In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

JAMES H. WATKINS Berry College “Returning to Mississippi by Choice”: Autobiographical Self-Location and the Performance of Black Masculinity in James Meredith’s Three Years in Mississippi IN THE OPENING CHAPTER OF HIS MEMOIR THREE YEARS IN MISSISSIPPI (1966), James Meredith describes the rural homeplace in Attala County, Mississippi, where he grew up as a child, conflating it with the strong patriarchalfigure of his father, Moses “Cap” Meredith, to whom thebook is dedicated. “If anyone was a king in his own domain,” Meredith observes, “it was Cap. It was as if our eighty-four acres constituted a sovereign state and we neither recognized nor had any diplomatic relations with our neighboring states” (19). Casting the farm as an isolated oasis of African American dignity and self-respect surrounded by a desert of white southern racism, Meredith positions it not only as a kind of psychic destination—the locus of his personal mythology of autonomous individualism—but also as validation of his decision to return from military service abroad to the heart of the Jim Crow South after a ten-year absence, a return that was occasioned by his intention to apply for admission to the all-white University of Mississippi: “As I remembered my old home, I was certain that I was returning to Mississippi by choice” (20). In an act of autobiographical self-location, the expatriate author uses his memoir to stake a claim to his home state, but as his emphasis on the sovereignty of Cap Meredith’s farm suggests, that gesture involves an identification not only with the rural over the urban, but with autonomy over community. In turn, Meredith’s deployment of autonomous individualism over more relational and collective forms of subjectivity ultimately stresses exceptional over representative selfhood. As a result, Three Years in Mississippi fails to conform to a pattern identified by Margo V. Perkins, in which autobiographies by civil rights and Black Power activists, like those by former enslaved people in the previous century and contemporary social 254 James H. Watkins justice activists, “tend to subordinate the uniqueness of [the author’s] own experience to the way in which it reflects the shared reality of many” (26). While Meredith’s tendency to emphasize his individual agency at the expense of the story of the larger struggle undermines some of the testimonial power specific to autobiography, it nevertheless sheds valuable light on the problematic construction of African American masculinity during this pivotal point in the struggle for racial equality in the South.1 By the time Meredith finished writing Three Years in Mississippi, he had already earned his place in history as the first openly African American student to attend and graduate from the University of Mississippi.2 To accomplish this feat he had withstood death threats for two years during the period of legal challenges to the state of Mississippi. When he finally matriculated into the school on September 30, 1962, under the protection of a force of federal Marshals, a three-day riot ensued, resulting in the deaths of two innocent bystanders and scores of injuries. In order to secure his personal safety, National Guard troops were deployed throughout Meredith’s entire career at Ole Miss, during which time he claims he was nevertheless harassed and subjected to profanity from fellow students on a daily basis. “I had been at the university ten months,” he writes, “before I ever descended the fifteen or twenty steps [of his dormitory building] without someone calling me nigger” (274). Many familiar with Meredith’s successful campaign to desegregate Ole Miss also know that three years after his graduation he 1 Although memoirs and autobiographies are fictions in the sense that they contain the individual author’s subjective recollection of past experiences, they nevertheless are accordedaspecialrepresentationalauthoritynotgiventoimaginativeliterature.Lejeune argues that when the name of the author, protagonist, and narrator align, a “pact” between author and reader is established in which truth claims are accorded a different form of authority than is found in fiction (13-15, 21). Since the antebellum slave narrative, members of marginalized groups have used the representational authority of the first-person singular to challenge official histories and witness for social justice, but that authority is...

pdf

Share