineers, using handicrafts production as the focus of group activity. They thus transformed the private practice of crafts design and production into a public and collaborative activity, characterized by the efficiency of the modern factory system (including standardization of design based on customer preferences rather than on the whim— or the aesthetic sense— of the producer), and directed at the manufacture of saleable items for distribution in a national market, principally as objects of art rather than objects for use.20 Even more momentous was the discovery of an indigenous tradition of folklore, folk song, and folk dance in the mountains, again around the turn of the century. And again Frost and Berea led the way. Although folklore collectors had begun publishing mountain materials as early as 1889, news of the “rich lode” of collectanea available in Appalachia seems not to have escaped the pages of the Journal of American Folk-Lore until C. Rexford Raymond of the Berea faculty published “British Ballads in Our Southern Highlands” in Frost’s journal of public relations and fund-raising, Berea Quarterly. 21 The earlier materials had largely been folklore, inchoate “tall tales” about witches, odd “superstitions” about planting by the moon and the efficacy of 20. Appalachia on Our Mind, esp. 220ff. On industrial education at Berea, see Elisabeth S. Peck, Berea’s First Century, 1855 –1955 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1955). For the use of handicrafts in the settlement schools and later in the folk schools as ways of modernizing the mountaineer, see David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). For the commodification of handicrafts and the Appalachianization of America, Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930 –1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 21. Appalachia on Our Mind, 224ff.; C. Rexford Raymond, “British Ballads in Our Southern Highlands,” Berea Quarterly 4(3) (November 1899): 12 –14; “An Artificial Seaboard: The Work of the Extension Department,” Berea Quarterly 6(1) (May 1901): 5 –14, reprinted (condensed) as “Old Kentucky Ballads,” Independent 53 (June 20, 1901): 1452.

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roots and herbs unknown in the conventional materia medica, along with some “songs” that didn’t scan— quaint and picturesque perhaps, but as hard to read about with pleasure, as hard for the modern consciousness to assimilate as reports of equally primitive knowledge, equally primitive practices among the exotic peoples of Africa or Australia. In the 1890s, moreover, the occurrence of Appalachian folklore and folk song had seemed additional proof of the primitive, perhaps even “degenerate” character of mountain culture. What Raymond (and Frost) offered instead, was yet another connection between contemporary mountain culture and pioneer, or traditional, or ancestral culture of New England and Ohio, and by asserting the British origins of Appalachian folk songs, the ancestral culture of that ancestral culture. When at the end of the first decade of the century, Hubert Gibson Shearin demonstrated that Raymond’s “British” ballads were in fact versions of the canonical “Child ballads”—the ur-texts of Anglo-American culture (named for Francis James Child, professor of English in Harvard College and thus teacher to several generations of social workers as well as university professors and magazine editors)—the legitimation of Appalachian otherness was complete. The mountaineers not only seemed to be like “our pioneer ancestors.” Now they were our pioneer ancestors, and contemporary Appalachia a kind of folk-society manqué, an incomplete version of itself.22 These “events” of the first decade of the twentieth century had serious consequences for the history of the idea of Appalachia. But they also stand as markers of a new tendency in social thought generally, to define the classes of things 22. Hubert Gibson Shearin, “British Ballads in the Cumberland Mountains,” Sewanee Review 19 (July 1911): 313 –27, reprinted (condensed) as [unsigned,] “Oversee Ballads in Kentucky Valleys,” American Review of Reviews 44 (October 1911): 497–98; “Kentucky Folk Songs,” Modern Language Review 6 (October 1911): 513 –17. In that year Shearin also published “An Eastern Kentucky Word List” in Dialect Notes 3 (1911): 537– 40 and, with Josiah H. Combs, A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk Songs, Transylvania University Studies in English, no. 2 (Lexington: Transylvania Printing, 1911). For the more highly publicized “discovery” of the British ballads in the southern mountains by the Merrie Olde England promoter Cecil J. Sharp in 1915 — during World War I, when America’s own English origins and therefore America’s responsibility to the mother country was hotly debated—see Appalachia on Our Mind, 252ff., and for its context and consequences, Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine, 103 –79 et passim.

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with which social thought is concerned in terms of their contents rather than in terms of their location in a hierarchy from savage to civilized. For what characterized the early-twentieth-century discussions of Appalachian otherness is, first, that they responded to assertions about the characteristics of mountain life (and sometimes of mountain landscape) rather than to the “fact” of Appalachia’s status as a “strange land and peculiar people,” to the “fact” of its “isolation” (distance) from modern American civilization, or to the “fact” of its primitive (low) conditions; and second, that these assertions about the characteristics of mountain life focused on patterns of social and economic organization, of belief and behavior, which contemporaries were just beginning to call “culture”—sometimes as the culture of a place, sometimes the culture of a people. None of the argument above is intended to suggest that the men and women of the early twentieth century were more accurate in their assessments of the characteristics of mountain life than those who commented on the fact of Appalachian otherness in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century as in the nineteenth, conclusion continued to anticipate observation, so that what people saw was what they expected to see—including what best served their own (usually occupational) self-interest and what best matched their own (usually occupationally connected) convictions. In the twentieth century as in the nineteenth, moreover, those who talked or thought about Appalachia, including increasing numbers of persons of and in Appalachia itself, continued to beg the question of Appalachian otherness by starting out with the untested and ultimately unverifiable assumption that Appalachia was in some profound way a strange land inhabited by a peculiar people, a discrete region in but not of America. Nor is this to say that the men and women of the twentieth century were “nicer” or “more democratic” or “less patronizing” or “less exploitative” in their attitude toward the mountains or the mountaineers. In the twentieth century as in the nineteenth, the mountains and mountaineers continued to be objects— of pity, of curiosity, of benevolence, of distaste, and ultimately of exploitation. Nor is this even to say that what the men and women of the twentieth century had to say about the southern mountain region was substantially different from what their predecessors had said in the late nineteenth century. What is at issue here is not so much what they said as why they said it, the style of their thinking and arguing. And what is different is that the men and women of the 286

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twentieth century defined Appalachia as a thing in itself, a place, and the mountaineers as a people— one place and one people among the many places and many peoples of the United States. While historians can demonstrate how they came to accept the legitimacy of Appalachia as a place and of the mountaineers as a people—at least I have tried to do so— even the most careful and thorough analysis of the processes of discourse on Appalachia cannot finally “explain” either the new emphasis of the twentieth century on the “internal characteristics” of the region and its people—and their “culture”— or the legitimation of Appalachian otherness that followed.23 If this new tendency of the early twentieth century to legitimate Appalachian otherness cannot be explained, it can at least be noticed. And if we can notice it, we might as well do what William Goodell Frost did, and give it a name. Or two names: regionalism and pluralism. They go together; they offer the same kind of solution to the persisting problem of diversity in a nation presumed to be unified and homogeneous. Both regionalism and pluralism acknowledge diversity as normal, but the units whose differences are to be addressed are now not individuals or social classes or sections or cities. Instead, the units are “broad geographical areas containing a population whose members possess sufficient historical, cultural, economic, and social homogeneity to distinguish them from others”—that is, regions— or else the populations inside such regions (or originating in them), whose members are presumed to possess sufficient historical, cultural, economic, and social homogeneity to distinguish them from others— that is, peoples. Those are the units, and both regionalism and pluralism assert that they stand in a relationship of equivalence. But alas, not equality, either in theory, or as we have seen in our own time, in practice. 23. But I attempt to examine the shift from hierarchical to content-based categorization, and therefore the mechanism of legitimation, in “The ‘Place’ of Culture and the Problem of Appalachian Identity,” in Appalachia and America: Autonomy and Regional Dependence, ed. Allen Batteau (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 111– 41.

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he south carolina Legislature voted in May 2000 to remove the Confederate battle flag from its state capitol, an event of enormous symbolic significance in the redefinition of southern culture. The Confederate flag had once flown over several state capitols in the South. Alabama, one of the last to remove its flag, did so in 1993, after a lawsuit by African Americans, but the battle was fully fought in the state that had been secession’s birthplace. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) initiated a boycott in 1999 that had a dramatic economic effect on South Carolina, which forged an effective alliance among political moderates across party and racial lines. The symbolism of the flag’s coming down was dramatic, but some black leaders saw only a partial victory in an ongoing struggle, because the compromise that removed the flag from the capitol stipulated that it would be moved elsewhere on the capitol grounds, near an existing Confederate monument. The NAACP opposed the compromise, to the chagrin of black legislators who had worked for it, and some whites were upset about the removal. One white man interviewed at the Sportsman’s Bar along the Catawba River observed, “That’s one thing people do around here. They get attached to things [that] may not be worth anything, but they want to keep them.” The reaction of the defenders and critics of the Confederate flag suggested, nonetheless, that it was worth much to them, indeed.1 South Carolina, like the rest of the South, assumes the burden of its traditional culture at those moments when African Americans challenge its historic symbolism. That symbolism is rooted in the Old South and in Confederate ex1. The quote is from “An Old Flag Bedevils the New South,” Washington Post, February 11, 2000. See also David Firestone, “South Carolina Acts on Goals, but N.A.A.C.P. Isn’t Happy,” New York Times, May 12, 2000.

