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Drinking Poisoned Waters Traumatized Masculinity and White Southern Identity in Contemporary Family Memoirs james watkins Near the beginning of his 1997 memoir Power in the Blood: An Odyssey of Discovery in the American South, author John Bentley Mays describes his descent during his early adulthood into acute depression. Although the breakdown stemmed from his repressed grief over his parents’ death when he was a child, Mays explicitly links it to his misguided, obsessional identification with a mythic South he associated with his father and the paternalistic social order he represented in the boy’s mind. Mays’s depiction of the episode’s causes bears scrutiny because it points to a recently emerging trend in the representation of southern regional identity in which white autobiographers are moving away from emphasizing racial guilt as primary to their southern identity and adopting a more therapeutic model of self-narration in which southernness is figured in the language of pathology. More specifically, this shift suggests a turning away from what Fred Hobson calls the “white southern racial conversion narrative,” a form of autobiographical narrative in which liberal writers, “all products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society, confess racial wrongdoings and are ‘converted,’ in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment.”1 While examples of the racial conversion narrative continue to be produced, this moral, quasi-religious framework for representing white southern regional identity shows signs of being effaced by one in which writers like Mays articulate their ambivalent identification with the South in the discourse of the trauma recovery narrative. This type of autobiographical writing, which is informed by psychoanalysis, seeks to bring to light the author/narrator’s repressed and painful memories—most often from childhood—of loss or physical and/or psychological violence and to foreground the therapeutic role that the writing of one’s traumatic experiences plays in the process of recovery.2 For Mays, the deaths of both of his parents by the time he reached age ten served as the pivotal traumatic experiences of his childhood, but he makes it clear that these events alone were not responsible for his descent into acute depression in his early adulthood. Rather, he claims, it is the characteristically southern modes of attaching significance to those traumas, particularly to the sudden, mystery -shrouded death of his father—“what some called an automobile accident, and others thought was murder”—that results in his crisis.3 An only child, Mays was born on his father’s cotton plantation near Spring Ridge in northwestern Louisiana . He lived there until age seven when, upon the death of his father, he moved with his mother to his maternal grandmother’s house in nearby Shreveport. While they were residing there, his mother was diagnosed with cancer and died within three years of her husband’s passing. During that period in Shreveport, he writes, the farm at Spring Ridge loomed large in his imagination and “became less true place than a fantastical Eden simplified and internalized, made perfect and brittle by bleeding away all the colors that were ugly in the original fabric . . . In the aloneness of my dark room in the house where my mother lay dying, I would swim in bright fantasies of a southern boyhood in light” (18–19). A socially awkward child who already was temperamentally predisposed to shyness and introspection, Mays was encouraged to dwell in idyllic daydreams of his remembered childhood at Spring Ridge by his paternal grandparents and Aunt Vandalia, with whom he lived in Greenwood, Louisiana, after his mother’s death. They immersed him in frequently retold stories about his father’s childhood there in the house where he now dwelled: “The stories were not meant to deceive me: but they deceived us all. And gradually I began to believe that only here, where my father had been a radiant boy . . . could I be a Southern boy like him” (19). Over the years, Mays’s habitual escapes into fantasies of a return to his lost childhood innocence led to a corresponding identification with a version of the South he had come to associate with life on the plantation of his youth. “During my early twenties,” he writes, “as part of my last attempt to protect the legion of nostalgia gnawing on my soul, I threw my whole heart into being Southern, in the sense I understood the phrase—living in an archaic, presumably noble past that 221 Drinking Poisoned Waters [13...

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