Autobiographies and Southern Identity

Southern historian C. Vann Woodward claimed that the South was never more victorious than in the moment of its defeat in the Civil War. He referred to the remarkably successful effort on the part of white southerners to transform their military defeat into a cultural victory. They romanticized the Old South and slavery, they condemned Reconstruction, and they celebrated the return to white supremacy. This “Lost Cause” ideology spread through organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Daughters of the Confederacy, through the construction of monuments and museums, and through autobiographies. This exercise in collective memory was a powerful force in southern experience before World War II, as the autobiographies of J. Motte Alston, William Alexander Percy, and Virginia Durr reveal. Though Durr’s autobiography also shows how events during the Great Depression and World War II began to shake that view of the southern past.

Too often “Southerner” is used to mean “white Southerner” when, in fact, blacks and whites have lived on intimate terms in the region since the first blacks arrived at Jamestown in 1619. As historian John Boles wrote, “Nothing and no one in the South has escaped the mutual influences of the two races.” That essential fact is well represented in this course — race is a central factor in all the autobiographies we will read. But African American culture is also something distinctive, and the African American experience must be considered on its own terms. Autobiographies by Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Moody, and the Lady Chablis illustrate central facets of African American history in the South, but also challenge many accepted notions about African Americans in the region. These readings illustrate the importance of class and gender and how much has changed for African Americans in the South since World War II. The Lady Chablis subverts many of the myths of the Old South and openly defies gender roles (and be warned, she’s rated X!).

Popular images of the South have often created the illusion of homogeneity. Talk of the “Solid South,” for example, has helped create and sustain the idea of the South as a monolithic region populated by slow-talking Protestants who prefer grits with breakfast and their pork barbequed. That view obscures the diversity that lies within the region. There are other races in the South apart from whites and blacks, other religious groups than evangelical Protestants. Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree reminds us of the long history of Native Americans in the region, but at the same time raises fundamental and disturbing questions about autobiography and truth. Stella Suberman’s The Jew Store takes us inside the lives of a Jewish family in small-town Tennessee and reveals the challenges “outsider” groups like Jews faced in the South’s evangelical heartland.

That potent myth of the Old South celebrated the lives of the planter aristocracy, but the planter aristocrats were always a tiny minority of the white South. Large parts of the South – Appalachia, the Ozarks, the Piney Woods, the Wiregrass – all lay outside the plantation South and gave rise to their own vibrant sub-cultures. These regions were poor, and that grinding poverty and isolation made their lives very different from that of many southerners. Harry Crews’ brutal memoir takes us to the Wiregrass region of south Georgia in the midst of the Great Depression where the most vital link to the outside world was the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. Dennis Covington explores how the snake-handling religion of the mountain folk of Appalachia helped sustain them as they moved to urban areas and confronted the New South.

The blending of diverse races and cultures in the South has produced a remarkable cultural and artistic life intensely localistic but with an enormous depth, range and international appeal. Some scholars have found this cultural South to be the region’s true defining characteristic and the true marker of southern distinctiveness. African American and white southerners borrowed from one another, imitated one another, and through that process created distinct but related cultures that merged to form a shared southern culture. That powerful cultural syncretism has arguably made southern culture the most distinctive in America, and it has been exported to the rest of the nation and around the world. Nowhere is the richness of southern culture better expressed than through southern literature and music, and no form of southern music is more distinctive and more celebrated than jazz. Eudora Welty is one of the South’s most perceptive writers, and in her autobiography she ponders the source of her remarkable talent. Jazz was born in rich cultural mix of New Orleans. Autobiographies by Louis Armstrong, the most famous jazz performer to come out of the South, and Thomas Sancton, who plays around town today, illustrate the long and complex history of America’s most original art form.