Читать книгу Constructing the Self - AA.VV - Страница 14

“I Knew Then Who I Was”: Memory, Narrative, and Sense of Self in Autobiographies of the Jim Crow South

Jennifer Ritterhouse George Mason University

In Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, historian Kevin Gaines observes that “a theme common to much African American autobiographical writing is the telling of the moment, usually during childhood, at which the author learns the drama of ‘social equality,’ or, as James Weldon Johnson put it, ‘the brutal impact of race and . . . how race prejudice permeate[s] the whole American social organism’” (47). Highly self-conscious, conventional, literary, sometimes lyric, black autobiographers’ dramas of “social equality” recount, in Gaines’s words, “the painful socialization of young African American males and females into a negrophobic, Victorian social order” (47), and they are inevitably shaped by the authors’ mature political views. In fact, scholars have been so aware of the extent to which black autobiography is shaped by its authors’ mature political views that they have often questioned the truthfulness of autobiographical narratives. The best-known case is Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which, as biographer Michel Fabre has shown, includes a number of fictional elements.

The truth-value of autobiography is a problem for historians who want to draw on the rich autobiographical literature of the American South—so much so that historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach has devoted an entire book to the subject. Wallach argues provocatively in Closer to the Truth than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow that it is precisely the most fabricated elements of autobiography—its literary techniques such as imagery and metaphor—that make it uniquely valuable for capturing the intricate realities of a Jim Crow society that can be difficult for later generations to comprehend.

Along with historians of Jim Crow, historians of childhood have a particular need for an answer to the question of how autobiographical source materials can best be approached. Children leave few historical sources and almost none that capture what they were thinking and feeling when they were very young. By the time they are able to write letters, diaries, and other first-person accounts, which rarely survive anyway, “children” are actually much more like adults in many respects than they are like the infants or toddlers they—and every human being who has ever lived—once were. In the absence of child psychologists or other interested on-the-spot observers, only retrospective sources like autobiography and oral history can provide insights into the subjective experience of growing up.

As necessity is the mother of invention, a desire to understand what it meant to grow up Jim Crow can help illuminate a historical approach to autobiographical source material that is at once pragmatic and sophisticated and also somewhat different from Wallach’s literary analysis.¹ The first step is to emphasize a word Kevin Gaines uses: drama. It is also important to think critically about the nature of memory and to look for patterns across the broad genre of southern life-writing.

First, drama. Gaines identifies black autobiographers’ dramas of “social equality,” but dramas of social inequality is a more straightforward term. As historian Nell Irvin Painter explains, “social equality” was white southerners’ catch-phrase for any kind of association as equals among blacks and whites—a kind of association that was not supposed to happen for fear that it would lead to “race mixing” and, worst of all from most white southerners’ point of view, sexual relationships between white women and black men. Thus, “‘social equality’ existed only in the negative” in the South, Painter writes (53). Social inequality—how race prejudice permeates the whole American social organism—was the lesson black children were forced to learn and the lesson black autobiographers regularly recount.

None did so more self-consciously than Walter White, who was born in Atlanta in 1893 and served as Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1931 until his death in 1955. White’s 1948 autobiography A Man Called White begins with a classic drama of social inequality. Titling his first chapter “I Learn What I Am,” he describes his experience of the terrible Atlanta race riot of 1906, when he was thirteen years old. He claims to have gained a “great awareness” of himself as “a Negro” when he aimed a shotgun at a white mob that was about to burn down his family’s home (11). Although gunfire from a neighboring building quickly scattered the advancing mob, this sense of self-recognition lingered. White says his identity as “a Negro” was “all just a feeling then, inarticulate and melancholy.” But it was a reassuring feeling “in the way that death and sleep are reassuring”: immutable, unshakeable, something he would cling to for the rest of his life (12).

The truthfulness problem is that there was actually no shotgun. As Kenneth Janken explains in his biography of White, “[t]he shotgun made its first appearance in a 1930 profile of White by Heywood Broun in The Nation” and was nowhere to be found in White’s “first extant account of the mob menacing his home” in a 1927 letter (17). Moreover, White’s mother and sisters remembered the story differently. As his sister Alice wrote in response to the 1930 profile, she read the article in The Nation “with much amusement. Where did the shot-gun come from?” White seems to have had no deliberate intention to deceive his readers when he included the shotgun in his autobiography. He told his mother in a letter that his “memory was quite definite on the matter of the guns” (Janken 17). Nevertheless, White’s mother and sisters are more reliable because they had less invested in the issue of whether or not there was a gun. As Janken concludes:

