Читать книгу Constructing the Self - AA.VV - Страница 11

‘My Story is Better Than Yours’: The Changing Politics of and Motives for Composing Southern African American Life Narratives

Trudier Harris The University of Alabama

On 29 May 1880, prospective African American writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt, residing in North Carolina at the time, wrote in his diary:

I think I must write a book. I am almost afraid to undertake a book so early and with so little experience in composition. But it has been my cherished dream, and I feel an influence that I cannot resist calling me to the task. . . . If I do write, I shall 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 which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism—I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people; and I would be one of the first to head a determined, organized crusade against it. . . . This work is of a twofold character. The negro’s [sic] part is to prepare himself for social recognition and equality; and it is the province of literature to open the way for him to get it—to accustom the public mind to the idea; and while amusing them to lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired state of feeling. If I can do anything to further this work, and can see any likelihood of obtaining success in it, I would gladly devote my life to the work. (Brodhead 139, 140)

I quote this passage at length here because it may well have served as the impetus to all of those formerly enslaved African Americans who penned the stories of their lives. They all wrote with a purpose, as Chesnutt avowed, and their compositions were designed to effect the greater good of the African American communities of which they were a part. They were, in other words, conscious activists. Consider Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), for example. This text, which has become the standard by which all other narrations by those formerly enslaved are judged, was designed to assist in the abolition of slavery. Indeed, Douglass perfected the style in his narrative by lecturing on the abolitionist circuit in New England once he had escaped from slavery in Maryland. Time and again, Douglass told the story of his experiences in slavery. As a result of those repeated tellings, his narrative achieved the polished status for which we praise his published life story.

Douglass combined purpose and commitment to a larger community, that is, he embraced a political outcome for his writing. You may recall in his narrative that, in the foiled attempt to escape from Maryland, Douglass had formed a group with four fellow enslaved men to plot their departure. Criticisms about Douglass’s individualism to the contrary, there is no gainsaying that Douglass saw himself as a part of a community and that he hoped for freedom for himself as well as for those enslaved with him. He makes that even clearer at the end of his narrative when he writes in the “Appendix”:

Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds—faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love, and justice, for success in my humble efforts—and solemnly pledging myself anew to the sacred cause,—I subscribe myself, FREDERICK DOUGLASS. (Narrative 162-163)

That larger political or communal objective, that “sacred cause,” not only defined what Douglass wanted to achieve in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, but it also defined what Harriet Jacobs hoped to accomplish in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). In showing her commitment to a purpose larger than her own freedom, Jacobs, in the preface to her narrative, writes:

I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself . . . But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations. (Incidents 1-2)

Booker T. Washington, in his Up from Slavery (1901), had a political agenda as well. Famed scholar William L. Andrews asserts of Washington’s narrative:

Washington wrote his autobiography in part to show the great benefit that such institutional training [the industrial school at Tuskegee Institute] could be to African Americans making the transition from slavery to freedom. The best-selling African American autobiography of the early twentieth century, Up from Slavery, combined the classic formula of the individual success story with a shrewd though oblique and politic plea for racial solidarity through affiliation with African American-controlled institutions. (Oxford Companion 36)

Indeed, several African American scholars have argued that, in their prioritizing communal concerns over individualistic ones, formerly enslaved African American narrators effectively instituted the tradition of African American literature. Following their publications, most African American writers would insist upon a purpose-driven focus for their imaginative creations. As Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon point out in their Black Writers of America (1972), African American writers found their commitment to social justice as one of their earliest motivations to creativity. The quest for liberty and equality, Barksdale and Kinnamon assert, was one of the three prongs that shaped African American literature. The other two were the appeal of Christianity and questions of identity in relation to American democracy and the incorporation—or not—of the black body into that democracy. Questions about the purpose of African American literary production have engaged writers from the mid-nineteenth century until contemporary times. For an extended period, notions of being a “Negro writer” or “a Negro who just happened to be a writer” plagued creators of African American literary texts. Theorists from W. E. B. Du Bois to Richard Wright to Amiri Baraka weighed in on the relationship of art to propaganda, of creativity to social justice.