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periences that have resonated for whites since the Civil War as the defining time of southern culture. Southern whites indeed enshrined such mid-nineteenthcentury symbols as the Confederate battle flag and the song “Dixie” as regional icons, but they did so at a time when blacks in the region did not have the cultural authority to influence that symbolism. With the end of Jim Crow segregation laws and disfranchisement practices in the 1960s, African Americans launched a movement in the following decade to desegregate southern cultural symbols. It often was on the back burner, as economic and political issues predominated in public-policy concerns. But by the 1990s blacks had achieved victories in their efforts. L. Douglas Wilder, who would later be governor of Virginia, had scarcely been elected to the Virginia Senate in the 1970s when he called for the repeal of the law designating “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny” as the state’s official song. It took twenty-seven years, but the legislature finally removed its official sanction of the song. Another example was the University of Mississippi. In the fall of 1982, the first black cheerleader at the university, John Hawkins, refused to carry the Confederate battle flag in that former bastion of Old South customs. His efforts began a long struggle that led in the late 1990s to the university’s alumni association and student government officially calling for an end to displaying the flag and a noticeable decline in its use. Reflecting dramatic symbolic change, the university’s student-body president and studentnewspaper editor are African American.2 Having desegregated its restaurants and theaters, having made great strides in desegregating its schools, the South is now midway through the process of desegregating its public symbols. With each struggle over these symbols, though, the region confronts once again the burden of its past. Webster’s dictionary defines burden as “that which is borne or carried; a load.” It suggests that duty and responsibility are parts of this meaning. A second definition, though, says that a burden is “that which is grievous, wearisome, or oppressive.” One might look at southern history and conclude that everyone who has studied it, or lived it, has seen it as a burden. The South has never

2. “Unifying the Symbols of Southern Culture,” in Charles Reagan Wilson, Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (Athens, 1995), 159 – 63; James C. Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (Athens, 1999), 125 – 49; Kevin P. Thornton, “Symbolism at Ole Miss and the Crisis of Southern Identity,” South Atlantic Quarterly (summer 1987).

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lacked outside critics who have seen the region as burdened in this sense. Southern blacks have, in turn, seen themselves as burdened with whites, while southern whites have seen themselves as burdened with blacks and northerners.3 The most famous attempt to explore the idea of the burden of the South was C. Vann Woodward’s collection of essays, The Burden of Southern History (1960). At a time of fundamental changes in the region’s politics, economics, and race relations, the volume attempted to define the distinctiveness of the South through its history. One essay, “The Search for Southern Identity,” proposed historical experience as the enduring feature of southern identity; the South’s legacy of poverty, defeat, failure, moral guilt, and a sense of place gave the region a different perspective on life from the rest of the nation. Woodward’s concerns were historical, but he clearly drew from cultural materials in a way that betrayed his appreciation of cultural history. The essay, to be sure, offered no theoretical framework for, or conscious discussion of, southern culture, but Woodward’s use of such terms as “myth,” “identity,” “character,” “collective experience,” “heritage,” and “tradition” suggested an understanding of cultural processes. He used the term “cultural landscape” in noting the changes in his era, and he talked in passing about symbolism, putting forward the image of the bulldozer at a construction site as a new symbol of the South. Woodward talked at length, however, about only one cultural form other than the awareness of history. He praised “the magnificent body of literature” created in previous decades by the South’s writers, and he pointed out in particular the “peculiar historical consciousness of the Southern writer.” 4 Woodward’s book itself was a part of that “magnificent body of literature” produced during the Southern Literary Renaissance, but advances in scholarship and new concerns inevitably make it seem dated now. Where is the South’s music in its identity? The quality and quantity of the South’s musicians surely rival those of its writers. The South’s musical renaissance, moreover, must offer some perspective on the question of the southern identity. Where is the folk culture that David Potter would later argue was the key to southern distinctiveness? Woodward mentioned religion in the book, but mainly in a theological discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr in the final essay. He made no effort to gain insight 3. Jean McKechnie, ed., Webster’s New Twentieth-Century Dictionary (New York, 1979). 4. C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, 2nd. ed. (Baton Rouge, 1968), vii–xiii, 3 –26.

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into southern identity from the region’s distinctive religious tradition, dominated for so long by evangelical Protestantism. Throughout his career Woodward showed little interest in exploring religion’s role in the South, despite a wide-ranging appreciation for the significance of other forces shaping the region. But to fault Woodward for failing to deal with some of these matters is unfair, because much of the literature on cultural concerns was simply not available until a decade or so after he wrote his essays. The point is simply to emphasize the rise of interdisciplinary studies of southern culture in the last quarter-century and their contributions to understanding, and redefining, the region. Actually, such studies go back even further than that. Sociologist Howard W. Odum, for example, produced some two hundred articles and twenty books on regional sociology, and sociologists such as Rupert Vance and Guy Johnson played a prominent role during the 1930s and 1940s in sketching the “Problem South,” the southern burdens stemming from socioeconomic deficiencies. Scholars such as John Dollard, Hortense Powdermaker, Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner investigated the complex structure of race and class relationships in these decades as well. Social scientists in general were most comfortable with the research and writing of studies addressing cultural concerns before Woodward wrote. But regional sociology declined in the 1950s. Cultural study of the South took a back seat in the 1960s to social activism and social conflict.5 Since then, however, southern studies have become even more interdisciplinary, and concentration on issues of culture has risen. The title of Clifford Geertz’s 1980 article “Blurred Genres” suggests that what was happening in the study of the South was, of course, part of a broader intellectual development. Louis Rubin, Lewis Simpson, and Hugh Holman were among the leading advocates of studying southern literature by placing it in the context of society, thus abandoning the New Critics’ stress on the text. In the 1970s, Odum’s successor at Chapel Hill, John Shelton Reed, rediscovered the sociology of the South (as distinct from sociological studies set in the region but not addressing particularly southern issues). Folklorists such as Henry Glassie produced sophisticated 5. Richard Maxwell Brown, “The New Regionalism in America, 1970 –1981,” in Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest, ed. William G. Robbins, Robert J. Frank, and Richard E. Ross (Corvalis, 1983), 137–96.

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studies of folk housing, combining fieldwork and historical research to throw new light on old questions. And Michael Ann Williams produced a classic of sorts, using oral history to enhance the study of material culture. Cultural geography emerged as the liveliest field in that hoary discipline, and many geographers charted the South. Religious studies offered perhaps the clearest picture of developments. The key figure in the increasingly complex study of southern religious history has been Samuel Hill. In Southern Churches in Crisis (1966) and later works, Hill drew on his training in history, theology, and sociology and on his institutional involvement in both church life and university religion departments to offer a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary perspective on the South’s religion. His argument—that the central theme of southern religion has been the dominance of evangelical Protestantism—has influenced other scholars who have extended his insights to other disciplines.6 The unifying thread in this interdisciplinary study is the attempt to understand the culture of the South—including both its internal relationships and its role within the broader national culture. In the 1950s Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckholn catalogued 164 definitions of “culture,” suggesting the problems, then and now, of a precise definition. Raymond Williams has said that the term is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” and few would dispute that, especially after seeing the various ways writers have used it. One could say the same for “South” or “region,” similarly problematic terms. But in this postmodern world, even Woodward’s “history” is problematic, lacking any agreed-upon foundation that scholars across disciplines can embrace. What has surely been clarified about all such terms is their lack of essence, the tentativeness with which we must speak of them. That awareness should not blind us to their continued usefulness in scholarly work. Culture is not static or essential, and it is surely ideologically contested, but all of those traits suggest its continued function in illuminating the particularities of different social groups and nationalities.7 Clifford Geertz’s definition of “culture” has been usefully applied to the 6. See “Introduction,” Charles Reagan Wilson, The New Regionalism (Jackson, 1998), ix–xxiii. 7. See “Introduction,” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill, 1989); Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1976), 76 – 82; and Terry G. Jordan, “The Concept and Method,” in Regional Studies: The Interplay of Land and People (College Station, 1992), 8 –24.

