Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography

Introduction

1 Introduction I HAVE LONG BELIEVED that autobiographers are, or can be, among the most astute chroniclers of the South. Much of what makes their self-portraits so accessible —indeed, so memorable—is that they tend to privilege storytelling, dramatic turning points, and cathartic or revelatory moments, all of which are packed with meaning, insight, and feeling, sometimes well beyond anything intended by their authors. As Flannery O’Connor once noted, “The Southerner knows he can do more justice to reality by telling a story than he can by discussing problems or proposing abstractions. . . . It’s actually his way of reasoning and dealing with experience.”1 Autobiographers then, as both historians and storytellers, have much to tell us about what it has meant to be southern, whether black or white, male or female, rich or poor, at various times and from various locales, all of which allows us to see and understand the region and its people in ways that elude more conventional treatments drawn from more traditional sources. By allowing us to view the South through a multiplicity of contexts and voices and time periods, autobiography and memoir comprise what I believe are among the most moving and vividly expressed forms of historical documentation.2 Part of the power of southern autobiography, in particular, lies in the fact that southerners, far more consciously than most Americans, have long seen themselves and their world in terms of place—whether the South as a whole, or some specific part of it. Louis Rubin once asked, “Isn’t it significant that the imagination of the Midwestern writer—I think of Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald—has so often been directed outward, while that of the southern writer has generally insisted upon finding its direction within the community ?”3 While Rubin was thinking primarily of novelists, his observation holds 2 ‡ introduction true for autobiographers as well. Yet as easy as it is to romanticize that attachment to home, to land, or to community, those linkages between self and place were often precarious or uncomfortable ones for southerners, both black and white. Many found themselves at odds with their communities or with the region as a whole; indeed, their very impulse to write often came from an attempt to understand what it was they felt alienated from, marginalized by, or hostile toward.4 Maya Angelou recognized this dynamic as central to the story of her early years in Stamps, Arkansas. “What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet,” she stated, “must be the experience shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there.”5 Yet those answers did not always come easily; the connection to place can be complex, full of contradiction and ambiguity, as the best of these writers make clear. Indeed, it can represent as much a negative as a positive for many southerners, black and white. James Watkins observed that “‘place’ can denote a fixed position in a racial or social hierarchy” as much as a geographical locale, and as such, many southern autobiographers chronicle their “efforts to reject the place he or she has been assigned.” Pat Conroy once noted through the voice of one of his fictional southern protagonists, “My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”6 Harry Crews also saw his sense of self bound to the county in which he spent his early years, even subtitling his memoir of his childhood The Biography of a Place. In describing the sharecropping existence of his childhood in south Georgia, he noted that “the importance of family” was for him “the rotten spot at the center of my life,” in part because there was never a single house or “home place” that anchored his world. “Because we were driven from pillar to post when I was a child,” he wrote, “there is nowhere I can think of as the home place. Bacon County is my home place, and I’ve had to make do with it. If I think of where I come from, I think of the entire county. I think of all its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness.”7 One can’t understand or explain oneself in the South without fully embracing those external forces that could be either wounds or anchorages, conveyed as either loveliness or ugliness . It is the...