Early life narrators, in their commitment to community, were far less troubled by their reasons for literary creation than were their later peers. Even when they were unsure about what the outcome of their writing skills would yield, they never doubted the value of their stories or the purpose for which they wanted to tell those stories. Once slavery was abolished, however, and the immediacy of life and death threats was lessened slightly, other motives for literary creativity in life writings entered the picture. I seriously doubt that Langston Hughes wanted to transform American society when he published The Big Sea (1940), which chronicles his early life, his adventures in New York during the Harlem Renaissance, and his first trips to Africa. Similarly, Claude McKay probably did not contemplate national politics overly much when he published A Long Way from Home (1937). These narrators during the 1920s and 1930s provide the beginnings of a tradition of individualistic life narration that would stretch from that period into contemporary times. Even when some writers earned national reputations, as Hughes and Richard Wright did, it is challenging to determine where their life narratives offer the direct political commentary that characterized narrations by enslaved persons.

With Wright, another dimension is added when we consider that Wright is composing about his life experiences in the Deep South, that part of the United States that had been most maligned during the days of slavery. Certainly Douglass and Jacobs were enslaved, but their enslavement was in the upper South states of North Carolina and Maryland. It was therefore possible, given the proximity of those states to northern, free territory, for those enslaved to plot their routes to freedom—as Douglass and Jacobs assuredly did. The Deep South, on the other hand, presented additional problems. The vastness of geography made it far less likely that enslaved persons could escape from bondage. Trying to navigate on foot from Alabama, for example, through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and other states before arriving in the North would have been almost impossible. Thinking of a southern route of escape, perhaps by way of New Orleans and stealing aboard a ship bound for the Northeast, would have been equally challenging. It is no wonder, therefore, that those confined to slavery in the Deep South viewed it essentially as a death sentence. It is thus not surprising that there are no classic narrations of enslavement in Deep South territory from those formerly enslaved on that soil. It is well into the twentieth century and with the likes of Richard Wright that narrators begin to chart their lives in the southernmost part of the United States. And you can’t get much farther south than Mississippi, which is where Richard Wright came to consciousness in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.

The racism that inspires Wright’s recollections is certainly a part of the national fabric, but it is much more a part of southern landscape, southern territory, southern history, southern law, and southern customs. As a life narrator, therefore, Wright is shaped by that territory, and his narrative reflects that shaping. While that territory and that shaping were certainly communal, collective factors, I argue nonetheless that Wright determines to carve out an individualistic response to that territory and that shaping. Other blacks might suffer racism, but Wright presents them as too mentally dulled to feel it to the depths of their beings as he does. In one instance in Black Boy, for example, Wright recounts witnessing a black man’s allowing a white man to kick his rear end. Wright is disgusted, but the presumed victim explains that he has earned a quarter in the process, and quarters are hard to come by. In another instance, Wright depicts an encounter with a black mother and daughter; the mother is desperate to get Wright to marry her daughter, even though he has met her only a few hours before. In Wright’s estimation, these are pathetically un-understanding black peons whose intellectual capacities and abilities to comprehend their impoverished life circumstances and conditions of oppression are far beneath his own. Unlike Douglass, Wright does not feel sympathy for these black people. He wants to get away from them. Ironically, his lack of emotional identification with them does not preclude his using them in penning his life narrative, using them in fact as examples less to show pervasive racism than to show his intellectual superiority.

The same is true with his presentation of his family in Jackson, Mississippi. He depicts his sanctimonious grandmother as a severe hinderer to his intellectual development, curiosity, and emotional well-being. His mother, although a teacher, has little to offer in the way of intellectual guidance or life lessons. Again, Wright portrays his family members, as with other black folks he encounters, as having compromised the essence of their beings. They have made peace with racism, made peace with discrimination, settled into their roles as second class citizens outside the mainstream of American democracy, and self-segregated themselves into the geographical niches that whites have suggested is their natural lot in life. Throughout his narrative, therefore, Richard Wright presents himself as the individual, highly intelligent young man who has challenged—sometimes directly but more often indirectly—the system of inequality and injustice under which he and fellow blacks are forced to live. Those other blacks, though, do not have the intelligence, the critical and analytical skills to see their circumstances for what they truly are. On the soil of the South, therefore, Richard Wright presents himself as an exception, as perhaps the exception, to acquiescence to racial injustice. Wright is the conqueror who will go forth to save himself and write about other blacks, while they are content, ignorantly so, to remain in the places southern racism has assigned to them.

