Robert Penn Warren: The Real Southerner and the “Hypothetical Negro”

So much about the “racist South” has to do with memory. For a significant band of twentieth-century Southerners (most of them male), being Southern means having been racist. Jimmy Carter, perhaps the exception, remembers growing up in rural Georgia in the 1930s, but seems not to remember much racism in himself—except as southern traditions forced it on him. He portrays himself as more Huck Finn, less Tom Sawyer. Mississippian Willie Morris, growing up in the Delta in the 1940s, remembers being sadistically racist as a boy, alienated from his traditions on visits home from the University of Texas during the “massive resistance” to school desegregation in the 1950s, and finally ambiguously absolved (but without the right penance) as an expatriate in Manhattan in the 1960s. Anne Moody, growing up in Mississippi a few years later than Morris, knew nothing but white racism—until she joined the Movement.¹ Fred Hobson has tried to deal with remembered southern lives and remembered racism by suggesting that “The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative” be added to the canon as a “Southern literary subgenre” (120). His survey of the texts and his analysis of their shared constituent parts in But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (1999) are persuasive.² There may, however, be limits to what generic formalism can reveal about the interplay of identity and memory.

For most Southern writers coming of age during the rise and fall of Jim Crow, there was no other subject matter, no other crisis—social or psychological. If not the whole world, then at least the nation was watching for the confession, the conversion, the road-to-Tarsus bolt of lightning. What could possibly block the South from the joyous relief of penitence? Senator Fred R. Harris, in his brief foreword to Black Rage (1968), spoke for many Americans when he counted up “five civil rights bills since 1957, . . . the erosion of legal supports for segregated institutions, . . . greater acceptance of Negroes into our major institutions, . . . [but] it is still no easy thing to be a black person in America” (vii). How could circumstances change yet remain the same? How could the same public that made Gone With the Wind (1936) an iconic cultural experience also embrace To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) barely a generation later?

Perhaps public and private, cultural and psychological flows of memory do not work in tandem, and the narratives of those flows are roiled by undertows and countercurrents more often than not muffled by genre criticism. An episode in Carter’s memoir serves as an apt example. Archery, Georgia (his boyhood home—even smaller than Plains) and the Carter household, as the future president remembers them, formed an enclave of humane (almost prelapsarian) calm in the race-baiting Georgia of “Gene” Talmadge. Jimmy played with A. D., his sidekick, and other African-American neighbor boys utterly free from racist awareness until he ventured beyond the boundaries of his Eden. The closest movie theater was in Americus, a local train ride away, and when he and A. D. got to the theater they had to split up, the white boy to the choicer seats, the black to the balcony. They rode home, too, on a Jim Crow train. In spite of the patent racism, Jimmy cannot remember being a part of it: “I don’t remember ever questioning the mandatory racial separation, which we accepted like breathing or waking up in Archery every morning” (Carter 95–96). Who is “we”? In the immediate context, Jimmy speaks for A. D. What did he think, exiled to the balcony? What would it cost the white Southerner to listen to what he has to say for himself?

Indeed, in many cases public rituals of confession, recantation, or conversion and the narratives socially and historically shaped around them (shaped around presence and absence both) actually work to camouflage an obstinate—even desperate—clinging to the status quo. Unlike many other sins, racism seems to involve personal and communal identity: you are in sin before you do anything. The Southerner (of a certain generation) cannot be without...