Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow

Conclusion: Talking of Another World

conclusion Talking of Another World willie morris’s observation that his Mississippi was not the same place inhabited by black civil rights workers or, by extension, by his white neighbors from various political and socioeconomic backgrounds is at the heart of this analysis of literary autobiography. After reading the six memoirs under consideration here, the student of history quickly sees that there is no singular Jim Crow experience but that historical reality is inextricably intertwined with the perspectives of each individual who inhabited that world. Thus it becomes clear that sweeping historical narratives that claim to tell a history that is true for everyone may very well get the names and dates right but they gloss over the complexity of individualized and often contrary responses to a social world. The idea that individual experiences complicate attempts at grand narration is one with which most historians agree. However, owing in part to established convention, historical writing does not always accurately capture nuanced perspectives of the past, sometimes losing track of individuals altogether, expediently transforming them into historical “types.” The harried historian who is charged with the onerous task of translating a chaotic past into a coherent, written representation of that moment must often resort to speaking in terms of, for example, the “black community” or of “white reactionaries” or of “women,” thereby losing some of the particularized texture of the past. Of all the historians who have endeavored to recapture the felt experience of Jim Crow, Leon Litwack has perhaps been the most successful. In his masterful work Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, Litwack uses a wide variety of source materials and interjects numerous particular voices to movingly convey the multiperspectival nature of the time period. He declares his intention to capture the “interior life” of { 136 } the black community, but it might be more accurate to say that he captures multiple interior “lives,” numerous facets of what it meant to be black in the segregated South.1 He uses proper names and personalized accounts as he movingly describes, for example, different forms of African American cultural expression and ways that individuals and groups resisted white oppression. As successful as Litwack is at giving his readers a sense of how Jim Crow was felt and interpreted by black southerners from various backgrounds, there are, it seems, certain limitations to this snapshot approach. Historians rarely analyze entire texts, instead culling from larger sources and collecting bits and pieces of historical evidence. They then utilize these components to assemble their particular reconstruction of a past moment. This approach, of course, does not necessarily mean that the historian is unfamiliar with entire larger texts—in terms of structure and style as well as historical context—but oftentimes this is indeed the case. Richard Wright’s Black Boy, for example, is quoted widely in histories of segregation, but the complexity of Wright’s experience simply cannot be captured in one carefully selected passage that has been stripped from the larger text. Remember, for example, the way young Wright learned to embrace southern irony, to say one thing and mean another, in order to survive in segregated Mississippi. Were a historian to quote a passage either before or after Wright learned this vital and complicated lesson, she or he would enshrine only one moment in Wright’s evolution as representative . Litwack, for example, tells us that Wright could not “submit totally to the demands made of him,” that he resented being forced to hang his head, to tell white interlocutors what they wanted to hear.2 This is, in part, true, but to understand the complexity of Wright’s evolving experiences, we must see that he finally did learn to stifle his true nature, to say one thing and mean another. His survival depended on it. Wright’s awakening to Jim Crow realities was a process that cannot be captured without analyzing the text as a whole. When autobiographies are parsed and dissected to provide factual evidence or to illustrate a particular point, part of their meaning is invariably lost in the process. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has railed against “unspoken hierarchies” that dictate that “historical sense overrules poetic sense . . . [and that] master narratives override local knowledge.”3 An expansive understanding of the conclusion { 137 } enterprise of historical writing, such as the one advocated by Hall, must challenge the idea that what constitutes historical knowledge and, by extension...