The keys to understanding fully why Walter White fabricated the armed defense of his house—when the truth of his involvement was both heroic and horrific enough—lie properly in his adult efforts to raise his national profile. He wanted to show whites that black men (including himself) were just like white men in their determination to be brave protectors of the family, and he wanted to stifle the rumblings of his black critics who questioned his race loyalty. (17-18)

So, while the Atlanta riot was undoubtedly an important moment in young Walter White’s life, the obvious fictions in his autobiographical accounting of it would seem to compel a historian to focus on the literary aspects, rather than any truth-value, of such dramas of social inequality. Or, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain in Reading Autobiography, “life narrative cannot be reduced to or understood only as historical record. While autobiographical narratives may contain information regarded as ‘facts,’ they are not factual history about a particular time, person, or event. Rather, they incorporate usable facts into subjective ‘truth’” (13).

This is where the importance of looking for patterns in southern life-writing becomes evident. Black autobiographers are not the only southerners who narrate dramas of social inequality. Whites who dissented from Jim Crow orthodoxy often tell these kinds of stories as well, in both autobiography and oral history. The impulse that Fred Hobson has described as white southerners’ “rage to explain” the South’s social system and their place within it has often manifested itself in autobiographical accounts of childhood events much like the ones African American autobiographers recount, but with the roles reversed. Rather than experiencing the pain and confusion of racial subordination, white children learned to inflict it, often first on black nurses and playmates. Like black-authored dramas of social inequality, whites’ stories reveal the extent to which race and other categories of identity, particularly gender and class, were inextricably linked and learned in tandem. And, like black autobiography, white southern life-writing often has an explicit political intent. For white southerners who went on to challenge all or part of the Jim Crow system as adults, usually as a result of some adult moral or political transformation, an account of their “typical” southern upbringing served not only to show how much their own racial attitudes had changed but also to suggest that if they could change, so could other white southerners and so, ultimately, could the South.

Primarily the concern of white southern liberals and radicals, white-authored dramas of social inequality appeared with increasing frequency during and after the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Many describe post-World War II childhoods, but as historian Melton McLaurin (author of his own racial coming-of-age story, Separate Pasts) points out in “Rituals of Initiation and Rebellion: Adolescent Responses to Segregation in Southern Autobiography,” the majority of all southern autobiographies that have appeared from national and academic presses since 1940 have “rejected racism” (24 n. 4). A number of autobiographies describe late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century childhoods and present whites’ own versions of dramas of social inequality. One of the best known of these earlier memoirs is Lillian Smith’s influential 1949 autobiography Killers of the Dream.

Throughout the book, Smith emphasizes the subtlety and constancy with which white children were socialized into the southern racial system. “Neither the Negro nor sex was often discussed at length in our home,” she explains:

We were given no formal instruction in these difficult matters but we learned our lessons well. We learned the intricate system of taboos, of renunciations and compensations, of manners, voice modulations, words, feelings, along with our prayers, our toilet habits, and our games. I do not remember how or when, but by the time I had learned that . . . all men are brothers with a common Father, I also knew that I was better than a Negro, . . . that a terrifying disaster would befall my family if ever I treated a Negro as my social equal and as terrifying a disaster would befall my family if ever I were to have a baby outside of marriage. (27-28)

Obviously interwoven with lessons about gender, Smith’s race training eventually came to include very specific, if often unspoken, rules about not eating or drinking or shaking hands with black people, not calling black men and women “Mr.” and “Mrs.” or showing other forms of respect, and in general not becoming too “familiar” with African Americans.

Even if her race training was gradual, however, Smith did recall especially significant childhood moments, which she called dramas. One particularly influential “drama of the South” began when a white clubwoman in her hometown of Jasper, Florida, happened to find a young white girl living with a black family on the black side of town (34). Convinced that the child had been kidnapped, the town marshal took the girl away and placed her in the Smith home, where she and Lillian became fast friends. Three weeks later, a black orphanage called and informed Smith’s mother that Janie was black. Told that her new friend must return to “Colored Town” and could never play with her again, Lillian demanded over and over to know why, until her mother, her voice “sharp” but her face “sad,” finally ended discussion of the matter with the same words that black parents often used in response to their children’s questions about race: “You’re too young to understand” (37). Although she accepted this answer, Smith knew that “something was wrong” (37). “I knew that my mother who was so good to children did not believe in her heart that she was being good to this child” (38). Nevertheless, Smith “felt compelled” to believe that her mother and other white adults were “right” because that “was the only way my world could be held together” (38).