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South and has the virtue of clarity. He sees culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” This definition may imply more unity among cultures than exists, but it reflects current approaches in stressing symbol systems and their role in giving human beings a framework for understanding each other, themselves, and the wider world. It makes particularly relevant both Woodward’s 1960 discussion of symbols such as bulldozers and the black cheerleader’s protest against carrying the Confederate flag.8 Two points are central in exploring this relationship and should form at least part of the agenda for redefining southern culture. One aspect is the complex pattern of institutions, rituals, myths, material artifacts, and other aspects of a functioning culture that creates the “webs” that Geertz suggests make symbol systems coherent despite all the complexity in them. Geertz used the method of “thick description” to understand a simple ritual of everyday life in Bali, the cockfight; and Ted Ownby and Rhys Isaac have shown that southerners, black and white, staged cockfights, the analysis of which can help unravel dimensions of southern life. The second broad point to explore is the connection between history and the sense of identity among southerners as a distinct social group. Have people in the South had characteristic assumptions, values, and attitudes apart from other Americans? When did that identity arise and how did they transmit it to future generations? How did historical events and forces create a sense of common purpose among people in the South— or did a common purpose exist at all? What have been the varieties of cultures in the region and their accompanying identities? What is the relationship between a public South, based on power, authority, and official pronouncements, and a private South, of everyday life? 9 One aspect of the burden of southern culture, then, involves the work of the scholar. I am suggesting that interdisciplinary cultural studies of the South can help address these questions and clarify an understanding of the region. There 8. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York, 1979). 9. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740 –1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982); Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865 –1920 (Chapel Hill, 1990).

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may well be many burdens of southern culture. I want to suggest one of them. Woodward said the burden of southern history was defeat, guilt, poverty, and place. The burden of southern culture may well be the persistent belief through regional history that the South has some special role to play in history. It is a belief rooted in the symbolic. At the heart of both a southern identity and the burden of southern culture is a distinctive sense of regional mission. This is a variation on ideas of national mission, but the assertion has been that not just the nation but also the region has a special destiny. The beginning of a sense of southern mission could perhaps be traced back to the colonial era. To be sure, the Puritans who settled in New England set up colonies with an explicit sense of mission rooted in religion, but that was not true of the South. Its colonies might not have been religiously driven, but the first signs of an emerging southern self-consciousness in the colonial period did appear couched in religious imagery—the South as a new Garden of Eden. This implied a beneficent climate and overall environment and also an innocence that the New Englanders, with their Calvinist theology, would not have asserted. Historian John Alden argued that the First South—that is, the first time one can really talk about an identifiable regional consciousness—was in the Revolutionary era. Thomas Jefferson clearly asserted a sense of southern destiny as part of the new nation. His chosen people were agrarians, farmers toiling on the land, and this Virginian seemed to see southerners as the quintessential chosen people. Jefferson’s—and the South’s— early vision of destiny was American and also Arcadian, a timeless vision of human beings living and working on the land. It was a vision that grew out of the Enlightenment and also reflected Hebraic and classical influences.10 This vision of the South’s “pastoral permanence,” as Lewis Simpson terms it, did not, however, provide an enduring sense of mythic purpose for the region. Two developments in the early nineteenth century changed the context of southern thought as regards a distinctively regional sense of purpose. One was the development of the Solid Slave South. With the spread of the Cotton Kingdom into new lands in the Southwest came an accompanying greater reliance on slave labor and an intellectual and cultural defense of slavery as the basis of a good society. The myth of the Old South and its plantations was a romantic-era 10. Lewis P. Simpson, “Southern Spiritual Nationalism: Notes on the Background of Modern Southern Fiction,” in The Cry of Home: Cultural Nationalism and the Modern Writer, ed. H. Ernest Lewald (Knoxville, 1972).

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artifact that summed up the southern self-image of superiority. Southerners were Cavaliers to be admired by the world, while Yankees were, well, Yankees, and the less said about them the better. The chief problem with Yankees was their greedy materialism in an age of northern commercial and industrial expansion. By contrast, the best thing about southerners was that they had supposedly escaped this materialism. Ever since the antebellum years, then, the southern self-image has often involved the idea of spiritual superiority to northerners.11 The second development that caused a retreat from the Jeffersonian vision of timeless agrarian civilization was in religion. After the Great Revival of 1800 –1801, evangelical religion conquered the South. Groups such as the Baptists and Methodists, which had been dissenting sects in the eighteenth century, rose to dominate the region. Accompanying the evangelical orientation was a triumph of orthodoxy. The religious rationalism that had existed in the Jeffersonian South, and that became a major religious force in New England Unitarianism, was in retreat in the South by the 1840s. The separation of southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians from their northern brethren in the 1840s and later made these popular southern denominations the carriers of southern nationalism—and the idea of southern destiny— even before the conflict of the 1860s. They injected new passions into the southern identity that carried it far beyond Jefferson’s vision, rooting it in vernacular fears, resentments, and aspirations truly emerging out of the frontier.12 These developments reached a new stage in the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Civil War brought a full-fledged sense of southern mission into existence. The Revolution of 1776 had led Americans to see their history in transcendent terms, and the experience of fighting a war for Confederate independence led white southerners to a new awareness of their role in history. Those who reflected on the region’s experience came to see that the results of the Civil War had given them a history distinct from that of the rest of the nation. At the end of the war, they tried to come to terms with defeat, giving rise to the idea of the Lost Cause, which became the foundation of the southern sense of 11. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1961). 12. Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997).

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mission in the postbellum era. It suggested that white southerners had been destined to crusade for principle, as they saw it—and, even though they lost, the battle had not been in vain. Southerners would emerge with a spiritual discipline and understanding that the Gilded Age, money-hungry North did not have. The basis of the sense of mission underlying the Lost Cause was no longer Jefferson’s vision of a timeless Arcadia, an agrarian civilization of sturdy farmers. The new model of the South’s destiny was the memory of wartime suffering and defeat and the hope of Christian resurrection. The South must preserve its moral and religious values, its peculiar spiritual outlook within the American nation, so that one day it could be prepared when destiny called. The South represented a redemptive community in this new vision of a regional spiritual destiny. The precise mission of the region was not always clear in the rhetoric of the Lost Cause, but the emphasis was on white southerners remembering the past (“lest ye forget” was carved into many Confederate monuments) and knowing it had spiritual meaning. The defense of white superiority was, of course, allied with the Confederate memory from the beginning, and it became a primary buttress for tenacious southern white racial obsessions.13 The Confederate and postwar Lost Cause explanation of southern destiny had waned by the 1920s. Allen Tate’s poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead” expressed the frustration of a modern young white southerner standing at the gate of a Confederate cemetery. He thinks of the “inscrutable infantry rising” and of the battles fought. He envies the Confederates their conviction, their knowledge of why they fought and what they believed. The modern southerner of the 1920s knew too much, in effect, for simple convictions. He doubts and questions, making it impossible to regain the faith of the past. The writers of the Southern Literary Renaissance, such as Tate, themselves extended the belief in a southern destiny. They converted the southern experience into high art, into parables of the human condition. But Tate and his literary colleagues were largely without influence with the mass of southern people. In the modern South most southerners preferred to forget the tragic lessons of defeat in the Civil War and to think in more upbeat ways. Tate attended a Confederate memorial service in Clarksville, Tennessee, where a Baptist preacher told him that God had ordained Confederate defeat in order to position the South for later industrial 13. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865 –1920 (Athens, 1980).

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development—not exactly the mission the high-minded Tate had foreseen for his South.14 Regional writers kept alive, nonetheless, the image of the South as a redemptive community. Critic Lewis Simpson has argued that “the Southern writer has tended to be a kind of priest and prophet of a metaphysical nation” who has tried to “represent it as a quest for revelation of man’s moral community in history.” Writers increasingly placed the South’s experience in the broadest possible perspective, making their profoundest achievements when, as Simpson says, “they became sufficiently aware that the South is a part of the apocalypse of modern civilization.” As among the most sensitive chroniclers of the South’s spiritual destiny, the literary community would play a crucial role in refocusing southern cultural concerns beyond the Lost Cause.15 The 1950s and 1960s represented a watershed in symbolic southern culture. On the one hand, the older Lost Cause symbolism and explanation of southern destiny reemerged in a harsh new movement that emphasized their racial meaning. Segregationists used the symbols of the Lost Cause, and they became explicitly, almost exclusively, tied in with white supremacy. On the other hand, a fresh vision of southern destiny appeared—the idea of a biracial South. This was a southern liberal dream that Leslie W. Dunbar, director of the Southern Regional Council, invoked in 1961: “I believe that the South will, out of its travail and sadness and requited passion, give the world its first grand example of two races of men living together in equality and with mutual respect. The South’s heroic age is with us now.” This dream might have seemed a white man’s fantasy in 1961, but the terms “travail and sadness and requited passion” revealed its essentially spiritual foundation, suggesting that spiritual suffering could promote ethical rebirth within a specifically southern setting.16 This was not just a white dream, though. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the Civil Rights movement’s national and international significance for black liberation, but he also understood its specifically southern context. Achieving racial justice would nurture “our cultural health as a region,” as well as individual well 14. Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919 –1945 (Chapel Hill, 1982); Fred Hobson, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge, 1983), 204 –5. 15. Simpson, “Southern Spiritual Nationalism,” 190, 206. 16. Leslie W. Dunbar, “The Annealing of the South,” Virginia Quarterly Review (autumn 1961): 507.

