But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (review)

Post-Faulkner, one of the abiding clichés of white Southern identity must surely be the expatriate’s compulsion to “tell about the South.” In his careful and often insightful But Now I See, Fred Hobson explores the literary outcome of this compulsion, tracing the emergence around 1940 of a new mode of white Southern self-expression, a genre of autobiography he terms the “racial conversion narrative.” Hobson notes that these works borrow from earlier, often Puritan, conversion tales in their appropriation of religious tropes, their confessional tone, and their pursuit of redemption, though here the salvation is secular. Writers as diverse as Lillian Smith, Willie Morris, and Mab Segrest are more concerned with “getting right with man” than “getting right with God” in their mediations on guilt below the Mason-Dixon line.

But Now I See, while not particularly interested in the more writerly aspects of the texts considered, is an engaging examination of the variously gendered and classed paths by which a variety of often privileged white Southerners came to confront their own and their region’s racism. The chapter on Lillian Smith and the lesser-known Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin thoughtfully considers how the twin lenses of gender and sexuality refract the women’s tales, alternately enabling and curtailing their insights into race and region. The final chapter reminds us that it is at the “treacherous intersection of race and class . . . that any honest discussion of contemporary southern life increasingly must lie” (147). While it is clear that Hobson appreciates the struggles many of these writers endured in attempting to work through the weight of racist traditions, he generally resists an easy idealization of his subjects, recognizing that the memoirs sometimes veer toward the self-serving, even in their earnestness and honesty.

Hobson also identifies in a subset of the authors a tendency toward disillusionment, a certain “let down” after the initial joy and emotional intensity of conversion. These white Southerners repeatedly express their alienation in the wake of the absorption of the Southern Civil Rights movement within a larger Black Power movement. Many of them were seeking forgiveness and redemption, but faced with Black anger, the zeal of the newly converted often dissipated. When Hobson briefly observes that “perhaps that was the trouble with secular conversion all along” (106), I’m left wishing he had pushed this insight further, distinguishing among authors and drawing bolder conclusions. What are we to learn from this pattern of conversion and disillusionment? What else might be said about the tendency among whites to overinvest in the pain of the Other, deploying it in the service of a sort of religious, individualized high? Perhaps we might discern the limits of a racial conversion driven by guilt. A more radical conversion (and I would include Lumpkin’s among these) would move beyond guilt toward a desire fueled by a vision of justice rather than by a need for forgiveness, a move toward a complex “we” rather than a relentless focus on the white, autobiographical “I.” In the end, it is not enough for white Southerners simply “to see” or even to tell; we need also to act, and as these memoirs occasionally make manifest, guilt can all too easily trump action.