There is an irony in Wright’s impulse to creativity, however. Even as he presents himself as the exception, he is showing the circumstances under which other blacks live. Astute readers, be they black or white, will be inclined to sympathize with and perhaps desire change for those black folks from whom Wright wants to escape so desperately. To Wright, early twentieth century conditions of black existence in the South are not changed appreciably from days of slavery, so he follows the North Star into Memphis and Chicago in the hope of better things. He becomes a part of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and one of the first to write about it. While many of those who moved north during the Great Migration succeeded in helping their families—and even Wright himself did that—the initial impulse was for individualistic gain. Go North, get a good job, make some money, and then help others if you can.

While it might be argued that the segregated, Jim Crow, racist South could in many ways be viewed as a new form of slavery, as Douglas Blackmon argues in Slavery By Another Name (2008), it still did not inspire in Wright the desire for immediacy of transformation that Douglass and Jacobs expressed in their narratives. Drinking from water fountains marked black, or using toilets similarly marked, apparently did not resonate the way that receiving 39 lashes for not meeting a quota for picking cotton during slavery may have resonated.

The same arguments of individualism as the guiding force in the impulse to writing a life narrative might be applied to Zora Neale Hurston. Born in Alabama and bred in Florida, Washington, D.C. and New York, Hurston had published five books by 1940, which made her an exception not only among African American women writers, but among African American writers in general. Her success led her publisher, Bertram Lippincott, to insist that Hurston pen her life story. After extensive delays, during which she asserted that writing about one’s life was almost too daunting a task to undertake, Hurston did indeed complete her life narrative and published it as Dust Tracks on a Road in 1942. In the process, Hurston created a narrative that is so individualistic that scholars have difficulty in deciphering some of the visions that she claims shaped her life. Rather than focus exclusively on race or agitating for transformed southern race relations, Hurston spends quite a bit of time illustrating that she is, like Wright, an exception among so-called Negroes. That exceptionalism begins with her recounting of her birth, and it continues throughout her narrative.

While Richard Wright presents almost every encounter between blacks and whites on southern soil as potentially life threatening and definitely dangerous, Hurston elides any such hostility in her text. Encounters between blacks and whites are harmonious and, at times, downright helpful, beginning with Hurston’s own delivery. Most black folks of Hurston’s generation in the South were delivered by midwives, but Hurston paints her delivery as specially ordained when the midwife is out of place and her mother’s birth pains begin. No matter. A local white man just happens to arrive at the house to share some freshly killed hog meat, and he comes to the rescue. Hurston writes of this Good Samaritan who comes upon her shortly after she “rushes out” of her mother’s womb:

He followed the noise and then he saw how things were, and, being the kind of a man he was, he took out his Barlow Knife and cut the navel cord, then he did the best he could about other things. When the mid-wife, locally known as a granny, arrived about an hour later, there was a fire in the stove and plenty of hot water on. I had been sponged off in some sort of a way, and Mama was holding me in her arms. (Dust Tracks 21)

Note that Hurston privileges this white man’s intervention over her own mother’s birth pains. In fact, her mother almost disappears from the narrative, in spite of the fact that she is the one who gave birth. The person truly responsible for her survival at this point, Hurston implies, is the white godfather. From this auspicious beginning, therefore, Hurston makes it clear that she is not just some common colored person born in the country in Florida. Instead, her beginnings are legendary, almost mythical, which means that she is unlike the run of the mill average black person. She also makes it clear by presenting this man as being in her life for a number of years, even using the word “nigger” with her, that she is not going to spend her narrative castigating southern whites.

The exceptionalism that characterizes Hurston’s birth continues throughout her narrative. Two white women from the North select her as the student upon whom to bestow special favors, including giving her a cylinder of 100 shiny new pennies after she reads for them and sending her clothes from the North for an extended period after that. She recounts her visit to the women in their hotel room in Eatonville:

They had shiny hair, mostly brownish. One had a looping gold chain around her neck. The other one was dressed all over in black and white with a pretty finger ring on her left hand. But the thing that held my eyes were their fingers. They were long and thin, and very white, except up near the tips. There they were baby pink. I had never seen such hands. It was a fascinating discovery for me. (Dust Tracks 35)