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being and national political health. He recoiled from the South’s “tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue,” but he also spoke overtly of “our beloved Southland.” King used heroic language to describe black southerners in his era, language that had once been used in the South to describe the mythic figures of the Lost Cause. He told of suffering, tragedy, honor, virtuous conduct, the achievement of dignity by a defeated people—his southern black folk. He became even more direct in seizing the southern white legacy, noting of African American freedom protesters in 1963 that “the virtues so long regarded as the exclusive property of the white South—gallantry, loyalty, and pride—had passed to the Negro demonstrators in the heat of the summer’s battles.” King hoped that “spiritual power” and “soul force” would transform the South and, from there, the nation and the world. His “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 prophesied national salvation in a specifically redemptive South. King evoked the traditional southern appreciation for place in suggesting that the nation’s transformation would not be in some disembodied location, but at a specific site—his South. The region had been the scene of black suffering and of flawed humanity, but ultimately the virtue of blacks and decent whites would produce reconciliation, on the “red hills of Georgia,” where blacks and whites would “sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” Even Mississippi, “a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression,” would become transformed into “an oasis of freedom and justice.” 17 The southern dream of King and other black freedom fighters became a central metaphor that still evokes the belief in a distinctive regional destiny. One cultural meaning of the Civil Rights movement within the southern context was the public acknowledgment that blacks were southerners, too. Earlier generations of people living in the South often used the term “southerner” to mean white southerner. The ideas of southern destiny were white visions of the region’s mission. In the past, the symbols of southern public culture had been created by whites, and part of the burden of southern culture in the contemporary era is this symbolism. The region is searching for new symbols that express its changed circumstances, the new reality that blacks will assert their peculiar 17. Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York, 1963), 80, 116; Martin Luther King Jr., The Wisdom of Martin Luther King: In His Own Words (New York, 1968), 28, 41, 64, 75, 77.

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claims on the southern identity, their authority to help shape any new southern destiny.18 The issue is the southern community itself. The concern for community and sense of place are often mentioned as giving a distinctive character to the South, but the question for the scholar of southern culture is what was, and is, the southern community. Cultural history promises a way to gain greater understanding of that fundamental issue. By studying the way of life of southerners, the rituals, myths, material artifacts, institutions, and values of southerners, both black and white, scholars can gain deeper understanding of the southern community that comprised a diverse social group. Benedict Anderson writes of the “imagined community,” which suggests the crucial role of the symbolic imagination in defining communities. Scholars use other terms, such as “invented traditions” and “social constructions,” which indicate as well that communities have no essence except what people invest in them. But that investment can be considerable, with tangible manifestations.19 Scholars increasingly read “southernness” as a construction, but often fail to grasp the moral meanings that individuals from many ideologies in the past invested in it. Woodward’s Burden of Southern History pointed out that blacks should look at their southern heritage, but his “burden” mostly dealt with the white southern identity, coming especially out of the experiences of the guilt of slavery and defeat in the Civil War. Blacks had no reason to feel guilt over slavery, and the Civil War was not a defeat for them but a victory. The burden of southern culture has taken on new dimensions, though, since the Civil Rights movement allowed African Americans to claim a South that is their homeland, a new South that is redefined based on their experiences as well as those of whites. As whites and blacks work through these changes, they continue to see this redefined South as one with moral meaning. During the South Carolina de18. David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (Baton Rouge, 1990); Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture, 125 – 49. 19. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1991). For a postmodern critique of “southernness,” see Jefferson Humphries, “The Discourse of Southernness: Or How We Can Know There Will Still Be Such a Thing as the South and Southern Literary Culture in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Future of Southern Letters, ed. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (New York, 1996), 119 –33.

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bate on the Confederate battle flag, John S. Rainey, a prominent white Republican and businessman, used the language of southern mission, rooted in moral values and the possibility of redemption, to urge the state to bring the flag down from its symbolic center, the state capitol. “It’s about doing the right thing, the honorable thing,” he said. “There is a sea change going on in South Carolina, an awakening to what we can be if we really start tackling the old, hard issues.” 20 The South is still struggling with its heritage of tragedy and suffering and still invested with the hope that suffering can lead to salvation. 20. The quote is in David Firestone, “Bastion of Confederacy Finds Its Future May Hinge on Rejecting the Past,” New York Times, December 5, 1999.

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Contributors

william l. andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His many books include To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760 –1865, and The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. sue bridwell beckham is the author of Depression Post Office Murals and Southern Culture. She teaches in the English Department of the University of Wisconsin–Stout. thadious davis, Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, has edited many books on African American literature and is the author of Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance and Faulkner’s Negro: Art and the Southern Context. Her latest book is Games of Property: Race, Gender, Law, and Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses.” william ferris, past chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is currently the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of History and adjunct professor in the curriculum in folklore at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he is associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South. For eighteen years he was director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, where he was coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. His other books include Local Color: A Sense of Place in Folk Art and Afro-American Folk Arts and Crafts. joyce marie jackson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University. Both a folklorist and an ethnomusicologist, she is currently completing a book on African American gospel quartets and is associate editor of The Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music and author of Life in the Village: A Cultural Memory of the Fazendeville Community. She also researches performance-centered studies on rituals in Africa and the African Diaspora and the rural roots of jazz in southern Louisiana. 301

con t ributor s

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anne goodwyn jones has published Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1839 Ð1936, and is currently completing Southern Literary Theory and the Good Ole Boys. She teaches Southern and WomenÕs Studies at the University of Florida. daniel littleÞeld is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, and is the author of Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. john lowe is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University, where he directs the Program in Louisiana and Caribbean Studies. He is the author of Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale HurstonÕs Cosmic Comedy, editor of Conversations with Ernest Gaines, and coeditor (with Jefferson Humphries) of The Future of Southern Letters. richard megraw is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama. He has published widely on twentieth-century American history; his book,ÒLosing GroundÓ: Art and Society in Modernizing Louisiana, 1890 Ð 1945, is forthcoming. john shelton reed, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has published many books on southern culture, including Whistling Dixie: Dispatches from the South; Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy; Southerners: The Social Psychology of Sectionalism; and One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture. henry d. shapiro was Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. In addition to Appalachia on Our Mind he was the author of the Appalachian entries in The Encyclopedia of Southern History (1979), The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), and The Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History (1999). He died in 2004. charles reagan wilson is Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, an editor of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, author of Judgement and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis and Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865 Ð1920, and editor of Religion in the South. bertram wyatt-brown is Richard J. Milbauer Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Florida and now resides in Baltimore. His many books include The Literary Percys; The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family; and Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. 302

302

Index

a capella style, 156 Aaron, Daniel, 226 Abadie, Ann J., 79, 84 Abbott, Lynn, 165 Abramson, Harold, 237 Absalom, Absalom!, 78, 87, 95, 174, 255 Abzug, Robert H., 62 Acadians, 16 Adams, Johnny, 165 Adler, Mortimer, 33 African American folktales, 224 African American southern culture, 11 African Americans, 5, 11, 18, 21, 68, 71, 72, 100, 123, 154, 191, 199, 200, 202, 221, 225, 226, 232, 240, 241, 242, 245, 248, 288, 289 African heritage, 199 African rice cultivation, 213 Africanisms, 22, 27, 199, 213, 217, 219 Africanisms in American Culture, 22, 27, 199, 213 Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 10, 27, 215, 216 Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, The, 217 age of sentiment, 8 Agee, James, 35 Agrarians, the, 4, 173, 176, 183, 184, 186 alcoholism, 21, 82, 94 Alden, John, 294 Alexander, Charles C., 140

All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region, 284 Allen, James Lane, 270, 274, 275 Allison, Dorothy, 19 American Hunger, 52 American literary canon, 12 American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime, 210 Americanization, 17 Anderson, Benedict, 299 Anderson, Clara, 163, 167 Anderson, Marian, 162 Andrews, William L., 20, 39 –56, 66, 246 Angelic Gospel Singers, 168 Angelou, Maya, 127 Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898, 272 Anscombe, Isabelle, 141 Antippas, Andy Peter, 149 Appalachia, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287 Appalachia on Our Mind, 265, 268, 281, 283, 284, 285 Appalachian otherness, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 286, 287 Appalachian studies, 22

