My Southern Home or, The South and Its People (review)

Perhaps best known as the first African American novelist (Clotelle), William Wells Brown enjoyed a varied career as an author of fiction, travel narratives, drama, and history, as well as having gained international esteem as an antislavery lecturer and social commentator. My Southern Home represents every facet of his work, and this definitive edition prepared by John Ernest delineates the complexities of Brown’s literary achievements. As Ernest concedes in his introduction, the seams in My Southern Home show. The earlier portion demonstrates the barbarism and cruelty of slavery in the context of anecdotal sketches whose humor relies on caricatures and overt irony; the middle section presents a sociological tour of the Reconstruction South; the latter portion offers philosophic considerations of how ethnic communities of post-Reconstruction America can best interact.

Ernest’s introduction traces how Brown developed his final volume from new writing interwoven with reworked, previously published pieces as well as appropriated material from other authors. Ernest offers a persuasive description of this process, indicating that My Southern Home offers Brown’s text and even Brown himself as palimpsest, reconfiguring himself as he adapts his material during the growth of his influence. Readers will note how much Brown’s work matures in confidence and daring near the end of his career. While the basic structure of the early sketches recalls familiar local-color pieces from the humorists of the period (the careful reproduction of the original illustrations emphasizes this characteristic), Brown’s final chapters, in their analyzing of manipulative national politics, the dissonance between spirituality and ostentatious demonstration of faith, and the long-term effects slavery left in the preservation of family and community, carry the persuasive eloquence of Douglass, Jacobs, and DuBois.

In his offering a cogent argument for how we should read Brown, Ernest has performed an admirable accomplishment of textual sleuthing, sussing out the original published pieces for the majority of the works Brown incorporates into his own. Further, Ernest also works with care in presenting how particular elements in Brown’s account change over the course of their many retellings, articulating the questions one cannot help but ask, such as why Brown writes in the voice of a sometimes disinterested observer when offering the slave-time anecdotes, and why he blurs history and fact in his accounts of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction nation. As Ernest notes, Brown’s experience of the South has led him to re-create a “Southern home” within himself, later to be realized through his writing. To his credit, Brown considers the South capable of redemption, even as he struggles with considerations of how it might be saved. The debasement suffered by all in the practice of slavery, as Brown illustrates, continues to require a great deal of education, belief, and justice to overcome; his work retains a timeliness for this reason.

John Ernest’s new presentation of Brown’s My Southern Home invites a deeper appreciation if not a reconsideration of Brown’s place in the American literary canon; it should prove to be a valued and welcome volume to historians and literary scholars alike.