From her legendary arrival into the world to her being favored by these visiting white women to her belief that the moon follows only her, Hurston makes it clear that there are black people—and then there is ZORA NEALE HURSTON. Again, individualism trumps community in the creation of the narrative, and there is no higher agenda that seems to underpin the story. Indeed, Hurston even refuses to write about what made her the success she became that warranted an autobiography. Of the more than 300 pages in the narrative, Hurston spends only six pages on her literary career. For this autobiographical venture, Hurston essentially said, “I will give you a semblance of form, but I won’t give you substance. I will give you a substantially incomplete life, and perhaps you will simply conclude that I was tired, at points, especially here at the end, or that I didn’t really know what I was doing.” I maintain that she was “putting something outside her mind”—as she asserts in Mules and Men (1935) that black people generally do when they feel challenged—for Lippincott and her white readers to play with and going on about her business. And that business did not include a nationalistic agenda. As far as Hurston was concerned, the community of black folks in which she grew up was second in value to the little colored girl named Zora who came out of that community.

It is striking that neither Hurston nor Wright uses southern territory for substantial political commentary, although their texts are not completely devoid of such commentary. Certainly they value the landscape and the folk traditions that surrounded them as they grew up, but southernness in and of itself, or any concentrated desire to change southernness, does not appear in their texts. Neither expresses a clear cut political agenda that would be comparable to agitating for the abolition of slavery. For Wright and Hurston, who found themselves more a part of a region than part of a nation, penning their narratives meant, to some extent, leaving their region to join the nation, the very nation that Douglass and Jacobs found so problematic.

Still, there are narrators who are thoroughly engaged in and called for change on southern territory. This is especially the case with narrators during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. Whether it is Alice Walker challenging Mississippi laws in her life or in her fiction, or Anne Moody in Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), southern territory for some African American life narrators means embracing activism for the remainder of their lives. In essays as well as in Meridian (1970), Walker expresses her commitment to social activism. She deliberately married a Jewish man and moved to Mississippi in defiance of the anti-miscegenation laws in that state. In her essay “Choice: A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” she recounts how her social consciousness was developed in part as a result of hearing her mother pray for Dr. King’s safety.

Moody begins her narrative in pretty mundane fashion, at times testing the reader’s patience with her repeated recitations of her family’s poverty-stricken circumstances in rural Mississippi. In fact, the narrative begins in a kind of “in medias res,” for readers are only aware that they are reading about Mississippi from the title of the volume. It is many pages before there are sufficient geographical markers within the text to locate the physical territory. Then, after a painfully depressing, humorless childhood and middle school existence, Moody begins high school during the year in which Emmett Till is killed. Though she has been aware of inequity and racial issues before, her learning about Till’s death sparks an awakening that defines her activism throughout her college years. After Till’s death, Moody’s political activism dominates the narrative, whether it is leading a protest on her college campus about maggot-infested grits, sitting in at lunch counters or bus stations in Jackson, Mississippi, registering voters in Canton, Mississippi, or traveling to Washington, D.C. for the famous March in August of 1963. Her early life certainly intersects with those of Wright and Hurston in that she paints herself as the only person in her town of Centreville, Mississippi, who is sensitive enough or intelligent enough to be angry about and resistant to racist practices. However, her deviation from Wright and Hurston is dramatic from the moment she leaves her hometown. She engages in events that enable her to produce a classic African American political life narrative.

A classic African American narrative at the end of the Civil Rights era, however, is less activist-oriented than it serves to chronicle the life of a larger-than-life figure. I refer to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). While its most engaging sections are located on southern territory, it nonetheless depicts Angelou in St. Louis, San Francisco, and part of Mexico. Caged Bird is the first in a serial life narrative from Angelou that covers several volumes. It engages as much for its creation of a legendary figure as it does in portraying the folk culture of rural Arkansas that Angelou credits with being the primary shaping force in her life. Again, the individual trajectory of the narrative takes precedence over the communal trajectory, though Angelou does record several instances of southern racism that affected the entire community in which she lived, such as a white doctor’s refusal to pull her aching tooth because, he avers, he would rather put his hand into a dog’s mouth than into the mouth of a Negro. Angelou went on from such misadventures to become active in the Civil Rights movement, and she actually rubbed elbows with Martin Luther King Jr., but personality is the major thing that dominates Caged Bird, not communal issues.