303

index Arieti, Silvano, 97 Aristotle, 2, 30 Armstrong, Vanessa Bell, 161 Arts and Crafts in Britain and America, 141, 142, 152 Arts and Crafts movement, 141, 143, 149, 152 Arts and Crafts Movement: Monographs, The, 141 As I Lay Dying, 179, 194 Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 190 Atlanta, 1, 6, 7, 8, 27, 72, 73, 156, 226, 257 Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, The, 205 Aurelius, Marcus, 43 autobiography, 65 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The, 65 Awakening, The, 27, 59, 186, 195 Babbitt, 51 Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery, 218 Baird, Helen, 91 Baker, Houston, 173 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11 Bambaran cosmology, 215 Bantos, males e identidade negra, 218 Bantu peoples, 209 Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States, The, 217 Baptist Easter Rock ritual, 154 Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865 –1920, 253, 296 Barkmeyer, Estelle, 134 Barr, Callie, 83, 85 Barr, May Bell, 84 Barth, Fredrik, 2 Barthes, Roland, 172, 176 Bartholomew, Dave, 166 Becker, Jane S., 284

Beckham, Sue Bridwell, 100 –32 Beecher, Henry Ward, 236 Bell, Larry, 163 Beloved, 8, 63, 64, 248 Bemporad, Jules, 97 Benton, Brook, 165 Benton, Thomas Hart, 103 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 1, 26 Berea College, 277, 279 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 9 Bettersworth, Beulah, 107, 109, 122, 130 Beverly Hillbillies, The, 18 Bezzerides, Al, 89 Binns, Charles F., 147 biracial South, 297 Birmingham, 26, 159 Birth of a Nation, The, 14, 243 Black American Literature Forum, 65 Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, The, 214 Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion, 200 black musicology, 59 Black Reconstruction, 225, 251 black return migration, 63 Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 211 black southerners, 11, 21, 42, 60, 65, 66, 67, 70, 226, 230, 231, 236, 263, 298 black studies, 5, 61 Blasberg, Robert W., 144, 146 Blassingame, John, 62 Bleikasten, Andre, 9 Blotner, Joseph, 80, 82, 84 Blount, Roy, 261 blues, 170 Bontemps, Arna, 65, 249 Booth, Wayne, 89 Borsen, Orin, 96

304

index Boskin, Joseph, 232, 240 Bosworth, Sheila, 8 Botsch, Robert, 263 Bove, Paul, 186, 191 Boyer, Lillian Frances, 134 Bradley, David, 64 Brasileiros Na Africa, 202 Brazil, 201, 202, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 215, 217, 218, 219 Brazil and the Brazilians, Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches, 207 Breaux, Quo Vadis, 18 Bright Stars of Michigan, 160 British slave trade, 206 Brodhead, Richard, 241, 244, 250 Brodsky, Louis Daniel, 89 Brooklyn All-Stars, 160 Brooks, Cleanth, 5, 35, 98 Broughton, Panthea Reid, 94 Brown, Larry, 19 Browne, Aldis, 114 Bruce, Lenny, 17 Buck, Paul, 236 Buddenhagen, I. W., 213, 214 burden of southern culture, 293, 294, 298 Burke, Kenneth, 184 Burnichon, Joseph, 210 Bush, George W., 16, 180 Butler, Judith, 104 Butler, Leila, 85 Butler, Octavia, 245

Campbell, John C., 270, 274, 282, 283 Campbell, Robert F., 282 Cape Fear, 8, 246 captivity narrative, 23 Caravans, 168 Caribbean, 10, 35, 188, 211, 258 Caribbean Transformations, 211 Carmer, Carl, 189 Carney, Judith, 211, 213 Carpenter, A. J., 213 Carpenter, Meta, 94, 96, 98 Cash, Wilbur J., 176 Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 40 caste system, 43, 45, 51, 55 Castille, Philip, 61 Cavalier tradition, 256 Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster, The, 81 Center for the Study of Southern Culture, 16, 19, 31, 33 Chabrolin, R., 214 Chaneysville Incident, The, 64 Charles, Ray, 164 Cherokees, 72 Chesnutt, Charles W., 59, 61, 222, 223, 250, 251 Chicago Public Library, 139 Chicanos, 15 child labor, 107 Child, Francis James, 285 Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner, 91 Childress, Alice, 238 Choctaws, 263 Chopin, Kate, 186 Christian, Meg, 177 Chronicle of Higher Education, 20, 24, 27, 28 Churchill, Winston, 270 Civil Rights movement, 9, 20, 24, 40, 43, 54, 59, 70, 173, 182, 186, 299

Cabbage Patch Dolls, 17 Cabell, James Branch, 4 Cable, George Washington, 59, 230, 245 Cajun culture, 2 Call to Home: African-Americans Reclaim the Rural South, 70, 71 Callaloo, 23, 63 Campbell, Bill, 72

305

index Civil War, 3, 5, 25, 34, 41, 99, 121, 155, 182, 185, 221, 222, 230, 243, 253, 256, 264, 274, 275, 289, 295, 296, 299 Clansman, The, 223, 251 class division, 280 Classic Slave Narratives, The, 66 Classification of Mountain Whites, 282 Clemenceau, Georges, 145 Clifford, James, 1, 10 Cline, Isaac Monroe, 134 Clinton, William Jefferson, 57 coal companies, 271 Cobb, James C., 289 Codman, John, 210 Cohn, Deborah, 188 Color Purple, The, 65, 238, 253 Combs, Josiah H., 285 Coming of Age in Mississippi, 39, 40, 54, 55 Companion to Southern Literature, 19, 26 Compson, Quentin, 1, 8, 17, 31, 78, 88, 95, 255 Confederate flag, 23, 24, 288, 293 Conjure Woman, The, 222, 224, 226, 241, 245, 247, 250 Consolators, 165 Cooke, John Esten, 236, 276 Cooke, Sam, 164, 165, 167 Cotton and Cotton Oil, 210 cotton mills, 271 country music, 17, 32, 35, 263 Covey, Arthur, 107 Cox, Paul E., 145 Crews, Harry, 62 Crisis, 22, 65, 254, 289, 292 Critical Period in American Literature, The, 270 critical theory, 21, 61, 174, 177, 185 Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation, 62

Cullison, William R., 136 cultural studies, 12, 13, 16, 61, 177, 293 Curry, John Steuart, 103 Curtin, Philip, 205 Daingerfield, Henderson, 283 Daniell, Rosemary, 62 Dardis, Tom, 85 Dargan, Olive Tilford, 186 Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart, 248 Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, 94 Davenport, Carson, 100, 103 Davidson, Donald, 5, 11, 184 Davies, Rev. J. M., 267 Davis Sisters, 168 Davis, Allison, 291 Davis, Angela Y., 62 Davis, James, 162 Davis, Richard Harding, 270 Davis, Thadious, 3, 20, 42, 57–74 de Man, Paul, 178, 179, 182 De Niro, Robert, 8 Dearborn, Mary, 234 deconstruction, 179, 192 Delaney, Samuel, 245 Delta Southernaires, 165 Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal, 101 Depression, 40, 97, 100, 101, 102, 112, 121, 130, 153 Depression Post Office Murals and Southern Culture: A Gentle Reconstruction, 101 Derrida, Jacques, 172, 174 Designing Women, 18 Dessa Rose, 64 Deutsch, Karl, 260 dialect, 199, 223, 224, 226, 227, 260 Dinwiddie Colored Quartet, 157 Dixie, 24, 27, 41, 160, 162, 163, 165, 170, 256, 289

