Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South

3. Old Irish, New South: A Bridge to the Moderns

75 3 old irish, new south A Bridge to the Moderns Si quieres aprender á orar, entra en el mar. —spanish proverb, quoted in Lafcadio Hearn’s Chita No forcing the sea. —irish proverb We must not forget that real literary art is absolutely impartial and invariably just. None other can endure. —joel chandler harris T his chapter alights toward the end of the long nineteenth century, really , and considers four writers—Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, William Marion Reedy, and Lafcadio Hearn—who encountered widely variable circumstances. To generalize about them is to fla"en. But if there is a common thread, perhaps it is this: from the first, encounters with American conceptions of race defined them. So we begin with a redheaded bastard named Joel Chandler Harris (1845– 1908), who was by some twist of fate slated to play a significant part in transitioning from Civil War hostilities to the uneasy and o#en compromised peace that ensued. Nearly too young for conscription to the Confederacy, and certainly too scrawny, the intensely shy writer would become the very public face of the southern storyteller—a spokesman for black and white, antebellum and postbellum, critic and apologist. His life story reveals much about the perception of the Irish in the American South following the Civil War. The biographer Walter Brasch explains that Harris “considered his red hair, more identified with Irish than American Southerners, as a mark of shame; others compounded his alienation by calling him a ‘red-headed bastard.’ As an adult, he was still shy, still sensitive about his red hair. . . . Even when his hair and mustache turned from red to a sandy blond, he still believed they were 76 Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South ‘fiery red.’”1 “Redheaded bastard” is a curious old southern derogatory that falls somewhere in a class with “dirty egg-sucking dog.” Joel Chandler Harris likely heard the taunt hurled at him more than once during his childhood. He might also have heard the phrase “beaten like a redheaded stepchild,” perhaps one notch above being “beaten like a rented mule.” To say that Joel Chandler Harris’s father was “an Irish day-laborer,” as his authorized biographer stated it, meant that he issued from the lowest echelons of the social strata. It is significant that Harris’s biographers have repeatedly foregrounded the painful immutability of Harris’s red hair as confirmation of his Irish patrimony . “He had flaming-red Irish hair and a slight frame that could well have made him the object of schoolyard ridicule,” writes Bertram Wya"-Brown in Hearts of Darkness.2 Paul Cousins, who authored the first scholarly biography of Harris, references his “diminutive size and pronounced red hair and freckled face,” which “set him apart from the others.”3 As a cub reporter in Savannah, he carried the baggage, writes Paul Cousins: “He had become highly sensitive about his awkwardness when he was among girls and women, and particularly so on account of the numerous references in the Georgia press to his personal appearance, especially to his red hair.”4 The staff at the Macon Telegraph dubbed him “Pink Top from Old Put”;5 his dispatches were elsewhere described as “Hot shots from Red Hair-is,” “Harris Sparks,” and “Red-Top Flashes.”6 Lucinda MacKethan identifies his red hair as a source of “lifelong embarrassment .”7 Bruce Bickley, Harris’s fine biographer, mentions a theory that Harris habitually wore a hat indoors.8 Perhaps it is startling to submit that large-freckled, red-headed Joel Chandler Harris was probably not of Irish stock, although he died verily a Catholic. Rather, Joe Harris, as he was known, was branded Irish. His Irishness was widely accepted, although his own family was nonplussed about this strange theory and seemed at a loss to provide reliable genealogical information. The fact that so many of his homefolks would accept the notion is itself revealing. Harris’s distance from the southern center was in some respects liberating, as he subversively undermined the Lost Cause edifice in his writing. His Atlanta was home to a small and vivacious Catholic community with its own norms of respectability; Margaret Mitchell was of them, and she drew on their lore when she wrote Gone with the Wind. Harris was an irregular churchgoer, and his decision to convert (or to be converted, as Flannery O’Connor would have it) was his last act of apostasy where southern...