The South as a territory of narrative composition, therefore, is at times influential and at other times merely a backdrop to the ego that pictures itself on that soil. While region and landscape certainly tie into how lives get formed in the South, there are also other factors that shape narratives. I am thinking specifically of natural disasters and how they define the composition of life narratives. More specifically, I am thinking about Hurricane Katrina and the devastating impact it had upon lives in Louisiana, Mississippi, and the broader area of the Gulf Coast. For years after the Hurricane did its unprecedented damage in 2005, narrators across the South were recounting their experiences during that time period. Professors from various universities, professional writers, and just plain folks penned their responses to the devastation that Katrina heaped upon their lives. Dillard professor and well-known African American literary scholar Jerry W. Ward Jr. published The Katrina Papers: A Journey of Trauma and Recovery (2008), a memoir that contains a mixture of theory and artistic forms, including poetry. Joanne V. Gabbin, founder of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, sponsored a write-in of sorts, in which anyone affected by Katrina could compose a poem about the experience or compose a prose narrative. Gabbin also edited Mourning Katrina: A Poetic Response to Tragedy in 2009. Katrina has arguably been the most written about natural disaster that ever occurred on southern United States soil.

Katrina also made her way into movies and documentaries, especially with Spike Lee, as well as into fiction. And I am thinking specifically of Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011, and Mat Johnson’s Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010), which is a graphic novel about the Katrina disaster. Jesmyn Ward depicts a family’s wait for the arrival of the Hurricane as well as the destruction that they witness afterwards. The natural events serve as the backdrop against which a poverty-stricken family, whose primary pastime is dogfighting and whose 15-year old narrator is pregnant, lives out its miserable existence, an existence made even more miserable by the arrival of the hurricane. Katrina has thus entered into the linguistic heritage of the South in all forms of writing, from memoir to poetry to essay to graphic novel to traditional fiction.

One of the most fascinating accounts of the hurricane’s aftermath, however, is Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, published in 2010. What is striking about this memoir is that it is only barely about Trethewey. It is, rather, a meditation on nature, kinfolks, space, and place. The place specifically is Gulfport, Mississippi, and the failed efforts at restoration in a space that Trethewey and her only brother Joe know as their ancestral home. The book is also about that brother, who, unable to find work or any legal means of making a living after the destruction that Katrina caused, ends up selling drugs and earns a prison sentence as a result. Beyond Katrina, therefore, is not about birth and growing up; it is about people living with and trying to survive destruction—not only natural destruction but the destructive effects of drugs on Joe’s life. The character, so to speak, in the text is the storm itself—together with its lingering effects. Racism is not the primary villain; nature is—with human stupidity being second in villainy. The construction of the narrative is intriguing in its distancing of the narrator herself from the major focus of the text, which means that this is a memoir that has no precedent for what it labels itself or for what it hopes to achieve. Self-erasure for Trethewey becomes the device through which she privileges destruction and attempts to recover from destruction. It matches the erasure that she notes in terms of destruction of the landscape as well as the erasure that ensues as time passes and memories of the disaster falter or disappear altogether. Hurricane Katrina constructs a narrative, and there are narratives about Katrina and the landscape on which she inscribes her signature. Trethewey’s meditations finally enter a realm of imaginative creation that uses writing to comment on the writing that nature did on the geography as well as upon human lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Trethewey, like Jerry Ward, is a college professor. She holds a distinguished professorship at Emory University. Their narratives focus specifically on Hurricane Katrina, but they are nonetheless in a long line of African American life narrators who hold appointments in American universities. These narratives generally showcase an up-by-the-bootstraps trajectory of persons from impoverished communities who manage, against the odds, to acquire not only college degrees but who succeed in higher education. There is a plethora of manifestations of this category, including Louis Gates, Jr.’s Colored People (1994), Karla F. C. Holloway’s Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character (1995) as well as her BookMarks: Reading in Black and White: A Memoir (2006), Deborah McDowell’s Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin (1996), and Horace A. Porter’s The Making of a Black Scholar: From Georgia to the Ivy League (2003). With the publication of my Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South in 2003, I joined those academic narrators. Here, I reflect upon Summer Snow to comment on my composition of the narrative as well as various reactions to it. I am fortunate that the volume has been taught in a variety of classroom settings, including ones at Southern Illinois University, the University of Delaware, the University of Kansas, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Summer Snow had its impetus in a family loss. On 8 January 2001, my mother died at the age of 86. I started thinking about what I could do to honor her memory. I thought of a family newspaper or some kind of annual family gathering. Then, as I was mulling this over, I started thinking about my mother’s fishing history, and I thought about trying to capture some of the memories I had of her in a series of essays. Then, I thought, why not just produce a memoir in which my mother would play a vital role? That would give me a chance to honor her as well as to record some of the events surrounding my growing up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, attending Stillman College there, and then matriculating to The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. So, I started writing the essays on weekends, and they just seemed to flow from my mind and my pen. Things were going so well that, though I am not Catholic, I decided to give up the occasional glass of wine (which was really no stressful sacrifice) and all desserts (that was a major sacrifice) for Lent. It is amazing what one can accomplish in terms of thinking and writing when the body and mind are free of alcohol and sugar, but especially sugar. I wrote like a fiend between January and June of 2001, and Summer Snow was done. Though it was not published until 2003, the work was complete.