306

index Dixie Hummingbirds, 160, 162, 163, 170 Dixie Nightingales, 165 Dixon, Thomas, 223, 249 Do Lord Remember Me, 69 dogtrot house, 35 Dollard, John, 40, 291 Donald, David, 175 Dorsey, Thomas, 158, 164 Dos Passos, John, 79 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 77 Douglas, Ellen, 8, 19, 89, 90, 238 Douglass, Frederick, 60, 61 Driving Miss Daisy, 231 “Dry September,” 179, 194 Du Bois, W. E. B., 22, 65, 243 Duffy, James, 201 Duke, David, 24 Dunbar, Leslie W., 297 Dunbar, Prescott N., 134 Duncan Brothers, 158 Dusk of Dawn, 45 Dyssli, Samuel, 200

essentialism, 103, 104, 130, 132, 174 ethnic Chinese, 15 ethnic groups, 2, 16, 17, 20, 58, 201, 206, 210, 212, 237, 240, 248, 262 ethnic humor, 17 ethnicity by consent, 224, 247 Evangeline Oak, 116 Evans, Walker, 194 “Everyday Use,” 66 Fable, A, 96, 97, 98 Fairfield Four, The, 156, 158, 165, 170 Falkner, John, 87 Falkner, John Wesley Thompson, 82 Falkner, Maud, 85, 86, 87 Falkner, Murry C., 79, 83, 86 Falkner, Sallie, 85 Falkner, William Clark, 82 Falkners of Mississippi: A Memoir, The, 79 Farm Security Administration, 102 Faulkner: The Transfiguration of Biography, 89 Faulkner at Nagano, 88 Faulkner, Estelle, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 134 Faulkner, William, 4, 7, 15, 21, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 59, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 92, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 179, 194, 195, 228, 249 Faust, Drew Gilpin, 173, 194 Fehr, Richard, 136 feminism, 104, 188, 191 Feminists Theorize the Political, 104 Ferguson, Leland, 217 Ferris, William, 16, 19, 28, 29 –36, 292 Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860 –1900, 281 feuds, 271, 281 First Revolution, 162, 170 Fitzhugh, George, 175

Eastman, Mary H., 232 Ebonics, 199, 200 Edge of the Swamp, The, 175, 195 Edwards, Harry Stillwell, 22, 226 Elder, Glenn, 258 Elegbede-Fernandez, Abiola Dosumu, 202 Eliot, T. S., 80 Ellison, Ralph, 9, 34, 48, 61 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 12, 26, 42, 282 Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 28, 33, 292 Eneas Africanus, 226, 231, 251 Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater, 101, 104, 106 environmental determinism, 139 Erikson, Erik, 41

307

index Flags in the Dust, 95, 189 Flash of the Spirit, 218 Fletcher, J. C., 207 Folami, Takiu, 201 folk culture, 35, 156, 272, 281, 283, 290 Food Crops of the Lowland Tropics, 214 Ford Foundation, 15 Ford, Frank Eugene, 134 Forrest, Leon, 64 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 124 Forster, E. M., 81 Foulahs, 219 Four Great Wonders, 158 Fox, John, Jr., 270, 274, 276 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 192 Foy, Francis, 114 Franklin, Cornell, 90 Franklin, John Hope, 57 Franklin, Tom, 19 Frederick Hall Jubilee Quartet of Dillard University, 165 Free Southern Theater, 63 Freud, Sigmund, 77 Freudian family romance, 181 Frey, William H., 71, 72 Freyre, Gilberto, 207 From Mammies to Militants, 238 From Slavery to Freedom, 57 Frost, William Goodell, 267, 270, 276, 277, 279, 280, 283, 287 Fryd, Vivian Green, 23 Gaines, Ernest, 8, 61, 65, 225, 249 Gallen, Anthea, 142 Gambian slaves, 204 Gardner, Burleigh, 291 Gardner, Mary, 291 Garreau, Joel, 263 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 65, 66 Gates, Robert F., 114

gay and lesbian studies, 19 Geechee language, 216 Geertz, Clifford, 3, 26, 291, 292, 293 Gender of Modernism, The, 185 gender scholarship, 103 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 104 Genovese, Eugene, 20, 173, 175, 187, 211 Ghana, 201, 206, 207, 214 Gilded Age, 251, 296 Gill, Paul L., 124 Gilman, Sander L., 43 Glasgow, Ellen, 4, 174, 180 Go Down, Moses, 228, 239, 249, 250, 251 Golden Chain Jubileers, 165 Golden Gate Quartet, 161, 162 Goldfield, David R., 299 Gone with the Wind, 2, 25, 32, 100, 121, 123, 222, 229, 230 Good, Minetta, 116 Good Government League, 150 Goodwin, Donald, 77, 82 Goodwin, Frederick K., 97 Goody, Jack, 214 gospel quartets, 155, 158, 159, 164, 165, 169 Grady, Henry, 234, 257 Graff, Gerald, 12, 27 Grant, Eula, 73 Gray, Richard, 14, 59, 96, 173, 176 Great Migration, 72 Great Revival, 295 Green, Al, 62 Greenough, Horatio, 23 Gresset, Michel, 9 Griffith, D. W., 243 Grisham, John, 19 Gullah People and Their African Heritage, The, 220 Gullah War, 217

308

index Gummere, Francis B., 272 Gutman, Herbert, 214 Haitians, 15 Hale, Sarah, 236 Haley, Alex, 67, 68, 69 Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, 10, 215, 216, 220 Hall, Jacqueline Dowd, 71 Hamblin, Robert, 78 handicrafts production, 272, 284 Hannah, Barry, 19 hard gospel shouters, 168 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 6 Harlem Renaissance, 11, 185 Harper, William, 175 Harps of Melody, 163, 167, 170 Harris, George Washington, 244 Harris, Trudier, 238 Hawkins, John, 289 Hawks, 165, 166, 170 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 233 Hayes, C. Willard, 276 Hayes, Michael, 71 Heath Anthology of American Literature, 195, 223, 252 Hee-Haw, 18 Helper, Hinton, 14 Hemingway, Ernest, 79 Henderson, Joe, 165 Henning, Tennessee, 67 Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century America, 140 Herskovits, Melville, 212 Heyrman, Christine Leigh, 295 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 236 Highway QCs and the Soul Stirrers, 165 Hill, Samuel, 292 Himes, Chester, 245 Hinton, Joe, 165 Hirsch, Stefan, 111

Hispanic studies, 16 History of Lagos, Nigeria: The Shaping of an African City, A, 201 History of Southern Literature, The, 62 Hobsbawm, Eric, 232 Hobson, Fred, 11, 255, 297 Holloway, Joseph E., 22, 213 Holman, C. Hugh, 14, 39, 61, 176, 291 Home, 63 Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage, 68 Hubbell, Jay, 236 Huckleberry Finn, 30, 31, 244 Humming Four, 165, 166, 170 Humphries, Jefferson, 172, 181, 299 Hurston, Zora Neale, 2, 60, 186 Hutchins, Robert, 33 Hutson, Ethel, 134, 148 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 127 Ibsen, Henrik, 77 Idea of the American South, The, 27, 195, 260 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 299 Imperial Record Company, 166 In Ole Virginia, 252 In the Tennessee Mountains, 274 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 66 Indian removal, 23 industrial design, 115, 137, 138 industrialization, 136 Inkspots, 167 Interpretation of Culture, The, 26, 293 invented tradition, 232, 299 Irvin, John T., 78 Irvine, Mary E., 142 Irwin, John T., 78, 83 Is Alcoholism Hereditary?, 77, 82 Isaac, Rhys, 293

309

index Ivanhoe, 248 Ivy League, 33

Commerce, 1750 to 1911: A Study in the Economic History of a Coal Field, The, 283 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 28, 292 Kidder, D. P., 207 Killens, John O., 18 King, B. B., 36 King, Grace, 224 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 24, 41, 297, 298 King, Richard, 59, 60, 173, 180 Klein, Herbert, 209 Kluckholn, Clyde, 292 Knight, Grant C., 270 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 18 Kreyling, Michael, 173, 178, 181 Kroeber, Alfred, 292 Kushner, Tony, 17

Jackson, Joyce Marie, 21, 154 –71 Jackson, Mahalia, 155 Jacobs, Harriet, 60 Jamaican planters, 201, 206 James, Henry, 33 Jamison, Kay Redfield, 97 jazz, 162, 171 Jefferson, Thomas, 294 Jelliffe, Robert A., 88 Jensen, Merrill, 266 Jet, 72 Jews, 15, 16 Jim Crow, 41, 289 Johnson, Charles, 9 Johnson, Else, 97 Johnson, Guy, 291 Jones, Anne Goodwyn, 20, 21, 60, 172 –96, 228 Jones, Bobbie, 160 Joseph and his brothers, 228 Journal of American Folk-Lore, 284 Journeys through the South, 258 Joyce, James, 29 Joyner, Charles, 211 Judson, David, 71

Labiche, Emmeline, 116 Lagos: A Legacy of Honour, 202 Land of the Fair, The, 241 Lange, Jessica, 8 Lanterns on the Levee, 39, 40, 55 Larks, The, 165 Latin America, 58, 258 Laurens, Henry, 204 Lauter, Paul, 185, 223 Lawrence, Jacob, 128 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 141 Lee, Robert E., 19, 33, 223 Lesson before Dying, A, 225 Lester, Julius, 69 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 189, 194 Levine, Lawrence W., 155 Levine, Saul, 114 Lewis, Henry Clay, 244 Lewis, Laura B., 109, 118 Library of Southern Literature, 4, 27 Life and Labor in the Old South, 210, 219 Like One of the Family, 238, 251

