I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! and the Materiality of Southern Depravity

DAVID A. DAVIS Mercer University I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! and the Materiality of Southern Depravity MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER WAS WARDEN OF A GEORGIA CHAIN GANG. I remember my grandfather’s telling me stories about growing up on the prison camp: his best friends were inmates, his pets were bloodhounds, and everyone called his father “Cap’n.” His stories reiterated the Southern plantation myth with his father playing the role of benevolent paternalist, but his memories contrast starkly with the common perception of the chain gang as the American gulag, an image that originates at least in part with the film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! (1932). The film based on Robert Burns’s sensational autobiography shocked many people and convinced some viewers that the Southern penal system was categorically cruel and inhumane and should be abolished in the interest of human rights. The outcry emanated primarily from outside the South, making the film a source of regional antagonism. Some Southerners responded that the scenes of baying bloodhounds and bloody whips were grossly exaggerated, that chain gangs were a reasonable and effective crime deterrent, and that the Southern penal system was of no concern to the rest of the nation. Regardless, the South’s peculiar penal system became a signifier of its moral depravity, along with sharecropping, segregation, and lynching. Films about the South tend to oscillate between depictions of gentility, such as So Red the Rose (1935), and depictions of depravity, such as Deliverance (1972). Studies of the South’s representation in American cinema frequently focus on the tension between these images. In Media-Made Dixie, for example, Jack Temple Kirby categorizes Southern films according to stereotypes such as “The Grand Old South” and “The Devilish South.” Other film scholars have focused more closely on specific representations of Southern culture. Edward Campbell describes the marketing of moonlight and magnolias mythology on screen in The Celluloid South, Allison Graham explores the representation of Southern racism on film during the Civil Rights Movement in Framing the South, and Tara McPherson introduces the 400 David A. Davis term “lenticular logic” to describe the vacillation of Southern tropes between the plantation myth and the benighted South inReconstructing Dixie. McPherson explains that competing images of gentility and depravity continue to define the South in American popular culture as a regionally-contained narrative of degeneration through violence. I mention these studies to establish a crucial point: whether films present the South as genteel or depraved, they portray it as a space of alterity, as America’s exotic, romantic, and dangerous other. Because films do not make truth claims, depictions of Southern otherness could be dismissed as fabrications or as simulacra of the Southern imaginary. But while one could postulate that depictions of Southern gentility draw upon moonlight and magnolias mythology rather than upon fact, depictions of Southern depravity draw upon the red record of Southern history—its violence, its racism, and its cruelty— which makes them especially disturbing. For the purposes of this essay, I will vacate the genteel side of the equation because I want to investigate I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! and the materiality of Southern depravity. In the case of this film, the actual conditions of Southern depravity established the conditions of the region’s cinematic representation. When I initially began work on this project, I expected to explain how the movie contributed to penal reform in the South, but my research indicated that it did not, a circumstance that aroused my curiosity. While this film did not lead to the abolition of the chain gang, it did lead to the emergence of a persistent image of the South in popular culture. My argument analyzes the movie’s marketing of the chain gang as a signifier of Southern depravity, then explores how the chain gang as a depraved mode of production responded to market forces including the growing value of human rights, and finally examines how representations of the chain gang as a form of Southern depravity continue to resonate in popular culture even after its abolition. Rather than simply portraying the chain gang as an inhumane penal system, I Am a Fugitive...