Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South ed. by Anne Valk and Leslie Brown (review)

Anne Valk and Leslie Brown tackle a daunting enterprise—creating a cohesive thread of interviews for a twenty-first-century audience culled from an archive of more than 1,200 interviews from the Duke University project, Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South, collected between 1990 and 1995. Juxtaposing a wide range of narratives of African American women, Valk and Brown shed light on largely unexplored complexities of the everyday lives of African American women within their families and communities—lives affected by civil rights and freedom issues but not consumed by them. They also assess the stories in terms of contemporary events to extract meaning for a younger audience. Their book is organized around oral history methodology and the analytical framework of feminist theory; with an admirable degree of success for students interested in oral history and its processes, it contextualizes archival interviews and mediates what could appear to be, to younger generations, an ancient historical period, now that we are in the post-Obama era.

Editors Valk and Brown were research coordinators for the Behind the Veil oral history project, which largely used graduate students as interviewers, and also conducted some interviews themselves, so they bring an enviable familiarity—even kinship—to the material and methodology that would elude the average archival researcher. Questions are handily addressed regarding content (excerpted interviews with women born between 1900 and 1947) and context—a look at almost a half-century of social change for women; the distinction between living memory and recorded history; the silences on such topics as sexism, depression, alcoholism, domestic abuse, "and other well-known affects of poverty—exacerbated by racism"; and transcription and editing techniques (6). In their self-described role "to mediate between our narrators and readers," they employ a feminist reading of the stories, a "womanist consciousness" that puts women at the center, telling their lives in their own way (3). The effectiveness of this strategy is evident in the wealth of details and diversity of perspectives on African American women's lives.

The book is organized into five chapters that explore what growing up as "black" girls meant for the narrators in their communities. Topics include gender and sexuality; work life; participation in various institutions and cultural life; and social and political activism. Summations at the beginning of each chapter outlining the significance of the upcoming stories and how they interrelate, and descriptive introductions of each voice, help to make the transcripts easier to navigate, especially where the same narrator is used several times and the voices go back and forth between time periods. Some insights that surface warranting a closer look include the close scrutiny of girls' behavior; the promotion of and resistance to community pressure and standards of respectability; the chastening of unmarried mothers; dual labor as housewives and farm hands; the use of sewing skills, midwifery, teaching, and, later, unions, in providing economic advancement and female bonding; women as "culture carriers and curators" in churches and social and political organizations; and activism for civil rights and change that occurs on the private/personal level in everyday encounters (113).

Issues of interracial tensions and racial disparities are also discussed. For instance, as one narrator points out, "The Sunday school teachers were always preparing us to do a better job and always using white people as the standard" (40). Another narrator recalls that children were aware of the importance of not talking back or reacting to whites because their parents would suffer. The editors, who mostly allow the narratives to carry out the theme of the book, occasionally offer a peek behind the statistics. For instance, in the chapter "Working Lives," they look more closely at the economic impact of the exclusion of farming and domestic work (the major employment of almost a third of African American women as late as...