Kador, Ernie, 165 Kagy, Sheffield, 122 Kallen, Horace, 262 Kaplan, Wendy, 141 Karp, David A., 83 Kartiganer, Donald M., 84 Kenan, Randall, 19, 68 Kennedy, James Pendleton, 236 Kenner, Chris, 165 Kent, Charles William, 3 Kentucky Mountains, Transportation and

310

index Lincoln, Abraham, 99 Linsott, Robert N., 83 Littlefield, Daniel C., 22, 199 –220 local color, 3 Lombardo, Augusto, 9 Long Dream, The, 70 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 116 Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 244 Looney, Ben Earl, 134 Lopes, Nei, 218 Lost Cause, 230, 232, 237, 242, 251, 295, 296, 297, 298 Lowe, John, 1–28, 221–53, 299 Lukács, György, 235, 252

McQueen, Norman, 160 McWhiney, Grady, 261 Megraw, Richard, 21, 133 –53 melting pot, 262 Mencken, H. L., 4, 172, 256 Meridian, 66 Meriwether, James B., 79, 80 Mexico, 58, 71, 106, 112, 270 Meyer, Joseph Fortune, 145 Meyerowitz, Eva L. R., 213 Michaels, Walter Benn, 223 Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade, The, 209 Mill, Hugh Robert, 278 Miller, Wilbur R., 281 Millgate, Michael, 79, 98 Milosh, Barbara, 101, 104, 106 Mind of the South, The, 176, 194, 211 minstrel jubilee quartets, 156, 163 Minter, David, 78, 189 Mintz, Sidney, 211, 212 miscegenation, 208, 210 Mission Work among the Mountain Whites in Asheville Presbytery, North Carolina, 282 Mississippi Burning, 18 Mitchell, Margaret, 100, 121, 124, 188, 249 Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and Planning in Appalachia, 273 Mood, Fulmer, 266 Moody, Anne, 20, 39, 52 moonshining, 271, 272, 273, 281, 282, 283 Morris, William, 136, 137 Morris, Willie, 20, 39, 46, 62 Morrison, Toni, 63, 64, 222, 249 Moses, 227, 229, 239, 240, 241, 242 Mosquitoes, 189, 194 Mosse, Eric P., 96 Mount, Mary W., 134 mountain culture, 281, 285

Madden, David, 8 Magafan, Ethel, 127 Main Street, 51 Maizlish, Stephen E., 62 Mama Day, 8, 64 mammies, 238 Mandingoes, 219 Manic-Depressive Illness, 97 manifest destiny, 23 Markowitz, Gerald E., 101 Marling, Karal Ann, 101 Marr, Carl, 136 Martin, Jay, 84, 85 Mary Verhoeff, 283 masking, 10 Mason, Bobbie Anne, 5 Massaquoi, Hans J., 67 Mathis, Deborah, 72 Matthiessen, Peter, 8 McCorkle, Jill, 66 McCrary, Rev. Samuel, 156 McCullers, Carson, 19 McKinney, Gordon B., 281 McLean, Mrs. Walter B., 84 McPherson, James Alan, 8

311

index Mullin, Gerald W., 200 Murfree, Mary Noailles, 274 My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Reminiscence, 85 “My Southern Home,” 177

North Carolina Humanities Council, 68 North Toward Home, 39, 47, 48 Norvell, Lillian, 134 Nude Descending a Staircase, 103 Nyquist, Carl, 106

NAACP, 288 Naipaul, V. S., 8 Narrow House, The, 81 Nashville Tennessean, The, 71 National Broadcasting Company, 157 Native American features of African American life, 219 Native Americans, 15, 17, 23, 25, 58, 72, 112, 113, 240 Naylor, Gloria, 8, 9 Negroes in Brazil: A Study in Race Contact in Bahia, 208 New Criticism, 172, 184, 185, 190, 192 New Deal, The, 21, 102, 104, 153 New Life Singers, 160 New Orleans, 1, 7, 10, 24, 35, 94, 98, 99, 133, 134, 135, 136, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159, 160, 162, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 200, 224 New Orleans Art Pottery Club, 142 New Orleans Gospel Coalition, 160 New South creed, 234, 271 New York College of Ceramics, 147 New Yorker, The, 5, 64 Newcomb pottery, 21, 143, 150, 152 133, 134, 135, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152 Newcomb school of art, 134 Newman, Frances, 186 Nicholson, Bentley, 134 No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880 –1920, 141 Nolte, Nick, 8

Odum, Howard, 4 Ohr, George, 147 Old English Ballads, 272 Olento, Antonio, 202 Ootsey, John, 160 Orozco, José, 106 Os Africanos no Brazil, 207 Osbey, Brenda Marie, 18 Osborne, William, 26 Ostendorf, Berndt, 9 Ovid, 224 Ownby, Ted, 293 Oxford, Mississippi, 7, 19 Page, Myra, 186 Page, Thomas Nelson, 22, 221, 223, 252 Paine College, 70 Painter, Nell Irvin, 67, 68 Palmer, Robert, 32 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 150 Paris Review, 48 Park, Marlene, 101 Parton, Dolly, 36 Passages, 254 Patterson, Orlando, 201 Paulding, James Kirke, 236 Payne, James, 167 Peck, Gregory, 8 Pena, Lydia M., 132 Percy, Walker, 25, 60, 81, 91, 99 Percy, William Alexander, 20, 39 Persico, Luigi, 23 Peterson, Dorothy, 70

312

index Phil Stone of Oxford: A Vicarious Life, 87 Phillips, Ulrich B., 4, 14, 210, 219, 255 Piaget, Violet, 139 Pickett, Wilson, 165 Pierson, Donald, 208 Pilgrim Travelers, 165 pioneer culture, 277 Pistey, Joseph, Jr., 126 plantation narratives, 3, 22 plantation school, 25, 221, 222, 229, 230, 245, 246 Plimouth Plantation, 25 pluralism, 22, 273, 280, 287 Poesch, Jessie, 142 Polk, Noel, 91, 92 Poovey, Mary, 245 Popular Ballad, The, 272 Porter, Katherine Anne, 179, 185 Portuguese Africa, 201 post office murals, 21, 106, 110, 111 post-structuralist theory, 184, 192 Potter, David, 255, 290 Powdermaker, Hortense, 291 Powledge, Fred, 258 Pratt, Minnie Bruce, 186 Price, Reynolds, 66 Proclamation of 1763, 266 prodigal son, 229 Prudhomme, Paul, 1, 2, 27 Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), 153 Purdy, Robert, 130 Pynchon, Thomas, 248

racial identity, 58 Radcliffe, Anthony, 134 Rainey, John S., 300 Ransom, John Crowe, 190 Rawley, James A., 205 Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan, 8 Rawls, Lou, 165 Raymond, C. Rexford, 284 Raynaud, Louis, 112 Red and the Black, The, 81 Red Rock, 222, 223, 224, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 242, 247, 248, 252 Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South, 289 Redford, Dorothy Spruill, 67, 68 Reed, Ishmael, 61, 222 Reed, John Shelton, 3, 22, 254 – 64, 291 Regional, 6, 12, 287, 292, 297 Regionalism in America, 266, 291 regionalist formula, 271, 273 Requiem for a Nun, 97 return migration, 63, 70, 73 Rhode Island School of Design, 133 rhythm and blues, 164, 165, 166 Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina, 204 rice cultivation, 211, 212, 213, 214 Richards, Paul, 213 Ridgely, J. V., 14 Rimbaud, 81 Rivera, Diego, 106 Roberts, Elizabeth Madox, 186 Robinson Humming Four, 158 rock and roll, 32, 35, 154, 162 Rodrigues, Nina, 207, 210 Rohland, Caroline, 123, 127 Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 211 romance of reunion, 222, 235 Romine, Scott, 221

Quebec Act, 266 Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner, 87 Rabelais, 145 race and region, 57, 60, 65, 67, 69, 73 race label, 157

313

index Rookwood Pottery, 146 Roosevelt, Franklin D., Jr., 161 Roosevelt, Theodore, 150, 270 Roots, 32, 67, 194 Round Table Club, 135 Rowan, Ed, 104, 110 Roy, Joseph E., 267 Rubin, Louis D., Jr., 27, 62, 178 Rubin generation, 178, 181, 182, 183 Ruffin, David, 165 Ruskin, John, 136 Russell, Irwin, 224