Now, in an attempt to capture autobiographical experiences, a writer makes choices—what to include; what to leave out; how to write about particular kinds of things, especially if they are embarrassing or make you look like a fool; and how to treat the countless characters who are going to people the volume with you. The decisions include such questions as: Do I really want to paint Great Aunt Jessie as the witch she was? Of course, she was a witch, . . . but, if I say that, her many descendants will be pissed off. That is, they will be pissed off IF they read the book.

Let me share a brief aside here—When Summer Snow was published, the North Carolina Writers Network asked me to come to Wilmington and talk about it. I gave my presentation the title “How to Write About YOUR Life Without Pissing Off Your Relatives.” They politely informed me that I could not use the phrase “pissing off” in my title because they would have to print it in their brochure for advance publicity, and they could not do that. If writers, scholars, and presumably sane intellectual people in 2003 wanted to censor a mere phrase, then imagine how much more Great Aunt Jessie’s relatives would want to censor how she might be presented for public viewing in something that I would write.

The writer, then, has to plan how to respond to accusations about Great Aunt Jessie if she decides to include a portrait of her. And think of neighbors. Did I really want to reveal that five men in my neighborhood noticed me too much from the time I was a mere thirteen or so years old and into my college years? That one even touched my breasts when I was cleaning house for his wife? Those men were all respected—by somebody, if not by me—and their reputations would be tainted if accurate descriptions of them appeared. In my mind, I always refer to them as “five dogs,” and I have, after all these years, written an essay about them that will appear in my second collection of non-fiction essays, which I have titled “Unspeakable.” In Summer Snow, however, I mention only one of them, the one that I encountered after I matriculated to college.

And what about teachers and colleagues? How did I want to portray them? Mostly, I had fond memories of my teachers, so that was less of a problem than the case of the five dogs. Things got a bit sticky when I considered the number of occasions on which I, as an African American woman, was a first of some kind or another—the first black professor in the English Department at the College of William and Mary, for example. Or those occasions on which I was one of a handful of black people in majority white environments, such as being one of the few black professors in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. How did I want to treat the folks I encountered there and my interactions with them? After all, most of those people were still alive at the time of the writing and publishing of Summer Snow, and it would have been extremely difficult to disguise them in the writing. Contemplation of all these situations meant making particular kinds of creative and narrative choices. That is why I call Summer Snow a memoir instead of an autobiography. In memoir, one can be selective about inclusion, whereas autobiography suggests something more expansive, thorough, and complete.

There is thus a kind of self-censorship that a person writing about her own life has to consider. Now, that self-censorship can be minimal, such as leaving out true names, or expansive, such as leaving out years, episodes, events, and characters, but it is something that comes to mind. I am probably much more conscious of these things today than I was when I was actually composing the volume in 2001. A healthy dose of naiveté probably prevented me from being too restrictive. I did consciously make some choices, however, about the composition of the text and how I wanted people to respond to it, even if I were writing about them.

First, I was responsive to the sound of writing. In fact, I actually give a lecture in which I talk about words singing to me. For me, writing is rhythm, and I want readers to hear those rhythms as they read. In Summer Snow, I heard voices from my childhood, and I wanted to capture them, especially in essays such as “Cotton Pickin’ Authority” (29) and “The Overweight Angel” (69). If a phrase or sentence doesn’t sound right, then I will discard it and try again, because I want readers to be as much wrapped up in the voices and rhythms as I am.