Smith narrated this incident as an example of a remembered experience that contributed to her eventual renunciation of Jim Crow, but apparently she did not remember it well enough to be certain of her playmate’s name. Six years before she published her autobiography, she wrote an article called “Growing Into Freedom” in which she called the girl “Julie” rather than “Janie” (50-51). Although not as big a fiction as Walter White’s invention of the shotgun, this discrepancy reminds us that white “dramas of social inequality,” like black ones, are narratives, with all of the authorial shaping that the word implies. Indeed, like blacks’ accounts of experiencing and resisting racism, whites’ accounts of learning to distance and subordinate racial others are both personal and generic. As Lillian Smith explained in her autobiography, her specific experience with Janie was “an incident that has rarely happened to other southern children. In a sense, unique. But it was an acting-out, a private production of a little script that is written on the lives of most southern children before they know words. Though they may not have seen it staged this way, each southerner has had his own private showing” (30).

Ultimately, the conventional nature of both black and white autobiographers’ dramas of social inequality does not cast doubt on their objective truthfulness so much as it sheds light on how societal arrangements affect individuals and create subjective truths on a broad scale. Lillian Smith’s analysis of southern children’s racial learning as “dramas” that follow “scripts” written on the lives of children “before they know words” is important because it highlights the fact that autobiographers’ dramas of social inequality are dramas of socialization as well. That is, they are not merely literary conventions or self-conscious political statements; rather, they are a literary subset of a much larger category of narratives that embody the memories and the process of remembering that define and continually redefine individuals’ sense of themselves—regardless of whether they ever write these narratives down in memoirs. The somewhat conventional childhood stories that I have been calling dramas of social inequality are best understood as highly crafted versions of the usually unwritten stories we all tell ourselves about ourselves in an effort to understand who we are and how we fit in our world. No matter how much an autobiography may be shaped by adult concerns, the childhood stories that autobiographers tell contain a core of identity-shaping experience. They are touchstones of memory worn smooth by frequent handling. Thus, barring conscious deception, the “polished” narrative of an autobiographer does not necessarily tell us less about his or her experiences than a supposedly “unvarnished” account. Instead, if we recognize that every experience involves individuals’ subjective interpretations of events, we may find that the highly interpreted stories of autobiographers tell us even more than putatively transparent texts.

In Reading Autobiography, Smith and Watson argue that, as readers of autobiography, we need to “attend to the role of remembering—and conscious forgetting—in the act of making meaning out of the past and the present” (30). We also need to draw on Joan Scott’s foundational essay “The Evidence of Experience” to understand that “it is not individuals who have experience but subjects who are constituted through experience” (779). As Smith and Watson summarize Scott’s point, experience is “the very process through which a person becomes a certain kind of subject owning certain identities in the social realm, identities constituted through material, cultural, economic, and psychic relations” (30-31). Patterns of experience result in patterns of subjectivity—they are private productions of little scripts, as Lillian Smith wrote, deploying that helpful dramaturgical metaphor that Kevin Gaines also used.

Historians tend to be most interested in the patterns, the scripts—that is, in the social and cultural more than the individual level. Nevertheless, there is something to be gained by exploring the nature of subjectivity. In Touching the World, critic Paul John Eakin posits that autobiography is never simply mimetic, but attempts to transform the past, involving “a simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the constraints of the real” (46, 180). Attuned to individual psychology, Jennifer Fleischner expands on Eakin’s insight in Mastering Slavery: Women, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. She argues that autobiographers not only find themselves, but create themselves in writing and that they do so with a greater self-awareness than readers often recognize. Even those authors most committed to telling “the truth” comprehend, at some level, that they can tell the truth only as they saw it and as they have come to understand it. Indeed, for many, the autobiographical impulse derives from a feeling that they have achieved a mature viewpoint on past events. Thus, to write an autobiography is, as Fleischner puts it, “to act on the desire to repeat one’s past in order to ‘supplement’ it, because the past is and was ‘never acceptable’” (20).

From here, Fleischner goes on to discuss Freud’s idea of the “compulsion to repeat”:

the idea that, over the course of a life, each individual symbolically restages powerful experiences out of a complex tangle of motivations: to test, verify, and correct reality; and to master or give vent to underlying feelings of rage, fear, frustration, and pressures for revenge. In this way, the psychoanalytic model of the vicissitudes of remembering is consonant with . . . the autobiographical project to ‘supplement’ a ‘never acceptable’ past. (20)

Although the Freudian compulsion to repeat is presumably less conscious and perhaps also more urgent than the autobiographer’s desire to retell his or her life story as literature, the analogy between these two forms of “repetition” holds, suggesting, in Fleischner’s words, “that there is a continuum between unconscious and self-conscious narrative positions along which all narrators move” (20). In other words, individuals’ narration of their memories in autobiography is inextricably linked to their earlier and ongoing narration of their memories to themselves in an effort, as historian Jacquelyn Hall puts it, to “secure their identities” (440).

