Reconstructing Self, Sex, and the South: Minnie Bruce Pratt's Walking Back Up Depot Street

Exclusion

Although Minnie Bruce Pratt has long been considered an important voice in lesbian literature, she has yet to garner much attention as an author working within and in response to the Southern literary tradition. One could argue that there simply hasn't been enough time or distance to judge this contemporary poet's literary place or import in relation to "major" Southern literary icons. I suspect, though, that Pratt's open lesbianism may have made her somewhat of a third rail to Southern scholars—not only because speaking about lesbianism in the context of Southern literature might be unsettling to traditional conceptions of the region, or because by being designated as lesbian she has been set apart, but also because openly lesbian Southern writers like Rita Mae Brown or Dorothy Allison seem a "new" phenomenon, unprecedented, ahistorical. In an interview with the Southern Quarterly in 1997 Pratt commented, "I guess a lesbian poet can't be Southern" (Hunt 106). Indeed even the book jacket reflects uneasiness with reading Pratt within the context of Southern letters and history. Though the description on the back cover alerts the reader that Walking Back Up Depot Street is "a story of the segregated south" in which we will "hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers—and of sharecropper country women and urban lesbians," and that in it we will "hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of songs from those who marched on the road to Selma," it places or, rather displaces, her poetry in "literary traditions ranging from Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body, Pablo Neruda's Canto General, Nazim Hikmet's Human Landscapes." The comparisons are appropriate given the author's attempts at the end of the book to place the story of the South in an international context. Still, considering Walking Back Up Depot Street's Southern setting and subject matter, the absence of references to Southern writers is notable and, I believe, mistaken.

I can understand the desire to avoid the clichéd references to Faulkner, Welty, and O'Connor that often threaten to bury the contemporary Southern writer by the weight of his or her tradition. More poignantly, I can understand the difficulty in speaking about the effect of an author on a tradition to which she does not comfortably belong. How does a lesbian fit into terms such as "Agrarian" or "Fugitive?" one might ask, when the very terms were defined by the patriarchy as part of the defense of the patriarchy? And certainly, part of the project, part of the journey, both for Beatrice and for Pratt, is to use the journey motif and epic form to dramatically present her struggle through and emergence out of the South and Southern cultural taboos. To avoid the question of Pratt's "Southernness" is to deny the strength of the resistance she faces and ultimately the value of the journey and the project. By first recontextualizing Pratt within the tradition of Southern literature and then examining Walking Back Up Depot Street from the perspective of Pratt's own identification as a Southern lesbian writer, we can appreciate this distinctive and revolutionary work.

Pratt as Southern Author: Unburying Madeline

I have mentioned that Pratt's work as a lesbian author makes her a "third rail" for scholarship in the discipline. The rail is not a bad metaphor for Pratt's placement in the Southern canon in that her work seems to move on a parallel track with Southern literary tradition and yet not quite fit within the way that tradition has been theorized—partly because of how tangentially her point of view relates to the more iconic voices and themes of Southern literature and partly because it comes from a place that until recently has been denied a historical existence within mainstream scholarly discourse on Southern cultural life in general. If the Southern woman was defined, confined, and contained within myth and...