I also made decisions about style. I wanted vivid, active prose (Mama sez, “I’ll slap you into next week” versus “the child was slapped into next week by her mother”). I wanted concrete images, such as when I describe the son of one of my neighbors washing collard greens with bath soap (119). I wanted to paint characters who would stick in the minds of readers, such as Aun’ Sis in “The Overweight Angel.” Notice I use the word “characters,” so a memoirist creates just as fiction writers do. And I wanted accuracy in word selection. Writing a column for several years for The Chapel Hill News was good practice in capturing that vividness.

In connecting with readers, I also wanted a certain amount of humor in the volume. It is always good when readers laugh as they are learning about you and sharing in your experiences. I capture humor by envisioning readers. As a writer, it is important to be creator and audience member, writer and reader. If I write something, I must be able to imagine how readers will respond to it, what their reactions might be. For any composition, whether it is a newspaper column, a personal essay, or a scholarly book, I try to conjure up an ideal audience member to whom that writing is directed. For Summer Snow, that ideal reader/listener was my mother. I figured that, if my mother—who had a tenth grade education—could read and enjoy Summer Snow, then anyone else could. Notice that I say “reader/listener.” I always imagined taping the book for my mother to listen to it. Also, if I could get my non-reading relatives, such as my third sister and her husband, to read the book, then that would have been a major achievement. I succeeded in doing that when the mischievous husband called me and read passages that he recognized as being about certain members of the community in which we grew up.

Summer Snow is also about intentionally disturbing the peace at times, as in the essay, “Would you go out with a white boy for five dollars?” I was hoping that readers would indeed contemplate cross racial, social and sexual liaisons in the South and what those had traditionally meant—as well as what they mean for contemporary times. With “Dental Charity,” I wanted readers to contemplate how even well-intentioned good deeds can backfire, or, in another essay, how desegregation was detrimental, or, in yet another, how celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday can be wrongheaded at times.

Mostly, though, Summer Snow is about claiming the South. As I point out in the eponymous essay, it is about as rare for black people born in the South to claim that territory, emotionally and physically, as it is for snow to fall in Alabama in July. Over several decades, I have grown to love the South, in spite of its viciously violent history, and I have grown especially to love the territory in Alabama in which I grew up. Still, I join James Baldwin in his claim that, because he loves a territory, he has earned the right to criticize it. So, I criticize the backwardness of the South, its continuing racism, its poorly educated citizens, and its lingering propensity to violence. Nonetheless, I call it home, and I, like Natasha Trethewey, will claim my final resting place there.

For my purposes here, however, I emphasize that I did not think consciously of some of the things I’ve mentioned as I was composing the essays in Summer Snow. In an early essay, “The Overweight Angel,” for example, I was so excited about remembering the folks in that essay that I was too naïve to change their names. Aun Sis was my mother’s only sister, so she was simply called “Sis.” She was a rather large woman, who, from my adolescent eyes, seemed always to be sitting on her porch minding other folks’ business. She didn’t take no stuff from her five children or from anybody else’s kids. There was no business that she did not consider her own. She would tell my mother how to raise us after my father died, and she would set her children against us as models for correct behavior. So, without a thought of impending consequences, I named her in the essay.

In 2003, I still resided in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I had no way of knowing when any particular relative got their hands on a copy of Summer Snow and read it—unless they let me know. Well, apparently some of Aun Sis’s folks read that essay. And they were not happy. Now, they didn’t tell me that they were unhappy; they just conveyed that to my relatives in Tuscaloosa. This went on for years. In fact, I only found out on a trip home to Tuscaloosa. The general feedback was that Aun Sis’s descendants, that is, her three remaining daughters and lots of grandkids, did not like how I had portrayed Aun Sis. Initially, I was genuinely puzzled. What had I done wrong? Was there some innate sense of violation of privacy? Did they not like how I had described her physically?—but she DID look like that. Did they not like the traits I had assigned to her?—which were all true. Did they not like the fact that the narrator was laughing slightly on occasion? Or, did they just not like the fact that any member of their family could be portrayed in a book, no matter how she was portrayed?

