Sometimes a writer just gets it right. Fred Hobson does in his brief but enlightening examination of the “white southern racial conversion narrative,” But Now I See. Hobson reviews autobiographical works published by white southern writers since 1940—Lillian Smith, James McBride Dabbs, Will Campbell, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, and Pat Watters among them—and finds in them a secular version of the Puritan conversion narratives of the colonial era. Like the Puritan narratives of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, these white southern writers express their “guilt,” “confess,” and then “repent” their “sins,” and, finally, achieve “redemption.” Similar too, these southern narratives seek both to cleanse the individual sins of the authors and to lead their people—their fellow sinners—to salvation. Unlike the colonial New Englanders, however, most of the writers in Hobson’s study focus less on finding the Kingdom of God in heaven than on achieving the beloved community of racial harmony on earth.

Lillian Smith’s conversion narrative, Killers of the Dream, might serve as the definitive model for this genre, albeit that, as a white southern integrationist lesbian, Smith’s alienation from a segregated, unequal society was particularly acute. Of all the writers examined here—except, perhaps, for Pat Watters—Smith adopts the most evangelical tone. She is a missionary with the solemn purpose of exposing the South as a living hell. The region’s nightmare of lynchings and hate could nonetheless be redeemed, Smith argued, since “deep down in their hearts [white] southerners knew they were wrong.” They knew because racism was something learned in childhood, a lesson for life. You might go to hell if you stole a nickel, but you would not if you pushed a Negro off the sidewalk, or, like Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin’s father, thrashed a black cook for her “impudence.” But racism was not innate, Smith, Lumpkin, and other liberals of the 1940s prayed. Even if racism did appear at birth, they argued, white southerners could always be born again. [End Page 82]

Smith may have used the language of conversion, but several of the writers that Hobson discusses went further: they saw in the Civil Rights movement and in black southerners a means to redeem the white southern soul. James McBride Dabbs, a Presbyterian scholar and Southern Regional Council activist, believed that blacks had suffered more than whites, were better Christians as a result, and therefore had much to teach the white South. But Now I See shows, however, that for Dabbs—as for Lillian Smith—a commitment to the civil rights cause, though genuine, was also about personal pain and his own individual need for salvation. As Will Campbell’s brother Joe, a pharmacist, reminds him: “What you’re saying is that you’re going to use the niggers to save yourself. . . . Your niggers are like my pills, they prop you liberals up and make you feel good.”

Hobson’s presentation of the (relatively) “poor white” Campbell brothers introduces a vital twist to his analysis of the southern racial conversion narrative. All of these authors confess the sin of blindness to the humanity of black people; not all of them can see the pain or suffering of their fellow, less-privileged whites. Charlottesville writer Sarah Patton Boyle reminds her readers that “the greater part of our race prejudice is vested in the lower-classes,” but that she, personally, came from one of the “First Families of Virginia.” Even Alabama’s Virginia Foster Durr—whose political commitment to civil rights went farther than any other writer discussed here—could not conceal her contempt for the “common-as-pig-tracks people” who supported George Wallace. (Wallace, himself, never got around to writing his own racial conversion narrative, but he testified to his past sins and, as Hobson notes, begged forgiveness “of any blacks willing to listen.”)

As Hobson’s analysis shifts to contemporary authors, the trope of religious conversion loses much of its explanatory power...