Shearin, Hubert Gibson, 285 Sheehy, Gail, 254 Sheerer, Mary, 146, 147 Shneidman, Edwin, 81, 82 Shore, Laurence, 203 shotgun houses, 35 Sierra Leone, 205 Silber, Nina, 222 Silverman, Kaja, 191 Simms, William Gilmore, 244 Simon, Bennett, 78, 82 Simpson, Lewis P., 11, 175, 182, 242, 291, 294, 297 Singal, Daniel Joseph, 180, 297 Slatoff, Walter J., 86, 87 slave-based economy, 58 slavery, 58, 62, 170, 194, 195, 201, 219, 253, 257 Smiley, David, 255 Smith, Harrison, 91 Smith, Jon, 181, 188 Smith, Kenneth E., 144 Smith, Lee, 66 Smith, Lillian, 173, 175, 180 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 48 Snell, Susan, 87 Sobel, Mechal, 219 Society for the Study of Southern Literature, 18, 172, 173 Sollors, Werner, 224, 237 Some Notables of New Orleans: Biographical and Descriptive Sketches of the Artists and Their Work, 134 Somerset Place, 67, 69 Sophie Newcomb College, 134 Soproco Spiritual Singers, 170 Sound and the Fury, The, 83, 86, 87 Southeast Asia, 58 southern aristocrats, 43

sacred race records, 157 Sacred State of the Akan, The, 213 Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, The, 65 Sanders, Dori, 8 Sangari, Kumkum, 9 Schwartz, Stuart B., 209 Scorsese, Martin, 7 Scott, Anne Firor, 187 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 185 Scott, Evelyn, 81, 186 Scott, Joan W., 104, 115 Scott, Sir Walter, 234, 235, 248 Segrest, Mab, 186 Selah Jubilee Singers, 165 Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930 –1940, 284 Selznick, David O., 123 semiotics, 14, 23 Semple, Ellen Churchill, 276, 283 Senegal, 213, 214 Senegambia, 205 Senegambians, 212, 215, 218, 219 sense of place, 5, 34, 35, 48, 53, 183, 290 sense of southern mission, 294, 295 Shapiro, Henry D., 22, 265 – 87

314

index Southern Association of Women Historians, 187 Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, 295 southern cultural studies, 175, 178 Southern Economic Association, 4 Southern Highlander and His Homeland, The, 274 Southern Historical Society, 5 Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, 90 Southern Literary Festival, 15 Southern Literature and Literary Theory, 172, 178, 180, 182, 183, 194 Southern Living, 5 Southern Magazine, 62, 134 southern manhood, 193 Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865 – 1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community, 281 southern mountaineers, 267 southern musical culture, 154 Southern Regional Council, 297 Southern Renaissance, 4, 180 Southern Renaissance, A, 27, 59, 180, 195 Southern States Art League, 140 Southern University, 160 Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South, A, 60 Southernaires, The, 157 Southerners: The Social Psychology of Sectionalism, 262 southwest humorists, 179 Southwestern Training Institute, 141 Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meanings of Illness, 83 Speight, Francis, 115, 122 Spencer, Elizabeth, 8, 17 Spirit of Memphis, 165 Spirit of the Times, The, 244

spirituals, 64, 154, 157, 158, 162, 166 Spratling, William, 99 Spruill, Julia Cherry, 187 Square Books, 7 St. Vincent Millay, Edna, 190 Stack, Carol, 71, 73 state flags, 23 Stein, Jean, 97 Stendhal, 81 Stephens, Edwin L., 135, 137, 141, 144, 150 Stone, Phil, 87, 93 Stone Mountain, 257 Stono Rebellion, 217 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 236 Strange Fruit, 100 Strenuous Age in American Literature, The, 270 structuralism, 14, 174 study of region, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36 Styron, William, 48, 93, 94 Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865 –1920, 293 Sudanese slaves, 207 Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550 –1835, 209 Sun Belt, 14, 26, 58, 63, 66, 71, 72 Sundquist, Eric, 223 Sutpen, Thomas, 34, 36 Syllabus of Kentucky Folk Songs, A, 285 Szwed, John F., 211 Tait, Agnes, 109, 130, 132 Talking about William Faulkner: Interviews with Jimmy Faulkner and Others, 88 Tamerin, John S., 82 Tanzania, 214 Tate, Allen, 186, 296 Tate, Linda, 60 Taylor, Johnnie, 165

315

index Taylor, William R., 295 Tharpe, Rosetta, 167 Their Eyes Were Watching God, 186 Third Life of Grange Copeland, The, 66 Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, The, 85 Thompson, E. P., 137 Thompson, Edgar, 258 Thompson, Robert Farris, 218 Thompson, William Tappan, 244 Thornton, John, 217 Till, Emmett, 54 Tilly, Louise A., 115 timber companies, 271 Tindall, George, 263 Tise, Larry, 176 To Wake the Nations, 253 Todorov, 221 Tolor, Alexander, 82 Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 60, 180, 195, 252 Tompkins, Daniel A., 210 Toomer, Jean, 9 Torrence, Jackie, 62 Town, The, 98 Townsend, Ernest, 228 Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett, 78 tragic mulatto, 59 Trail of Tears, 72 Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, The, 205 Transformation of Virginia, The, 293 transnational South, 10 travel sketches, 268 Treasury Section of Fine Arts, 101, 104, 129 Trufaut, S. A., 134 Tubman, Harriet, 128 Tucker, Tanya, 259

Tulane University, 133, 134, 135 Turner, R. Gerald, 24 Twain, Mark, 30, 31, 35 Two Runaways, 231 Two Southern Impressionists: An Exhibition of the Work of the Woodward Brothers, William and Ellsworth, 136 Two Wings to Veil My Face, 64 Uhry, Alfred, 231 United States capitol, 23, 24 University of Mississippi, 15, 31, 289 University of Texas, 16, 252 university quartets, 157 Unvanquished, The, 32, 79, 249, 251 Utica Institute Jubilee Quartet, 157 van den Berghe, Pierre, 237 Vance, Mary A., 141 Vance, Rupert, 291 Vass, Winifred, 216, 217 Veal, Albert, 166 Vechten, Carl Van, 70 Verger, Pierre, 201 Victor Record Company, 157 Vietnam, 58 Vietnamese, 15 Vincent, George E., 276 Violinaires, 165 Virginia Quarterly Review, 4, 297 Vizenor, Gerald, 248 Vlach, Michael, 217 Voltaire, 145 Wade, John, 4, 5 Wake of the Wind, The, 64 Walker, Alice, 17, 32, 35, 60, 65, 66, 188, 238 Walker, Margaret, 65, 249 Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of

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index Post Office Murals in the Great Depression, 101 Waller, Altina L., 281 War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919 –1945, The, 297 Ward, Jerry W., Jr., 27 Warren, Robert Penn, 42, 100, 109, 249 Washington, Booker T., 241 Washington, Mary Helen, 66 Washington-Creel, Margaret, 217 Wasson, Ben, 88 Waters, Muddy, 32 Watkins, Floyd C., 88 Watkins, Frances Ellen, 22, 185 Web pages, 33 Weiss, Rick, 82 Welty, Eudora, 6, 32, 34, 35, 187 West African jihads, 209 Wheatley, Phillis, 235 Whisnant, David, 273 White, Deborah Gray, 62 white supremacy, 190, 264, 297 White Trash on Moonshine Mountain, 18 Whitman, Walt, 30 Whitten, Norman F., Jr., 211 Wild Palms, The, 78 Wilde, Meta Carpenter, 96 Wilder, L. Douglas, 289 Wilgus, Donald K., 272 William Faulkner, American Writer: A Biography, 80 William Faulkner: His Life and Work, 195 William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 137 Williams, Hank, 36 Williams, Joan, 97, 98 Williams, Michael Ann, 292 Williams, Raymond, 6, 292 Williams, Samm-Art, 63

Williams, Sherley Anne, 249 Williams, Tennessee, 19, 32 Williamson, Joel, 62, 85, 250 Wilson, Charles Reagan, 20, 23, 24, 230, 242, 288 –300 Wilson, Edmund, 184, 226 Wittenberg, Judith Bryant, 89 Wolfe, Thomas, 32 Wolff, Sally, 88, 96 womanism, 188, 191 Women, Race, and Class, 62 Women, Work, and Family, 115 Women Artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, 1870 –1914, 142 Wood, Grant, 103 Wood, Peter H., 200 Woodward, C. Vann, 14, 173, 175, 182, 187, 290 Woodward, Ellsworth, 21, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150, 153 World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, The, 219 World War II, 159 Wright, O. V., 165 Wright, Richard, 4, 7, 9, 20, 32, 34, 36, 39, 48, 52, 61, 70 Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region, 59, 194 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, 21, 77–99, 188 Yaeger, Patricia, 181 Yazoo City, Mississippi, 46, 47 Yellin, Jean Fagin, 66 Yerby, Frank, 65, 70, 222, 245 Young, Stark, 231, 240 Zion Harmonizers, 168, 171 Zion Travelers Spiritual Singers, 157, 171 zydeco, 17, 154

317