Well, I said, if folks have objections, let them come and talk with me. Interestingly, no one ever did. If anyone had confronted me directly, I would have countered with: “But the essay shows clearly that Aun Sis believed in education, which is something that our family has supported strongly since we can remember, so what’s the problem with that? In spite of the humor, Aun Sis is a good woman.” I’m not sure that that “defense” would have convinced anybody, but I would have used it happily. Still, rumors about the displeasure of those descendants persisted for years. I could never zero in on any one person responsible for the displeasure, or any specific complaint, but the overarching sense that I had violated some un-written or un-spoken rule prevailed. Since I moved back to Tuscaloosa in 2009, I have not heard any comment about Aun Sis’s portrayal in the essay and, at this late date, I don’t expect to hear any. I became conscious of the fact, however, that any writer, but especially a memoirist, perhaps needs a bit more schooling in the art of disguise when he or she produces a memoir.

On the other hand, the large family about which I wrote in “Make A Joyful Noise” never raised a single voice of objection. Perhaps the lighter side of that essay made it much more acceptable. Or perhaps those were just folks with other, more serious, things to contemplate than what someone had written in a memoir. Or perhaps they didn’t read Summer Snow—which is a distinct possibility. “Make a Joyful Noise” remains one of my favorite essays because it captures a time in my youth when camaraderie was prominent, when church was as much a social institution as it was a spiritual one, and when neighborhoods were truly neighborhoods.

Memoir writing is an adventure, but it is never a journey that one takes alone, no matter how much he or she might believe to the contrary. Writing is about multitudes, for each of us carries relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers, church members, and a host of others around with us in our very DNA. While we can never separate ourselves from them, we can only hope that they do not attempt to claim too much of our lives. Their residing with us, after all, constitutes a shared community that presumably gives the individual the right to express individuality without having to unchain herself from unapproving hoards. Perhaps, as my younger sister said upon completing Summer Snow, “Well, that’s the way you remember things,” it is the sanest response we can hope for from that community.

Academic life narratives will probably never achieve the acclaim of the one that Frederick Douglass penned. However, they succeed well in showing that the impulse to creativity that grew out of the circumstances of those who were enslaved continues to define African Americans in twenty-first century narratives. “How I got over” is as legitimate a reason for exposing the self to public scrutiny as “How I escaped from slavery.” In both cases, the migrations in the lives of black Americans from one state of being to another had—and have—the power to influence generations of other aspiring African Americans. Transformation is the impetus to creativity, and those transformations are well worth the trips down memory lane.

Works Cited

Andrews, William L. “Autobiography.” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford, 1997. 34-37. Print.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1970. Print.

Barksdale, Richard and Keneth Kinnamon. Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. New York: Macmillian, 1972. Print.

Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Print.

Brodhead, Richard, ed. The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. 1845. Cambridge: Harvard UP/Belknap, 1980. Print.

Gabbin, Joanne V., ed. Mourning Katrina: A Poetic Response to Tragedy. James Madison U: Furious Flower Poetry Center, 2009. Print.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. Colored People. New York: Knopf, 1994. Print.

Harris, Trudier. Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South. Boston: Beacon, 2003. Print.

Holloway, Karla F. C. BookMarks: Reading in Black and White: A Memoir. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006. Print.

---. Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995. Print.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Hill and Wang, 1940. Print.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks On a Road. 1942. New York: Harper/Perennial, 1991. Print.

---. Mules and Men. 1935. New York: Perennial, 1990. Print.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. 1861. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Print.

Johnson, Mat. Dark Rain. New York: DC Comics, 2010. Print.

McDowell, Deborah. Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin. New York: Scribner, 1996. Print.

McKay, Claude. A Long Way from Home. 1937. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970. Print.

Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Dell, 1968. Print.

Porter, Horace A. The Making of a Black Scholar: From Georgia to the Ivy League. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2003. Print.

Trethewey, Natasha. Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010. Print.

Walker, Alice. “Choice: A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens. New York: Harcourt, 1983. 142-145. Print.

---. Meridian. New York: Harcourt, 1976. Print.

Ward Jr., Jerry W. The Katrina Papers: A Journey of Trauma and Recovery. New Orleans: U of New Orleans P, 2008. Print.

Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones. New York: Bloomsburg, 2011. Print.

Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. 1901. New York: Norton, 1996. Print.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945. Print.