Recognizing similarities between the memory work of autobiographers and the everyday workings of memory on a conscious and subconscious level helps us to see the ways in which our experiences and the stories we tell about them do, in effect, create us. Even when they are crafted into literary dramas of social inequality, black and white autobiographers’ childhood stories often remain open-ended, retaining some part of the trauma that could make a particular moment unacceptable and thus destined for repetition in both the psychoanalytic and the narrative senses of the word. It is in the lack of closure that we can read black and white southern children’s dramas of socialization—dramas that are marked by an irresolution and depth of emotion that suggests that a meaningful interaction between the individual and his or her culture has taken place. These are moments when one learns, in Walter White’s words, that “there is no isolation from life”—that social categories impinge upon individual psychology, shaping individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and convictions at a level beneath consciousness, beyond even the autobiographer’s, much less the experiencing subject’s, control. Thus, in Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith compared her lost sisterhood with Janie to a splinter that “worked its way . . . down to the hurt places in my memory and festered there” (38). Many other autobiographers assert along with James McBride Dabbs that they “never forgot” or were, in fact, unable to forget the moments of racial learning they describe (11). It is the unforgettable quality of such moments—the almost inevitable seepage of underlying feelings of rage, fear, frustration, confusion, guilt, or pain into even the most calculated narratives—that reveals their true formative power.

In short, there is something of unusual value to historians in autobiography’s retrospective and constructed nature. In autobiography and in related forms such as oral history, men and women of an earlier time draw on inside information that only they can possibly know to offer their own interpretations of how they came to be who they are. And though these autobiographical assessments are merely interpretations, they retain a link to the selves in question that no other person’s (and certainly no historian’s) necessarily outside observations can share.

As problematic as it may be for someone to extract an experience from the minute-by-minute flow of existence and say “this is the moment when . . . ,” it is equally true that we all do so all the time in our own minds. As Lillian Smith noted just before recounting her story about finding and losing Janie in Killers of the Dream, “to excerpt from a life and family background one incident and name it as a ‘cause’ of change in one’s life direction is a distortion and often an irrelevance. The hungers of a child and how they are filled have too much to do with the way in which experiences are assimilated to tear an incident out of life and look at it in isolation” (30). And yet Smith did go on to tell her story as a story, a snippet of experience, a coherent narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like Smith, we tend to think in terms of stories even though we know, if we think about it, that every beginning has antecedents and no ending equates to the end of a story’s possible significance in our unfolding lives. Indeed, one could argue that meaning exists only in the present, in our perpetual reinterpretation of our memories, which itself depends mainly on what we need any particular memory for at any particular time. Clearly, black and white southern autobiographers needed their stories of childhood racial learning to explain the Jim Crow system and their part in it. Their dramas of socialization, which they often narrated in a highly self-conscious form as dramas of social inequality, are not merely literary constructs but measured doses of perception and understanding. Such stories help us see not only what black and white southern children experienced, but also what part of their experiences they could take in, how they assimilated those experiences, and how they remembered and repeated them throughout their lives.

Works Cited

Dabbs, James McBride. The Southern Heritage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Print.

Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Print.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Trans. Isabel Barzun. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. Print.

Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. New York: New York UP, 1996. Print.

Gaines, Kevin K. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996. Print.

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “‘You Must Remember This’: Autobiography as Social Critique.” Journal of American History 85.2 (1998): 439-465. Print.

Hobson, Fred. Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983. Print.

Janken, Kenneth Robert. White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP. New York: The New Press, 2003. Print.

McLaurin, Melton. “Rituals of Initiation and Rebellion: Adolescent Responses to Segregation in Southern Autobiography.” Southern Cultures 3.2 (1997): 5-24. Print.

---. Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1987. Print.

Painter, Nell Irvin. “‘Social Equality,’ Miscegenation, Labor, and Power.” The Evolution of Southern Culture. Ed. Numan V. Bartley. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988. 47-67. Print.

Ritterhouse, Jennifer. Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. Print.

Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773-97. Print.

Smith, Lillian. “Growing Into Freedom.” Common Ground 4 (Autumn 1943): 50-51. Print.

---. Killers of the Dream. 1949. New York: Norton, 1994. Print.

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.

Wallach, Jennifer Jensen. Closer to the Truth than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2008. Print.

White, Walter. A Man Called White. New York: The Viking Press, 1948. Print.

¹ This essay is based largely on Chapter Three of my book, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (2006).