Southern Obsession, Southern Delight: New Perspectives on Race and Place in Southern Literature

To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel. By Jeff Abernathy. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003. 222 pp. $49.95 cloth; $18.95 paper.

Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race. By Dean McWilliams. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002. 261 pp. $39.95.

Racial Politics and Robert Penn Warren's Poetry. By Anthony Szczesiul. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2002. 253 pp. $55.00.

The southern obsession with race and place has been the subject of numerous critical studies, literary works, symposia, and the like. Just how much of an obsession continues into the twenty-first century is the subject of three recent works of literary criticism: Jeff Abernathy's To Hell and Back, Anthony Szczesiul's Racial Politics and Robert Penn Warren's Poetry, and Dean McWilliams's Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race. Each of these works adds appreciably to the extant reading of race in the South, but together they do much to advance our appreciation and deepen our understanding of race as a complex and peculiarly American institution.

Abernathy's To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel is without question one of the bravest forays into racial politics and literary production that has been written. His premise is that southern writers, taking their example from Mark Twain's Huck Finn, have developed a pattern of embracing blackness as part of their own humanity and then betraying that blackness once they return to a white setting or frame of mind. Further, Abernathy argues that as goes the South, so goes the rest of America in its ever-ambivalent feelings about blackness and whiteness as a construct in western culture. Abernathy posits that Twain established the pattern of embrace and betrayal in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when Huck declares that he will "go to hell" in helping Jim escape slavery. In order to do so, in Abernathy's estimation, Huck has to embrace Jim's blackness as part of himself. The reversal—betrayal—takes place once Huck returns to whiteness and becomes "born-again" into white society through his association with Tom Sawyer whom Twain casts in direct opposition to Jim. Abernathy's reading of Twain's novel is fresh and powerful, and he mines its racial and racist holdings for what they will yield in the understanding of the problematics of race in America. In claiming that Twain, through Huck Finn, embraces and then recoils from the idea of blackness as a part of his own multicultural self, Abernathy underscores the dilemma that continues to plague America as whole.

Having established the pattern of embrace and betrayal of blackness, Abernathy reads a number of works by southern writers and essentially takes them to task for their repetition of the pattern and their continued practice of moral vacillation instead of moral stance. The writers range from William Faulkner to lesser-known and more contemporary writers such as Padgett Powell, writers whose careers span the entire twentieth century. Without fail, though, Abernathy argues convincingly that these writers have both extended and complicated the pattern, thus complicating even more the entire matter of race in America. Alongside the white writers included in the study, Abernathy places several African American literary heavyweights—Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Alice Walker—and shows how they confront the same racial mythology that is so much interwoven into the cultural fabric of the South. He ends his study with a coda in which he unflinchingly observes that "Americans continue to idealize and then disavow their truest identity, preferring the pain of disavowal to the recognition of a multicultural self."

To Hell and Back is an extraordinary book, well argued without being condescending and penetrating in its analysis without being vicious or petty. Abernathy has thrown down the gauntlet of racial crossing as it were and has challenged the South and...