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Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (review)
- Southern Cultures
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
- pp. 108-110
- 10.1353/scu.2004.0031
- Review
- Additional Information
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Southern Cultures 10.2 (2004) 108-110
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Summer Snow is an intriguing, slender volume, its nature captured by its subtitle. A sometimes strange mixture of autobiography, reflective personal essays, a dash of comparative literature, and occasionally fiction, it is entertaining, thought provoking, and at times enlightening. In general, the most satisfying pieces in the collection are those in which Trudier Harris, a professor of literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recounts her memories of adolescence in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, or employs her keen powers of observation and analysis to explore the manner in which racism continues to impact daily life in modern America. [End Page 108]
The autobiographical essays, with their easy accessibility and emotional intensity, provide yet another insight into the experiences of a black academician who came of age in the segregated American South. These essays lack the raw power of Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi or Mary Mebane's Mary, conveying instead an unmistakable nostalgic tone that, fortunately, does not diminish Harris's analytical abilities. She correctly sees many aspects of her southern childhood as evidence of her racial heritage. She seems less aware of the reality that many white southerners of her generation will identify with much of what she recalls, including the importance of fishing as a low cost, readily available, relaxing recreational activity; the importance of front porch conversations; the use of the ability to perform hard manual labor as a measure of one's standing in the community; and the ability of common folk to create colorful, effective means of employing the spoken language. While much of the content of her autobiographical essays is more universal than perhaps she realizes, her sketches of life in a small southern town of the 1950s and 1960s are right on target, both factually and emotionally. In fact, Harris's observations are so accurate that her habit of including literary references in many of her essays to buttress her point (she is particularly fond of Zora Neale Hurston) is a bit of a distraction.
Other black autobiographers have addressed many of the issues that Harris explores. This replication underscores the constants that racism has imbedded in the daily life of African Americans, the inevitable struggle against efforts to dehumanize and degrade. Thus Harris recounts her facing the implications of hairstyles for African American women, as well as the sexual exploitation of black women that has always been a significant element of the ideology and practice of white supremacy. She also unblinkingly explores the edginess of relationships with whites, both racial liberals and conservatives, and the difficulties of developing a meaningful dialogue about race in a society with such a profoundly racist past.
Three of Harris's essays alone are worth the price of the book. In "Black Nerds" she poignantly portrays the emotional cost of leaving the security of her segregated, familiar community for success in the wider, overwhelmingly white world. Harris escaped through education, although she retains her ties to the world from which she came. Here, again, her experiences reflect emotional losses with which many white Americans can identify, losses remarkably similar to those recorded in the autobiographies of whites from the rural and small-town South and of second-generation Americans of immigrant parents. In "The Price of Desegregation," Harris endorses what has become the standard interpretation in the academic world: that the African American community paid the price, a proposition that much of white America continues to reject. While this is perhaps her most nostalgic essay, she acknowledges that social and economic changes have made a return to the supportive African American institutions of her youth [End Page 109] an impossibility. In her final essay, "Summer Snow," Harris proclaims that she is a "Southerner," then defines what she means by that term. She speaks as a black female native of a region with a turbulent and violent racial past, a history of white supremacy...