"Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact": Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow (review)

Wallach's book is both a comparative study of memoirs about life in the American South during the Jim Crow era and an argument for the value of autobiographical literature as a tool for historical understanding. The memoirs that Wallach discusses—by Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, and William Alexander Percy—are all well known, even "canonical," texts. As Wallach shows, their authors depicted the segregation era in widely varying ways. Wright's Black Boy, a Record of Childhood and Youth (New York, 1945) was an unrelenting indictment of southern racial prejudice, whereas Percy's Lanterns on the Levee—Recollections of a Planter's Son (New York, 1941) offered a romanticized portrayal of a patriarchal society in which benevolent whites protected a black population unable to care for itself.

Although the versions of southern life offered by these two authors support the stereotypical depictions of Jim Crow found in history textbooks, Wallach argues that other texts offer alternative perspectives that cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1942) and Gates' Colored People: A Memoir (New York, 1994) depict vibrant black communities and individuals whose lives were shaped but not crushed by segregation. Morris' North Toward Home (Boston, 1967) tells a story of a sensitive white man's alienation from his native culture but nonetheless reveals his lasting emotional attachment to his native region. Smith's scathing denunciation of racial injustice in Strange Fruit (New York, 1944) often coexisted with the perpetuation of clichés about blacks' supposed inherited characteristics.

The variety of ways in which both black and white memoirists depict the segregated South illustrates Wallach's broader arguments for the value of autobiographical writing, not merely as historical source material but as a means of historical insight in its own right. Her two introductory chapters, "Subjectivity and the Felt Experience of History" and "Literary Techniques and Historical Understanding," are the most original part of the book, offering insights for scholars in fields well outside the history of race relations. Although Wallach concedes that memoirs are inherently subjective, she argues that this fact does not invalidate their historical value. Given that historians have had to acknowledge that perfect objectivity is an unattainable goal, the perspectival vision of autobiography is not completely alien to history. Autobiographers, unlike fiction writers, share historians' conviction that there is "a past external to the text" (22). Moreover, skillful autobiographical writers can venture into the interior experience of people living in the past in ways that historians cannot, and the literariness of autobiographies—their use of such devices as metaphor, irony, and allegory—communicates truth in a manner that can "form lasting impressions and inspire vivid mental imagery" (40).

In order to benefit fully from autobiographical sources, however, Wallach argues that historians must learn to read them appropriately, and not simply mine them for illustrative citations: "Autobiographical texts should be analyzed in their entirety" (138). Properly used, autobiographical sources can help historians to "capture the ambivalence and confusion that are often an inherent part of felt experience" and guard against the profession's "predilection toward certainty" (138). Wallach's lucidly written essay offers much food for thought, both for scholars of history and life writing and for general readers trying to recapture the flavor of the past.