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

Composed of four tightly written chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, Jennifer Jensen Wallach’s “Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact”: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow makes a compelling argument about the value of memoirs as historical documents. Wallach’s title comes from Lillian Smith, who, in her memoir Killers of the Dream (1949), acknowledged that memories are “never quite facts,” but are “sometimes closer to the ‘truth’ than any fact” (120). Wallach removes the quote marks from the word “truth,” but—like Smith’s memoir—her book invites readers to reflect upon the ways in which historical truths have been constructed.

Through an examination of six memoirs—three by African Americans and three by white southerners—Wallach demonstrates that “historical reality is inherently perspectival” (9), and that it contains both outer (i.e., public) and inner (i.e., personal) components (24). More so than other historical resources, memoirs enable readers “to re-experience the affective and cognitive inside of a historical moment” and thereby provide readers “the chance to live vicariously” (26). To reach these ends, memoirs rely upon figurative devices such as metaphor and irony, the latter of which is crucial to an understanding of the Jim Crow era. “Literal depictions of race relations that do not capture irony cannot capture a primary aspect of the social reality of that time,” Wallach maintains: “Every interaction between a black and white southerner contained layers of meanings. The outward reenactment of prescribed social roles camouflaged but could not erase deeper meanings” (48). Wallach will probably not convince historians that they have tended to miss these deeper meanings along with “the immediacy of past experience” (50), but few will contest her larger claim that memoirs—because they focus on individual experiences— work to subvert “fixed historical interpretations that silence dissenting voices” (34). When read beside one another, the memoirs in Wallach’s study do indeed “reveal that there was no singular Jim Crow history or representative experience” (56).

Perhaps no Jim Crow memoir has been seen as more seminal than Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945). With this work Wright details many of the lessons of white supremacy and the various levels of irony that undergird a segregated culture, including the ability of African Americans to placate white authority figures by saying one thing while meaning something else. Wright was, however, ambivalent about aligning himself with other African Americans, and in this respect he differs significantly from Zora Neale Hurston, whose Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) is deeply rooted in her love for black folk culture. As Wallach observes, Hurston does not “share the constancy” of Wright’s “anger and outrage at the Jim Crow system. Her reaction is more complex and just as logical a response to white racism as Wright’s rage” (77). Henry Louis Gates’s Colored People: A Memoir (1995) seems more in synch with Hurston’s perspective than with Wright’s. Gates looks back on the waning years of segregation with a surprising degree of nostalgia. His acknowledgement that integration provided the means for his subsequent success as an academic is accompanied by what Wallach identifies as an undeniable “sense of loss” (94).

Wallach finds similarly diverse perspectives in the memoirs of Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, and William Alexander Percy. In North Toward Home (1967), Morris renders the ways in which his social perceptions evolved, while admitting that he could not “bridge the gap” between his experience of Jim Crow and that of Richard Wright, his fellow Mississippian (112). Although different in most other respects, Smith’s Killers of the Dream and Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941) each focus to a large degree on what their authors perceive as the ways in which Jim Crow victimized whites as well as blacks. Percy and Smith thus provide views “not typically represented in the historiography of the...